Baby Blue On Baby Blue
We were all trying to get as low in the bed of the truck as we could to avoid the cold air we traveled through. Too many of us to lay down flat, we clutched our rifles with gloved hands and pulled our heads into our chests. I was glad to be wearing a black wool watch cap. The others had a ball hat or no hat, and nobody’s jacket had a hood.
Our truck was in the lead of a two-vehicle convoy. We rolled along the deserted road between tree-topped embankments covered in hoarfrost. The sky at dawn said it would be a cloudless day, and the sun made the tops of the pines pink against a perfect blue sky.
Occasionally, I caught the whiff of cigarette smoke from the man driving. He held his hand near the top of the door, letting the smoke escape through the inch-wide gap above the window. Through the glass on the back of the cab I could see the driver nodding to whatever the guy riding shotgun was saying.
We turned off the paved road and bounced along a dirt track for a few minutes. The sun was still below the tree line when we came to a stop where the road led into an open field, about big enough to play football. The other truck pulled alongside us, its bed similarly loaded with people and guns.
The man driving my truck stepped out and surveyed his cargo.
“Cold enough for ya?” he asked to no one in particular. No one answered. He looked at me and said, “You were smart to wear that,” pointing at my hat, “but you’ll be shedding it soon as the sun clears the trees.”
I nodded.
“Alright,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “Let’s go.”
The tailgates were let down, and we started scooting out the back of the trucks with our guns and packs. In a few minutes, we were ten fully kitted, armed, and ready-to-rock killers, assembled and waiting for the green light.
I was beyond nervous and tried not to let it show. This was my first search-and-destroy patrol. If the others felt what I did, they didn’t show it either. I gripped my rifle and waited with the others for instructions, for the word to lock and load, to chamber rounds, to begin the movement toward whatever waited for us out there in the woods.
Nixon had just been reelected. Watergate was coming like a cruise missile, not yet landed. And I was ten years old.
We were a small (lethal) Boy Scout troop sponsored by a small protestant church in the middle of nowhere Georgia. I think the title Boy Scout was aspirational; I never recall anything formally associating our activities with the BSA in any shape or form. No oaths, no uniforms, no socks with garters, no neckerchiefs. We were clad in discount store camouflage, jeans, and whatever footwear we could find. The adults in charge of us said we were Boy Scouts, so we were.
But we had guns. We all had rifles chambered for .22 caliber long rifle bullets. Everybody but me carried a semi-automatic with multiple rounds at the ready loaded into an internal magazine. I had a single-shot bolt action Remington intended for use on a range. It required me to load bullets into the chamber individually, lock the bolt forward, set the safety to fire, aim, and shoot. To clear the chamber, I had to jack the bolt to the rear, ejecting the spent cartridge. Everyone else could fire ten rounds in the time it took me to shoot once and reload. I wore a bandolier of shiny bullets across my chest, Pancho Villa style.
The four adults with us were all from church. Everybody knew everybody, but we had never hunted together. Wisely (or as wise as possible given that they were walking with ten armed children ranging in age from 10 to 13), they broke us down into two groups of five. The instructions began. Safety was emphasized — don’t point your gun at one another, no running with a loaded gun, and be aware of what is behind or near your target.
Our targets would be the gray squirrels putting away food for the winter, and in the next fifteen minutes my group would break every rule we had just heard.
“Ok. Any questions?” said an adult. We were silent for a breath, and then one of us asked a question that I would hear repeated throughout my twenty-year career in the Army.
“Can we load?”
With sheepish adult chuckles, one of the men said, “Yeah, I hear they work better with bullets in them. Go ahead and load ‘em.” The other boys furiously jammed several rounds into their rifles, while I took my one bullet and loaded it. I closed the bolt and set the safety to safe.
“Ready?” asked an adult.
“Ready,” came the reply in a chorus of breaking voices.
The groups walked away from each other. My group walked five shooters abreast. I was at the end, on the right side to the direction of travel. We walked in silence as the sun topped trees, the crunch of acorns marking our passage.
We scanned for squirrels. Walking behind us, the adults carried shotguns as they tried to train us in what I would later learn is called dismounted patrolling. We have schools in the Army and Marine Corps that teach what we were doing that day, the difference being that new recruits are never handed live ammunition until they have practiced more than once with empty rifles, and then with blank rounds.
“Ya’ll spread out. You’re bunching up,” came from behind us. We moved away from each other until there were about fifteen feet between each shooter. “That’s better.”
As we walked, I began to trail behind the line, as did the kid to my left. We were in a formation called an echelon right, a slanting line. If a squirrel were to have come from the right, we would have all had a shot.
The first squirrel of the day came from the left.
“I see one!” exclaimed the kid who now found himself in the lead.
“Get him!” said an adult.
The first shot of the day rang out. I still could not see the squirrel, but the second armed youngster could, and he began to fire. The squirrel, in an obvious fit of surreal daring, ran across the front of us, giving everyone a shot. The squirrel began angling toward me, forcing the shooters to adjust in order to track his movement and continue shooting. Shortly, the squirrel was finally in my line of fire, bullets biting the dirt behind him. Four boys, shooting semi-automatic rifles as fast as they could, made it sound like we had a machine gun in those woods. As I brought my rifle to my cheek to take my one and only shot, the dirt between the squirrel and me puffed. The bark on a tree to my right exploded.
I ran for cover. The squirrel ran next to me. The bullets continued to fly past us as four young men, anxious to get the first kill of the day, emptied their magazines. I saw a large oak ahead, big enough to hide my body, and ducked behind it.
The shooting stopped, and I heard the adults screaming, “Cease fire! Cease fire!” It had not occurred to them that once the shooting started their voice commands would be useless. Then, “You okay, boy? Are you hit?”
“No sir,” I replied. “Can I come out?”
Laughter. “Yes, please do.”
I stepped from my tree and saw the squirrel frozen at its base. I brought my rifle to my cheek, thumbed off the safety, and shot the squirrel from about four feet away. I jacked the bolt to the rear, ejected the spent cartridge, pulled a shiny bullet from my bandolier, and reloaded. I reached and picked the squirrel up by the tail. My face was expressionless as I walked back to the group who had just nearly killed me. I was no longer ten years old. I was ten feet tall.
“Good job, boy,” said an adult. “That’s how it’s done.” He held out the burlap sack he carried as a game bag. I dropped in my kill.
The other adult amended the safety instructions. “What did I say before we started? Huh? Didn’t I say to be aware of what’s around your target? Didn’t I say that? This boy here is alive by the grace of God. If I see any more dumb moves like what I just saw from you boys, we’re going home.” It would be years until I realized one of us would have had to be actually wounded in order to justify going home. Near misses did not end the hunt.
Fast forward about nineteen years. I’m in the turret of an M1 tank, the commander in charge of thirteen other tanks, and our own artillery is raining down on us in the Saudi desert. Gray squirrels have been replaced with entrenched Iraqi infantrymen. Kids shooting at me with .22 caliber rifles have been replaced with US Army artillerymen shooting at me with 155-millimeter howitzers. This time I can hear people screaming across the radio “Cease fire! Cease fire!”
This is not one of the days we will celebrate in Desert Storm circa 1991.
Finally, the friendly fire stops. One of the tanks in my unit rolls up to the mouth of a bunker. An Iraqi infantryman (who also just experienced the same artillery fire we did) peers out of the hole and sees the American tank pointing directly at him. He disappears into the darkness of the hole.
Across the radio, the sergeant on the US tank explains his situation. “He went back into the hole. What should I do?”
Without hesitation, I say, “Kill him.” The tank fires a main gun round from thirty feet. The overpressure from the cannon’s muzzle blast alone would have liquefied his internal organs. Another tank rolls over the bunker, crushing it. We move on to the flaming oil wells until one of my tanks runs out of fuel.
While we stop and wait for the fuel trucks to catch up, I reflect on the day's events and remember my first encounter with friendly fire, that first time I was almost killed and the first time I killed something. I wonder why I didn’t feel bad. I wonder why I didn’t feel anything. I think, “Maybe I better get over myself and just be glad this isn’t my first rodeo.”
Originally from Macon, Georgia, Tony Schwalm spent much of his adult life as an Army officer, serving as a tank company commander in the First Gulf War in 1991 and leading Green Berets during the Haiti invasion in 1994. Retiring from the Army in 2004, he works as a consultant to the Department of Defense and lectures to business students at the University of South Florida on the merits of improvisation as learned in the world of guerrilla warfare. In 2009, his essay, Trek, won first prize at the Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference at the University of North Texas and was the basis for the book The Guerrilla Factory: the Making of Special Force Officers, the Green Berets published by Simon and Schuster in 2012. He makes his home in Tampa, Florida.
