This point was driven home every time a nation that was supposed to be an ally took a step to undo those small success that RT Kilo did manage to achieve. In truth, Aveno could find little fault in what the French and others were doing. He believed that if his own national leaders were not prisoners of their own rhetoric, they would be seeking some way of getting out of an open ended policy that was only costing American lives. Of course, such considerations were well above Aveno’s pay grade. His personal mission was to follow orders and finish his current tour of duty with some degree of pride and sanity.

These dark troubling thoughts were in Ken Aveno’s mind as he approached Kilo Six, Captain Burman’s Hummer. Through the camo nets still draped over the vehicle, he caught sight of Burman perched upon the hood of his Hummer. This was a bad sign, for it had become something of a ritual for his commander to assume this particular posture when translating orders he had received during the day into detailed instructions. It was his way of announcing that the team had been tasked to go out into the gathering darkness once more and find something that a cabal of staff officers, ten thousand miles away, had suddenly taken an interest in. While most of these forays resulted in the discovery of targets that were subsequently bombed into oblivion, more times than Aveno cared to count the forays had turned into a snipe hunt, but one in which the snipe had sharp teeth and long, deadly claws.

Stopping a few meters away, he watched as Captain Burman pored over maps and scribbled notes on a pad lying next to him. It didn’t seem right to the young officer that in this age of computers and high-tech wizardry success and failure in combat still depended upon illegible scribbling on a page made by a human being. It was like they were insulators placed within an increasingly high-speed system to keep it from overheating or spinning out of control. That there were fellow officers sitting in the Pentagon and at Fort Leavenworth trying to figure out how to eliminate those insulators was no great secret. Rubbing his irritated eyes, Aveno thought that the sooner those guys finished their work and made him obsolete, the sooner he would be free to pull pitch and turn his back on Syria, its people, and its fucking desert.

It was several minutes before Burman noticed that his executive officer was standing off to one side watching him. Determined to finish what he was doing before he lost the last bit of useful daylight, Burman ignored Aveno.