“Get me Sergeant Major Mosovich,” he snarled at the recalcitrant machine as the sky began to scream.
“He what?” shouted the normally mild-mannered Twelfth Corps commander.
“General Bernard ordered his artillery to engage the Posleen positions near Virginia 639.” The corps operations officer looked like he had taken a drink expecting water and gotten unsweetened lemonade. In a way he had.
“Send the corps provost to the Twenty-Ninth Infantry Division headquarters. Order him to place General Bernard under arrest for insubordination and disobedience to direct orders. Send General Craig to take command.”
“Craig isn’t from the Guard, sir.”
“Fuck ’em. This is the last irresponsible action I am allowing that rat-fuck division command and staff to undertake. Tell George to put a leash on those idiots. Contact Division Arty, tell them that the order is countermanded. Relieve the commander, have him report here, replace him with his XO pending final disposition. Tell the XO he can figure on finding a new home unless he justifies staying in command.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get me Colonel Abrahamson. He needs to know we may be kicking off early.”
CHAPTER 42
Dale City, VA, United States of America, Sol III
0728 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad
“Does anyone know what the fuck is going on?” asked Specialist Keren, rhetorically.
“You heard the Pres, so shut up and dig,” said Sergeant Herd, but it was without heat. Everyone was confused and uncertain.
The Fiftieth Infantry Division was a new unit. Its unit colors had been in storage since World War II when it had performed undistinguished service in the Pacific theater. It had nearly participated in the battle of Leyte Gulf. It had performed heroic rear area service during the battle of Tarawa. It had nearly invaded the Japanese mainland and gone down in Army history. Unfortunately, it was only a blip in Army history and an unnoticed blip until the present emergency. And Ground Force personnel had responded appropriately.
The current service personnel transferred to the unit were, by and large, the soldiers and officers that relieving units were just as happy to see the backs of, and the new recruits had only those personnel and a smattering of rejuvs to use as guidance. A few officers and NCOs stood out, but in many cases only because of average performance rising out of an abyssal morass of incompetence.
Mortar platoon, Alpha Company First Battalion Four Hundred Fifty-Second Infantry, Third Brigade, Fiftieth Infantry Division, was, if anything a cut above the rest. Specialist Keren had, admittedly, been a sergeant before and would probably be a private again but that had very little to do with his competence as a mortarman. He had a bit of a drinking problem, and with it came a coincidental habit of telling officers what he thought their mothers did for pocket money, but that was no problem in the field. And he was the high point of the “trained” privates. A couple of the newbie privates were on the mental level of Oscar the Zoo Gorilla. And the platoon sergeant had spent the last fifteen years improving his knowledge of metalworking in a machine shop. And the platoon leader, despite the overabundance of first lieutenants, was a recent graduate of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard Officers Training School and would soon, almost certainly, require a razor.
But, for all of that, they had established a unit camaraderie that was sorely lacking throughout most of the division and they had managed to hold together during the occasional riots that had broken out and they had trained, even when the rest of the battalion had screwed off or gone AWOL half the time. What magic element infected them, whether it was Keren’s sarcastic outlook on their chances in the event of real combat, or the platoon sergeant’s careful attention to every last detail of personal and equipment needs or the platoon leader’s puppy-dog eagerness that was too infectious to ignore and too ingenuous to kick, the unit had come together. True, they were far below the pre-emergency norm for the American Army, and they had a lot of training to catch up on, but they were as good as it got in the Fuckin’ Fiftieth.
Unfortunately the current situation would have strained a veteran unit.
First there had been the mad dash to saddle up, with nearly half the battalion officers gone and over fifteen AWOLs in Alpha company alone. Then going into the defense when it became apparent that they might be in the interdiction circle. Then the orders to move out to positions north of the Potomac, which was just fine with most of them. Last came the sudden about-face.
Up until then operations had progressed with remarkable smoothness. The occasional unit got lost or at least off on the wrong road and stuck in civilian traffic, and a couple of units had run out of fuel because their bowsers could not find them. And there were not enough lowboys — the tractor-trailer rigs that were normally used for any movement that would not involve conflict — in the entire world to move all the armored fighting vehicles being shuffled on the eastern seaboard. So the division had to move in its APCs, Bradleys and tanks and plenty of them broke down; some of the units in the division had not done maintenance in months. But, basically, all things considered, up until the turnaround everything was going as smooth as silk.
Moving a corps is something like moving a large family. Telling such-and-such a unit to go to this location and repeating that ad nauseum will not work. The units invariably do not have enough fuel to complete the movement, even as simple a drive as from Alexandria to Quantico: a forty-five-minute drive by car on a good day. And telling the units to go here or there, centering hundreds of fighting units with their support on a small area, means that thousands of vehicles are all trying to use the same roads at the same time. While that works just fine for commuters, military units rarely recover well when they lack cohesion. Individual vehicles simply follow the vehicles in front and rarely does every vehicle commander follow a map. Mixing units leads to one unit with extra vehicles and one unit with virtually none. Just having mom and dad go out to the car and sit after telling the kids to pack and load the car is a recipe for disaster.
In a normal movement or even a “planned” emergency every unit is given a destination, a route to use and an estimated time of arrival. In addition there are specified points to refuel, rearm and be served hot chow. Good commanders send that information down the line and the subordinate units brief their individual drivers and vehicle commanders. At a minimum almost every driver and vehicle commander knows where they are going, the route to follow and any planned stops along the way. (There are always exactly ten percent that do not “get the word.”) Then the unit moves out and invariably everyone except the drivers, the officers, senior NCOs and overeager junior NCOs goes to sleep. On arrival it is the overeager junior NCO’s job to wake everyone up. That is how they become senior NCOs.