Rebirth (John Taylor #1)

Chapter 1

"Taylor! Get your ass up. We're Oscar Mike," Sergeant Alvarez said.

"Yes, Master Sergeant," I said, sliding off the hood of the vehicle I was lying on and looking around, blinking.

I had pulled the boonie cap off my face when I got up, and was practically blinded by the sun. It was bright as hell.

It was also hot. Of course, it was the desert, in the middle of summer, and I had been lying on the hood of a metal Humvee for almost an hour; so, 'hot' was kind of a given. Even with my sunglasses on and my eyes closed, it felt like I could still see the sun, blaring down on me.

Everyone was starting to mount up. I headed to the second of my team's three Humvees, and slid in behind Malcolm Reeves, one of our two 18Cs specializing in engineering and demolitions.

In Army Special Forces there are five specialties that team members focus on, plus our field command team. I was one of the two weapons sergeants, also known as 18Bs. Besides knowing how to operate a wide range of weapons, both from the US and from allied and foreign nationalities, we were trained in the maintenance and repair of weapons as well. We also helped out maintaining vehicles, and assisting guys like Reeves, since there was some crossover in mechanical ability between the two specialties. Besides Reeves, our Humvee also carried our team Sergeant, who had just yelled at me to get moving, and one of our medics.

It took a few minutes for the guys in the trucks ahead of us to start up and pull out. There were about fifteen vehicles in total, counting our three Humvees in the center, and one Humvee at the front and one at the rear of the convoy. The remaining vehicles were the ubiquitous two and a half ton trucks that carried all of the military supplies.

The convoy we had been waiting on to form up, all morning, finally looked about ready to go. It had been decided, higher up the food chain, that it would be best to hold our Operational Detachment Alpha, also called an ODA, and have us travel with a supply convoy back to Camp Blessing, the Forward Operating Base in the Pech district.

I guess I could see their reasoning. The Taliban had made huge inroads in the region, pouring back in from Pakistan. The roads back, and the area itself, were dangerous with numerous ambushes and IED attacks on our convoys in the last several months. Knowing all this didn't really help with my impatience, however. After Camp Blessing, we were set to rotate back to Bagram Airbase for some down time. It was something to look forward to, after almost a month of working in 'the valley'.

We had come out for a hearts and minds mission, to work with some local village leaders, with the hope that we could cut off some of the growing Taliban influence. It hadn't gone particularly well. Half of the villages were hostile, and wanted nothing to do with us. The rest of the villages we contacted were terrified of reprisals from Taliban forces as soon as we were out of sight.

Sadly, that was all too frequent an occurrence. We usually had to pull back to a secure base at night, for security reasons, while the Taliban lived among these people twenty-four seven.

So, we were headed back with little to show for our effort. It sounds bad, but it didn't really bother me one way or the other. It was just another day on the job. That sounds callous, but that's the way things were. Captain Evers, however, was annoyed. This was his last rotation, and from what I had heard he wasn't looking to re-up. He had spent a lot of years in the Army, and he wanted something to cap off his career. Helping push the Taliban out of the Pech valley would have done just that. But, you win some, you lose some.

The trucks themselves were empty or lightly loaded for the most part. They had rolled into the camp early in the morning dropping off food, bottled water and ammo for the combat outpost. While there were only about fifty Americans and a hundred Afghan soldiers stationed at the base at any given time to support and supply patrols and missions into the valley, the Army kept these supply runs irregular, but large enough to keep the camp going for a month. The hope was it would keep the insurgents from guessing a pattern in our shipments or getting too many bites at the apple.