Once on the ground, he headed for the first truck he came to. Aiken, seeing Cerro, who he thought was Major Nihart, on the ground, ordered his driver to stop. Dismounting even before the truck stopped rolling, he began to head for Cerro. "If you start forming the perimeter, Major, I'll direct the other vehicles over to you."
Cerro ignored the fact that Aiken thought he was the major. "Sounds good to me, Sergeant Major."
Confused, Aiken walked up to Cerro, confirmed who he was, then apologized. "Sorry, thought you were Major Nihart, sir."
"The major's been hit. He's out of it for now."
"Anything we can do?"
Cerro looked around as he answered. "No, the major will be all right, I think. His driver's with him now, taking care of him. Besides, you and I got a lot to do out here. If you will go on over there, Sergeant Major, and direct the incoming trucks to me, I'll start circling the wagons."
Aiken was about to respond when a red star cluster popped over the portion of the column that was still on the road. "What do you suppose that means, Captain?"
Cerro looked at the star cluster, noting that the ambushers were increasing their rate of fire. "I don't know, Sergeant Major. But I have a sneaking suspicion we're gonna find out. Until then, let's get a move on and form this here perimeter."
Aiken, looking at the road one last time before setting out, sighed,
"Big Al's going to be pissed."
"Pardon my apparent disrespect, Sergeant Major, but screw Big Al.
Right now, I'm more concerned about the yahoo that's directing the ambush and what he's thinking."
Almost a kilometer away, on the other side of the road, Captain Garza, the yahoo that Cerro was referring to, decided to break off the attack.
The sudden separation of the rear of the column had come as a surprise to him. From where he sat, it looked as if the Americans had been less surprised than he had hoped, and were responding better than he'd expected.
There was no telling what they were about to do and how they were going to respond. Rather than press his luck, Garza decided to break off the attack.
Firing the red star cluster, he paused for a moment and watched the response of his men. As instructed, some of the men increased the rate of fire while others, under the direction of their leaders, began to move back to their rally points. The mortars also increased their fire, switching to firing all high-explosive rounds instead of a mix of illumination rounds and high explosives. The mortars would be the last to stop, as they covered the withdrawal of the rest of the force. Garza's planned route of escape took him right past their position. He personally would give them permission to leave.
Satisfied that all was in order, he turned to the militiaman who was serving as his radio operator. "We have done well tonight. Tomorrow, there will be many gringo families mourning."
In the fading light of the last illumination rounds, Garza could see the militiaman's face. The young farmer, a boy of sixteen, was smiling.
"And we, el capitdn, will have much to celebrate."
21
The morality of killing is not something with which the professional soldier is usually thought to trouble himself.
The shock wave generated by the battle of Monterrey, what some were calling America's second Tet, was just as great in Washington as it had been to the troops who had fought it. Instead of the simple, controlled occupation of a security zone, an image that the president and his advisors had worked hard to cultivate, the American public found itself involved in a full-scale war. Though the battle was technically a victory, since the Mexicans had been forced to break contact and withdraw and all U.S. forces had more or less reached the southern limit of advance that defined the security zone, few people in America saw it in those terms. In that single attack, and the operations immediately after it, the United States Army had suffered more casualties than it had during the entire Persian Gulf War.
The impact of the battle had been magnified by the news stories, uncensored by the military. In contrast to its policy in the Gulf War, where it held a tight rein on what correspondents could see and what they could release for public broadcast, the military had felt that, due to the nature of the operations in Mexico, no censorship would be necessary.
Both the administration and the Pentagon, however, had soon regretted that decision. To counter statements made during briefings by Pentagon spokesmen, who continued to assure the public that the fight around Monterrey had been a tactical victory, newscasters freely used film footage fresh from the battlefield, showing the devastation. One network newsroom ran a two-minute segment during which the soundtrack of a Pentagon briefing was dubbed over footage showing burning American vehicles, rows of filled body bags being tossed into trucks, overcrowded aid stations, and soldiers, dazed from combat, stumbling back to the rear.
Such techniques, coupled with interviews with soldiers fresh from battle and still reeling from the impact of losing a friend, made the statements by military officials in Washington seem trite and out of touch with the reality of the situation in Mexico.
For those in Congress who had been opposed to the establishment of a security zone in Mexico, warning that such a move was not only dangerous but unnecessary, the news from Mexico was vindication. Congressmen like Ed Lewis, who had been vocal in their opposition, redoubled their efforts, taking every opportunity to drive home the point that the longer U.S. forces stayed in Mexico, the more both nations would suffer. The entire affair, Lewis pointed out, had been ill-conceived and based on too many false assumptions. On the day after the battle of Monterrey, after emerging from a special briefing at the White House for selected senators and congressmen, Lewis summed up the administration's problem. When reporters asked him what he and the other members of Congress had been told, Lewis smiled. "The president," he told the reporters, "has assured us that we have that tar baby just where we want it and, any day now, we're going to teach it a thing or two."
Into this growing controversy came Jan Fields, bearing her message for the president from the Council of 13. When she was told that it was not possible for her to deliver the message in person, as Colonel Guajardo had requested, by a condescending third-echelon White House staffer, who informed her that the president could not possibly see her, Jan decided not to get mad. Instead, she delivered the text of the message in a special fifteen-minute segment aired by the World News Network. With a summary of the events that had led up to the current crisis, along with her own observations based on interviews with participants on both sides as a lead-in, Jan delivered Colonel Molina's message. The result exceeded anything Jan could have imagined. The effect was akin to the dumping of gasoline onto a smoldering fire. Within hours, Congress, with Ed Lewis in the vanguard, opened a formal investigation into the administration's handling of Mexico since the beginning of the June 29 revolution.
That he had been called to the White House along with two dozen other congressmen and senators for a special briefing the day before had come as no surprise to Ed Lewis. That he had been invited back, alone, did.
Perhaps, he thought, the president, stung by his tar baby comment, was going to give him a piece of his mind. That caused Lewis to chuckle.
God, he thought, the last thing this president needed to do was to give anyone a piece of his mind. He already had too little to work with as it was.
Lewis was still in the midst of his private joke when the president's national security advisor came out of the Oval Office and started to walk over to him. A college professor before joining the White House staff, William Hastert gave new meaning to the word wimp. With men like this to advise the president, Lewis mused, how can he possibly go right? When Hastert reached Lewis and greeted him, there wasn't a hint of warmth in his handshake or smile. Instead, Hastert only mumbled that both he and the president were glad that Lewis had been able to make time in his busy schedule and come over on such short notice. That Hastert placed himself before the president did not escape Lewis's attention.