Colonel Jeffries, who was our tour guide, led us to the men, and we stopped in front of a tall black officer. “Mister President, this is Captain…”
I never heard another word the man said. I took a close look at the captain, and I could see him smiling, just perceptibly, and his eyes were darting back and forth between me and Marilyn. It took me a few seconds, and I totally lost whatever the colonel was saying. “Nooooo… it’s not…” The black face in front of me cracked a big smile, and I knew. “Oh my God! ROSCOE!? What in the hell are you… Marilyn!”
“ROSCOE!” Marilyn squealed happily and pushed past me and wrapped Captain Roscoe Buckminster in a tight hug.
Roscoe laughed and wrapped his arms around her. “Damn, it’s good to see you, Aunt Marilyn! You too, Uncle Carl!”
He reached out to shake my hand, but I hugged him as well. “Damn, boy! What are you doing here?”
“They let anybody in this country!” he replied.
Around us any attempt at military decorum had collapsed. Roscoe’s troops were staring at us, and the Kurds were jabbering among themselves. Colonel Jeffries asked, “You know this officer, sir?”
I laughed at that. “Colonel, I’ve known Roscoe his whole life. His father was one of my oldest friends.”
Marilyn added, “I used to change Roscoe’s diapers!”
“Aunt Marilyn, we didn’t need to know that!” protested Captain Buckminster as some of the others laughed.
“Damn, it’s good to see you!” I repeated. “What the hell are you doing running an armored company? You’re only out of the academy four years now?”
“I was the exec, actually, and then when we were loading the trains in Vilseck, Captain Rodrigo fell off the flatbed and broke both legs! The Colonel gave me the company rather than bring somebody else in at the last minute. I just made Captain a week ago,” he told us.
“Captain Buckminster’s company performed excellently during Kurdish Dragon, sir,” interjected Colonel Jeffries. “His promotion was quite deserved.”
I nodded and smiled back. “I’m not surprised. His father was an excellent soldier as well. He saw action in the Gulf War. Maybe it runs in the blood.” I clapped Roscoe on the shoulder. “Colonel, I don’t know what your schedule was going to be, but I think I found where we’re having lunch, even if it’s cold MREs.”
He smiled and agreed. “Yes, sir, understood!”
Just then, as we began to turn away to continue our tour, one of the Peshmerga came up to us from where they were jabbering to each other. It was like he was pushed forward by a few of the others. They were all pointing to the ‘All American’ patch of the 82nd Airborne on my jacket. The Kurd looked at me and asked, haltingly, “You are American President?”
I nodded and smiled. “Yes, I am President Buckman.”
He immediately turned to the others and rattled something off in Kurdish, which made for a lot of chatter. He turned back and asked, “You are soldier? Like…” he paused and added, “Parachute soldier?”
“Yes, I was a soldier, a paratrooper, in the Airborne, like the men in Azwya.” I shrugged and smiled, adding, “Many years ago.”
My official interpreter, who spoke much better English, translated this and the Kurds began speaking to each other with a lot of animation. Then he turned to me and asked, “Your leg, they want to know if you were shot in the leg, and if that is why you need a cane.”
I was using an old and slightly battered hickory cane. My brass and walnut model was back in Erbil. I shook my head. “No, nothing like that. I simply had a bad landing and hurt myself. I had to leave the Army then.”
Roscoe piped up and said, “Tell them that the President, when he hurt his leg, then rescued his troops and they marched to safety and attacked drug sellers.” The translator zipped through that and there was even more talk in Kurdish.
I looked at my young friend. “Roscoe, if your mother heard you telling a whopper like that, she’d wash your mouth out with soap!”
“Mom was the one who told me, sir,” he said, smiling and not backing down.
The first Kurd, the one who spoke broken English, he came up and said, “You are warrior. You are Peshmerga!” Then the bastard shook my hands vigorously, and kissed me on the cheeks!
The American troops all applauded and yelled at this. These boys must have really impressed these bastards! Jesus Christ, I’d been adopted!
I introduced Marilyn to everybody, and the Kurd asked, “You have sons? They are soldiers, too?”
“Yes, we have a son. He was in the Marines, sort of like soldiers on ships,” I answered.
Well, they kept jabbering to each other. I guess this was proof I was from a warrior family, or something. It seemed like the Buckmans met the minimum requirement for Peshmerga acceptance.
At that point Roscoe gave us a tour of his command. He had a Stryker Rifle Company, and he led us over to one of the Strykers, basically an eight wheeled armored car with a machine gun up on the roof. It had a hatch in the back which was open, and Marilyn and I got inside and looked around a bit, and then left. Then he showed me one of the odd looking jobs, which had a big honking gun on the roof. “What is this thing?” I asked.
“That’s a Mobile Gun System, an M-1128. It’s a Stryker with the machine gun replaced with a 105 mm tank gun. I had a platoon of these until I became the exec in Vilseck. I’ll tell you, you fire this thing, it has a kick like a mule!” he replied.
“Huh. You shoot any tanks with these?”
“Not really. Oh, you can, but the 105 is a bit light for the frontal armor of a T-72. They can handle the sides just fine, though, and can really carve up BMPs and APCs.” He pointed at a few other Stryker variants. “That one mounts some TOW missiles, and that one over there has a lid that pops open and can fire a 120 mm mortar.”
“You’ve got your own little army here,” I commented.
He nodded. “We also grabbed an engineer platoon and a scout platoon, an anti-tank platoon, a few other things as well. Dad always said it was better to have it…”
“… and not need it than to need it and not have it! Yeah, who do you think taught your old man that one?!” I replied. Roscoe must have been doing okay. He had the makings of a small battalion under his command.
“He told me he taught it to you.”
I snorted at that, and he then introduced me to a few of his platoon leaders, as well as a few of the Kurds. I wasn’t sure what kind of rank structure the Peshmerga had, but it seemed to suit them, and their men gave them the proper respect, and their morale was good, too. “These guys would ride on the roofs of the ICVs until we got into battle, and then hop off. It reminded me of some of the newsreels from the Russian front in World War II,” he told me.
“Riding on the outside of a tank is a good way to get shot!” I told him.
Roscoe simply nodded. “As far as these guys are concerned, it’s the price of doing business. I lost some guys, too. We make sure these guys get the same medical treatment our guys do.”
I waited until the Kurds were out of earshot, and asked, “So, tell me about the Kurds. Are they any good?”
He glanced over at them and lowered his voice. “Hey, I’m just a captain, but I’d rather they be on my side than the other way around, you know?” As it was, he seemed to consider them his troops as much as any of the Americans. When it came time for lunch, they actually had a mess tent set up, and lunch was a mix of American food and some Kurdish food (lamb in a stew over rice, with flatbread.) The Kurds lined up just like the Americans; they also seemed to like Tabasco sauce, since a lot of the troops pulled bottles out and passed them around. It might not be the way it was shown in the books at Fort Knox, but it seemed to be an effective combat outfit.