According to the intel from HQ, the peace talks between Turkey and Syria were going to get serious any day. Any day had been more than a month in coming, and moving C Company from support capacity inside Turkey to the border wasn’t a promising sign.
Dug in on the plateaus that made up the southeastern section of Turkey, Goose stared due south. The terrain wasn’t as mountainous or craggy as in many places along the border. This had once been the gateway to Mesopotamia, home of some of the world’s oldest civilizations—Babylon, Sumer, Persia, Assyria, Chaldea. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers flowed from the mountains further north and spilled into the lowlands in the southeast, emptying into Iraq and Iran to form what had once been known as the Fertile Crescent.
Back when he was a young man, in a Bible class his daddy’d taught at church back home in Waycross, Georgia, Goose had studied this region. It was the place many Bible scholars believed had once housed the Garden of Eden. But now the green paradise was gone. Here the world seemed reduced to a sea of shifting yellow sand and gravel that sported islands of treacherous rocks and stubborn scrub bushes. And Goose, too, had changed. His easy acceptance of the church’s teaching was long gone. He had seen too much violence to buy into the simple beliefs of his youth.
His faith, like the landscape around him, had been blasted.
“So, what do you think, Sergeant?” The voice of his commanding officer came via Goose’s ear/throat headset. Satellite communications kept the teams in constant contact, and with HQ five klicks behind the front lines, that was good. As First Sergeant, Goose’s headset was chipped for the main channel as well as four subset frequencies he could use for special team assignments. He was second-in-command and ranking NCO of a company consisting of for four rifle platoons ranged across the border, shoring up the exhausted Turkish soldiers on the front lines.
Despite the fact that the Syrian military hadn’t shown signs of having audio-pickup equipment or signal-capturing communications antenna, Goose spoke quietly and evenly over the scrambled channel. “I think they’re waiting on something, sir. Or someone.”
“Nothing appears out of the ordinary,” Captain Cal Remington replied.
“No, sir,” Goose said, surveying the way the Syrian soldiers took refuge from the sun under vehicles and tarps. “The grunts are all business as usual. But I do see a little more spit and polish than normal today.”
“‘Spit and polish’?”
Goose grinned. “Yes, sir, Captain. An enlisted man, sir, he never forgets the dog and pony show he has to put on for an officer. Always cleaning. Always drilling. Always looking busy. The more important the officers, the more spit and polish.”
“And you’d know that, would you, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir. And if I recall, sir, there was a time before OCS when you knew that, too.” Their friendship reached through nearly sixteen years of hardships and dangerous assignments, including Remington’s choice to sign up for the army’s Officer Candidate School. That long bridge of friendship more than spanned the gulf between officer and non-com.
Remington was silent.
Knowing the captain was back at headquarters, availing himself of the computer systems tied into the geosynchronous spy satellites twenty-three thousand miles into space, Goose waited. He shifted the binoculars slowly. Maybe Remington hadn’t noticed the subtle change in the attitudes of the Syrian soldiers on the other side of the border.
The Syrian soldiers wore camouflage fatigues that looked a lot like the ones worn by the American and Turkish troops. The pattern was bigger, cleaner, and not as shaded. A civilian eye, Goose knew, probably wouldn’t be able to differentiate between the three sets of battle dress uniforms in this part of the world, but Goose had no problem. His life—as well as the lives of his squadmates—could depend on that skill. It wasn’t just a matter of finding and shooting the enemy. Like the old saying went, “Friendly fire isn’t.”
Syrian troop placement was heavy. Winning through intimidation, Remington called the effort, with his signature smirk of disapproval. Remington always said real warriors won wars by handing down a decisive victory that left no room for argument—not by saber rattling and trafficking in threats. Goose knew that for Remington, anything other than confrontation and aggressive action was NJ—no joy.
Goose didn’t feel that way. If intimidation kept everybody from shooting, he was all for it. Putting on a good show could save lives. Remington may have had his reasons to prefer action. An officer’s career advanced through victories, while an enlisted man simply wanted to do a good job and remain alive. Goose hoped the Syrians were willing to stick to intimidation for the foreseeable future.
The Syrian military boasted an assortment of Jeeps, Land Rovers, T-62 and T-72 main battle tanks, BMP-2 and BMP-3 armored infantry fighting vehicles, and BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. Farther back among the hills, Goose had seen self-propelled artillery and air defense units, as well as multiple rocket launchers. Satellite reconnaissance had confirmed all those weapons, as well as giving reliable estimates of troop numbers.
During the last week, the numbers had doubled. So the changes weren’t all just spit and polish. Goose was getting a bad feeling about the future.
The Turks and the U.N. forces had their own array of weapons. The border area was crawling with Humvees, M-1 Abrams main battle tanks, and Bradley M-2 and M-3 APCs. Artillery and air defense units were bolstered by MLRs and Apache helicopter gunships. If that wasn’t enough to handle the army arrayed against them, heavy-duty help was close by. The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit—Special Operations Capable, or MEU(SOC), was on standby, poised for action on their three-ship amphibious ready group, anchored by the USS Wasp. The ARG sat on a 180-day float out in the Mediterranean Sea, ready to lend air and Marine support to the land-based forces at a moment’s notice.
The Syrians
