Trent Reedy - Divided We Fall

“Move it, ladies!” Sergeant Meyers shouted.

Specialist Sparrow unsnapped her chin strap so she could tip back her helmet and wipe her forehead. “I really wish he would shut up.”

Me and Luchen chuckled.

“Stop messing around, Luchen, Wright,” Meyers said. “This is a basic combat engineer task. Let’s get this obstacle in.”

That was easy for him to say. He was only shuffling his fat ass around telling others what to do, and how and when to do it. He knew his stuff and kept us moving, but by the sixth time I had lifted the steel pounder by both handles and slid it over a picket, I was ready to punch the guy.

Shortly before dark, we were allowed to stop, but we only had three rows done. I sat on the ground at the side of the road with Luchen and Sparrow, who, like me, drank madly from their CamelBaks.

“This sucks,” Luchen said. “Two more days of this shit. Don’t know if I can take it.”

Sparrow elbowed him. “Come on, I thought you were supposed to be a tough guy.”

“Don’t you ever get tired?” Luchen asked her.

“’Course I do,” she said. “But I have to hide it more so I don’t catch crap from Meyers and you guys.”

Sergeant Kemp stepped up behind us. “I just got word that our team is going to be setting up fighting positions somewhere over there.” He pointed to the north edge of the valley, toward a hill that was covered in pine trees on the Washington side of the border, but at least partially cleared on the Idaho side. “We may be doing a live demo mission to bring down trees faster, but I doubt they’ll actually find us any C4 for that. Anyway, grab your rucks, ’cause we’re stepping it out right now. We’ll work on it as much as we can before dark, and then finish up tomorrow morning.”

“Why are we doing all this?” Specialist Sparrow asked.

“I’ve decided to stop asking questions like that,” Kemp said.

“Let’s go, Sergeant Kemp! Get your team up there and get started!” Sergeant Meyers yelled.

“At least we’ll get away from Meyers,” Kemp said under his breath. Then he added louder, “Oh, and Specialist Sparrow, draw a pack of old field phones and a spool of wire from the back of the truck. We’re going to set up some old-school commo.”

The march down the lane past the couple farms and then up the hill was no problem. I’d had rougher marches in basic, where the shoulder straps from my ruck felt like they were about to cut right through me. At one point, a civilian rode up on a blue four-wheeler, hauling a little open-topped, single-axle trailer. “Hey, you guys know this is private property?”

Sergeant Kemp approached him. “Yes, sir, we do. I apologize for the intrusion. We have orders to conduct some… training operations… in this area.”

“Looks to me like a lot more than training going on here.”

“I’m instructed to ask you to refer all questions to our company commander, Captain Andrew Leonard.” Kemp sounded like he was reading a script.

The farmer removed his cowboy hat and shook his head before putting the hat back on. “So it’s like that, huh?”

“It’s like that, sir.”

“Not much point in me asking any questions, is there?” He spat brown tobacco juice. “You boys are gonna do what you’re gonna do.”

“We’re going to set up anywhere from fifty to seventy meters from the Washington border, sir. If you have cattle or anything in that area, it might be a good idea to move them somewhere else.”

“Most of my operation is on the Washington side of the border,” said the man. “I’m thinking it might be a good idea to make sure it’s all on that side.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“So am I,” said the farmer. “I’ve worked hard on this little ranch.” He fired up his four-wheeler and headed back down the hill toward his house.

The sun was down but it was still light out by the time Sergeant Kemp got us to the right place. He had specific points marked on a map on his comm where the leadership had decided they wanted overwatch positions. He told me and Luchen to get down in the prone while he and Specialist Sparrow went to find another point farther north.

Luchen and I were in the perfect spot for an overwatch, in a shallow U-shaped crevasse among the moss-covered rocks. The natural rock walls sloped off on the sides on the west end, so that we had a great view of the work site to our left down on the highway. A cliff dropped about ten feet down to a ledge, and then the terrain sloped down another five feet beyond that. Only a few trees blocked our view. From here, it would be easy to spot anyone who came out of the woods on the Washington side of the border, while the overhead branches from a couple evergreens behind us would provide concealment from aerial surveillance.

I lay down, grateful that my knees, belly, and elbows would be padded by the thick layer of long pine needles that carpeted the ground here. Luchen moved to the back of our pit, where the rock walls pinched toward each other to make a three-foot-wide passageway, the tops so high they reached a couple feet above his head. “Hey, this could make a good latrine back here.”

“It will not,” I said. “I do not want to smell your nasty shit. We’re gonna be right here all weekend.”

He shrugged and came back to join me, sitting down on the pine needles and leaning back against the gentle slope of the north rock wall. He pointed down to the road. “Better here than with those sorry picket-pounders down there. I only hope they don’t expect us to dig into this rock to make a foxhole. We’ll need more than our e-tools for that.”

I laughed. The entrenching tools, our little fold-up shovels, were definitely not equipped to cut through the solid rock here. “No, but we could stack rocks or logs to get some more cover.”

“Yeah, but cover from what?” Luchen said. “What are we doing here?”

We were digging in to prepare for attacks from American soldiers — from our own guys. I knew this, but I didn’t want to believe it, and I didn’t want to talk about it. I stood up and slung my M4 across my back. “You keep watch. I’ll go find some rocks to start building a wall for cover.”

I walked around the hillside, picking up big, round stones and carrying them back to close the west end of our bowl and make a barrier between us and the state of Washington. When it was too dark to see, I finally stopped.

Sergeant Kemp showed up shortly after dark with an ancient field telephone, wire trailing behind him from a spool. “Okay, we’re keeping comm and radio use in the field to a minimum. The light from the screen can give away our positions, and command is worried that comm-to-comm and even radio communications might be intercepted. So, we have these antiques — battery-powered TA-312 field telephones.” He showed us how to crank them to make a call. “Sound like something you can handle?”

“Sounds like something a brain-damaged chimpanzee could handle,” I said.

“Good.” Kemp laughed. “Then you two might actually be smart enough to make it work. They want us on 50 percent security with half of us awake half the night and half of us awake the other half of the night, but that’s crazy. We’ll each pull a two-hour guard shift. Just kind of walk around with your night vision glasses on and make sure the brass doesn’t come up here to check on us. If they do, hurry up and wake up half of us.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” we said.

The next morning we were up shortly before sunrise. After shaving and brushing our teeth in cold water that we squeezed out of our CamelBaks, we had field chow. But this was no ordinary field chow like we used to get at basic, with the preprocessed food packs that the cooks simply boiled and put into insulated pans for us. This was something completely new.