In Afghanistan, we’d be sneering at ANCOP, screaming, “Get in the fucking dirt! Low crawl or a bullet’s gonna blow out your fucking brains! You think we’re telling you to do this shit because we like seeing you in the dirt? We’re telling you this shit so you don’t fucking die!”
In Colombia—not so much. The Colombians are good. They win the Latin American special ops competition every year. They generally didn’t have to be berated. It wasn’t that they were better than us. We had more schooling, more training, better training, for the most part. As a medic, I had skills they couldn’t touch, our weapons sergeants knew far more guns far better than them because they had far more opportunities to train on a wider variety of weapon systems. We had broader capabilities, and way cooler toys. But as soldiers, they weren’t beneath us. They’d been through some tough shit. Tougher shit, sometimes.
Toward the end of the training, the Lanceros were heading out to Macarena to do COIN ops, a mission that wasn’t dangerous but just dangerous enough that at the last minute we got the word we weren’t allowed to go with them, which is when Ocho’s shit hit the fan.
“They think we’re faggots,” he yelled at Jefe in Spanish. “Because we’re acting like faggots. How am I supposed to train a son of a bitch when I can’t share risk with him?”
Jefe just raised an eyebrow.
“Training up foreign troops to protect their citizens so we don’t have to, that’s the whole reason Special Forces was created in the first place. De oppresso liber.”
It wasn’t Jefe at his most inspiring. The definition of foreign internal defense, straight from army manuals, plus the SF motto, was not going to convince a bunch of soldiers that they weren’t bored. “Man, Jefe,” Ocho said. “You’re more into FID than anybody I know.”
Jefe stared Ocho down, and Ocho lowered his eyes. Jefe was the first team sergeant I’d ever had. When a team leader is good, they’re something of a father figure, and Jefe was very, very good. Humility matched by flawless technical proficiency. The kind of man an aura grows around. I’d never seen anyone try, in any way, to take even a little of the air out of his tires.
“Yeah,” Jefe said, “that’s what’s on the fucking poster.”
Ocho looked at me.
“What do you think?” he said.
I looked at Jefe, and at Ocho, not sure exactly what was going on. Technically, Jefe was right. SF wasn’t supposed to be just a smash things unit. I’d had that in Ranger Battalion. Ranger Battalion is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. Ranger Battalion is supposed to be an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. It’s the reason I left. I was done being part of a crazy collection of angry individuals ready to fuck things up. I wanted to be a bit more than your average eight-hundred-pound gorilla. And SF is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla that can dance ballet.
But I owed Ocho loyalty, too. And I wanted to defuse things.
“I just had a kid,” I said. “An easy deployment, it’s not so bad.”
As we headed out, Ocho turned to me. “Man, when I joined Seventh Group, Colombia was the fucking legend,” he said. “All the old heads talking ’bout chasing Pablo Escobar and fucking hot Colombian bitches.” He shrugged. “Times change.”
• • •
Ocho was hardly the only guy who hated being in Colombia. The rest of 7th Group were cycling in and out of Afghanistan, living far from the flagpole, getting into gnarly firefights, dominating their enemy, and then going back to do it again. They’d sit with their Afghan counterpart (if there even was one), sip chai, look at a wall map, and say, “Let’s go to Mangritay. There’s always good hunting in Mangritay.” And then they’d load up the trucks, head out, stumble into a few firefights, come back, rest up, pick another spot on the map, and do the same thing again. Rinse, repeat, count the bodies. Pure war. No one was on the hook for securing a district, or a province, let alone the country. If the gunfight was a success, you were a success. Meanwhile, we were hand-holding indigs an ocean away from the real war.
If Jefe had just bitched along with everyone else, it would have been fine. But he wanted us to like the mission. He’d tell Ocho and the rest to shut up when they got on rants about how we were wasting our time, or he’d launch into speeches about Pappy Shelton, who’d trained up the Bolivian Ranger team that killed Che Guevara.
“While everybody else was in Vietnam, getting in badass gunfights and losing the war, Pappy was doing boring training work and winning the war against the most badass commie guerrilla . . .”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ocho said. “We all know about Pappy Shelton.” He turned to the room. “His brothers are dying fighting Viet Cong, and what does that bitch do? Run to Bolivia.”
When a few guys chuckled, Jefe’s face went purple. He looked around the room, his eyes eventually resting on me. An ODA team is supposed to be one cohesive unit, one collective mind. It’s not supposed to be a place where you have to choose sides between your senior medic and your team chief.
Later that night, Jefe caught me alone, and told me in that quiet way of his, “You know I like getting it as much as anybody. But I’ve seen too many people blown up or killed in this fucking job to have any patience for that hard-guy bullshit.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was right, or going soft.
• • •
The training itself was otherwise fine, straightforward—room clearing, shooting moving targets, raids, patrolling, specialized breakouts like me and Ocho working with the medics. Which, given that it was Ocho, meant some really specialized training.
One of the Colombian medics had nine kids, and Ocho was like, “That’s nine too many.”
“You have four kids,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “But I don’t care about
