by Mitch Weiss
Barrientos didn’t like it, but there was little he could do. The United States was providing most of the money to keep his country afloat. He just hoped that by the time the Rangers were ready for action, he’d still have a country.
CHAPTER 13
Shaping Up
After two months of intense training in the sticky heat, the Bolivian conscripts were grasping the finer points of soldiering. Many of them had never handled a rifle before they arrived, and now they could take apart and reassemble several weapons within moments. They could climb ropes and move quickly through a maze of obstacles without missing a step. The Rangers started their mornings with war chants, followed by thirty minutes of calisthenics. Then they sprinted to the range and back before tackling new assignments.
The Green Berets showed them how to secure jungle paths with warning devices made from coffee cans and string. They learned how to read maps and use compasses, and how to counterattack in an ambush. They were tired at the end of the day, but there was little rest—at night they went on maneuvers. It was coming together.
Training was getting more complicated. They moved into the advanced stages of individual training, which included rappelling off the side of the five-story sugar mill building. Everything was on schedule. Soon they’d move to unit training, learning to work as a team. Then, after two weeks of field exercises, they’d ship out to the jungles for the real thing.
One night in early July, Prado stopped at Shelton’s office for their end-of-day review. Prado had become invaluable to Shelton. He told him if soldiers in a particular unit were having problems with a concept or tactic, and the pair would devise a schedule to give the struggling soldiers some extra tutoring, or time on the firing range. (The range was always a tricky issue, because villagers and their cattle sometimes ambled unexpectedly across, on their way to their pastures.) Prado sat in his usual chair. Shelton poured the both of them drinks and asked his colleague how things were going.
“Everything is going well today,” Prado said, taking his glass.
“Are you telling me what I want to hear?” Shelton asked.
“No. I can see the difference. When they got here, they were not soldiers. They had no training. Now look at them.”
Shelton smiled and downed his whiskey shot. “What do you think we need to do next?”
Prado took a deep breath.
“Well, one thing we still need to put into the heads of our soldiers is that this is not just a training exercise. They are not going home after this, we are going out to fight, to kill people. I think we still have to put that into their heads. They have to be mentally tough to go into the jungle.”
“And how do you suggest we do that?”
“We need to keep telling them what’s at stake. That this is more than just training. They are becoming Bolivia’s elite force.”
He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts.
“You asked me how things were going.”
Shelton nodded yes.
“By the time the training is over, the men will be soldiers,” Prado said. “I am not worried about that. My worry is whether I will be able to lead them. These men trust me with their lives. Am I ready for that? Can I lead them as they should be led?”
Shelton flashed that wide grin.
“Gary, I know that you will be more than ready. I’ve watched you with your men. They respect you. I respect you.”
Prado was stunned. None of his army superiors ever said such things. To hear those words from Shelton filled him with pride. But he was uncomfortable with praise.
“I’ve never been in battle. I don’t know how I will react.”
Shelton didn’t flinch. “Gary, I’ve been in battle. And I have a sixth sense about soldiers and officers. I can predict who will run and who will stand and fight. And I can tell you that when the time comes, you will fight. You’re a good officer.”
Shelton looked in Prado’s eyes. “I think we’re going to do this. We’re going to deliver this battalion.”
Prado nodded in agreement. “Yes. I think so.”
Officers were so important to success, commanders even more so. And every one of them, in any military unit, had an ego the size of Texas. Shelton was sure the United States could win the war in Vietnam, but the commanders had to let the soldiers fight. The United States had the best soldiers in the world, but commanders, under political pressure, were holding them back. It was no wonder public opinion was turning against the war. And that just made it harder on the soldiers. They would fight like hell for a hill or a village, then they would give it up the next day. Vietnam was a classic guerrilla war, and for the most part, the United States was still fighting it like a conventional one.
That’s not how you win, Shelton thought. You do it like Special Forces. You go in. Train troops. Live with the people. Build trust. What they were doing in Bolivia was an example of what they should be doing in Vietnam. Hell, he did it in Laos, too. He built trust with the villagers. He was doing it again in Bolivia.
Prado cleared his throat and set down his empty glass.
“We’re going to get Che,” Shelton assured him. “I know things look rough now. The guerrillas have been playing hit-and-run. I know some Bolivians are worried.”
“You mean the president?”
“Yeah. Barrientos. Ovando. All of them. But Che doesn’t have a chance. And after this is over, you can go back to your wife and kids and tell them what you did. Tell them that you helped train a battalion that took care of Che Guevara. Hell, tell them you led a battalion that got the bastard.”
“And when it’s over, what will you do, Pappy?”
“Me?” Shelton grinned. “I’m going home for good. This is it for me. I’m riding off into the sunset.” The smile faded from his face. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do. I might go to college,” he said softly.
College? Shit. This was his calling. But he’d promised Margaret he would leave. If he said he was going to do something, he did it. Besides, he missed his kids. While he was out here being Pappy for the goddam army, his kids were growing up without their dad.
“Before we leave, I want to make sure that school is built,” he said. “That’s something that can really help these people.”
Construction materials for the school had started arriving in La Esperanza. U.S. AID was providing most of the money, and Bartos Construction, Singh’s company, was donating equipment and expertise. The people of La Esperanza promised to help build it. On June 25, the village had kicked off the project with a fiesta, where the local priest blessed the site. Shelton hoped they would finish before the money ran out.
Shelton had heard that Ambassador Henderson was holding up some of the funding. He had no idea why. But if the situation didn’t get better, Shelton promised himself he would confront the son of a bitch. It didn’t matter that Henderson was technically his boss. Like Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field, Shelton was going to find a way to build the damn thing.
* * *
For medic Peterson, the long hours of training were tiring, but Hapka’s presence made it easier. The American medics met a few weeks before the mission. But as they prepared for the assignment, they quickly became friends.
Peterson and Hapka were from two different worlds; Hapka grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a city with 740,000 people in 1960. At the time, it was the nation’s eleventh largest city. Peterson spent his childhood in Bradford, Pennsylvania, a rural town in the Allegheny Mountains, where there were less than a dozen students in Peterson’s graduating class.
But they had some things in common. They were only a year apart in age: Peterson was twenty-five, while Hapka was twenty-six. And they loved to hunt.
On most days, the medics taught first-aid classes on how to treat gunshot wounds and other potentially life-saving skills to Bolivian soldiers. They also treated sick soldiers and villager
s. Sometimes they would ride horses to neighboring villages to provide basic health care. But on weekends, they’d sneak in the surrounding thick brush looking for birds, mostly quail and dove. They would spend hours, away from the others. Sure they’d talk about the usual soldier bullshit. But they’d also discuss their families and their lives.
The outgoing Hapka, who sported a moustache, graduated from West Milwaukee High School in 1959. The city was booming with factories. And there were sports teams—the Milwaukee Braves had been in the World Series in 1957 and 1958. And in nearby Green Bay, Wisconsin, there were the Packers, who, under legendary Coach Vince Lombardi, was becoming a National Football League powerhouse. After high school, Hapka enlisted in the army and joined Special Forces in 1962.
Peterson took a different path. He enrolled in a state college, but dropped out when he ran out of money. He enlisted in the army in 1961 and joined Special Forces a year later.
Both joined the army because of their sense of patriotism, and because the army offered them economic opportunities.
For Peterson, it also was a continuation of a family tradition. His father had joined the navy in 1942—the same year Peterson was born. He had siblings who also served.
Peterson was training as a medic in San Antonio, Texas, when he met a woman at a night club who would later become his wife. It was a hectic time in his life. In 1965, he was deployed to Venezuela for two months to train soldiers in that South American nation. Now he was in Bolivia.
The men didn’t know Shelton before the mission. But the medics liked the major. Shelton was easygoing and didn’t micromanage, Peterson recalled. He trusted his men.
Shelton would stop by the dispensary where Peterson and Hapka spent part of their day. He’d say: “You’re responsible for doing this.” Then he would ask them how they were doing and if they needed anything.
Usually, they’d respond: “No, sir. Everything is going fine.”
Then Shelton would smile and leave.
Despite the harsh climate, Peterson and Hapka tried to make the most of the deployment. At night, they would hang out at Kiosko Hugo drinking and bullshitting with the other soldiers, and listening to Shelton play his guitar. When they got drunk, they’d sing along. There wasn’t much else to do. They were isolated.
That’s why those hunting trips with Hapka were so special. It gave them a much-needed escape. On one trip, Peterson found a farmer who was selling a musket from 1842. He bought it and planned to take it home. But Peterson tried not to think that far ahead. Not when he knew training was far from over. Not when the guerrillas were still on the loose. Not after Samaipata.
* * *
Prado ran up to the edge of the circle of men. Inside the ring was weapons sergeant Chapa, dug into a foxhole with a Browning .30 light machine-gun setup. Out in the distance a newspaper flapped from a tree branch—the target.
The American told a Bolivian sergeant to step inside. It was his turn.
For the last hour Chapa had been teaching the noncommissioned officers how to fire the weapon. Training NCOs was a critical part of Special Forces instruction. Once they were trained, they passed along their knowledge to soldiers who needed additional help.
Prado knew how to use the M-1919A6 machine gun, a military workhorse. It was a fixture during World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. It weighed thirty-two pounds without its tripod and could fire several hundred rounds a minute.
The Bolivian sergeant peered through the iron sight mounted on the boxy body of the gun and charged the first round. He adjusted his aim and squeezed the trigger. The gun let out a throaty burst as the rounds raced out of the barrel. The fire had a rhythmic pace as tracers arced toward the target. The newspaper exploded into shreds.
The sergeant raised a fist in celebration. Prado was impressed. The men were becoming deadly proficient, and the NCOs carried that confidence with them when they worked with the conscripts.
For Prado, this was the beginning of the rebirth of the Bolivian military. Over the last few years—under Barrientos’s guidance and with Ovando’s blessing—the military had been rebuilt. But there was a long road ahead. The most critical, most needed change was in the very culture of the military, Prado thought. There were too many dinosaurs in powerful posts, men who had served in the aftermath of the Chaco War. They had lost every battle they’d ever engaged in, and their pessimism permeated the fighting units. Even the Special Forces soldiers ran into the Bolivian past.
Weapons training was a good example. Sergeant Chapa was constantly squeezing the Bolivian supply officer for ammunition. The cantankerous bastard was reluctant to part with “his” ammunition.
“He always gave me half of what I requested each time,” Chapa recalled. “It was a constant fight to get what was needed to train the soldiers properly.”
The best riflemen were recruited to become snipers. Chapa took them under his wing. He taught them how to set up a shot and find the best vantage point. Wind, distance, shadow, and light—all can make a great deal of difference to the accuracy of the shot.
At the end of each session, Chapa stayed around for anyone who needed more help.
The Special Forces team also trained soldiers for the mortar squads. Mortars gave the light infantry real firepower in a portable form. Probably the most important defensive weapon in the battalion’s arsenal, a good mortar team could beat back an attack with a steady barrage of high-explosive rounds.
Besides weapons, the Green Berets were training a platoon of intelligence officers. They learned to disappear into their civilian clothes and mix in with the locals. They would have to fan out across the operation zone to gather critical information, determine its worth, and get it to the right person with utmost efficiency.
Prado knew nothing could change Bolivia’s awful military past, and real transformation would only come with a new generation. But there beside the machine gun in the training field he saw the plan coming together. Soon the army would have a battalion of three highly proficient and mobile companies. And with them they could take down the guerrillas.
* * *
Kiosko Hugo was filling up. Special Forces soldiers gathered around the outdoor tables, drinking and talking. Shelton’s guitar was there against the table, ready to be picked up and picked at. The men sang along if they knew the words—especially to “Mr. Shorty,” which had become the team song. Everybody laughed and drank a little more.
Work hard, play hard. There wasn’t much else to do.
Graham was on the porch, talking to Dorys Roca, a village girl from a big local family—fourteen of them lived in a three-room shanty. Dorys was a tiny thing, probably still a teenager, with long black hair and big brown eyes.
Roca hadn’t been there when the soldiers came to La Esperanza. She was working out of town, caring for a sick relation. When she came back and saw the camp taking shape at the sugar mill, she saw an opportunity to help her family. Roca took a job cleaning the quarters and doing the laundry for the Special Forces soldiers.
That’s how she met Graham—the tall, handsome radio operator from Phoenix, Arizona, who always greeted her with a smile. Like most of the Green Berets, he wore dark, flashy sunglasses. He was only twenty-three years old. This was his first mission as a Green Beret.
The couple gave the village gossips something to talk about. The pair took moonlight walks, chattering and laughing in the dark. Dorys was easy to talk to. Graham told her about his life back home and said one day he hoped she would see it for herself. Dorys wished she could go—Arizona sounded so different and exciting. For now, though, Graham had this mission. They had to train the Rangers, then go back to Panama in December. But they had until then. And he would come back to La Esperanza to see her after that, he promised. The onlookers were skeptical. He was a soldier, a foreigner, an American—there was no way he would marry a simple girl from a backwater town in Bolivia. Poor Dorys was going to get her
heart broken, but nobody thought to warn her. They didn’t want to shatter her dreams.
* * *
Valderomas stood by his window and stared into the darkness. It was late July and he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept through the night. He’d lost track of the days.
It was the damn soldiers on their damned night maneuvers. It was one thing to shoot and march and make noise in the daytime, but no decent person stayed up all night, shouting and shooting guns and exploding things. And that’s what was happening in La Esperanza. It seemed that the soldiers trained around the clock. The noise carried from the fields into his house. His wife and children didn’t seem to notice, but it unnerved Valderomas. He tossed and turned all night. Some of the other villagers also felt like he did. They liked the money the soldiers spent, but they worried. What if there was an accident? What if they set the village on fire? What if the guerrillas won, and La Esperanza was punished for hosting the foreigners and the trainees?
Valderomas talked to the mayor about it, but his concerns were shrugged off. The mayor looked at him and said: “What do you want me to do? Tell them to leave?”
“Yes,” he replied.
That wasn’t going to happen.
The Bolivian soldiers were training for something big. Why else would they have called in the Americans?
CHAPTER 14
“He will not leave Bolivia alive.”
The lemon-yellow Braniff DC-8 crested the mountains and started its approach to the airport in the bowl below. The plane seemed to fluoresce against Bolivia’s brown-and-tan landscape. Rebelling against the sobriety of traditional airline images, Braniff had dressed its fleet in glad-rag colors like turquoise, lemon, and baby blue. It was an ostentatious arrival for two Cuban operatives on a secret CIA mission, but it was one of the only direct flights to the small South American republic.