He shook his head in disgust at his own thoughts. This was not the time to mourn the end of his career. Not when so many of his men lay wounded or dead. He would not squander the little command time he had left on self-pity. He would not go out with a whimper.
He turned to his operations officer, “Assemble the command staff in the wardroom,” he said grimly, “we have some planning to do.”
The already sober visages of Colonel Flint’s officers grew even grimmer as he began speaking. “We have failed in our mission, gentlemen. Our mission was to maintain law and order as part of the East Timorese transition to self-rule. We not only failed to carry out these orders, we blew it big time.”
“The Chicken-in-Chief sent us into a death trap,” Ramirez said in a whisper loud enough to be heard throughout the wardroom.
“Watch what you say,” the XO cut in loudly. “The Commander-in-chief is above criticism, whatever you think about his personal life. The JCS has made very clear that we are not to speak ill of the elected officials that we serve.”
“I serve the U.S. Marine Corps,” Ramirez smiled savagely, “not that draft-dodging, pot-smoking, womanizing SOB… ”
“Cut the crap,” Colonel Flint broke in. The room quieted instantly. “Maybe this mission was a mistake,” he continued in a low voice. “Maybe it was ill-considered, ill-timed, politically motivated, and God knows what else. It doesn’t matter, jarheads. We — I mean each and every one of us” he said, stabbing the air for emphasis, “failed to carry out our mission. Worse yet, we failed our junior officers and men. Two companies of Marines were cut to pieces.”
There was a long silence, during which each man relived the recent tragedy.
“We should have anticipated the dangers,” Colonel Flint said finally, in a voice so low his officers had to strain to hear it. “We should have developed contingency plans for different threats. Every snot-nosed second lieutenant knows that an assault is only as good as the planning that goes into it. We live or die by how well we practice the PERMA rule — planning, embarkation, rehearsal, movement, assault. This time good Marines died…”
The Colonel’s head bowed, but only for a second. Then he stood up and squared his shoulders. His officers found their feet as one man. “Listen up, Marines. There will be no liberty in Satahip for the command staff. From this moment on this staff is in training. We will do map drills. We will plan assaults. Once we have embarked for Okinawa the entire MEU will run rehearsals. We will be in battle dress. We will do L-form, breaking out munitions from the ship’s armories. We will board the boats, armored assault vehicles, and helos. By the time we get back to Okinawa, we will be ready for anything.”
And I will be relieved of command, he thought to himself as his studied the faces of his officers. But at least I will turn over the MEU in fighting trim.
“Are there any questions?” he barked.
“No, sir,” his officers said in unison.
“Then let’s get busy planning an assault on Satahip and Utapow. Both the port and the airfield have fallen into enemy hands, and our Thai allies have requested help in retaking them. The warriors from the sea have been ordered into battle.”
Donna carefully read and reread the reports on the disaster over Ocussi harbor. The SAMs used to down the American choppers were manufactured by a European defense contractor. Significantly, the Indonesian military was not known to possess this type of SAM. Donna ran down her mental list of who might have the money, access and motive to kill U.S. Marines in Indonesia. Indonesian nationalist groups? Too fractured and disorganized. Islamic terrorist groups? No previous interest shown in Indonesia. The Chinese? Too much to lose…
Donna frowned. Lose. Lose what? Would we actually accuse them of killing our soldiers? What would they gain?
Donna knew she was on the verge of an epiphany but the months of double duty and little sleep were taking their toll. She had been pushed too far and too hard trying to provide support for America’s appetite for intervention.
16
Rehearsing for War
Lieutenant Colonel Chu Dugen’s Jia Battalion held 450 volunteer commandos. The best of the best in a nation of 1.3 billion people, Jia Battalion was the equal of any similar force around the world. For two months now the battalion had been practicing airfield assault and secure operations in a remote training post in the Gobi Desert. The training was too hard to be boring for the men, but the repetition was beginning to wear on the junior officers and senior NCOs. Even Dugen was beginning to wonder why he had been sent out to the middle of nowhere under a secret set of orders from the Ministry of the Interior.
Just when Dugen thought the training was getting monotonous, three new elements were introduced to liven things up. First, Jia Battalion began to fly into the airfield on an old Boeing 747 cargo aircraft that was converted into passenger configuration (it had very few passenger windows). Second, a special construction regiment which had arrived at the base in April had just completed building a mock set of 15 buildings out of cement block and plywood. The largest building was a huge terminal-like structure with two stories. It even had simulated luggage conveyer belts. Third, two battalions of the People’s Armed Police (PAP) arrived to provide an opposition force for Dugen’s men to work against. Dugen would have preferred PLA commandos or even Army regulars to the lightly armed paramilitary PAP, but he was thankful for the new fodder for his troops who took the new challenges with an intensity rarely seen by Dugen.
The training went in five-day cycles without a break.
Day one was spent at the north end of the runway in the old post buildings. The men cared for equipment and conducted physical training, including martial arts workouts. The officers planned the next assault and briefed their chain-of-command.
Day two consisted of packing the 747 and rehearsals of actions on the objective, using an elaborately prepared sand table, replete with miniature renditions of the buildings to be assaulted at the south end of the runway.
On day three Jia Battalion boarded the 747, took off, and circled the runway for an hour and a half, then landed. Upon landing, the commandos burst out of the giant aircraft and began to take control of the airport from the PAP troops. Dugen and his men loved this part of the training — pyrotechnics erupted everywhere: smoke grenades, blank ammunition, grenade simulators and an occasional canister of CS gas riot control agent.
Day four usually held more of the same as Jia Battalion expanded its control to include the entire post. The hardest part of this portion of the training was capturing and detaining the larger force of PAP troops while aggressively taking and holding more buildings. Dugen was puzzled as to why his commandos weren’t just ordered to “kill” the PAP defenders instead of taking the additional time and effort to “capture” them. Still, orders were orders.
Day five also held interesting training. Usually at midnight of Day four, Dugen was called into Lieutenant General Kung’s office and given a follow-on mission. Often the assignment was a simple as “commandeering” some “civilian” vehicles and performing a route reconnaissance 30 kilometers to the nearest village. Of course, the route reconnaissance was never routine. Often PAP “guerrillas” planted “mines” along the road or tried to ambush Jia Battalion en-route.