Inside the building. Boomer grabbed a couple of cups of coffee and a plateful of donuts and joined Skibicki who was joshing with the little old woman who worked the register.
“Boomer, meet Maggie Skibicki, my mom,” the sergeant major said.
“Mom, this young fellow is Boomer Watson.
I served with his dad.”
“Well, you are getting old, aren’t you. Ski? I don’t want to think what that says about me,” she joked.
“Pleased to meet you. Boomer,” Maggie said as she took his money.
Her face was wrinkled with the years, but her eyes were a piercing blue that had lost nothing over time. They gazed at Boomer, and he felt that look cut into him.
“Nice to meet you,” Boomer replied.
Skibicki led the way to a corner table where he sat down, his back square in the corner, facing the empty room.
“Mom’s been here at Shafter for over twenty years. She used to work up at Schofield Barracks.
“My dad was retired Navy. Mom’s what they call a Pearl Harbor survivor. She was living out by Pearl back in’fortyone.
Dad was on board the Enterprise, so it’s one of those strange twists of fate that she was here for the attack on Pearl Harbor and he wasn’t.
They used to joke about that all the time. He spent thirty years in the Navy. He died about four years back. Mom’s past mandatory retirement age, but she’s got a special exception from the post commander to work. She likes to get out and be around people.
You ever need to know anything about this island, you ask her.”
Boomer glanced across the room at the old woman with slightly different eyes. All he knew of the attack on Pearl Harbor were news clips and boring lectures at West Point.
“You need to go out there to Pearl,” Skibicki continued.
“It’s very interesting. Ask Maggie about it if you get the chance.”
“You said you served with my dad?” Boomer prompted.
Skibicki nodded. He reached into the breast pocket of his fatigues and pulled out a piece of cardboard and carefully unfolded it, revealing a faded picture inside.
“You ever heard of Projects B-50 or B-57?”
Boomer nodded.
“We used their after-action reports when I was in 10th Group to help write our team SOPS. B-50 and B-57 were the cross border operations 5th Group ran during the war to gather intelligence.”
Skibicki laid a photograph on the table top. A very young-looking Skibicki wearing tiger-stripe fatigues and sporting a CAR-15 stood next to another American, also wearing the distinctive fatigues and holding a short-barreled grenade launcher in one hand and an AK-47 in the other.
Four indigenous soldiers, dressed in fatigues and carrying AK-47s stood in front of the taller Americans. Boomer instantly recognized the second American as his father.
“There weren’t that many of us in S-F at any one time, although this was in’ sixty-nine when they were taking any Tom, Dick, and Harry and giving them a beret and shooting them across the borders because we were taking such high casualties,” the sergeant major explained.
“I was in the 173rd Airborne during my first tour, and when I went back for my second, they were hurting for bodies so they were taking even non-S-F people into the recon teams. Any idiot that was dumb enough to volunteer and had combat experience was accepted. So that’s how I became Special Forces-qualified in’ sixty-eight.”
He tapped the photo.”
“This was recon team Kansas.
Each team was named after a state. This picture was taken a week before we went on our last mission.”
Skibicki took a sip of coffee, then continued.
“Let me give you some background so you understand what happened.
“Sixty-eight and’sixty-nine were bad-ass years in the war. It was after Tet, and, despite what those pissant reporters said, we were kicking ass. The fucking NVA had run for the hills and was licking its wounds across the borders in Laos and Cambodia. The only time they showed up to fight was when they were sure they could hit us by surprise.
So in order not be surprised, in October of sixty eight the Blackboard Collection Plan was instigated by some Intelligence clink in Saigon.
The idea was to coordinate all surveillance and reconnaissance assets running operations near or over the borders.
“Project Gamma, of which project B-57 was a part, was the Special Forces’ contribution to the Blackboard effort.
And even though we only supplied six percent of the total flow of information to MACV, our stuff turned out to be over half the good intel. That was’cause we went in on the ground and put our beady little eyeballs right on the shit. We didn’t fly over at thirty thousand feet and guesstimate or drop in sensors that fucking deer could set off and the Air Force would waste a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of bombs “on making venison. When we said something was there, it was there right in front of us.
“Anyway, we would work off of humint — human intelligence — about possible enemy locations. We’d get some info, then go in and verify.
Well, in early’sixty-nine our sources started drying up. And the info we were getting was tainted. We lost several teams. They just went out, and it was like they disappeared into a black hole. We later found out what was happening: there was a double-agent at Nha Trang turning the teams.” Skibicki waved his hand.
“I’ll get back to that.”
“In May of’sixty-nine we got information about an NVA regiment staging right across the border from an A Camp at Long Le Chon so we were ordered to go in and check it out. Your dad was the team commander, I was the man with the radio, and we had four’little people’—Montagnard natives — along for security.”
Skibicki’s eyes were unfocused as he remembered.
“It was supposed to be a quick in and out, just to check to see if the bad guys were preparing to attack. It wasn’t straightforward though.
They moved us out of the normal launch site to another place. It was somewhere I’d never seen before and it sure wasn’t S-F run. We got a briefing from some CIA dude assigned to CCN — Combat Control North — and they gave us a spook straphanger. Your dad didn’t like that one bit, but that’s the bitch of being in the green machine; our’s is but to do and die, right?”
Skibicki didn’t wait for an answer.
“So we went in on one slick. We had two Cobras flying cover — two Cobras painted black. Air America at work. You wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff the CIA had working over there. Just the little I saw at that camp hinted at an operation beyond anything that’s ever been written or talked about.
“Everything went to shit from the word go. We didn’t go in where we were supposed to. I had no idea where the fuck we were but it certainly wasn’t across the border from Long Le Chon. Your dad was arguing with the spook. Right there on the fucking landing zone they’re having a Goddamn argument. Talk about giving you the shits.
Your dad wanted us out. The spook overruled him. Your dad had me come up on the guard net and call for extraction. CCN denied it and told us to continue mission. Except now we didn’t know what the fuck the mission was, other than go with this spook and watch his ass. And that guy was none too happy about us coming up on the radio trying to get out of there.”
Skibicki shook his head.
“If I’d have known then what I know now, I would have greased the spook right then and there and called in a’prairie fire’—that was our code word for emergency extraction. We had our own air assets and we could have gotten out, although there would have been hell to pay later. But we still had that good Army training: follow orders, even if you don’t know where the fuck they’re coming from. I’ll tell you one thing I learned from that: if you ever get in the position where you got to kill someone to keep the shit from hitting the fan, kill’em, drive on, and don’t say a fucking word about it. That’s what we should have done.