The Rangers Are Coming (20 page)

Fort Independence, Virginia

              Just as promised, the training intensified right after the Christmas furlough of 1772.  For the first time, the soldiers were issued their basic weapons.  Robby expected something different, but he could not have imagined what he got.

              The first thing they were issued were helmets that fit snugly on their heads because of the liner, and were shaped to cover down to the ears.  The next thing the soldiers got was body armor.  It took some time to get used to wearing it, since it covered their entire upper torsos and had flaps that extended to their necks.

              Now fully equipped in battle dress, the soldiers were run through relentless drills and obstacle courses until they were as fast as they were without the armor and helmets.  The equipment felt as if they had worn in forever.

              “I guarantee this equipment will save your life,” said Sergeant Boswell.  “Let me demonstrate.”  Another sergeant came forward with a standard British musket.  Boswell walked over to Robby and handed him the musket.  “You’re the best shot in the brigade, so I’m counting on you to hit where I say,” said Boswell.  The sergeant walked about 100 feet away and turned around.  “OK, Pierce,” he said, “put one right in my heart.”

              “You must be joking,” said Robby.

              “Not at all,” said Bowell, “just do it and don’t miss.

              Robby raised the musket, cocked it and aimed at Boswell’s heart.  He fired.  There was the usual amount of smoke from the musket, and when it cleared, Robby saw Boswell, climbing up off the ground.

              “Gather around,” he said.  The musket ball had hit dead center in the heart of Boswell’s armor.  He peeled off the armor and showed the musket ball stuck in the Kevlar.  “It stings a little,” said Boswell, but I could stand here all day and nothing the British fired at me would kill me, as long as if it weren’t a cannon ball from the same distance,” he grinned.  “This equipment makes you guys awfully hard to kill.”

              Next was the issue of the weapons for the Rangers.

“Men,” said Sergeant Boswell, “I give you the M-16A1 Assault Rifle, with the M- 203 grenade launcher.  It is a shoulder mounted, gas operated, selective fire, magazine fed weapon with a 30 round magazine.  It fires a 5.56 mm round with a range of 600 yards.  The rate of fire for this weapon is 600 rounds per minute.  The M203 grenade launcher fires a 40 mm explosive of various types and is used instead of a standard grenade.  Its effective range is 150 yards.  The weight of this weapon is 8 pounds.

For the next week, the men were trained to take the weapon apart and reassemble it blindfolded.  This was to maintain effectiveness of the weapon by keeping it clean.  The practice of sighting and clicking the rifle went on for hours.  To Robby, the weapon seemed like a toy.  It was so much shorter and lighter that the long muskets he had grown up using.

Finally, the men were marched to the rifle range and set up in long lines in front of targets placed 50, 100, and 200 yards apart.  Sergeant Boswell explained, “The M-16 has two firing settings.  The first one will fire a round every time you pull the trigger, which is what we will use here.  The second is fully automatic.  What this means is before your first spent cartridge-casing hits the ground, your 30
^th
round is already headed downrange.

When it came, Robby’s turn to shoot, the instructor laid down next to him on the ground and said, “Just relax, sight the target down the barrel and centered between the aiming notches at the end of the barrel.  Don’t jerk the trigger just squeeze it, like you were milking a cow.  I want you to fire five rounds at each of targets, starting with the nearest one.  I am going to help you get your rifle sighted in with the use of these binoculars.  After we do that, you will fire again to make sure we have set up the rifle properly.

Robby aimed down the barrel at the near target, remembering his father’s advice from the time he was a boy, “Aim small, miss small.”  He squeezed off the first five rounds.  The weapon did not kick as much as a musket, nor was it as loud and there was no smoke at all.  The instructor looked through his scope, and shook his head, “Very nice shooting son.  Your shot pattern is not more than two inches wide.  Try again with the middle target.”  Robby switched to the target 100 yards away, and pulled the trigger five times.  One again, the instructor looked at the pattern through his scope.  “You’re shooting straight, try the far target.”  Robby looked at the target 200 yards away.  He had killed dear from this range, so he relaxed and shot his five rounds in rapid succession.  The Instructor looked through the scope and whistled, “Your shot pattern is still only about two inches apart.  It looks like you’re a natural.”

The instructor took the rifle and showed Robby how to click the dials on the front of the rifle to correct for the tendency of the rifle to shoot off the bull’s-eye.  Then he had Robby replace this magazine and shoot at the targets again.  When he was finished, instructor looked through his scope.  “Wonderful shooting, son, every round at all distances are inside the bulls-eye circle.  I guess you grew up handling a rifle.

“Yes sir,” said Robby, “I had to go out and shoot dinner for the family when I was younger, only my father only gave me two musket balls, since that was all we could afford.  If I missed, both shots, the family had no meat that day.”

“Well, you’re a sure-enough dead eye shooter.  Looks like you will have a special assignment in your rifle platoon.”

“What’s that,” asked Robby?

“Sniper,” said the instructor.

Willis had shot almost as well in his test and the two found themselves assigned to headquarters platoon of company A of the 2
^nd
Regiment of the Ranger brigade.  They would go where the company commander ordered them to go to do their jobs.  Both men were issued new weapons.  They were called the M-4 Sniper rifle, and you had to turn the bolt for each round, which was twice the size of the assault rifles.  The barrels were considerably longer and the weapon was a little heavier.

They were taken out to a special firing range and practiced for days shooting targets as far as 1000 yards away.  Robby was even able to hit a target dead on at a mile.  Their weapons were brown and wrapped with camouflage fabric to keep them from shining in the light.  The men also received special coverings to wear over their uniforms, called ghillie suits.  When they wore them, they were all but invisible, lying in the grass or in a forest.

Now, as planned, the training platoons were broken up. Robby and Willis went with the majority of the troops to the ground assault platoons and their new positions as snipers in headquarters platoon of Company A.  They moved to a new barracks building that was for Company A.  The rooms were the same, and so the adjustment was minimal. 

Charlie Arthur was assigned to the Artillery battery.  The artillery battery began training in firing the 105 mm Howitzers.  Each had a crew of eight.  There was the fire direction center where they were trained, both by computer, and manually how to find targets, read the maps, and direct accurate fire.  The entire Brigade got a demonstration of what the Howitzers could do.  They stood on a hill overlooking a valley just outside the Fort and watched as the 105’s shot rounds from 7 miles away, hitting their targets of old wagons and even small barrels with perfect accuracy.  The destruction the Howitzers could inflict was a sobering experience for all.

  Now the big garages were unlocked and the Rangers saw, for the first time the “horses” that would carry them into battle.  The Humvees and the Bradleys’ were rolled out and instructors carefully trained the operators of the vehicles.  The Humvees were the easiest to learn.  They were just big trucks, but it took two months to train the crew of three to effectively operate and accurately fire the weapons on the Bradleys.

The men of the Ranger Brigade were seeing that everything their leaders had told them about being the most lethal fighting force in the world was completely true.  As the machine guns, the flamethrowers, the grenades, both hand held and rocket propelled, and the rest of the weapons came rolling out, the men believed that nothing could make them better.  They were wrong.

In the companies all over the brigade, the sergeants were bringing out one final piece of equipment.  It was small, merely a headset that fitted into the helmets, and had a small microphone attached to it.  The men put them on and clicked the on button on the side.  Instantly they heard Sergeant Boswell speaking to them in their headsets.  “If you need to transmit a message of your own, you just reach up and push the button at the front of the radio.  Everyone did that, and the din of overlapping voices was unrecognizable.  “As you can see, gentlemen,” said Sergeant Boswell, the radios should only be used when you have something to say.  These radios are set on a frequency to talk to everyone in the company.  Further, up the chain of command, their radios are more complicated.  They can talk to all of the companies and all you men at the same time.  It makes it so much easier to move you from one place to another without trumpets, flags or smoke signals.  In fact, the General can speak to just one of you, individually, if he wants too.

Sergeant Boswell had the whole company together, 200 men.  “Now we come to the battle tactics we will employ.  He took his pointer and pointed it at a screen of a British Army and the way they were organized.  “As you can see, the cannons are at the rear or sides, the command center, the officers running the battle are in the rear, in a high place where they can see their army in front of them.  The soldiers march in long ranks with their artillery shooting in front of them.  The opposing army is organized the same.  Each has a cavalry of horses to sweep down from the flanks and break up the lines.”

              “The armies march toward each other until they are within musket range, then they just stand there shooting at each other until one of the armies breaks and retreats.  This is the way all armies fight.”

              “Now watch what we’re going to do.  The simulation changed to show the Bradley’s alone in the center and advancing.  “Artillery, from a much further distance, than British cannons, will fire into the ranks of the soldiers.  At the same time, the Humvees and our troops emerge onto the battlefield from all sides, including the rear.  They simply advance, making the circle smaller and smaller until all the Red Coats are dead or have surrendered.  Our snipers will have worked into a position before the engagement, and when the shooting starts they kill the commanding officer and all his staff, one by one.”

              “Scratch one British Army.  If we do this, two or three times, there will no longer by any more Red Coats to fight.  The war is over, and we are free to move on to our other objectives, Quebec and Canada will be first, than we move into Mexico and Central America and conquer the Spanish.  We estimate that in about three years we will have subdued the entire North American continent, including the islands of the Caribbean and established the United States of America.  Then we announce to the world that the United States is open for business to anyone who wants to trade with us, and to anyone who wants to emigrate here, and declare our strict neutrality to any foreign conflicts.”

              The Rangers trained in tactics, deployment and the coordination of their forces for the entire year of 1773.  It was not all field training.  Large blocks of time were devoted to learning a detailed geography of North America, the location of principal foreign strongholds throughout the continent and in the islands of the Caribbean.  They also were given detailed instruction on the indigenous Native American tribes that were scattered throughout the continent.  Plans were drawn up to send small units of soldiers into these areas and establish peaceful relations with all the tribes and designate places where they would be able to establish their own singularity after giving them the full resources of the U.S. government to allow them to adapt to new ways of living by cooperation, rather than confrontation.

              One of the new skills, Robby and Willis learned was fluency in Spanish as well as a complicated sign language system that could be used to communicate with Indian tribes.  Their training in Martial Arts intensified.  Not a single day, except Sunday had less than a twelve-hour work schedule.

              There came a day in the spring of 1774, that a competition was held to determine the most proficient marital arts champion in the brigade.  Excitement was high for each platoons champion.  A field of 64 men were selected and put in brackets that matched the best with the least and so forth, to insure that some fluke of competition did not knock out the top seeds.  Robby was one of the four top seeds, and began working his way through the brackets. 

              There were some significant surprises as some of the lower seeds knocked off men who were supposedly better, but weren’t on that day, either through great heart or pure guts on the part of their opponent.  It even happened to one of the top seeds who was upset by a ninth seed in the third round.  The field grew smaller and smaller and Robby found himself in the final four.  He won the match and advanced to the finals where he actually won easily.

              As he was holding his trophy aloft and being mobbed by his platoon, the ranks parted and into the circle strode the dreaded black ninja.  Nobody knew who this was.  His face was covered by a black scarf that fit closely and had only small holes for eyes and mouth.  The Black Ninja had been the supreme teacher of all the men of the brigade.  None had ever been hurt, at least not badly, but there was no question that this fighter was the best by far.

              The Black Ninja stepped into the competition circle, bowed low to Robby and then rushed across the ring in full attack.  The battle went on for a long time.  Robby’s technique against the speed and guile of the Black Ninja.  Finally, in one furious exchange, both combatants found themselves on the ground with a fatal lock on each other.  Amazing as it seemed, the contest was a tie.