Trial by Fire

5

With nothing to do while they waited their turn to be inspected by their platoon leader, the men designated Group D, for "Distrito Federal," shuffled, yawned, and stretched as they stood in the ranks. From across the dilapidated hangar, Guajardo occasionally glanced up from the maps and diagrams laid out before him on a rickety table, watching the inspection with the same detached interest as the men undergoing it displayed.

As of yet, only the captain who was serving as their platoon leader knew where they were going and what their objective was. Even the majority of the helicopter crewmen who would be moving Group D as well as three other groups, did not know where they would be going.

Looking back down at his charts, maps, and diagrams, Guajardo wondered if his intricate scheme of deceptions and precautions had been necessary or effective. At times, during the planning process, even he had experienced difficulty remembering what was deception and what was actual. The need for tight security was not imaginary, since the target was one of the most effective and cunning criminals in Mexico. Referred to as El Dueno, or "the Manager," Senior Hector Alaman had created an empire that spread across the entire Caribbean and included in its ranks politicians, police officials, judges, and officers in the armed forces of every country in the region, including the United States.

Alamein did not directly involve himself in the growing, transporting, or marketing of drugs. Instead, he provided services to those who did.

These services included planning, coordinating, and orchestrating all aspects of the business for his clients. With a vast data base that tracked the demand and flow of drugs like those of any commodities market, Alaman and his advisors could provide information to both growers and shippers as to what product would be most profitable and where the best price could be had. Additionally, for a little extra, Alaman's banking associates provided the growers and shippers with a wide variety of financial services for moving and investing profits and business expenses from their illegal marketplace into legitimate banks, institutions, and markets. He even provided insurance policies, either long-term, which were quite expensive, or for single events, such as a shipment. Alaman's insurance, which was nothing more than an elaborate system of bribes, allowed his clients to operate their business free of official interference.

The network of contacts and "employees" needed to ensure that operations and shipments were not interfered with was created through a variety of methods that ranged from simple bribery to terrorism. Using an intelligence network that provided timely and accurate information on threats and potential threats to the industry from any quarter, Alaman and the members of his ' 'Action department'' sought to neutralize them.

When possible, the people who generated the threats were encouraged not only to change their minds, but were actively recruited by Alaman. When they could not be swayed, they were eliminated in a manner that would serve as a warning to anyone wishing to follow in their footsteps. Guajardo himself had experienced Alaman's power.

Alaman ran these operations from a villa located in the state of Tamaulipas, where Guajardo served as the military zone commander. Under Guajardo's very eyes, and those of the police and the government of the state, Alaman had built a fortress twenty-two kilometers southwest of Ciudad Victoria. The fortress, named Chinampas, was manned by a staff of experts and advisors in every imaginable field, most of whom had PhDs and years of practical experience in banking, trade, intelligence, transportation, law enforcement, and other disciplines needed to make the drug industry profitable, efficient, and safe. This staff, supported by a computer and communications system that put the one possessed by the Mexican Army to shame, lacked nothing, especially security. Protection was provided by a garrison of fifty well-trained mercenaries recruited from the best agencies, armed with the best weapons money could buy, and backed up by a security system similar to that used to protect Israel's nuclear-weapons depots. Chinampas, with walls that could resist a direct hit by a 105mm tank cannon, represented a formidable challenge to anyone who might consider testing its defenses.

Not that anyone ever thought that such an event would become a reality. Chinampas's best defenses came from the benevolent, well-paid, and well-tended judiciary at both state and national level. It would have been bad enough, in Guajardo's eyes, had government and state officials simply been unwilling to consider initiating an investigation of Alaman and his operations. Guajardo could have accepted the excuse that perhaps the government and police officials being bribed didn't fully understand what Alaman was about. The openness, however, with which Alaman associated with and entertained those officials made such a defense unsupportable.

Even before Chinampas was finished, Guajardo had watched a parade of officials whisked away to Alaman's paradise for weekends and vacations. Tending to every need, legal and illegal, of local, state, and national government and police officials provided Alaman security that most men in the shadow world of the international drug trade could only dream of.

Only a man of Guajardo's temper and conviction could conceive of such a mission. The destruction of Chinampas, however, had become more than a task for the professional soldier; it had become a quest. When the existence of Chinampas came to Guajardo's attention, he had conducted an unauthorized reconnaissance of the site accompanied by one of his trusted captains. Though it had still been under construction during his first visit, Guajardo had understood its potential. He saw it as a tumor that had to be removed before it grew and killed the state which he was responsible for. Foolishly, Guajardo had gone to the governor of Tamaulipas with his findings and a recommendation that the growing fortress be destroyed immediately. The governor reacted with a controlled sincerity that Guajardo naively believed. Thanking him for his concern, the governor dismissed Guajardo, assuring him that appropriate steps would be taken.

For a month, Guajardo had heard nothing more on the subject. Then, one morning, he had discovered what those steps were. Opening the front door of his home to leave for work, he found the naked body of the captain who had accompanied him on the unauthorized recon of Chinampas nailed, upside down, to his front door. The severity of the corruption that permeated the government was hammered home when the head of the state's police force came into Guajardo's office the next day and personally advised the colonel to leave Chinampas alone. At first, Guajardo could not understand why the captain, and not he, the man who had led the recon and recommended action against Chinampas, had been murdered.

The answer was provided by a friend at the funeral of the captain.

Guajardo, a senior and well-respected member of the Army, was more valuable to Alaman if, through a simple demonstration of power, Guajardo could be won over to Alaman's side. Failing that, Alaman's action would serve to frighten Guajardo into inaction.

The shock of the incident and the reasoning behind it were slow to wear off. When it did, however, anger and hatred, not fear and complacency, replaced the shock. It was then, even before Guajardo knew of Molina's plans to conduct a coup, that Guajardo dedicated himself to purging his homeland of those who made it a prostitute to be exploited by the highest bidder. While the reasons he had given the American TV correspondent for joining the Council of 13 were real, they paled in comparison to his goal of crushing Chinampas, and all who lived there. The coup, even the murder of his president, were merely chores that needed to be tended to before Guajardo could pursue his quest of striking Alaman down, avenging his pride and freeing Mexico of men like him in the process.

Conviction and good intentions, however, would not reduce Chinampas.

Only a well-planned and violent attack with overwhelming force could achieve that. Working on his own, Guajardo had learned everything he could about Alaman's operations, Chinampas, and the curtains of security that shielded it. He soon knew more about the capability of the defenses of Chinampas than Alaman himself.

Through frequent visits, often at night and always alone, Guajardo had learned everything he could about the terrain surrounding Chinampas and its defenses. Slowly, with the drive of a zealot, the eye of a professional soldier, and the patience of a native-born son of Chihuahua, Guajardo collected information and devised plans of action. When, at Molina's invitation, he joined the Council of 13, Guajardo found he had access to funds secretly diverted from the Mexican Army budget.

Using Alamin's.own techniques, Guajardo used the funds to obtain information. This included the purchasing of the original plans for the construction of Chinampas from the American construction firm that had built the fortress. By pretending to be a Colombian businessman, he easily obtained schematics and technical data of the security system used at Chinampas from the Israeli firm that had installed the original. Through a friend, himself a mercenary, Guajardo not only managed to obtain detailed dossiers on every man who comprised Chinampas's garrison, but, through the Belgian firm that handled Alaman's weapons contracts, Guajardo purchased copies of every invoice for both weapons and ammunition used to arm that garrison.

Chinampas itself was built for no other purpose than to protect its occupants. Its twelve-foot-high walls, though not overly imposing, were high enough to prevent scaling without the aid of ladders or ropes. Even if these were used, smooth metal rollers that rotated out and away from the interior of the fortress, similar to those that had been used on the former Berlin wall, lined the top of the wall. Anyone trying to climb over the walls would start the rollers spinning, causing the climber to fall off the wall. The walls themselves were reinforced concrete measuring four feet thick at the base, tapering to two feet at the top. The angle of this tapering was all on the outer side of the wall. This reduced but did not eliminate the dead space, or blind spots, at the base of the wall. To cover any dead space that did exist, command-detonated anti-personnel mines were placed in recesses in the outer wall.

A tower standing twenty feet high was located at each corner, with two intermediate towers covering the long northern and southern walls and the north and south gates. These six towers, also built of reinforced concrete, provided the garrison with excellent observation and served as weapons platforms. From them, every inch of ground surrounding and within Chinampas could be covered by automatic-weapons fire. Provisions for the firing of antitank rockets and guided missiles, as well as surface-to-air missiles, stored at the base of each tower, were incorporated in the design.

Even the buildings themselves were built with an eye for defense.

Although the facades of the main house, barracks, stable, and garage were stucco, the core of the walls, like the outer walls and towers, was all reinforced concrete. Apertures, cleverly designed to appear as ornate masonry, provided the occupants with firing ports. Even if the outer walls and towers failed to keep attackers out, each building could defend itself.

As formidable as these integrated defenses were, there were weaknesses.

The six towers were built in such a manner that they could not cover the base of the outer wall. Once the command-detonated mines were expended, or neutralized, assault forces could freely move about in the lee of the outer walls. Each tower also depended on overlapping fire from another tower or building to cover its own base. While the loss of one or two towers or buildings would do nothing to break the integrity of Chinampas's defense, the rapid loss of several would.

The surrounding terrain dominated Chinampas. Though the fortress was well sited to take advantage of the natural beauty of the area, the cool breeze that came down the valley from the north, and abundant water for the garden, the high ground to the northwest and east looked down into Chinampas. Finally, and most significant, while Chinampas could withstand and repel a raid, it could not withstand a siege against a large and determined force. Alaman had no forces, other than those within Chinampas and the benevolent intervention by friendly government officials, that could be rushed in to lift a siege.

Satisfied that he had all the information that could be safely obtained, Guajardo had begun the methodical process of exploring all options of attack available to him. Once all realistic options had been developed, Guajardo would wargame them, looking for the strength and weakness of each, comparing the advantages and disadvantages of each option before making a decision. This process, which took place in almost total secrecy, spanned several months and, like all obsessions, was never far from Guajardo's mind.

Some options had fallen out almost immediately. A ground attack was impractical. Ideally, such an attack would be conducted at night with no warning. But the Mexican Army lacked night-vision devices and the training that would make such an operation easy and ensure success. The garrison of Chinampas, on the other hand, was lavishly equipped to deal with such a threat. Numerous limited-visibility vision devices, both manned and automated, backed up by several belts of unattended ground sensors and remote monitoring stations, made an undetected approach by more than a handful of men highly unlikely. Besides, all units trained to conduct such commando operations were heavily infiltrated by informers either directly or through those who controlled their deployment and operations.

Unable to use stealth, Guajardo next considered the other extreme: direct and overwhelming conventional attack by regular Army units. As a professional soldier, he could easily organize and conduct such an operation. Though its weapons were not the most sophisticated, the Mexican Army possessed sufficient firepower to wipe Chinampas, and all within its walls, off the face of the earth.

An operation of that nature, however, could not escape detection. As with Mexico's special operations forces, every unit within his military zone, down to company level, had informers either in Alaman's pay or in the pay of another drug lord. Guajardo knew that any movement of major forces would be known in Chinampas even before the troops left their barracks. And even if, by some chance, such advance warning from within the ranks could be prevented, it would be impossible to hide the movement of troops through San Antonia, then north over the only road leading to Chinampas. Either way, while the troops and weapons could be brought to bear, and Chinampas destroyed, Alaman would be long gone before the Mexican Army could fire its first round.

Discarding direct ground attack, Guajardo explored the possibility of reducing Chinampas with air attacks. Together with an Air Force colonel who was a member of the Council of 13, Guajardo worked out the mathematics of such an attack. After looking at every possible combination of aircraft and ordnance available to the Mexican Air Force, both officers agreed that such an attack, though possible, could not guarantee success.

Though Guajardo desired to use a simple, direct, and quick solution, all the options that fit that description failed the most critical test: they did not offer a better than even chance of catching, or killing, Alaman and his key personnel. In a fit of frustration, anger, and irrational rage, Guajardo threw all the data, maps, draft plans, and working papers into his safe, changed the combination, locked it, promptly forgot the combination, and walked away from it. There the matter rested for several months.

It was during a conference at Fort Benning, Georgia, that a viable solution to the Chinampas problem began to form in Guajardo's mind. In one of the sessions dealing with special operations and raids, the briefer presented a short lecture on the American raid on Son Tay. Executed on 21 November 1970, that raid had been meant to liberate sixty-five American POWs held there. Although the operation was expertly executed, it failed because the POWs that had been held there had been moved days before the raid. As Guajardo listened to the lecture and studied the colorful diagrams, he could not help but compare many of the problems that faced the Son Tay planners with those that faced him at Chinampas. Even before the lecture was over, he realized that he had been given the key to the solution. Though a detailed plan had to be developed, from that moment on, Guajardo knew that Chinampas, and all who worked within its walls, would fall to him. All that was needed now was someone to open the safe he had locked.

Realizing that it is a mistake to take the solution to one military problem and apply it blindly to another, Guajardo carefully created his own plan, selectively using tactics and techniques used at Son Tay. An example was the manner in which the Son Tay raiders used helicopters to neutralize the guard towers in 1970. There, a CH-53 with miniguns on both sides flew between two guard towers, hovered at the same level as the towers, and fired the miniguns directly into them. The wooden guard towers at Son Tay, pulverized by miniguns firing 6,000 7.62mm rounds per minute, were, in effect, sawed off their supports. This allowed the initial assault group to come in and land unhindered in an open space in the compound.

Though Guajardo did not have a helicopter as big as the CH-53, or miniguns for that matter, he could improvise. For aircraft, four Bell 206 helicopters, each with a crew of two and capable of carrying five passengers, would be used. Since the Mexican Army had few helicopters, only the towers in the west and the center would be attacked. These four helicopters and their passengers, code named Group Z because it was staging and launching from Zacatecas, would hit Chinampas first. Coming in from the west, each helicopter would fly directly to its designated target, one of the four towers. Flying nap-of-the-earth, Group Z would use the hills west of Chinampas to mask their approach. Once clear of the hills, the pilots would only have a few seconds to orient themselves and line up on the tower they were to hit, all the while making a final high-speed approach.

The challenge that faced each pilot in Group Z was covering the last few meters of open ground as quickly as possible, clearing the outer wall, then rapidly bringing their helicopter to a hover a few meters away from the tower. With a main blade diameter of 11.3 meters, the closest the Bell 206s could come to the tower, or any other obstacle for that matter, was six to eight meters. That, however, was close enough.

Once the pilot or the co-pilot had brought the helicopter to a hover, the other crewmen, armed with automatic rifles, would fire out of their open windows into the guard tower. Guajardo knew this fire would be wildly inaccurate, especially since the crews would not be permitted to practice before the operation in order to preserve secrecy. But it didn't need to be accurate. Guajardo was counting on the surprise assault from the air, coupled with the suppressive fire from the helicopter crew, to allow the passengers enough time to rappel out of the helicopter onto the ground at the base of the tower.

The passengers carried by the Bell 206s were four teams of combat engineers armed with automatic rifles and a variety of explosives. Each team, consisting of an officer, a sergeant, and three sappers, had been hand-picked by a colonel of the engineers who was a member of the Council of 13. During the assault on Chinampas, while the helicopter hovered and the crew fired on the occupants of the tower, the engineers would exit the helicopter using the speed-rappel technique pioneered by the U.S. Army's special operations helicopter group, Task Force 160.

The nylon rope used was two inches thick and stiff. The engineers, wearing leather gloves, would slide down it like firemen dropping down a fire pole. Since the drop would only be twenty feet, even if someone let go, the chances of severe injury would be minimal. Once on the ground at the base of the towers, the engineers, using explosives, would force their way into the tower and clear it as rapidly as possible using gunfire and explosives.

Unlike the pilots, the engineers were allowed to practice exiting the helicopter and the techniques to be used in clearing the towers. To ensure security, each team in Group Z, along with the helicopter and crew that would transport it, was trained in isolation in a different part of Mexico.

None were told what their actual target was. Instead, the men, even the officers in charge, were told that they were being trained to deal with prison riots. To make this'cover story more convincing, the dummy towers and compounds they drilled on were patterned after actual prisons within the state where they were located. Even with this cover story, all rehearsals were classified top secret. Only on June 29, the day before the actual raid, would all members of Group Z be brought together at an abandoned airfield outside of Zacatecas. There, Guajardo himself would issue the actual order for their real target.

Since there was no way of knowing what helicopters and helicopter crews would be available on the day of the raid, Guajardo, who was not a pilot, decided to keep them out of the mission planning. To protect the security of the operation, Guajardo made it a habit to use different helicopter crews. An Air Force colonel on the council advised Guajardo to include the pilots in the rehearsals, but was rebuffed for his efforts. "This is," Guajardo told him, "a ground operation. All the helicopters are needed for is transportation. And for that, all the pilots need to be given is a course, speed, and destination." Unstated was Guajardo's dislike of aviators, a breed he considered to be overpaid and underworked. So the pilots, like many other participants, would learn of their role at the last minute.

With the two western and two center towers seized or under attack, the door to direct insertion of the main force into the compound itself was open. The open spaces needed to grow the beautiful gardens of Chinampas, which is the name given ancient Aztec floating gardens, provided ample space for helicopters to land within the walls of the fortress. Two assault groups, one coming in from the north and one from the south, would use these open spaces as landing zones.

The assault group coming down from the north, designated Group M for its staging area near Monterrey, was commanded by Major Antonio Caso, Guajardo's deputy commander for this operation. Consisting of two Bell 205 helicopters and twenty-four infantrymen, Group M would land in the northern half of the garden, seize the northern side of the main house, and engage the barracks with automatic rifle, machine gun, and recoilless rifle fire.

Converging on Chinampas from Distrito Federal in the south was Group D. It consisted of twenty-four men transported in two Bell 205A helicopters, nicknamed Hueys by the American military. Guajardo's corn mand group, in a Bell 206 like those used by the engineers, would follow Group D into Chinampas. Consisting of himself, two radiomen, and two riflemen to be used as runners as needed, Guajardo would move along with Group D once on the ground. Landing in the southern half of the garden, this group would seize the southern half of the main house and, from there, engage any of Alamdn's men holed up in the stable or garage.

So as to prevent confusion, the east-west walk in the garden served as a boundary to separate the landing zones and areas of responsibility for groups M and D.

A fourth assault group, Group N, consisting of 24 infantrymen commanded by a lieutenant, would approach from the east. Staging out of Nuevo Dolores, hence its designation "N," this group would not enter Chinampas. Its mission, instead, was to seize the airfield east of Chinampas, clear all buildings there, and capture, or if that was not possible, disable all aircraft on the field. Once this was completed, Group N was to deploy itself on either side of the footbridge, establishing fields of fire so as to prevent anyone from escaping from Chinampas. Though there was concern over the use of so junior an officer to command one of the assault groups, Guajardo dismissed it. The lieutenant, a graduate of the Mexican Military Academy at Chapultepec, was highly recommended by Colonel Molina.

If all went well, and all groups secured their objectives, any occupants of Chinampas or its garrison surviving the initial assault would be disorganized, perhaps leaderless, and trapped in the buildings along the eastern wall within ten minutes, maybe less. After a brief pause to regroup and assess the situation, Guajardo intended to begin a slow, methodical clearing operation to eliminate any remaining resistance.

Covered by suppressive fire provided by Group M from the main house and Group Z's teams in towers 2 and 5, Guajardo would lead Group D, reinforced by engineers from teams 1 and 6, against the garage.

By blowing a hole in the east side of tower 5 from the inside, Guajardo's force would gain access to the narrow gap that separated tower 5 and the garage. The engineers, covered by fire from every weapon that could be brought to bear, would cross that gap, blow a hole into the garage, and clear the way for Guajardo and Group D. Once inside the garage, Group D, assisted by the engineers when necessary, would be free to clear the garage, tower 4, and the stable room by room. With the stable cleared, if the garrison was still resisting from the barracks, Group D and the accompanying engineers would cross over from the stable into the barracks and tower 3 using the same techniques that had been used to gain access to the garage from tower 5.

Few, however, including Guajardo, thought that it would go that far.

Unable to escape, the garrison's occupants would be faced with the choice of surrendering or dying. As these men were either mercenaries or criminals motivated by money alone, once the hopelessness of their situation became obvious to them, Guajardo expected their will to stand and fight to collapse and resistance to cease. Guajardo hoped to forestall such an event for as long as possible. From the very beginning, his goal was nothing less than total eradication of Chinampas and all who lived and worked within its walls. Once he started, Guajardo had no intention of stopping.

Such thoughts, however, were clouded by apprehension as Guajardo watched the men of Group D complete their final preparation. Like an anxious groom, he felt second thoughts begin to creep into his tired mind.

The nervous flipping through maps, orders, and diagrams scattered before him was pointless. He knew every word, every detail on every map.

There was nothing more to do, nothing left to say. After two days of ceaseless activity that had begun the day before the coup and had taken him from one end of Mexico to another, not to mention months of planning, plotting, and preparation, Guajardo found himself with nothing to do but wait for lift-off. What he should have done was sleep. Yet he could not, despite the fact that he had less than four hours' sleep in the last forty-eight, all of it while being flown from one place to another, and never for more than an hour at a time.

Instead, Guajardo pushed himself away from the table, stood, and stretched, then began to pace. First he circled the small table where he had been seated. Tiring of that, he walked over to the door of the hangar and looked outside, checking his watch before he did so and after. After standing there for a few minutes, he walked back to the table and began to circle it again, absentmindedly.

In his head, thoughts rattled about, thoughts, apprehensions, and fears.

It was only natural, as Clausewitz once wrote, for a commander to become uneasy with his plan when the moment of execution drew near.

After all, the attack on Chinampas was no longer a theoretical drill. Men, weapons, and aircraft were, at that moment, in the final process of staging for the attack. The 124 soldiers and pilots participating in the operation were real human beings with all their frailties, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses.

Each man, officer, NCO, and enlisted, understood what was expected of him. The question that kept cropping up was, Could they do it?

For all the planning, for all the security, there was much that was against them. As part of the security plan, the four groups had never worked together. In fact, until a few hours ago, the commanders of each of the groups not only had not known what their true objective was, they had not even known that the other groups participating in the attack existed. Throughout the entire preparatory phase, each group had drilled and rehearsed on its own, all, like the engineers, believing they were training for an entirely different mission. The first time the entire force, with the pilots added in, would be brought together was within the walls of Chinampas itself.

Few commanders ever created such a potentially deadly self-imposed handicap. Even Colonel Molina had not taken Guajardo's plan seriously when he first presented it to the Council of 13. His efforts to convince Molina and the others that his plan was the only solution often reminded Guajardo of his grandfather's story of a man trying to sell a blind, three legged mule that had gone lame. Yet through sheer stubbornness and persistence, the other members of the council had finally allowed Guajardo to have his way.

Looking down at his watch for the second time in less than three minutes, Guajardo saw it wasn't even four o'clock. There was still better than half an hour to go before lift-off. The group he was traveling with, Group D, having the farthest to travel, would be the first airborne. They needed to be skids up at 0424 hours in order to cover the 483 kilometers and arrive at Chinampas at 0700 hours, H-Hour. Group Z, perhaps the most important of the four, with 362 kilometers to travel, was scheduled to leave at 0515, followed quickly by Group M, leaving Monterrey at 0536. Group N, nearest to Chinampas and with only 121 kilometers to cover, would not leave Nuevo Dolores until 0621, thirty-nine minutes before the engineers went in.

Even this thought gave Guajardo little comfort. Though he was the commander of the raid, he had no way of knowing if the other groups were ready or, when the time came, if they made it off on time. Another feature of the security plan imposed total radio listening silence on all groups until Group Z actually opened fire on the guard towers. The commanders of the other groups could not even contact Guajardo by phone if they needed to, for none of them, except Major Caso, knew where everyone was staging and launching from.

That thought triggered another, causing Guajardo to automatically begin to recite, in his mind, a litany of options and responses he had generated, in case one or more of the groups failed to arrive or reach their initial objective. This process, however, was cut short by the sound of helicopter blades beating their way through the still predawn darkness.

Also hearing the approaching helicopters, the platoon leader turned to his senior NCO and told him to have the men prepare for embarkation.

With a series of short, crisp orders, the sergeant set the men in motion.

For Guajardo, and the men who would make his quest a reality, the waiting was over.

It was easy to tell it was Friday morning. The entire 16th Armored Division, by battalions and separate companies, was out doing their morning run in formation. For a two-mile stretch, from Cedar Creek Road in the west to Hood Avenue in the east, massed ranks of soldiers ran along Maintenance Row. In the lead, their unit commanders and regimental colors and guidons set the pace. On the flanks, sergeants counted cadence and made corrections as tired soldiers wavered and slowed, causing disruption and disorder of the ranks and files. In the rear of each formation, other sergeants ran, encouraging those who were lagging or had fallen out. The words used to encourage or threaten the offending soldiers varied, depending upon the soldier or the personality of the sergeant.

Those shouts and threats mixed and mingled with the cadence and the commands of officers and NCOs as well as with the panting, moaning, and griping of soldiers reaching their limits, real or imagined. The whole disjointed chorus echoed and reverberated off the buildings along the entire two-mile stretch of road, then drifted across the rolling ground into the distance to remind all those who heard that this was a military base.

From a side street, Captain Harold Cerro paused before entering the endless stream of running soldiers. The spectacle of soldiers training, whether it was on the range or simply doing PT, never failed to excite him. Cerro loved being a soldier and loved being with them doing, as his wife often referred to it, soldier things. That he happened to be where he was, watching the massed formations go by, was no accident. Cerro had learned early in his career that you could tell a lot about a unit by watching it during PT. Two units, passing to his front as he watched, provided him with a good idea of what the 16th Armored Division would be like.

The first unit to run past Cerro was an artillery unit. It was in the process of passing a slower-moving unit. There was no mistaking their vocation. The artillerymen, wearing Army-issue running shorts and red shirts decorated with yellow crossed cannons that symbolized their branch, looked like a unit. And they moved like a unit. To a man, they were in step, creating a strange muffled slapping noise as hundreds of pairs of sneakers hit the pavement in unison. In the front, their battalion commander, closely followed by the battalion colors, moved out with a purpose. Behind him came the companies, in solid formations of four men abreast and led by their young company commanders and company guidons. Each company was in step, every soldier gliding forward almost effortlessly as they repeated.the chants sung by their NCOs.

In stark contrast, the unit the artillerymen were passing showed little sign of either cohesion or pride. There was no guidon or flag to betray their branch of service or unit. No two soldiers were dressed alike. The shirts and running shorts they wore were a riot of colors and styles, ranging from the Army-issue brown T-shirt to shocking-orange designer sleeveless running shirts. From what Cerro could see, not only was no one in step, there appeared to be no effort on the part of the NCOs to get them in step. Nor was there anyone in the rear of the formation, a term Cerro loosely applied to the gaggle, to police up a line of stragglers that trailed behind. By ones and twos, the soldiers of the second unit were dropping out, unnoticed by their commander, who kept on running, oblivious to the disintegration of his unit. Rather than a unit, the second group was simply a collection of people moving in the same general direction.

Shaking his head in disgust, Cerro was about to move out when he saw an infantry battalion moving down the road. From the pace and the determined look of its commander's face, Cerro had no doubt they had but one goal in mind, to pass the artillery battalion that had just gone by.

The soldiers of the infantry battalion, like the artillery unit, were outfitted in matching T-shirts and running shorts, their T-shirts embossed with their unit crest and motto. A history buff, Cerro recognized the regimental crest as that of the 13th Infantry, although he couldn't place the battalion based on the motto, "Forty Rounds, Sir."

Deciding it woujd be unwise to jump out in front of the infantry battalion, Cerro waited for it to pass. With a measured pace that now bordered on a dead run, row after row of infantrymen passed by. In step and leaning forward as their commander picked up the pace, the troops, on cue from their sergeant major, began to clap their hands every time their left foot hit the ground. Like a locomotive, the infantrymen bore down, closed the gap separating them from the artillerymen. In their rush, they never noticed the rabble that the artillery unit had passed.

For a moment, Cerro felt a pang in his heart, knowing that he would not be able to join a unit such as this one. His assignment to the brigade staff condemned him to a unit that, when it ran as a unit, would no doubt resemble the rabble that the artillerymen had passed. The only reason Cerro had escaped the unit run that morning was because he was still inprocessing and new. This had saved him from that morning's run.

Nothing, however, would save him next week.

As he was silently bemoaning his fate, Cerro looked up just in time to see a female, dressed in the same T-shirt and shorts as the infantry battalion, go by. It took him a few seconds to recognize her as the same woman he had run into the day before while inprocessing. Her long auburn hair, pulled back and held by a clip, swung from side to side as she ran. That, coupled with a physique that was unmistakably female, set her apart from the rest of the formation. Her appearance caused Cerro to reconsider his own plight. As much as he knew he would be like a fish out of water on the brigade staff, his predicament, he thought, was nothing compared to what the female lieutenant faced.

When the infantry unit finished passing him, Cerro shook himself out one more time before stepping off and joining the flow of running soldiers, adding the sound of his pounding feet to that of a division on the move.

The pace, even when the battalion commander picked it up to pass an artillery unit, was easy for Second Lieutenant Nancy Kozak. At West Point she had earned three letters in track and field, and at the Infantry Officers Basic Course at Fort Benning she had maxed the standard physical fitness test, the same one the male officers in her class had been required to pass. Physically, she was ready. Mentally, however, she wasn't sure. While she had gone over in her mind, again and again, what she would do and how she would handle herself, no mental drill could prepare her for her introduction to the unit, in particular the men in the platoon she was expected to lead.

From the company commander down to the lowest private, everyone in the unit treated her with the respect and deference that was appropriate for her rank and position. Her conversation with her platoon sergeant, the only NCO in her platoon she had had any time to talk to, had been short, functional, and punctuated with many "yes ma'ams" and "no ma'ams."

Throughout that conversation, she had been unable to gauge how the sergeant — Sergeant First Class Leon Rivera — felt about her. His manner, like his conversation, was functional and correct. Nothing in his tone of voice, in his expressions, even in his eyes, betrayed his feelings. The only thing she noted was that Rivera, like everyone else in the company, had a tendency to stare at her, and that the term ma'am did not come easily to him. More than once, Rivera, used to operating in an almost exclusively male world, had responded with "Sir."

The staring, more than anything else, affected Kozak. As hard as she might want to, she could not blend in. Through a simple biological function, started at the moment of conception, Nancy Kozak had become a woman. While that was not a curse, it would definitely be a handicap in her efforts to become an effective combat leader. That thought, and a thousand others, tumbled through her head as she ran beside her platoon, her long auburn hair gently.swaying from side to side.