Page 1 of 4 SHORT STORY
Unmanned and unnerved
By Julian Delasantellis
Sometimes, at times like this, taking the whole family out for the monthly
shopping trip, United States Air Force Captain Brian ( Big Green) Forrester
reflected that what he was doing now seemed very reminiscent to what the
pioneers did when they settled this area of the west almost 150 years ago.
Like in movies such as Shane, and TV shows like Little House on the
Prairie. There, the father, like Michael Landon in Little House, would
gather his whole family, his wife and three girls, and load them into the wagon
for the long and arduous trip on the rocky roads to the town general store. In
contrast, here he was, behind the wheel of his Chrysler Town and Country,
heading south down Nevada State Highway 95 for a brief trip to the modern
equivalent
of the general store, the massive Costco on Decatur Avenue in North Las Vegas.
His family, Carilyn, wife of 16 years, 12-year-old daughter Lilly, and
eight-year-old son Ethan Allen, were with him, all, as mandated by Nevada state
law, firmly strapped and buckled into their car seats. Forrester had no idea
how those old fashioned families passed the time on their much longer shopping
trips than these. From the house on Fisher it may take 30 if the lights and
traffic were breaking against them, 20 minutes, from the soccer fields on
Alliante, if Lilly's team drew the early kick and they were through by the time
the sun was just peeking over the towers of the strip, they might make it in
ten.
Still, his modern family was not just going to sit quietly and observe the
parade of American franchised commerce, Best Buy, Vons, Papa Murphy, Chili's.
Carilyn was listening to an MP3 of her supervisor's comments on her monthly
report, Lilly was watching a DVD in the backseat player, EA was playing his
Gameboy.
Even at this hour, the only parking space for the big rigs was up at the gas
pumps near West Rome, so Brian dropped his brood off, parked, met them under
the canopy. They were waiting for him outside the entrance; they couldn't get
in without presenting their Costco membership card, which was in his name.
While waiting, Carilyn was furiously rubbing the handle and other "touch" areas
of the massive shopping wagon with one of the free disposable disinfectant
cloths.
"Didn't you hear that somebody here got tuberculosis?", Carilyn said. "You
can't be too careful."
Pat Kass, the retired social studies teacher had who go back to work after she
outlived her savings at age 77, perfunctorily waved the Forrester's through
with barely a glance at the card. A few meters inside, they came on the first
of the sample stations, a young, portly Mexican girl, in full hairnet, total
body glistening clean white apron with white stretch booties, and thick, light
blue anti-germicidal latex gloves.
"Care for a mini Chips Ahoy? Only $7.99 for a four pound box, each pound
individually wrapped and sealed?"
Carilyn took one from the disposable dish the girl had poured the cookies in.
"Very nice," then motioned her family to continue walking into the store
The cart filled up quickly, a five kilogram bag of ground beef, eight Angus T
bones, five one-kilogram blocks of Velveeta, five kilograms of chicken breasts,
six one-kilogram cans of tuna, 10 kilograms of rice. Forrester and EA took
samples of rib eye from Dom Mattuchio, who Forrester knew was in his first job
since losing his construction business last year; all four took pizza samples
from Rose McGuiness, the RIFed assistant audio - visual tech who used to handle
the Lightbox in Lilly's school. Departing the food section, there were four
cans of Lysol wrapped into a single register item, two 48 roll, almost
sofa-size, packages of bath tissue, and then they were in electronics. Lilly
begged her parents for the new Jonas Brothers CD, and although he knew that
Carilyn disapproved, he put it in the wagon - after all, she just aced her AP
calculus class. EA saw this, knew there might be fertile ground here for
another kill.
"Look, Dad, the new Call of Duty," referring to the video game series developed
by Activision. "It's the one with all the new bombs and stuff. Can I get it,
please, please oh please?"
Carilyn brusquely took the game from her son's hand and put it back on the
display rack. "Now Ethan, you know that your father said you couldn't have that
before Christmas unless your grades improved." She gazed back up at Brian,
seeking parental reinforcement.
But Forrester was momentarily pre-occupied, going over the depiction of a
Hellfire missile fired from a Central Intelligence Agency Predator drone
slamming into a posse of swarthy Chechen terrorists.
"Honey?"
"Listen to your mother. Not until your grades improve."
Those who believe in the supremacy of individual human agency, the William
Ernest Henley worship of "my unconquerable soul" overruling all other human
destiny, might have a hard time explaining this peculiar destiny of the
Forrester family, where the toy video game with the feature that EA desired,
the Hellfire missile launched by the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle ( UAV)
system, was, after riding the backseat of an F-15 Eagle for six years, actually
the Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) of his father. This unique,
intergenerational circumstance grew out of events that occurred before both
were born, on October 6, 1973, the first day of the fourth Arab-Israeli war,
most known history as the Yom Kippur war.
Proving once again that nothing so brings defeat to a military faster than the
arrogance of victory, the Israeli air force, the hero of the 1967, Six-Day war
with their early bold strikes behind Egyptian and Syrian lines, attempted to do
the same in the early minutes of the 1973 war, confident in their ability to
cut the lines of communication and supply of the Egyptian invasion force that
had crossed onto the Eastern littoral of the Suez Canal. However, the pilots
were driven back, sustaining significant casualties of up to 200 fighter
aircraft shot down, by the sophisticated anti-aircraft system provided to the
Arabs by the Soviet Union, primarily the SAM 6 missile and ZSU-23 radar
directed anti-aircraft gun.
The only other major world power with the resources to marry so much
cutting-edge technology and money in the service of warcraft, the United
States, stood up and took notice. They weren't so concerned about the prospect
of more downed planes, in the new environment; after all, each one of those was
just another appropriation line to some lucky member of the military industrial
complex.
But the loss or the pilots, well, that was another story. They were devilishly
expensive to train, and their training was always long and arduous. In United
States civilian factories, the principle of replacing manpower with technology,
most commonly known as automation, was now well under way, so would it be in
the military. If you're sending something over a heavily defended enemy
frontier, the new thinking would be to decouple the plane/pilot package that
had existed since the age of flight began, and send in only the plane, in this
case, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) .
The first chance to demonstrate the new technology was in the 1991 Gulf War;
there, it was camera-equipped UAVs that pilots in conventional fighter/bombers
relied on to target air-to-surface ground munitions fired from behind enemy
lines to reach their target; this led to the famed "luckiest man in Iraq" joke
told by allied commander, Norman Schwarzkopf, in response to an Iraqi bridge
blowing up seconds after an Iraqi truck driver passed over it.
By the time of the wars of 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan to root out the
Taliban, and then, the war to depose Saddam Hussein, the CIA and United States
Air Force had married the capabilities of its extended range Predator and
Reaper UAVs with that of its Hellfire air-to-ground missile, and a new way of
war was born.
Thus, after bringing the US$350 order back from Costco, and after a few beers
and a few innings of the Dodgers, captain Forrester showered, shaved, donned
his air force blue, kissed the family goodbye, climbed up into the cab of his
Dodge Ram and began the lonely 80 kilometer journey northwest through the
darkening Nevada desert, up State Route 95 to Creech Air Force Base, the proud,
self proclaimed "Home of the Predators".
But, in actuality, where he was really going was straight into the heart of the
Afghan war zone.
To save on fuel, weighed down neither by human pilots nor the life support
system needed to keep them alive, the eight-meter long Predators were set aloft
from their simple fixed rail launchers as close to the action as possible, but
as for where they were controlled, that was another story. With the increases
in Pentagon satellite bandwidth that could be anywhere, and once the bad guys,
be it leftover al-Qaeda in Iraq or the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, found
out just how hard they were getting it from the Predators, the air force looked
around and found Creech, almost a kilometer in the sky, a formidable obstacle
to any jihadi trying to pass as Anglo in the nearby town of Indian Springs.
Once inside, one of the 12 interlocking 30-meter trailers (Britain's MI-6 had a
trailer on the other side of the base; a few months ago, Prince Harry was here
training on Predators patrolling over Pakistan) and settled in, Forrester's
missions were not that different from EA's when he plays the game with friends.
He's strapped in, before him are a VDT screen and all the controls needed to
"fly" the Predator, flaps, throttle, rudder. Besides Forester is his co-pilot,
First Lieutenant Rodger "Rico" Colon, the payload operator controller,
responsible for all the systems necessary to keep the Predator aloft, as well
as its key attraction, its two Hellfire II AGM-114 missiles, carried under the
Predator's wing, along with a number of uniformed intelligence analysts helping
them with targets.
With their light, composite material weight and relatively small, engines, the
Predators could conduct missions of far longer duration, sometimes up to 22
hours, than their human controllers had the endurance for; this necessitated
each mission to be manned by two separate teams, Forrester's Red Team, and
Captains Mike "Sherlock" Holmes and Jay "Pulaski" Popowicz's Gold team, which
were just finishing as Forrester's team approached. Another Predator,
patrolling about 125 clicks to the north, was controlled, from the station on
the other side of the room, by the Green and Blue teams. The whole command was
in the hands of Colonel Joe "Sidewinder" Ross, an old F-16 pilot now commanding
the Predators from his raised communications command platform between the two
Predator control stations.
Popowicz signed out his time roster. "Get any tonight?" Colon asked him,
wanting to know if they had played a part in stabilizing the rapidly
deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.
"Naahhh. The CIA had us shitting bullets over what they thought was Khalid
al-Raymi, and we were chasing our tails over that for a couple of hours, but it
all was nothing. Something for some striped-pants Langley faggot to get it up
before his wife breaks the on/off switch on the 'ol vibrator."
At Creech, they were well aware that the CIA had other Predator launch stations
in the area, from the Horn of Africa providing coverage all the way down the
Somali coast, through Iraq to Pakistan, all controlled by another ground
facility like this somewhere at Langley. The idea was that the uniformed
military would task Creech for the targets that supported the forces on the
ground, and the CIA would target the supposed big stuff, like high-value
al-Qaeda, that they found.
Still, the separation of labor was not perfect; Langley was always on the
blower to Ross about Creech picking up the ball on something they dropped. Ross
had the authority to retask a Predator to a CIA target, but heaven help him if
some marine infantry company pinned down under mortar fire took hits just
because he had shot the Predator's wad chasing down Langley's ghosts.
His first shift was uneventful, but, halfway through his second, on the next
day, something came up.
"Hey, Red Team," Ross called out. "Crescent Security is mounting a resupply
convoy from Khazxni to Kandahar. Leavin' in a couple of hours. They're afraid
if they catch any shit, they'll scratch all their new Rolexes. They want a
traffic report, to know if anybody's doing any road maintenance."
"OK, boss," Forrester replied. He checked his watch, it was still before 10 at
night in country, about nine hours to sunrise. He turned his Predator, which
had been doing lazy circles above the Darya ye Arghandab, east towards the
remainder of Zabol province.
"Road maintenance" was slang for a jihadi crew planting an improvised explosive
device in the path of an inbound American resupply convoy. This was always done
as night, Johnny Jihad had still not learned the Predators could, with their IR
Gear and other low lights, see them just about as well in dark as in
light.
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