John Ringo: A Hymn Before Battle

Ft. Bragg, NC Sol III

0911 EDT March 16th, 2001 ad

The secure phone on the broad wooden desk of the commander, Joint Special Operations Command, buzzed and he tossed the file he was annotating onto the pile of similar documents.

“JSOC—” pronounced Jay-Sock ” — General Taylor.” The room was tastefully decorated with an impressive “I love me” wall of battle decorations, paintings of notable battles and commission photographs. The carpeting was deep, rich blue and the wallpaper was matching but the view was pure walls. The room resided deep within a featureless concrete building, one of several, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Joint Special Operations Command was founded out of disaster. During the Tehran Hostage Crisis, the inability of the services to coordinate was critical in the debacle at Desert One. Special operations require depths of coordination and training that the regular services could not supply. As just one example, the forecasters for Desert One were not told precisely where the flights would go and, therefore, could not warn the planners about the dust storms the helicopters encountered. The Marine pilots, while capable and valiant to a normal level, were under-trained for a mission of that intensity, leading to the “pilot error” crashes at the site and other failures.

These critical failures of communication, intelligence and training, the cornerstones of any military, crystallized a movement to centralize the various services’ special operations groups under one umbrella organization. Joint Special Operations was the child of that movement. It was from JSOC that such high-quality actions as the Special Forces and Ranger raids in Panama, the Force Recon insertion into Baghdad and the SEAL diversion during the assault in Desert Storm drew their planning and implementation.

Now, the Joint Special Operations Command was a mature unit, ready to provide the right forces at the right time for special operations anywhere on the globe. But they were about to be tasked for a mission outside those parameters.

“General Taylor, it’s Trayner,” said the cold voice on the phone.

“And what can JSOC do for the Vice Chief of Staff, today?” asked General Taylor, leaning back and staring unseeing at the picture on the far wall: a line of blue-clad soldiers charging out of a mist against a similar line of soldiers clad in gray.

“It’s an awkward tasking,” said the VCA. “I need one of your people. I’m going to give you the specifications and you tell me who I need. Also, this should be obvious since I’m stepping all over procedure, this is as ‘black’ as it gets. Are we clear on that?” “Black” operations are so secret sometimes they never happened. There are no records and no reports, only results. Politicians, even presidents, hate black operations.

“ Capice , sir,” the commander replied, wondering what the fuss was. This was SOCOM’s meat and drink. “What are the specifications for this oh-so-special individual?” he asked. He picked up a letter opener off his desk and started to balance it on the tip of his index finger.

“NCO or officer,” continued the VCA, “to put together a team, mono-service or joint, for unspecified reconnaissance in hostile territory and environment outside the continental United States.”

Taylor scratched the back of his neck and changed his stare to the picture of a tropical beach on his desk. A much younger, bronzed Taylor had his arm around the waist of a skinny laughing blonde. He appeared to be trying to cop a feel. “That’s pretty damn vague General, except the ‘hostile’ part.” He flipped the letter opener in the air. It landed point down in a cork target just to the left of his monitor, obviously placed there for that very reason. He paid it no attention, assuming the letter opener knew where it was going.

“Don’t fish, Jim,” snapped the VCA. “This is as black as midnight; that’s straight from National Command Authority, the President. It wasn’t even from the SECDEF or SECARMY, they’re out of the loop. I was given this tasking personally by the NCA.”

“Jesus, this is deep shit,” snorted Taylor. He thought for a moment then laughed, “Okay. Mosovich.”

“Shit, I knew you’d say that,” the other general growled. “The sergeant major’ll shit a brick.”

“He’s your sergeant major, not mine,” Taylor laughed again. “You want black reconnaissance in hostile territory, Mosovich is the Man. I notice you don’t suggest Bobby-boy,” General Taylor continued smugly.

“He hates to be called that,” said the VCA, resignedly. It was an old and worn argument. “Okay, okay, put him TDY to my office. Tell ’im to sneak by the sergeant major if he’s so damn stealthy.” The phone clicked in Taylor’s ear.

“You wanted to see me, General?”

At the quietly spoken words the report the Vice Chief of Staff had been reading flew upward in a blizzard of paper. In the three days since his call to the JSOC commander, Trayner had hardly left his office. When Command Sergeant Major Jacob “Jake the Snake” Mosovich had entered his office or how long he had been sitting quietly on the Vice Chief of Staff’s couch was a mystery. The startle factor and long hours caused the VCA’s temper to snap.

“God damn you, you, you, fucking juvenile delinquent! How long have you been sitting there?” he shouted, slapping his desk. All it did was hurt his hand; the implied reprimand slid off Mosovich like rain off a roof. “And have you ever heard of reporting properly?” the officer snarled. He started to reassemble the file as if it were the shredded remains of his temper.

“I’ve been here since 0500, sir, about twenty minutes before you got here.” Jake’s scar-seamed face split in an uncharacteristic grin, “General Taylor told me to avoid Bobby-Boy.”

Sergeant Major Mosovich was a thirty-year veteran of covert special operations. Five feet seven inches tall and a hundred fifty pounds soaking wet, his head was almost totally bald, one side of it scar tissue, but his dress green uniform was virtually unadorned. He sported few decorations for valor and his open military record, his 201 file, listed him with limited time in combat: a few actions in Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm and Somalia. For all that, and the total lack of any official Purple Hearts, his face was pockmarked with black pits, indicative of unextracted shrapnel, and his body was covered in the ropy scars made by metal when it violates the human body. His medical file, as opposed to his 201, had so much data on trauma repair and recovery it could be used as a textbook. He had spent his whole career, except a first tour with the 82 ndAirborne, in special operations, moving from Special Forces to Delta Force and eventually back. No matter where he was, officially, he always seemed to be somewhere else and he had a permanent tan from tropical suns. Over the years he had amassed quite a retirement fund from temporary duty pay and he never went anywhere, anymore, unless it was at max per diem.

The necessity to avoid the Sergeant Major of the Army stemmed from an unfortunate incident the year before at the Association of the United States Army annual convention at the Washington Sheraton.

Once a senior NCO reaches a certain rank, all the positions are technically equal. Obviously, however, there is a certain prestige to the Command Sergeant Major position of, say, Third Army as opposed to Third Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colorado. But the higher prestige positions do not necessarily go to the sergeant majors with the most time in grade or combat experience, but rather to the sergeant majors who are willing to expend the political energy or have the patronage and desire.

The current Sergeant Major of the Army was Command Sergeant Major Robert McCarmen. Sergeant Major McCarmen was a contemporary of Sergeant Major Mosovich and they had both come up through Special Forces. But, whereas Sergeant Major Mosovich was always somewhere overseas doing something odd or unmentionable, with few exceptions Sergeant Major McCarmen had been at Fort Bragg, North Carolina (5 thand 7 thGroups), Fort Lewis, Washington (1 stGroup) or Fort Carson, Colorado (10 thGroup) except for training missions. He had, however, deployed for Grenada, Panama and Desert Storm. Somehow, despite the fact that these operations had involved minimal real combat for special operations personnel, with a few glaring exceptions, Sergeant Major McCarmen had amassed an impressive set of medals. Silver Star, Bronze Star with V device for valor in combat, and even the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest award for courage in the military pantheon. Each medal was fully authorized and if the citations were a little vague, well, what could be expected for a “Black Warrior.” The fact that the citations were all written by commanders with whom the sergeant major had a close and warm relationship was beside the point: it had to be your commander who made the commendation and McCarmen always interacted well with his officers.