Allies
Page 46
We had always been people of the sea—people of the spear and fishing weirs. The lands of our oldest ancestors had been poor and provided little game; few edible plants. Now, however, we had become people of the forest and the lake and the streams. But the sea remained in our blood. Even then, even when I was only a baby and before I had become a child, when I heard those stories of the Old Ones, I could hear the wind and waves and taste the brackish water spraying in my face, water unlike the sweet waters that now surrounded us.
It was my love of these stories; my earnest demands that the storytellers go on and tell us more that made the elders in my family decide that I was now aware enough of myself and of those around me that I was no longer just a baby but had matured enough to become a child worthy of a name. My cousin, a boy born to my father’s sister the winter before I was born, received no such recognition until the next summer. I took much pride in the fact that while I now spent half of my waking time away from the adults with the other children, he still had to remain with his mother.
My mother too took pride in my early maturity and graciously overlooked my developing air of superiority over the remaining babies in the clan. Not so Nakeme, my paternal grandmother. Watch out for that one, I heard her say to my mother. She is much too full of her own importance and will upset the harmony of this family if you don’t control her better.
As a child I now played and learned with other children.
Our playground, our place of learning and our workplace were one and the same. Our village stood on the sunset side of the lakes shore. Flowing into it was a strong meandering river that flowed from the mountains where we spent our winters through deep chasms until it emptied out on a large flat plain filled with bogs and reedy shallows. All around, a dense forest of pine and spruce, elm and birch and numerous other trees and underbrush rose up and blanketed the hills on their march into the mountains beyond. Every part of our world was teeming with life; and with danger.
We learned quickly in the dense forest and the fast streams and on the shore of the lake; the older amongst us teaching the youngest, like myself, how to fish, where to find the biggest crabs, how to dig for the fattest clams, which fungus was edible and which was poisonous, how to snare birds and rodents. I enjoyed those times when we were by ourselves but even more did I enjoy those times when both the adults and children went out together to forage.
In our clan it was the custom that when a man was ready to find a bride he would seek her out from amongst the other eleven families of the clan or from some other clan. If her family accepted his proposal and his gifts, the bride would leave her family to live with that of her new husband. So it had been for my mother, Kizo’alak, who had joined my father’s family, the W’wawsi—they who stand in kinship with the Bullhead catfish. So it was also with her sister who had become wife to a man of the Ma’kwa—the kin of the bear.
Each family of the clan had a role; a special skill or group of skills that benefited the entire community over and above the hunting of game and the gathering of fish and of edible plants that we all participated in. We W’wawsi stood as both healers and teachers in the clan. To us the spirits had given the task of ensuring that all the clan’s children were properly initiated into the skills of adulthood. My father’s parents—Nahom and Nakeme—were the leaders of our family and the keepers of the clan’s rituals of adulthood, rituals that I may soon be allowed to participate in.
The Ma’kwa too had their roles. One of these was the defence of the clan through building and maintaining the summer village’s stockade and in teaching the people the ways of the warriors. The other was, like the W’wawsi, to be healers. While the W’wawsi concentrated on the plants that brought health, the Ma’kwa’s skills went beyond that to include the repair of cuts and punctures and broken limbs. The most skilled healer amongst the Ma’kwa was my aunt who had earned the adult name Keek’wa; Healer.
From that summer when I became a child and for every summer thereafter, when the families of the clan would gather, I more and more became Keek’wa’s shadow.
Shyly and quietly at first, I watched and listened as Keek’wa and my mother picked herbs and roots and scraped bark and made pastes or boiled concoctions of herbs and fish or animal parts in a skin boiling-bag. I watched her as she massaged or manipulated joints and muscles and sewed up cuts and gashes with a bone needle and sinew. I heard her as she administered her potions and skills to the sick while assisting Midlino, the clan’s medicine elder, while he called on the powers of the spirit world to cure them or ease them of their suffering.
As I grew older and bolder I would ask her things: Why this combination of herbs for a woman who was giving birth? Why that bark draught for a hunter whose bowels would not move? How do you make a needle out of bone?
I like to think that she saw some potential in me from the very beginning because she never discouraged me or turned me away. Every autumn I would leave the lake with my family as we took the path to our winter camp and hunting grounds. There I would spend time with my mother hunting small game and learning to prepare the winter foods, to cure hides and sew clothes to protect against the cold, to build and maintain our shelters and the fires, to broaden my knowledge of healing plants. I would endure those times waiting for the spring to come and to shuck off the hides and furs and again to freely wander the woods with Keek’wa and to drink of her wisdom.
As I grew taller my own skills grew as well. While other children, those who had seen four summers and not yet seen their twelfth, had spent most of their day away from the adults gathering food and playing, the time that I had spent with my aunt and my mother had advanced my skill and wisdom as a healer. By my eighth summer I had been allowed to ease the burns of another child by making poultices from boiled yellow-spined thistle blossoms. By my tenth summer I was making salves out of pounded goldenseal root and bear fat to protect our skin against biting and stinging insects. By my twelfth summer I was making concoctions to numb pain, set the broken arm of a child, and had sewn up the gash on the leg of another.
With my skills came a new name. While I was still many years short of becoming an adult, the clan’s elders conferred and agreed that I would henceforth be known by the name Bi’keek’wa; Little Healer.
They were good times; peaceful times.
They were not to last.
— § —
AUTHOR’S NOTES
This novel is a departure from the previous ones in this series in that some of its primary characters are moving into the background to make room for new ones and, particularly, for the CID ones. The theme, however, remains the same: allies working together.
The rogue ODA from 5th group is a fictitious entity and doesn’t represent any real element or factual situation. In fact by 2007, 5th SFG(A)s primary AO was in Iraq while Afghanistan was serviced primarily by rotations from the 3rd and 7th SFG(A). A/2-20SFG(A) is a real element, however, the characters and events are entirely fictional.
The incidents relating to Marines in Nangarhar are real and follow the situation of MARSOC’s MSOC-F on March 4th and 9th of 2007. While the situation is historical, Phil’s role is entirely fictitious but is based, in large part, on information that came out of the report of the Inspector General of the Department of Defence dated 10 July, 2008, into allegations of misconduct on the part of the actual commander of SOCCENT at the relevant time. The IG concluded that “. . . [Commander SOCCENT] acted reasonably and within his authority by redeploying a Marine Special Operations unit from Afghanistan.”
MSOC-F left Afghanistan early in April. An Article 15-6 investigation conducted by the COS SOCCENT, concluded in early April 2007 and found that the Marines had used excessive force and referred the matter for a possible criminal investigation. NCIS, some two months after the incident, was tasked with an investigation.
In late 2007 the Commander of MARCENT, ordered a rarely used Court of Inquiry into the incident. A Court of Inquiry is a broad based formal investigation which, in certai
n cases, can be used as an Art 32 investigation for further court martial purposes. The court sat at Camp Lejeune early in 2008. The four Marines who fired their weapons during the incident refused to testify as they had not been granted immunity from prosecution.
In the end, the Court of Inquiry determined that the company commander, who by then had been relieved of his command, had been properly relieved but should receive no further punishment. Four other Marines—two officers and two enlisted—should be further investigated and possibly charged. During the interval, command of MARCENT had changed and its new commander, made the final decision that there would be no criminal charges but that three officers and two enlisted members would be dealt with administratively for the 4th and 9th March incidents.
To say that there is controversy respecting MSOC-F’s operations in Afghanistan and the subsequent investigations and proceedings is an understatement and is a debate that goes far beyond a difference of opinion as between the Marines and the Army as to how counterinsurgency operations should be conducted. In the end the unit was removed from Afghanistan because it had lost the trust and the confidence of the senior Army commanders under whom and in whose AO they operated.
— § —
Acknowledgments
There are several good sources available on US Special operations forces that have aided me in my research. Out of the 589 items in my research folder for this novel, the following two are the ones which I looked to as offering definitive historical information are:
For matters relating to SOCOM forces (less JSOC)
- The 6th Edition of the United States Special Operations Command History published by USSOCOM in Tampa Florida and covering the period up to 2008; and
For matters relating to JSOC
- Sean Naylor, Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command, 2015 St. Martin’s Press
Once again I’m indebted to my wife Kathy for all of her patience and assistance during the writing of this book. Once again it was her desire to what happens next to Mark Winters that led to the writing of this book as well as the one coming up next.
— § —
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WOLF RIEDEL is a retired lawyer and army officer with service in the artillery, infantry and with the Office of the Judge Advocate General. He and his wife Kathy live on the shores of Lake Erie and in Florida. This is the sixth book of the Allies series.