A Charmed Life
Copyright© 2025 by The Outsider
Chapter 18: The Dogs of War
19 December 1989 – Airborne – Southbound, over the Gulf of Mexico
The cadence got it wrong.
Jeff’s little trip was on a C-141 Starlifter aircraft, one of hundreds delivering an early Christmas present to Panama. Follow-on troops may be traveling on C-130s, but not the initial wave.
Jeff woke from his nap. He reviewed the plan for the jump one more time before putting the map away. If he didn’t know it by now, he never would.
I don’t think this will end like ‘Golden Pheasant’ did, Jeff thought.
He referred to the not-quite combat insertion he took part in last March. Unlike that jump into Honduras, combat was a certainty for the 504th PIR this time.
He saw a mix of emotions on the faces of his fire team when he looked down the row of seats. The new members of the squad, Adler and Feller, didn’t look nervous. They were sleeping. Both were experienced soldiers and transferred into the 82nd at their request. Williams and Sledz, however, looked scared.
“Hey!” he yelled to Williams over the scream of the plane’s engines. “Take a deep breath, man! You scared?” Williams nodded. “Good! Me, too!” Williams shot him a surprised look.
“You’d have to be crazy not to be! There’s only one way off this plane: through those doors back there! The first step’s like a thousand feet high!” Williams appeared to chuckle, shaking his head. He nodded to Jeff.
Jeff motioned for Williams to switch places with Sledz. The two privates swapped places, and Jeff repeated his little speech. Sledz looked more nervous than Williams before Jeff’s pep talk. The man started laughing uncontrollably after. He thanked Jeff after three minutes of laughter.
“Just remember, Manny, that ‘bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death.’ You and Rick have performed properly since you guys got here. Shit, you didn’t even budge when Doc cut Oscar Infante’s neck that day! If that’s not bravery, I don’t know what is!”
“Where have I heard that first thing you said before?”
“The person who said that was the first ever division commander of the 82nd Airborne, General of the Army Omar N. Bradley. That might be why you’ve heard it before.”
The interior lighting was ‘rigged for red’ the entire flight. This was to preserve the night vision of the troopers before they jumped. Now, the red pre-jump warning lights came on near the doors they would be jumping out.
“Showtime, Manny!”
The battalion assigned the 3rd Squad a security sweep outside the LZ perimeter. They were one of the units pushing the American-controlled envelope around Omar Torrijos Airport outward. They’d be far from other supporting units but weren’t worried about it. Hell, that’s what the Airborne does!
Their assigned reconnaissance patrol was routine, up until the point it was not, up until about thirty minutes ago.
Then, they stumbled across a Panamanian Defense Forces patrol, which launched a hasty ambush at them. Years of training the PDF in American tactics came back to bite them in the fourth point of contact - the butt in polite, airborne terms.
The PDF knew where to concentrate their fire to do the most damage to the squad. When the patrol stopped, they caught squad leadership conferring.
John Tyler and Frank Breckenridge were killed immediately, while Cory Song was wounded. He was now unconscious. The squad bounded away from the site of the attack after assaulting through the attempted PDF ambush and wiping the enemy forces out. Williams and Sledz carried the dead. American troops do not leave their fallen on the battlefield.
SPC Herman Adler and PFC Norm Feller limped along, carrying Song in a poncho between them. Feller was the squad’s RTO - radio-telephone operator, or radio man. He also brought the destroyed radio on his back as they left the ambush site. The PDF would know they were out of contact if they found it.
Jeff carried Adler’s M-60 and extra ammo, his weapon slung across his back. While the squad eliminated the PDF force that tried to ambush them, the Americans knew another PDF force would soon find their trail and try to hit them again. Survival was far from assured.
Ken was acting squad leader with Tyler and Breckenridge dead and Song out of action. He looked over the terrain he selected for the squad’s hasty patrol base site. It was nasty: a partial swamp separated from the trail by thick brush and buzzing with mosquitos. In other words, it was the perfect place for a patrol base.
The enemy would have to look hard for their trail, and the site allowed them an escape route. Third Squad needed to hole up. Ken picked out spots for the squad members to use as their fighting positions.
“What now, Ken?” Jeff whispered.
Jeff spoke in English to avoid any possible confusion during translation. He looked at Ken, but it was too dark to see his face - just his silhouette. Jeff was also lucky that Ken couldn’t see him. Jeff suspected his left arm was bleeding and already soaking through his BDUs.
“We’ve got to get this perimeter set up quickly before the PDF returns,” Ken whispered to his friend. “Conserve ammo, water, rations, then hold out until the sun comes up and we get relieved. If they hit us and we can’t get away, we give ‘em everything we’ve got.”
The pair and the rest of the squad bent to the task and set up the perimeter. Ken and Jeff, who was now Ken’s assistant squad leader, met to discuss what else needed to be accomplished. Before they could start, they saw a flash of something outside their perimeter. Without a moment’s hesitation, Ken shoved Jeff backward.
Jeff landed hard as he heard Ken’s grunt of pain. Williams and Sledz returned fire while the rest of the squad held steady. The shot came from outside of their sectors. A cry pierced the darkness, and the two ceased fire. Jeff rushed to Ken’s side, his heart in his throat.
“Through-and-through to my bicep,” Ken said through clenched teeth. “I’m okay.”
Jeff thought Ken needed work on his definition of ‘okay.’
Jeff tore away the arm of Ken’s BDU shirt before opening Ken’s first aid pouch. Under the dim light of a red-filtered flashlight, Jeff dressed the wound as best he could. Jeff grabbed the grenades off Ken’s LBE to hand out to others in the squad. He took the Claymore mines out of Ken’s pack and put them in an empty rucksack, which he stripped off one of the dead.
He collected more mines from the squad, including the deceased. Jeff thought their lieutenant was nuts when he told them to take the mines before they left, but he was now grateful that he insisted.
“I’ll be right back,” he whispered.
“The hell you will!” Ken whispered back.
“Ken, I’m the only one not wounded in the leg. I’m the only one of us that can still move around. The rest of you guys are already starting to stiffen up, and we need to get this done before the PDF hits us again.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to make this a costly piece of ground for the PDF.” Jeff handed Ken a large, soft-sided case. “These are Tyler’s PVS-7s. I’m taking Song’s and going out to even the odds a little.
“I’ll flash the active IR source every hour on the hour to let you know I’m okay. I’ll flash a reverse SOS with my flashlight to tell you I’m coming back in: three longs, three shorts, three longs, okay? Get these guys home if I don’t make it back.”
Jeff was gone before Ken could object. By the time Ken put on his night vision goggles, his friend was nowhere to be seen.
Pain.
That’s what registered first when consciousness returned. The pain centered around Jeff’s left chest and arm. His returning memory let him recognize that pain was a good thing. He’d been in combat, so the pain meant that he was still alive, at least for the moment.
Next to register was the steady <whine> he heard even through what he guessed were headphones over his ears. He recognized the whine - the engines of a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane. He’d been on one only once, for a trip home last year, but the sound was hard to forget.
He tried opening his eyes. Even the low-level lighting hurt at first. However, after a few minutes, he could identify the shapes of the people near him.
Two women, both officers, were nearby. They wore Air Force flight suits and aircrew headsets with microphones. Jeff’s litter was at their waist height, and he could see their insignia. A first lieutenant briefed a lieutenant colonel.
From what Jeff could see, the colonel looked familiar to him. Her height and the patches on her flight suit reminded him of someone he met once. When she looked up from what the lieutenant showed her, he did recognize her.
Jeff thought he was close enough to reach the colonel despite the IV lines taped into his right arm. He reached out to touch her elbow. The lieutenant noticed his movement. Her glance at him caused the colonel to see and turn towards him. The colonel had a hint of tears in her eyes. She rested her hand on his arm and smiled down at him.
“Wrong party, Colonel,” Jeff mouthed exaggeratedly from under his oxygen mask. The lieutenant relayed his message to the colonel through her headset. The colonel nodded and grabbed a pad from her pocket. She scribbled a quick note.
Sleep - Long flight - I’ll come back.
He nodded and drifted back into unconsciousness.
Jane Donnelly looked down at the young man on the litter, wishing that her daughter’s best friend wasn’t so severely wounded. Lieutenant Mia DiNapoli was briefing her on his injuries – penetrating trauma to the left anterior chest and left upper arm, pneumothorax, hemothorax, massive blood loss, dehydration ... when they both noticed his movement. As badly hurt as he was, he wasn’t the worst on the flight. But he was the only wounded soldier she knew.
“Ma’am?” came the voice over her headset. “Are you all right?” Jane turned. She saw Lt. DiNapoli looking at her with concern.
“No, Lieutenant, not really,” was Jane’s honest reply. “This soldier is my daughter’s best friend. I thought – or maybe hoped – that he would become my son-in-law, but my daughter and he said that romantic feeling just wasn’t there. They’re very close now, like brother and sister.” Jane sighed. “I’m not looking forward to telling her he’s been wounded.”
“My condolences, Ma’am. I knew you were concerned about him, but now I understand why. What did he mean, Ma’am, when he said ‘wrong party?’”
“Last December, I flew a cargo mission out of Pope to Westover Air Force Base, just outside Springfield, Massachusetts. The corporal was flying Space-A that day. His family’s Christmas party was on the same day, and he was trying to surprise them. He hadn’t told anyone he was trying to come home. He was the only person besides my crew on board, so I let him sit on the flight deck.”
Jane paused to compose herself.
“This young man really, really impressed me and my officers. He gives you a good vibe right away. He was reading a book about a possible conventional Third World War. The title escapes me at the moment ... I think it had a color in it?”
“I think I know the one you mean, Ma’am. Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising?” The colonel nodded.
“That’s the one. He’s a voracious reader and a huge history buff. The rest of my flight crew had read it and said he had some excellent insights into the book. They were particularly impressed with his knowledge of the state of NATO and Warsaw Pact forces and capabilities back then, and he provided a few alternate scenarios based on his knowledge.
“When we got to Westover, my daughter arrived to pick me up while I got cleaned up. The two of them hit it off like nothing I’ve ever seen. Their history debates over the next couple of weeks were very insightful and beneficial for Heather when she returned to school. She said he provided viewpoints she hadn’t considered or heard in class. Since then, she’s used one or two to construct arguments for her papers.” Jane sighed again.
“For those two weeks, they were all but inseparable. They were always together, either at my parents’ place, his parents’ place, or off somewhere. My dad’s a retired paratrooper, a former commander of the same regiment the corporal is in now. It usually takes him a long time to trust someone new around ‘his girls.’ That’s my daughter Heather, my mom, and me. He liked the corporal right away.– Again, something else I’ve never seen.
“At the end of those two weeks, when it was time for Heather to head back to school and for him to report back to his unit, they had a very adult conversation about their relationship. That’s when they decided that while they loved each other, they weren’t in love with each other. They considered themselves siblings from that point on. Mom and Dad were disappointed that he wouldn’t marry Heather, and I think I was too.” She shook her head.
“Thank you, Lieutenant, for listening to me ramble,” Jane said, drawing herself straight. “I’ll get back to my job so you can return to yours. Thank you for briefing me.”
“Of course, Ma’am.”
Jane Donnelly found a dark corner in her cavernous aircraft and cried for the young man she considered an adopted son.
Later that day, an exhausted Jane Donnelly dropped into a desk chair. She was in her Visiting Officer’s Quarters room at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, DC. She looked longingly at the full-sized bed mere inches from her, but she knew she had a couple of calls to make before lying down. She picked up the phone and dialed a number she’d memorized in childhood.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Heather.”
”MOM! Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Heather. I’m just tired. It’s been a long few days. After I hang up with you and make one other call, I’m taking a shower and sleeping until Christmas.”
“Mom, Jeff’s been wounded in Panama!” Heather told her, near tears. “Kara said they haven’t told her family much beyond that Jeff was wounded and flown back to Walter Reed in Washington!”
“I know about Jeff, Heather,” Jane sighed. “He was on the aircraft that I flew into Andrews just now. I need to call his parents. Would you give me their number in Enfield?” Jane wrote down the number as Heather gave it to her.
“Heather, I talked to the flight surgeon on the plane. Jeff was badly hurt, but he woke up and recognized me, and he was awake again when we landed, and they unloaded him. The surgeon said those were perfect things. He’ll be okay.”
“Thanks, Mom,” her daughter replied, the relief clear in her voice. “I’ll tell Grammy and Grampy you’re safe and that you’ll call after you wake up. I love you. Get some sleep.”
“I promise, Heather,” Jane replied. “Love you, too. Bye.”
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