Staff Sgt. Highrock, Jimmie to the guys, was chilled to the bone and slightly delirious with sleep deprivation but never felt more fulfilled. It was also hard to complain since the rebels were doing the same with less and had been at it for years. The ODA had had to break up into 4 cells in order to get the coverage they wanted and his cell, Alpha, had just spent the last 12 tortured hours on horseback riding over ridges and up to the spur deep in Taliban held territory. Before leaving he had set his Type 7B wrist watch to count the number of days so he could keep better track over the limited supplies they had. The latest supply drop had missed the DZ and they couldn’t for the life of them find any trace of it and so went the extra MREs they had counted on bringing with them. Dave had just finished setting up the SOFLAM and Mike was on the SATCOM to confirm with the Capt. they had arrived as well as the expected kickoff for the attack that they would be supporting. Their task was to bomb the shit out of any reinforcements moving south towards Dostum’s point of attack on the Taliban lines.
Mike confirmed to Dave and Jimmie that the attack was set for mid-afternoon about 2 hours before sunset. They had finally arranged through K2, their base in Uzbekistan, to have air assets over the battle area in order to provide close air support before, during, and after the attack. They still had a few hours to wait and so spent the time glassing the road and the surrounding mountains through their Steiner binoculars trying to locate enemy positions. Jimmie reset the 12-hr bezel on his watch, currently set to EST where it was the middle of the night and his wife was asleep, to point to the hour hand so he could keep track of the number of hours before the action was set to begin.
As Dave took over the surveillance so he could eat, Jimmie started to reflect on the whirlwind week since they had landed in the valley. It made him think to that quote:
Everything changed after 9/11. In the years leading up to the attack they had had a hard time getting what they felt was the minimum gear that they needed to maintain an acceptable state of readiness. The politicians acted like war was supposed to be a thing of the past. The Tornek-Rayville Type 7B had taken more than a year to get approved even after working in as many pre-approved design elements as possible. If it wasn’t for pulling a few strings and bending, almost breaking, the rules around the use of the Alternative Requisition Express System (ARES for short), which was how they got their custom rifles and other gear that they needed/wanted, they wouldn’t have had the watches for this deployment. The watch filled a specific need for them. It was a field watch crammed with as much info as possible that was also still dive capable. More importantly the movement was the tried and true automatically winding mechanical NH36, an improved version of the one found in the dive watches the SEALs had issued to the teams. You never really knew when something would flare up somewhere and the last thing you remembered to do was replace your watch battery, as one of the Agency guys found out on his way here.
The Type 7B came with a choice of either a 60 minute time elapse bezel or the 12-hr bezel that Jimmie preferred for its added flexibility. Unlike the brass running the supply system he and the guys weren’t sold on those tritium gas tubes that were in all the standard issue watches. They much preferred this new material that had become publicly available just before the development process started. SuperLuminova was non-radioactive, re-chargeable with sunlight and it wouldn’t degrade over time like tritium. For the 90s this was cutting edge stuff that Jimmie and the other watch nerds on the team kept up to speed on.
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