el policy regarding offenders of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Someone had pointed out—many soldiers, officers, and enlisted thought very late in the game—that only a very few soldiers committed what in civilian life would be called “serious felonies,” that is to say, rape, murder, armed robbery, and the like. The vast majority of prisoners in Army stockades all over the world had been found guilty of offenses against the Army system and most of the offenses had to do with being absent without leave, mild insubordination, drunk on duty, and the like.
Those sentenced by court-martial to six months or less were normally confined to prisons, called “stockades” on the larger military bases—forts like Bragg, Knox, and Benning— where they spent their days walking around the base, guarded by shotgun-armed “prisoner chasers,” picking up cigarette butts and trash.
Someone had pointed out that not only did this punishment not contribute much to the Army but that the prisoner chasers—usually, one for every two prisoners, sometimes one for each prisoner—had to be taken off their regular duties to perform that guard duty, which was not an effective use of manpower.
Furthermore, if a soldier disliked the Army so much that he went “over the hill” or told his sergeant to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut when chastised, for example, for having a dirty weapon, or needing a shave, he probably wasn’t making much of a contribution to the Army when he wasn’t in the stockade.
The ideal was “cheerful, willing obedience to a lawful order, ” and, if a soldier wasn’t willing to offer that, what was he doing in the Army?
If a first sentence to the stockade didn’t serve to make someone see the wisdom of straightening up and flying right, then hand him a Bad Conduct discharge and send him home.
That would do away with having to have large, heavily guarded stockades, with barbed wire, chain-link fences, guard towers, and everything else that went with them all over the Army, and having to take a hundred or so men on each post away from their normal duties on any given day to serve as prisoner chasers.
It might also result in an Army where most soldiers believed that cheerful, willing obedience to a lawful order was really not such a bad idea.
The new personnel policy was implemented. Post stockade populations dropped precipitously all over the Army, including Fort Bragg, at just about the time the new, supersecret Delta Force was formed.
It was decided that Delta Force should have a very secure base, isolated from the rest of sprawling Fort Bragg, protected by a double line of chain-link fences topped with razor wire, with floodlights, guard towers, and the like, and that inside the fence there should be barracks, a mess hall, supply buildings, and so on.
Someone then pointed out that a system designed to keep people in, like the Fort Bragg stockade, would probably, with minor modifications, be entirely suitable to keep people out.
Delta Force moved into the old stockade.
Most of the Delta Force people, who were of course the cream of Special Forces, thought moving into the stockade not only was hilarious but also had the additional benefit of keeping Fort Bragg’s complement of candy-ass officers from snooping around to see where they could apply chickenshit.
No one was allowed in the Delta Force compound without specific authorization and only a few senior officers had the authority to issue that authorization, and, as a rule of thumb, they checked with Delta Force officers before granting it.
From his seat in the motor pool van, Major C. G. Castillo, who had done his time in the Fort Bragg stockade, was not at all surprised to see a tall, muscular lieutenant colonel wearing a green beret and a shoulder holster standing inside the outer fence of the Delta Force compound, or that the gate in the twelve-foot, razor wire-topped fence was closed.
Floodlights pushed back the deep darkness of the North Carolina night to provide enough illumination to make the signs hanging from the chain-link fence every twenty feet clearly legible.
They read:
DO NOT APPROACH FENCE
RESTRICTED AREA
ABSOLUTELY NO ADMISSION
GUARDS WILL FIRE WITHOUT WARNING
Castillo got out of the back of the van, marched up to the outer fence, and saluted crisply. The tall officer returned the salute casually.
“Colonel Fortinot?” Castillo asked.
The tall officer nodded, just perceptibly.
“Sir, my name is Castillo . . .”
“Stop right there, Major,” Lieutenant Colonel Fortinot said. “This is a restricted area. You need written authorization to enter this area. Do you have such authority?”
“No, sir. I do not.”
Lieutenant Colonel Fortinot pointed at Captain Brewster.
“Are you the officer who called the duty officer here, asking that I come here?”