Captain Scott Mitchell tucked himself tighter into the underbrush as the sputtering whine of a diesel engine broke the morning silence. The mud road just ahead wove away like a rusty red bloodstain through the forest.
A moment later, the old truck with a tattered tarpaulin covering its flatbed rounded a cluster of pines and jostled forward, trailing rooster tails of clay.
Mitchell, dressed in black civilian clothes with a black
Today Mitchell's name was Jawaad, and he was the local guerrilla chief, or G-chief, in this part of 'The People's Republic of Pineland,' a fictional country whose unassuming name suggested a land of trailer parks rather than a war-torn nation. For the past six months, insurgents from OpForland, a country of political and religious unrest, had been smuggling themselves across the border to terrorize Jawaad's village. They had killed his father and two brothers.
Jawaad was here to strike back at the insurgents, liberate his country from oppression, and send a message to the enemy. He was here for revenge. To that end, he and his guerrillas, or Gs, had linked up with Operational Detachment Alpha 927, a twelve-man team of American Special Forces soldiers who had armed and been training them for the past two weeks.
In point of fact, the entire scenario was part of Robin Sage, a nineteen-day field training exercise (FTX) and the final phase of the eighteen- to twenty-six-month-long Special Forces Qualification Course taught at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. The name Robin Sage was derived from Robbins, a nearby town, and from the man who had developed the exercise, Colonel Jerry Sage, one of the school's original commanders.
The exercise was conducted throughout fourteen counties and put operators through a grueling series of unconventional warfare situations in which they had to rely upon every aspect of their training, from mission planning to execution. Robin Sage was the final exercise before graduation and assignment to one of the operational Special Forces groups. To the men taking the course, passing the exercise meant everything.
But they had to make it past Scott Mitchell first.
Being the G-chief, Mitchell had already made it clear to the detachment commander, Captain Fred Warris, and the warrant officer, CW2 Baron Williams, that this was his show, and those guys had initially argued over that. Out there in the real world you sometimes had to trust the local chief you'd only known for a month, because if you didn't, you'd never get the job done. What's more, sometimes you had to let him lead because it was his fight and his honor at stake. That was difficult for many operators to accept, men who thrived on being in control.
Robin Sage training also incorporated the experiences of real-life soldiers like Mitchell, who had designed this particular scenario based upon an experience he'd had in Eritrea. The young Captain Warris was about to be overwhelmed.
Mitchell's breath grew shallow. The truck was about twenty meters from the trigger line now.
Close enough.
He burst from cover, ran onto the road, and began firing wildly at the vehicle, screaming at the top of his lungs, 'For my father! For my brothers!'
Behind him, Warris began hollering, 'Jawaad, what the hell are you doing? Come back!'
Mitchell kept firing, his paintballs exploding on the windshield of the truck.
Warris hollered even louder, 'Jawaad, get back here!'
The truck's driver threw it in park and hopped out, along with a passenger: both OpForland soldiers armed with rifles. They dropped to their bellies and began returning fire, paintballs whirring past Mitchell, who was grinning to himself.
G-chief Jawaad had screwed up the entire ambush.
The ODA team and the guerrillas were supposed to lie in wait until the truck hit the trigger line, at which time one of Jawaad's men would toss a smoke grenade while a simulated claymore exploded, tearing apart the vehicle's front end.
Mitchell had, in his own way, just welcomed his students to Unconventional Warfare 101, where no battle plan survived the first enemy — or friendly — contact.
He continued running at the truck, taking fire from the enemy soldiers, paintballs striking his thighs and chest. He squeezed off a few more rounds and staggered forward, shouting once more about revenge until he dropped to his knees in the mud, fired again, then fell and rolled onto his side, crying, 'Help! I've been hit! I'm hit!'
Now it was up to Warris and Williams to gain control of the chaos.
Mitchell lay there and watched as, across the path, one of the team's evaluators, Captain Simon Harruck, rose from the scrub to watch as the sergeant assisting him lifted his small camera to digitally record the event.
Warris ordered his engineers who'd been standing by on the claymore to circle around to the vehicle's rear, while everyone else opened fire on the truck, paintballs thudding and fountaining across metal.
Within five seconds the two enemy soldiers were 'dead,' and Warris called a cease fire. His engineers were the first on the vehicle and began unloading and busting open crates containing Meals, Ready-to-Eat and weapons caches.
Mitchell got to his feet. 'ODA team? Guerrilla team? The exercise is terminated. On me right now!'
It took several more minutes for everyone, nearly thirty in all, to rally around Mitchell in the middle of the road. He shook his head at Warris. 'You got two medics. Couldn't spare one to save my life?'
The captain furrowed his brows in confusion. 'You ran at the truck, blew the whole ambush. You looked like you were trying to commit suicide.'
'And now every G here is pissed off at you for letting me die.'
'But you killed yourself.'
'No, I was getting my revenge. And maybe that was more important to me than my own life. Or maybe I was trying to show my men how important their cause is. I was trying to teach them how to fight to the death.'
'By running into fire.'
'Maybe I martyred myself.' Mitchell sighed and adopted a more conversational tone. 'See, you don't know what these guys will do when it comes down to it. You always have plan B, which involves them betraying you or doing something crazy, like running into the road.'
Warris nodded. 'But we still accomplished the objective. Truck stopped, cargo seized.'
'Maybe not. You put so much gunfire on that truck that you blew it up. Everybody should have held fire. You send out your medic and put your snipers to work to pin down the bad guys.'
Warris swallowed, and Mitchell knew that every decision the captain had just made would weigh heavily on his mind. He was already wondering if his career was in jeopardy.
So Mitchell let him off the hook and added, 'I know that one second could make the difference between living and dying, but you need to take that second and think, okay, I got a guy running at the truck. He's stopped the truck — which was what the claymore was supposed to do. We got no smoke, but the G-chief has all their attention. Let me get my marksmen on target. And yes, I know you need to make that assessment in one second. But we're not out in the woods because we're afraid of challenges. And for what it's worth, I did the same thing you did — just put tons of steel on target. I never sent the medic. The guerrillas turned it around and blamed me for his death. It took me a long time to win back their trust.'
Warris considered that, muttered a 'Whoa,' then added, 'Captain, I appreciate your honesty.'
Mitchell offered his hand. 'Lessons learned. So now that I'm dead, you need to figure out if you can still negotiate with my Gs and who's in charge — and sometimes even that can be a real headache. And oh, yeah, the Gs are going to loot those bodies, then after that, they might want to chop off their heads and put them on poles. How do you feel about that?'
Warris's eyes grew wide.
Mitchell gave a short nod to Captain Harruck, who began barking new instructions to the group as up ahead, an HMMWV came rolling forward and stopped. 'Hi, I'm looking for Captain Mitchell,' said the young PFC at the
