For the first time in his life everything made sense to Gabriel; everything felt right. It was as if he was given a codebook to the world around him. For the first time in his life he felt like a real adult, like he finally got it. Before long he began leading Bible study. He taught newcomers how to ride and shoot. He put all of his pent up enthusiasm into the reservation. After about a year, however, Gabriel realized that he was different from Owen and the other Mountain Men. Deep down they were impotent; happy to live in the woods and bitch. For Gabriel that was not enough. He wanted to fix the United States, to return to the notions of the country’s forefathers. Gabriel wanted to take action.
Politically, Gabriel moved further and further toward the right. He found extremists like himself in roadhouses and at gun shows. He was finally fortunate enough to get connected with a group in South Texas, now almost two years ago. Like the Mountain Men they were heavy on rhetoric, but he sensed right away that the members intended to take action. They hoped to start a revolution, to continue the work of Timothy McVeigh. For a while they called themselves Freedom Catalyst. On Gabriel’s recommendation they agreed that it would be best to not have a name, no means to identify themselves as an entity. So they erased all references to Freedom Catalyst. Thereafter, in speech amongst themselves their body was referred to as the group, or sometimes just “it.”
“It is going well.”
“The group will meet tomorrow.”
After a few botched attempts at creating local havoc the group realized that they needed education in anarchy. Setting fires and vandalizing government buildings was just not enough. So they saved and raised money to send a few of the members to Libya for advanced training in insurgency and low intensity conflict. Gabriel was chosen as one of the men to go.
Before he left, Gabriel told his mother and his neighbors that he was going to tour North Africa. The highlights would be Casablanca and Marakesh, Morocco and Tunisia where he would visit the Tattoine set from Star Wars. To develop an explanation for a long absence, Gabriel suggested that he may even bum around Egypt searching for work in archeology. Gabriel hoped his listeners would suspect that he was looking for a drug connection in Marakesh, not that he would be preparing to overthrow the central government.
In Libya he met Nasih.
FOUR
The workshop was as dark and still as solitary confinement. Only the hum of the air conditioning system and the occasional crackle on the radio reminded Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Theodore Ball that he was on an aircraft carrier.
He lay on a cot contemplating whether or not he should get up and go to his rack — his assigned bunk in the berthing space where the ship’s compliment of SEALs and EOD Technicians lived.
Ball was once jealous that EOD Techs were nearly unknown while their counterparts in the SEAL Teams enjoyed fame in fact and fiction. Now he considered their obscurity a badge of honor. Ball explained to anyone who asked that their roots were the same, yet both had a uniquely different mission. He liked to point out that while there were over three thousand SEALs in the U.S. Navy, there were fewer than seven hundred EOD Techs.
“You tell me then, who’s elite?” he often asked young sailors who visited their shop inquiring about the EOD program.
BM2 Ball spent the night in the EOD workshop because he was responsible for the flight deck watch the previous night. In the early morning hours, the air boss told him he could retire to the shop, just two decks below the flight deck in the port aft corner of the USS George Washington, provided he monitored the radio for trouble.
Ball was standing by to render safe any explosive hazard on the deck of the aircraft carrier. George Washington’s aircrews were flying in the North Arabian Gulf, some even flying over Iraq, in support of Operation Southern Watch. This hostile zone required all of them, even the Search and Rescue helicopters, to be fully armed and ready for action. This made the always important EOD presence, imperative.
This was not his first deployment; it was in fact Ball’s second “float” away from his home and his young family. On his previous sojurn he fixed a 30 millimeter cannon that jammed, removed damaged fuzes from Mark 82 bombs, and even rendered safe a High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM) that careened across the deck just as the EA-6B Prowler it was connected to hit the four-wire. Ball was ready for any and all of these ordnance accidents to happen again. He was also ready in the event of a plane crash. As the EOD watch, he would be needed to render safe the explosive components of the ejection seats as well as any ordnance on the aircraft.
When any of the six-man EOD detachment on board George Washington stood the flight deck watch, he wore a red turtleneck and a red life vest identifying him as an ordnance handler. Each had a painted stencil of the EOD “crab,” on the back; an inverted bomb on a shield superimposed over a wreath and two lightning bolts. All EOD Techs are required to learn its meaning upon beginning Phase I of their training.
The wreath is symbolic of the achievements and laurels gained by minimizing accident potentials, through the ingenuity and devotion to duty of its members. It is in memory of the EOD personnel who have given their lives while performing EOD duties. The bomb was copied from the design of the World War II Bomb Disposal Badge; the bomb represents the historic and major objective of the EOD attack, the unexploded bomb. The three fins represent the major areas of nuclear, conventional, and chemical/biological warfare. The lightning bolts symbolize the potential destructive power of the bomb and the courage and professionalism of EOD personnel in their endeavors to reduce hazards as well as to render explosive ordnance harmless. The shield represents the EOD mission which is to protect personnel and property in the immediate area from an inadvertent detonation of hazardous ordnance.
The EOD students also learned that completing the course would not end their training. Each would continue to build upon their expertise, advancing from Basic to Senior, and finally Master EOD Technician.
Like all students, when Ball learned the meaning of the EOD crab it became more to him than military insignia, it was a source of pride; a symbol. Upon graduation from the EOD pipeline, Ball wore the Basic EOD crab, commonly called a ‘slick bomb’ because the bomb was naked. Now as a Senior EOD Technician his bomb had a star on it.
Ball pulled the poncho liner that served as his blanket up to his chin. He decided to go back to sleep, to find his wife Jeannie in a dream. Suddenly, the door opened throwing fluorescent light into the room. Then the overhead light of the shop was turned on.
“Get up, T-Ball!”
Ball grunted in response to hearing his moniker. An instructor gave him the nickname his first day at dive school in Panama City, Florida.
“Damn it, Johnny! It’s Sunday! I’m trying to get some holiday routine here!”
“Right, shipwreck… holiday for some… routine for others. Come on, we just got a short fuse on an op.”
“What?”
“Ship takedown with the frogs.”
Aviation Ordnanceman First Class Jonathon Hooke was the detachment’s leading petty officer, the senior enlisted man who was not yet a chief petty officer. Additionally, Hooke was at the pinnacle of an EOD career as a Master EOD Technician. His EOD crab had a star on the bomb, with an additional star and wreath above the shield.