Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit

As things calmed down in the Persian Gulf, there was one final act to Chilly Dog. At 0430 hours, two Aegis cruisers and a pair of Spruance-class destroyers began to launch a strike by 124 BGM-109 Tomahawk missiles against the automobile factory at Bandar al Abbas and missile batteries in the Straits of Hormuz. After an overland flight from the Arabian Sea side of Iran, they leveled their targets, fully 88 % of the missiles striking their designated aim-points. With this, Chilly Dog came to an end. The political fallout around the world, though, would last for months.

Joint Session of the U.S. Congress, Washington, D.C., January 18th, 2007

The final words of the President's 2005 State of the Union Address were simple, as all good speeches should be. 'Ladies and gentlemen, I summarize the results of the Bushehr Raid in this way. We have decisively ended a clear violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as a threat to the stability of Southwest Asia. Even more important, the individuals who perpetrated this violation are to be tried shortly for crimes against humanity. Already, we have seen the fall of the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran and the beginning of a thaw between ourselves and the people of that troubled land. We offer the hand of friendship and commerce to the people of Iran, and the hope that the terrible fire that we have contained will never again raise its head in the Persian Gulf.

'I also wish to thank the men and women who conducted this action. We live in a new millennium, and unless we choose different paths for ourselves and our world, the human race will not see another. Luckily, we have good people out there who stand on the walls, and guard them for us as we sleep. I never want to be without a military to watch over our interests, and protect them. God bless them, and God bless the United States of America!'

Officers' Mess, USS Bataan (LHD-5), Western Mediterranean, January 18th, 2007

Lev Davidovich Telfian watched the State of the Union address with a smile on his face, knowing that he had helped in bringing a happy end to this situation. He was still aboard the Bataan, where he would be safer until the memories of the Iranians were less fresh. Telfian had been thinking about what he wanted to do next, and he had several offers. One came from the IAEA to work on an inspection team in South America and Africa. Another one had been extended from the U.S., to work as a consultant for the Defense Nuclear Agency on counter-proliferation issues. Even the SVR was making him an offer, as an intelligence analyst at Moscow headquarters. That last one held few attractions for him. Perhaps the Americans. At least they were working to take the damned bombs apart. After being so close to the nuclear genie for so long, perhaps it was time to try and force it back into the bottle.

Operation Tropic Fury: The Liberation of Brunei, September 2008

Limbang Valley, Brunei, September 2nd, 2008

This morning, the Sultan of Brunei would dedicate a new clinic for the hill tribes of the upper Limbang Valley. The Royal helicopter, a luxurious Sikorsky S-76, snaked up the valley from the South China Sea toward the rain- forested mountains of northern Borneo. It was only a twenty-minute flight from the Palace, and the airspace over the entire district had been cleared of other traffic. Sometimes the Sultan, an enthusiastic and reasonably skilled pilot, liked to take the controls himself, but today he was content to sit back and browse through the electronic edition of the Wall Street Journal on his new Toshiba data pad. The lead story was, in fact, about his plan for partition and management of newly surveyed oil fields in the South China Sea.

They centered around the Spratlys, a few barren reefs that had ambitions to be islands at low tide. The new oil pools were probably the biggest at-sea petroleum find since the North Sea fields back in the 1970s. Unfortunately, the nations surrounding this oil discovery were nowhere as reasonable as Great Britain and Norway when they partitioned the North Sea fields. Half a dozen nations had claims over the new oil find, and few of these nations could be described as 'reasonable.' To the east lay the Philippines, where a share of the oil revenue might relieve an exploding population's chronic poverty. To the west, the Communist governments of China and Vietnam coveted oil to fuel their economies and earn hard currency from petroleum exports. To the north, Taiwan, still claiming to be the 'true' Government of China, felt entitled to a piece of China's share. But the real trouble lay to the south, where Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Brunei all had claims on the new fields, and some of them were willing to fight for a larger share.

Tiny Brunei, with the wells that produced fabled North Borneo crude, the world's purest oil, was the richest nation per capita in the world. This provoked envy among neighbors, particularly Malaysia, with its growing population, simmering ethnic tensions, and lack of oil resources. The Malays had been full of threats this past summer. The reason was the upcoming United Nations conference at the end of October which would settle, once and for all, the development plans for the South China Sea oil fields. Malaysia had joined Indonesia in a coalition for the coming conference, and was trying to entice Singapore. The same offer had been extended to the Sultan, but he had politely declined the invitation.

He would place a proposal on the table to create a multi-national non-profit corporation which would invest the oil income into a regional development fund to build schools, roads, and other infrastructure so badly needed by the peoples of the region. The Sultan knew that the leaders of the other countries did not share his vision, and this was why he wanted to put his ideas on the table at the UN. The article in the Wall Street Journal spelled out the details of the plan-as well as the first reactions to it, which had come quickly. Malaysia and Indonesia had denounced it. Vietnam and China had remained ominously silent. But Singapore, Taiwan, and the Philippines had all endorsed the idea, and this gave him hope. He smiled and sat back, composing his thoughts for the clinic dedication.

The bright, newly painted yellow circled 'H' of the clinic's medevac landing pad was just coming into view around a bend in the river. Today's duty pilot for the Royal Flight was a retired British Fleet Air Arm commander with thousands of hours logged in just about anything with rotors. He had also been trained in escape and evasion. It didn't do him much good. He caught the flash on the ground and instinctively pulled into a hard break to starboard. The data pad flew out of the Sultan's grip and bounced off the Plexiglas windscreen.

The pilot's move was too late. The seeker head of the first shoulder-fired missile had locked onto the hot metal of the turbine exhaust even as other missiles lanced upward from the opposite side of the valley. The high- explosive warhead detonated on impact with the port engine, shredding fuel lines, hydraulic tubing, and control cables. A single missile hit might have resulted in a survivable crash, but the second hit turned the tough and graceful chopper into a flying cloud of flaming wreckage. By the time the stunned VIPs and the medical team from the clinic arrived at the crash site, His Royal Highness, the Sultan of Brunei, by some estimates the world's richest human, was identifiable only from dental records.

The Palace, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, September 2nd, 2008