Expendable Elite by Daniel Marvin

Author:Daniel Marvin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
Publisher: Trine Day
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

What time is it?” I was stalling. I sleep less than four hours a day, and when I do sleep, I get fairly cold and clammy and my body kind of shuts down for the most part.

“0530, Dai-uy, Major Le wants to see you in his office. He just got bad news from Khanh Binh. Sergeant Trang’s wife and child were killed by a booby trap.”

That tragic news jolted me to full awareness. I always slept in my black pajama uniform and wool cushion sole socks and all I had to do was slip my feet into jungle boots, grab my rifle and head on out. I thanked Eleam and then almost knocked him down getting through the doorway on my way to Le’s office. He was sitting behind his desk. I shook his hand and told him how sorry I was to learn of Sergeant Trang’s loss. “How did it happen?” I asked.

He motioned for me to sit down. “It is a very sad thing, Dai-uy. Trang had just come back from an all night ambush and was on his way home from the FOB. Maybe 20 feet away from his house, he stepped on a tripwire and blew up his own home with his wife and baby trapped inside.” Tears formed in Major Le’s eyes and rolled down his cheek as he continued, “They were killed instantly. Because of the way this tragedy took place, I think we should go to Khanh Binh and talk to Lieutenant Luong as soon as possible.”

I told him I’d be ready to go in 30 minutes, washed my face and upper torso, shaved, donned jungle fatigues and boots, grabbed a hunk of bread and a slab of cheese and gulped that down. Back to my cubicle, I gathered my combat gear, and rushed out to meet Major Le at his jeep at exactly 0600 hours.

The sun’s pre-dawn reflection off the scattered cumulus clouds lent a pinkish tint to the morning sky as we drove north along the river in Major Le’s jeep. The beauty of it all did little to soften the hard reality of Trang’s family tragedy or sweeten the bitter feeling in our hearts against the killers of an innocent baby and her mother. Would there be any comfort to Sergeant Trang, who would not forget that it was he, whose innocent stepping on the trigger wire, had unknowingly brought about the death of his own wife and baby?

The trip to Khanh Binh was void of conversation as we both grappled inwardly with the need to be swift and brutal in response to this tragedy or suffer a significant lowering of morale and perhaps precipitate a rash of desertions.

The Striker who became discontent with his role as an irregular warrior and left did not “desert” in the traditional sense. All Strikers were, in reality, paid mercenaries. The CIDG program had, for the most part, developed into a loyal group of paid irregulars who did not consider themselves mercenaries. They did,

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