Staff Sergeant Domingo Chavez was one of these. Known as “Ding” by his squad, he was twenty-six. Already a nine-year veteran – he’d begun as a gang kid in Los Angeles whose basic common sense had overcome his ineffectual education – he’d decided that there was no future in the Bandidos when a close friend had died in a drive-by shooting whose purpose he’d never quite figured out. The following Monday morning he’d taken the bus to the nearest Army Recruiting Office after the Marines had turned him down. Despite his near illiteracy, the recruiting sergeant had signed him up in a moment – his quota had been short, and the kid had expressed a willingness to go infantry, thus fulfilling two blank spots on the sergeant’s monthly reporting sheet. Most of all, the youngster wanted to go right in. It could not have been better for the recruiter.
Chavez hadn’t had many ideas what military service would be like, and most of those had turned out to be wrong. After losing his hair and a rat-faced beard, he’d learned that toughness is worthless without discipline, and that the Army doesn’t tolerate insolence. That lesson had come behind a white-painted barracks at the hands of a drill sergeant whose face was as black as a jungle night. But Chavez’s life had never known an easy lesson; as a result he hadn’t learned to resent the hard ones. Having discovered that the Army was also a hierarchy with strict hierarchical rules, he stayed within them and gradually turned into an above-average recruit. Former gang kid that he was, he’d already known about camaraderie and teamwork, and redirecting these traits into positive directions had come easily enough. By the time basic training had ended, his small frame was as lean and taut as a steel cable, his physical appearance was something in which he took inordinate pride, and he was already well on his way to mastering every weapon that an infantryman can carry. Where else, he asked himself once a day, do they give you a machine gun and pay you to shoot it?
But soldiers are grown, not born. Chavez’s first posting was to Korea, where he learned about hills, and just how deadly enemy gangs could be, since duty on the DMZ has never been anything that one might call safe. Discipline, he learned there once and for all, had a real purpose. It kept you alive. A small team of North Korean infiltrators had picked a rainy night to go through his unit’s piece of the line for purposes known only to their commanders. On the way they’d stumbled on an unmarked listening post whose two American occupants had decided to sleep through the night, and never awoke. ROK units had later intercepted and killed the invaders, but Chavez was the one who’d discovered the men from his own platoon, throats cut in the same way he’d seen in his own neighborhood. Soldiering, he’d decided then and there, was a serious business, and one which he wanted to master. The platoon sergeant noticed first, then the lieutenant. Chavez paid attention to lectures, even trying to take notes. On realizing his inability to read and write beyond things he’d carefully memorized in advance, the platoon leader had gotten the young PFC help. Working hard on his own time, before the end of the year Chavez had passed a high-school equivalency test – on his first try! he told everyone who would listen that night – and made Specialist Fourth Class, which earned him an extra $58.50 per month. His lieutenant didn’t fully understand, though the platoon sergeant did, that Domingo Chavez had been forever changed by that combination of events. Though he’d always had the Latino’s deep pride, part of the eighteen-year-old soldier now understood that he had truly done something to be proud about. For this he deemed himself to be in the Army’s debt, and with the deep sense of personal honor which was also part of his cultural heritage, it was a debt that he would forever after work to repay.
Some things never left. He cultivated physical toughness. Part of that came from his small size – just five-eight – but he also came to understand that the real world was not a football field: the tough ones who made the long haul were most often the compact, lean fighters. Chavez came to love running, and enjoyed a good sweat. Because of this, assignment to the 7th Infantry Division (Light) was almost inevitable. Though based at Fort Ord, near Monterey on the California coast, the 7th trains farther down the coast at Hunter-Liggett Military Reservation, once the sprawling rancho of the Hearst family. A place of magnificent green hills in the moist winters, Hunter-Liggett becomes a blistering moonscape in the California summer, a place of steep, topless hills, gnarled, shapeless trees, and grass that crumbles to dust under one’s boots. For Chavez it was home. He arrived as a brand-new buck sergeant E-5, and was immediately sent to the division’s two-week Combat Leaders Course, a prep school for squad sergeants that also paved the way for his entry into Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. On his return from that most rigorous of Army training courses, Chavez was leaner and more confident than ever. His return to Fort Ord coincided with the arrival of a new “cohort” of recruits for his battalion. Ding Chavez was assigned to command a squad of slick-sleeved privates fresh from Advanced Infantry Training. It was the first payback time for the young sergeant. The Army had invested considerable time and training in him, and now it was time for him to pass it along to nine raw recruits – and also time for the Army to see if Chavez had the stuff that leaders are made of. He took command of his squad as a stepfather of a large and unruly family faces his newly acquired children. He wanted them to turn out properly because they were his, and because they were his, he was damned sure going to see that they did. At Fort Ord, he’d also learned the real art of soldiering, for infantry tactics are precisely that for the light-fighters – an art form. Assigned to Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion of the 17th Infantry Regiment, whose somewhat ambitious motto was “Ninja! We Own the Night!” Chavez went into the field with his face coated in camouflage paint – in the 7th LID even the helicopter pilots wear camouflage paint – and learned his profession in full even while he taught his men. Most of all, he came to love the night. Chavez learned to move himself and his squad through cover as quietly as a whispering breeze. The objective of such missions was generally the same. Unable to match a heavy formation force-on-force, Chavez trained to do the close, nasty work that has always characterized light infantrymen: raids and ambushes, infiltration and intelligence gathering. Stealth was their means, and surprise was their tool, to appear where least expected, to strike with close-quarter ferocity, then to escape into the darkness before the other side could react. Such things had been tried on Americans once, and it was only fair that Americans should learn to return the favor. All in all, SSG Domingo Chavez was a man whom the Apaches or the Viet Cong would have recognized as one of their own – or one of their most dangerous enemies.
“Hey, Ding!” the platoon sergeant called. “The ell-tee wants you.”
It had been a long one at Hunter-Liggett, ending at the dawn now two hours old. The exercise had lasted nearly nine days, and even Chavez was feeling it. He wasn’t seventeen anymore, his legs were telling him with some amusement. At least it was his last such job with the Ninjas. He was rotating out, and his next assignment was to be a drill sergeant with the Army’s basic-training school at Fort Benning, Georgia. Chavez was immensely proud of that. The Army thought enough of him that he would now be an example to young recruits. The sergeant got to his feet, but before walking over to where the lieutenant was, he reached into his pocket and took out a throwing star. Ever since the colonel had taken to calling his men Ninjas, the nasty little steel projectiles had become de rigueur to the men – somewhat to the concern of the powers-that-were. But there was always a little slack cut for the good ones, and Chavez was one of these. He flipped the star with a deceptively powerful flick of the wrist and buried it an inch deep in a tree fifteen feet away. He collected it on the way to see the boss.
“Yes, sir!” Chavez said, standing at attention.
“At ease, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Jackson said. He was sitting against a tree to take the strain off his blistered feet. A West Point graduate and only twenty-three, he was learning how hard it could be to keep up with the soldiers he was supposed to lead. “Got a call. They need you back at headquarters. Something to do with the paperwork on your transfer. You can go in on a resupply flight out of battalion trains. The chopper’ll be down there in an hour. Nice work last night, by the way. I’m going to be sorry to lose you, Ding.”