Turning his attention back at his assembled leaders, King gave the order to move out. “All right, gentlemen. It’s time to go. 1st Platoon, move out as soon as you can. 2nd Platoon will follow. Any questions?”

When none were forthcoming, King nodded. “Good. Now let’s get going.” With the traditional hand salute initiated by King, the officers of Company A, 3rd Battalion, 517th Parachute Infantry broke up their meeting and scrambled to execute King’s orders without giving the plight of the 3rd Platoon another thought.

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 15

BOISE, IDAHO AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 31

Patiently, Nancy Kozak waited in the State Adjutant General’s outer office. Like a dozen other staff officers and commanders of support units, she was there to provide data in her particular area of expertise to the senior Guard commanders meeting with the governor and Adjutant General. She had already been called in once to give a quick breakdown of the ammunition stocks within Idaho as well as an update on additional munition that had been promised to them by the Montana and Wyoming Guard. While her news that short falls of some critical munitions could be filled by fellow Guardsmen from neighboring states was greeted with cheers, Nancy viewed the prospect of an escalation of the crisis with a growing sense of alarm. There was something, she kept telling herself, wrong about what they were doing.

To some degree this feeling stemmed from the exhaustion and listlessness that often follows combat. She had been there. She understood the mental trauma that tagging and bagging the bodies of her own dead generated. She knew the images of soldiers who had died on her watch would be with her for a very, very long time. This she accepted. She was, after all, still very much a soldier.

More troubling to her was the nature of this crisis and the face of her opponent. In the First Persian Gulf War her enemy had been foreigners. The Iraqis were different, culturally, religiously, and politically. She couldn’t relate to them, making it much easier to view them as something other than human. The men who had stormed her positions that morning, however, had not been people whose ways were strange to her or who spoke a foreign tongue. The paratroopers were fellow Americans, no different from her or the Guardsmen she commanded. Under other circumstances the paratrooper she had shot could have been serving under her. That she had been forced to shoot him for no other reason than the fact they were on opposite sides of a political issue was unsettling.