Read The Ten Thousand for Free Online

piloted by a twenty-two-year-old warrant officer, aided only by a navigational system built by the lowest bidder and night vision goggles that turned everything black and green, moving at one hundred plus miles an hour less than one hundred feet above the ground on a pitch black night, was an entirely different matter. That, Pape would gleefully point out to his drinking buddies, was a truly frightening experience.
    Yet Pape felt no fear that night. Even when the pilot, misjudging a hill mass, almost stood the helicopter on its side, Pape didn’t bat an eye. He was at nineteen a true adrenaline freak. No ride was too dangerous, no challenge too frightening. That was why he was a ranger. Rangers were always doing something neat, something that was just a little bit unconventional and a tad dangerous. Though, like everyone else in the United States Army, Pape had to tolerate the day-to-day routine BS, the rush of a mass parachute drop or a day on the rappelling towers more than compensated for the occasional tour of guard duty or post police detail. Besides, for him the rangers were just a beginning. When his current enlistment was over, he intended to re-enlist for Special Forces. In Pape’s nineteen-year-old eyes, they were the ultimate danger junkies.
    That he might not make it through his current enlistment was the furthest thing from Pape’s young mind that night. He knew where they were going, and he knew what they were after. That there would be shooting was a given. After all, it was ludicrous to think that the troops guarding the nukes would just step aside and hand them over. As Pape’s platoon leader pointed out, the first reaction of the Ukrainian guards when they saw a battalion of rangers armed to the teeth and spoiling for a fight come boiling out of the night wasn’t going to be a challenge and request for a password.
    It was therefore no surprise that the commander of the 1st Ranger Battalion, 77th Infantry, translated the line in his operations order directing him to use minimum force to mean swift, violent, and overwhelming firepower applied in the shortest amount of time. Such aggressive thinking was infectious and, to the rangers, welcome. Pape’s company commander, carried away by what the first sergeant called the spirit of the bayonet, restated the phrase minimum force to mean using the fewest bullets in the shortest amount of time to kill the most Ukrainians. At their final briefing the young captain told his assembled troops that he expected them to “go in, blow away anyone that gets in our way, secure the nukes, and wait for the Air Force. No muss, no fuss.”
    So it was not surprising that young Kevin Pape, raised in the shadows of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Rambo, drilled in the skills of war until he could perform without thinking, and fired up by bold, aggressive, and confident officers, should feel invulnerable to the point of being cocky. There was no room in his mind that night for the image of shattered bodies brutalized by grenades and automatic weapons. Pape’s young nostrils had yet to inhale the stench of burned flesh or the contents of human bowels and intestines, mixed with warm blood, spilled at his feet. There was, in training, no way to simulate the screams of wounded and dying men that sounded more like wild animals than the cries of sons and fathers. Combat, only combat, brutal and bloody, can cure a young soldier’s naiveté. Pape in less than fifteen minutes was about to receive his first treatment.

    If Pape lacked the ability to visualize what was about to happen, Colonel Ed Martin, commander of the 404th Tactical Fighter Squadron, more than made up for him. Easing his F-l17 fighter down to an altitude of 20,000 feet, Martin prepared to commence his final run-in. There wasn’t actually much for him to do. Since takeoff, his fighter had for all practical purposes been on automatic pilot. All he needed to do to keep his aircraft on course was to keep the little