Bamboo Battleground

by Don Bendell

  Bo slapped his arm laughing and the others chuckled softly in the darkness. They moved on through the light jungle, keeping to clearings and mainly a large pathway that skirted the river.

  After another hour, they stopped again, drank water, and removed leeches, which seemed to be everywhere. It started pouring rain.

  A very large, tall black sergeant first class named Moses Trudy, but called Big Mose by everyone, said, “I have another Boom story.”

  Bobby said, “We have time and nobody is damned sure going to hear us in this rain.”

  Big Mose said, “I about died when I heard it from Boom at the NCO club one time, but, Major, the language is salty.”

  Bo said, “Thank you, Sergeant, but I am an army officer. You are not going to bother me with any language, and I will not be offended, but I appreciate you asking. Please?”

  “All right, ma’am,” the sergeant said, “but I am going to clean it up a bit.”

  He continued, “This man in a suit stood against this building in a busy downtown, and he would watch all the beautiful secretaries and businesswomen going by him in their minidresses and such, and as soon as they would walk by, he would say, ‘I’d like to tickle your ass with a feather,’ and when the woman would stop and say, ‘What did you say to me?’ he would say, ‘I said it is particularly nice weather.”

  Big Mose took a bite of an energy bar and chewed it up while everybody waited to hear the rest.

  Dave said, “Hey, Big Mose, don’t eat again until you’re done. Man.”

  Big Mose laughed and said, “Okay, sorry, you guys, ma’am, so anyhow, this guy staggers up who is really drunk and watches for a few minutes. Then he staggers over to this guy and says, ‘Shay, man, I was jist watchinyu, and hic, that was beeyootiful. What d’jew say again to the women?’

  “The man said, ‘I simply wait until a nice-looking woman in a short skirt walks by, and I say, I’d like to tickles your ass with a feather, and when she turns and asks me what I said, I say, it is particularly nice weather, and smile at her.’

  “On the second try the drunk clapped his hands and said, ‘Man, that ish awshome, dude, jish aweshome. I’m gonna go do it myshelf.’ So the drunk staggered across the street and leaned against the building.”

  “In a few minutes, this gorgeous woman walks by in a cute little miniskirt, and when she gets right next to him, the drunk blurts out, ‘I wanna shove a feather up yer ass.’

  “Shocked and angry, the woman turned around and said, ‘What did you just say to me, mister?’

  “The drunk laughed and clapped his hands, saying, ‘Pretty frigging cold, ain’t it?’ ”

  Everybody in the patrol, despite the exhaustion and drenching rain, laughed their heads off for several minutes.

  Every time they stopped, after that, several Boom stories or anecdotes would be told. Several men were glad that it was raining on them, so the tears would not be noticed, as each thought about the beloved Special Forces legend.

  It was close to dawn when they arrived one kilometer outside the guerilla base camp of Y-Ting Tran and his men. They waited there and Bobby called Y-Ting on a sat phone. Within twenty minutes, they saw the man and two other Montagnard followers approaching.

  They quickly introduced themselves and led the patrol back to their hidden guerilla base camp. The Americans were all surprised when they were led to a stilted longhouse with a matted rattan floor and a thatched roof that kept the whole place dry. Exhausted, they both fell fast asleep.

  Bobby and Bo awakened simultaneously in the corner of the longhouse. Y-Ting squatted in front of them in the fashion of both Montagnards and Vietnamese, with the knees deeply bent, buttocks resting on the back of the legs. He was smiling.

  “I am Y-Ting,” he said, extending his hand.

  In the manner Boom and his father taught him, Bobby grabbed his right forearm with his left hand and shook hands with his right.

  “I am Lieutenant Colonel Bobby Samuels and this is my wife, Major Bo Samuels,” Bobby said.

  Y-Ting said, “Vietnamese call you Trung-Ta Samuels and call her Thieu-Ta Samuels, but we call you Chung-Ta and call her Thieu-Ta. Boom speak of you many, many times. He sound like a father.”

  Bobby got choked up.

  Then Y-Ting looked at Bo and said, “Boom speak of you. He say you are a mighty, mighty warrior woman, but very, very beautiful.”

  Now it was Bo’s turn to get choked up.

  The four Delta Force sergeants, all wearing long hair and two with beards, were now sitting up from their sleeping places.

  Big Mose said, “This is nothing like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan. Man, what sauna did we wake up in?”

  Y-Ting looked at him with his eyes opened wide and said something in Rade to his compatriots outside the stilted longhouse, and they murmured excitedly among themselves. They had a fire going and were cooking food. Bobby reached into his pack and pulled out several MREs and tossed them to the Montagnard and Hmong warriors. The men got excited and tore the packs open and immediately started heating water to pour into the plastic bags of dehydrated foods.

  Y-Ting said to Big Mose, “You are a very big man, like the elephant.”

  Moses stuck his hand out and said, “Nice to meet you. Call me Big Mose. This guy you can call Dave, and Trinity, and Speedy.”

  The other three sergeants shook hands with Y-Ting.

  Y-Ting said, “You have long hair, are you men in army or out of army like Boom?”

  Bobby interrupted and winked at Y-Ting. “They are tourists from a foreign country. Nothing we carry says Made in USA, even those MREs.” He handed Y-Ting an MRE.

  Y-Ting laughed, saying, “Oh, all of you must be in Delta Force. Very best warriors in world. Good. We kill many bad guys.”

  The four looked at Bobby and each other then started chuckling.

  Bo stared at the jungle-covered mountains in the near distance and felt the stifling heat, as if their longhouse was suspended over a giant boiling pot of water. She slapped a large mosquito and thought back to the incredible scenic drive she and Bobby made to Westcliffe from Boom’s ranch and then to Canon City for dinner. She saw on that one-hour drive mule deer, elk, some buffalo on a ranch near Westcliffe, herds of pronghorn antelope, two coyotes, a bald eagle, and the most scenic vistas in the world. Drenched with sweat, she fantasized about living there and visualized that drive.

  The towering peaks of the Sangre de Cristos were like a giant wall on their immediate right with giant caps of pure white, vicious winds blowing clouds of snow here and there on the tops and swirling the white powder into various curls that looked beautiful and harmless from thousands of feet below. The dark green carpeting of evergreens and hardwoods, which covered the mountains like a giant afghan, went all the way up to the timberline, somewhere around 11,000 or 12,000 feet high. Many of the peaks were over 14,000 feet in elevation and most all were at least 12,000 feet up into the clear blue sky. The Wet Mountain Valley floor went from the right side of Highway 69 and spread out for a mile or two to the base of each mountain, like a carpeted inclined walkway ramp to the big range.

  Numerous thickets of scrub oak near the base of each, from the distance, looked like small groups of low bushes. In fact, some hid herds of mule deer or harems of elk bedded down for the afternoon. Distance was so deceiving in the wide-open spaces.

  They arrived in Westcliffe and Bobby asked Bo if she was hungry. She said she was, and he headed east to Silver Cliff. Which meant an additional minute of driving. Then he turned left on Oak Creek Grade, an old stagecoach road that wound its way through San Isabel National Forest to Canon City a half hour distant and almost 3,000 feet lower. Bo thoroughly enjoyed the scenic drive on the hard-packed dirt road, which wound its way between towering rock walls and evergreen-covered ridges. This was after passing through several miles of mountain homes, which housed everyone from retired professionals with a desire to get away from it all, lawyers, laborers, illegal woodcutters hiding out from child-support enforcement w
arrants, to wannabe modern-day mountain men and women. Such little communities dotted the mountain ranges all over Colorado and each had similar personality traits, which almost always included such diverse attitudes as a mini-Peyton Place mind-set to one of nobody ever passing someone whose car was broken down on the road. A car breakdown on the way to town and an unexpected mountain storm could mean death, so most people living in such communities are totally different than those in cities and towns all over the rest of America who avoid ever stopping for fear of a mugging or carjacking. Bo was also amazed at the fact that virtually everyone, except obvious tourists approaching from the other direction on that mountain road, waved at you.

  Then Bo thought about Boom’s self-sufficiency. He did not have to depend on the government or anybody to take care of him. Then she thought about the similar self-sufficiency of so many who were Special Forces like her husband, and the intelligence of Boom and these four men he trained or worked with. Still daydreaming, she remembered the amazing experience she had the morning of that day Bobby took her on that drive.

  She was so impressed with the beauty of Boom’s ranch, but was also a little intimidated by the enormity of the looming snowcapped peaks, it almost frightened, yet fascinated her.

  She said to Boom, “What if there is one of those mountain blizzards I heard about and power lines go down here. Wouldn’t you be stuck?”

  Boom chuckled and pointed down his mile-long driveway, saying, “Do you see any power lines?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t.”

  Bobby held the back door for Bo, saying, “Come on, baby sister, I want to show you something out back.”

  She spoke with Boom as they walked to a small building behind and attached to the main house. They walked into the building and Bo was amazed. It looked to her like they were in the engineering room of the starship Enterprise . Attached to the outside of the building was a large propane tank with copper tubing running into the outside building.

  “What is this?” Bo asked, looking about the room full of modern-looking contraptions.

  Boom said, “See the copper tubing coming through the wall.”

  She nodded.

  He went on, “It goes into this fuel cell, which in turn is connected electrically to that geo-exchange pump over there. Now, it automatically converts the central air-conditioning unit there into a furnace system in the winter, and there is a photon cell, which you saw earlier, up on the roof that is also incorporated into the system. Now, see that computer-looking device over there?”

  She said, “Yes, what is it?”

  He replied, “A computer device.”

  She chuckled, and he continued, “My computer is tied into this whole system through there, and it automatically turns my appliances on energy-saving mode whenever they are not in use.”

  She pointed at the floor and asked, “What is that?”

  There was a latched, locked trap door on the clean tiled floor, and Boom opened it to reveal a very clean-looking large tank of pure water. A large pipe came out of the floor and through an electrical pump and was connected to a large fiberglass-looking tank with another pipe running out of that, with two plastic bottles that looked to Bo like blender canisters, and then the pipe ran into the house.

  Boom said, “You know how you go into the store to buy a bottle of Rocky Mountain clear, pure spring water?”

  She said, “Yep.”

  He said, “That’s what you’ve been drinking. I have a large spring up above and behind the house a few hundred yards. Remember where you commented on all the flowers and greenery?”

  She nodded.

  He went on, “I have a collection tank buried underground there, with pipes that carry the water to this cistern. There is an aerator in the cistern that keeps it bubbling and full of oxygen, and prevents it from becoming stagnant. Then it is pumped out of the cistern and into that pressure tank, then when you get a drink of water or take a shower in the house, the water goes from there, through those two canisters, which are filters, and then into the house, and you end up drinking about the purest water in the world.”

  “Wow!” she said. “Fascinating!”

  “That’s not all,” he went on, excited. “There is an overflow pipe outside that runs underground from the top of the cistern and it carries excess water to our gardens, lawn, and watering troughs. Even the watering troughs overflow all the time.”

  She said, “I noticed that. It seems so muddy around them.”

  “We do that on purpose,” Boom explained. “When the horses water, they stand in the mud and moisture, which helps keep their hooves from getting dried out and unhealthy.”

  Bo came out of her daydream and said, “Bobby, when we retire I want a ranch like Boom’s.”

  Bobby looked at her and suddenly started laughing, saying, “Where did that come from?”

  She said, “My heart.”

  Bobby said, “Then that is where we will make our home, honey.”

  They took care of their morning needs, although it was now early afternoon.

  Y-Ting explained, “In Vietnam and here, nobody moves when sun is on top of the sky. Too hot. Most sleep. Besides you say to me on phone, we work tonight.”

  Now Y-Ting stopped smiling, saying, “You know Boom was our friend, too. We all love him very much. We want to pay back the Cong-An and the al Qaeda for what they do to Boom. It is bullshit.”

  “I know,” Bobby said. “We will. I promise you.”

  The rest of the day was spent in preparations for the evening patrol. They took off at 1600 hours, or 4 p.m., headed toward the objective, which was the al Qaeda training compound. After the killing of Boom Kittenger, because of the shallow thinking of the SRV, the compound was simply moved to the other side of the mountain ridge next to it. The spy in the sky flying high overhead recorded every bit of the movement, and Y-Ting had men watching from distant ridgelines as well.

  Back in Washington, D.C., in the meantime, the president called in some senators and representatives for a top secret meeting while Bobby, Bo, and the SFOD-Delta personnel were on board the stealth jet. He made sure that Sen. James Weatherford was invited.

  After those present were advised that the briefing was classified top secret and was only to be discussed on a need-to-know basis, would be automatically downgraded at three-year intervals, and automatically declassified at the end of twelve years unless otherwise specified, and all the other warnings, each present was given a classified briefing folder.

  The president had discussed it with his advisors and a few who were present for the evening closed meeting in the Cabinet Room, and they had concluded that they would tell all these congressmen a complete fabrication for the sake of protecting, Bobby, Bo, and the others; later he would explain all to them and include all of them in credit for busting the traitor Weatherford.

  The secretary of defense spoke briefly, then the director of national intelligence, and finally the briefing was turned over to Gen. Jonathan Perry.

  He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this briefing is of the highest sensitive nature and what is told here must not leave this room, not to aides, assistants, nobody. The commander in chief insisted that each of you, because of bipartisan involvement in various crucial congressional committees, such as the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, appropriations committees, and so on, be totally informed of this operation from the outset. We have received a number of substantial humintel report of recent sightings of the top al Qaeda leadership, several key figures operating out of safe houses in two different towns not far from the Khyber Pass in Pakistan.

  “You are all familiar with the tremendous success at preventing another 9/11 by special ops CID agents Major Bobby Samuels and Captain Bo Devore, when they spear-headed a multioffice task force that interdicted and prevented the detonation of two Soviet backpack nuclear devices that were to be detonated simultaneously in New York City and Miami, Florida. Well, I am pleased to announce that both have been promoted to lieu
tenant colonel and major and recently got married, so it is now Lieutenant Colonel and Major Samuels.”

  Several in the room who were in the president’s party applauded, and the others politely joined in.

  General Perry continued, “We have confirmed the sightings with UAVs and satellite digital imagery, so we have the Samuelses and four members of Combat Applications Group from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who are currently wearing sterilized uniforms and carrying sterilized equipment and are on board a B1B Stealth for a HALO insertion hopefully undetected into the area of Pakistan south of the Khyber Pass.”

  One of the senators said, “General, excuse me, but how can Mrs., I mean, Major Samuels make a HALO insertion when she has never attended U.S. military schools for such, or special forces training?”

  The general replied, “Major Samuels did a considerable amount of civilian skydiving, even competitively, which well prepared her for such an undertaking. She has also, on her own, Senator, undertaken many classes and courses, which only strengthens her for the job she is performing, such as Ironwoman competitions, scuba diving, and she has taken many refresher courses frequently. Just in case there might be a concern, sir, that we are trying to re-create G.I. Jane, we absolutely are not. Major Samuels has a specops MOS but is not allowed to wear a Green Beret, can never be assigned to a Special Forces unit, or Combat Applications Group, or anything of the sort. Major Samuels would be the first to tell you she does not want that. She believes strongly that there are some women who could qualify, but their presence in those prestige units would complicate and not enhance the mission and would be a detraction instead of an asset. As far as forced road marches of twenty or thirty miles carrying weapons and eighty-pound rucksacks through harsh conditions such as is done in the Q-Course, Major Samuels says she physically would not be able to carry that out and has no desire to. However, she is very much mission-ready for this particular, or similar assignments, as she has already certainly proven under fire. Mr. Senator, when you asked that, I wanted to address it clearly, so I could also alleviate any concerns some of you may have. I hope I have answered your question, sir. Have I?”