Texas Nights - Book 13 of the Damned of the 2/19th

My Animal Now

Alpha and Charlie Company Barracks Area
15th Forward Support Battalion
Fort Hood, Texas
CONUS
19 September, 1991
1400 Hours

The Day Room, where soldiers went to relax and play pool, foosball or ping pong, or just watch TV and talk was deserted when I opened the door. The advantages of it being a Thursday afternoon meant that everyone was busy down at the motorpool instead of off shamming somewhere.

The ping pong table squealed as I pulled it from against the wall and further into the room, then squealed more as I pushed it from straight up to flattened out. I didn't bother setting up the net, just set my files down on the surface and stared at it.

The unit was in worse shape than I had thought. In Captain Jane's defense, it wasn't her fault. They had moved her from Headquarters Company to take command of Charlie Company only a month before. There was apparently some kind of scandal there, but to be honest, I didn't care. I cared about now, about how her leadership abilities would effect the unit, not bullshit gossip.

Most of the unit hadn't qualified on their weapons in months. The lower enlisted had either been in AIT or Basic Training when Desert Storm had gone down, or had been with units that never deployed. They had exactly one person with an Expert Field Medical Badge, which honestly should have been a Combat Field Medical Badge, but instead for some reason she was only given the EFMB despite treating patients under fire during the Ground War. The other four medics that had been deployed to Desert Storm had all been in different units, none of them had moved across the Iraq or Kuwait borders until days after the war had been over.

None of the NCO's had even left CONUS.

Surprisingly enough, Captain Jane had been in Desert Storm, a Lieutenant in charge of helicopter medevac crews. While it was an administration job, she still had experience that I could respect.

It also helped that she had been with 13th Evac, the unit that had picked up Actual's dead and wounded from that final battlefield. That made me cut her more slack than I probably should have, but I still remembered the simple fact that 13th Evac had sent thin skinned Black Hawk helicopters into an active combat to retrieve our wounded that first hour.

I wondered if hers was the voice I had heard cursing out the General who had ordered our air support to retask to support First Infantry Division. Who had retasked the incoming Black Hawks to 1st ID "just in case" something happened.

Shaking off the memory of the last radio message we had heard, I looked at the files in front of me. The Company was woefully unprepared, but it wasn't the first time I had encountered the attitude of "There won't be any more war" since the end of the Desert Storm and the Cold War. The fact that the three officers of Charlie believed that idiocy had leaked down into the lower ranks, and with it came negligence.

The Company needed training. I knew it would make the enlisted bitch, but bitching was a god given right to the enlisted, and any officer or NCO who tried to make the enlisted stop complaining was an idiot who probably tried to hold back the tide with a child's plastic sand shovel.

I'd need to start with a basic Annual Physical Fitness Test. Sure, a lot of the ranks had taken one at the end of AIT, but as far as I could tell, the only unit in 15th FSB that had bothered with an APFT since First Cavalry Division had returned from the Persian Gulf in June was Alpha Company, and that was only a week ago.

After that, I'd need to take them all out to the range to zero their weapons, then make them qualify on their weapons. I knew I'd get some push back, probably at Battalion level, at the fact I intended on forcing the medics to qualify on the new M9 9mm pistol, but it needed to be done and I figured my own unique brand of charm would convince the Battalion Training NCO to allow me to do the same.