Report from the Border: With the Alabama Minuteman Support Team

Report from the Border: With the Alabama Minuteman Support Team by Mike Vanderboegh, Team Coordinator

Tuesday 0800: The floor of HCC has not softened. Chris, who says he needs beauty sleep "to maintain his manly charm" oversleeps but so do the rest of us. The truth is we are all sleep starved and will be as long as were here.

The first thing I do is grab Big John and induct him into our team. We've been operating short since Ranger's departure. Mark is not yet here. John's from the southeast, he's proved willing and helpful and most importantly he has not yet been assigned to a line unit as the line guys are still sleeping after another unproductive night. Gary approves, so he becomes an honorary Alabamian and a member of our recon and surveillance team: Rover One One.

Next comes the briefing whil we wolf down breakfast. Somewhere in here I have managed a shave and whore's bath in the back sink. Nothing makes you feel more civilized than a shave, even if the rest of you reeks. But later the heartburn will remind us that there is never enough time.

Gary has sketched what turns out to be a remarkably accurate map of Old Baldy, the first mile marker of interest and surrounding terrain. (I refer to them hence as first and second mile markers because there are some things that will be happening throughout the month that require operational security.) It is to be a vehicle/foot recon of the AO with another secondary but equally important objective-- the second mile marker. Gary has spotted some sign on a previous road recon that he thinks bears checking out. We are to dress in civvies, no camo.

On our way we get lost, or at least confused. This my fault for talking when I should have been observing. We shoot past the first mile marker, where we observe a county sheriff's deputy examining the fence. We drive on to the second mile marker to give him time to clear the first. We stop at the second mile marker and our education begins. First off, we discover that our GPS unit is stuck on one coordinate. This may be because we don't know how to use the borrowed unit properly, but there is no manual with it, so marking down GPS coords goes right out the window.

But it is at the second mile marker that we begin to use the senses God gave us. To begin with there are thirty culverts in a row at the milemarker, a perfect layup spot. Yet if this spot is being used, their trash discipline is extraordinary. Crossing the fence about halfway down the culverts, we find some bent stringers (These are reinforcements to the fence placed evenly between the poles, but if someone with any weight crosses the fence, the stringers end up bent; another trick is for the coyotes to use their belts to loop around the bottom protrusion of the stringer and bend it UP. Because of its tensile strength, it then holds the bottom wire up so an illegal or mule can easily shimmy under), but nothing major. Across the fence Chris notices an area with a strong odor of human urine, some toilet paper and lots of trails branching off, but no hoof prints.

While John and Chris map the other side I start using Mark One Eyeball on the area around the fence. The first thing I notice is a bare spot on the other side, where the vegetation has been worn away by foot traffic. The second, and the thing I'm most proud of, is that I find the barbs on the top string of wire have been bent down by constant weight going over the fence. Only the top wire demonstrates this. What we have found is a crossing point so important to the coyotes or contrabandistas that they are exercising great care in not drawing attention to it. Later we are told that inner tubes or horse blankets are often use to cover the barbs as the mule crosses over. This usually means that drugs are passing over and not just illegals. Illegals in a hurry don't care if they break fences, smugglers do.

Chris and John find vehicle trails coming up an old railroad embankment from the other side, some of them quite fresh. As they walk down one side of the fence and I the other, we find an old repair where a vehicle came through. The fence was taken out all the way down. I cross over to their side to examine the tire tracks and find something odd and out of place: two old boards arranged in V, with a lump of coal in the crux of the V. It is obvious the boards have not been there long, the imprint of one can be seen in the dirt about a foot away. OK, so somebody moved it. Why?

Well, as an old cacher myself, I known a cache marker when I see one. I follow the direction the V points in without success. OK, so go back to square one. At the base of the V are two other smaller boards, one arranged almost as a base to a triangle formed by the other two boards, the other a long pointed stick. I look closely at the soil and although someone has taken a lot of trouble to hide the fact, the soil is loose unlike the rest of the rock-hard strata around it. I stick my hands in it and it flows around me. I begin to very carefully remove it with my hands (looking for that big surprise, a trip wire) and soon come to hole that goes straight back into the bank. I take the long pointed stick and probe it-- it is empty. Still, it is obvious I have found somebody's stash point.

We take pictures of it and then I reconstruct it to the condition I found it. Idly, I muse on what might be accomplished with an M26 frag with the pin pulled stuffed in the hole for the next contrabandista to find. Alas, I am too law abiding. I do not have an M26 frag and I wouldn't have the ruthlessness necessary to use it if I did. Sigh. We're the good guys, so we don't do things like that. Still, I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about it. Guess its a good thing for the EBGs ("evil bad guys", a generic term used by Ranger) that I'm a Christian with a reasonable of hope of getting into Heaven. Were I some godless pagan, I might do more than speculate on the subject. Maybe when I come back I'll bring a rat trap. Now THAT would be funny, but the SOP probably wouldn't allow it. Another sigh.

So, having mapped and photographed everything useful at the second mile marker, and made a note for the Rough Riders to follow the tire tracks to see where they lead, we regain our vehicle and move back down past the first mile marker where the deputy is gone. But in his place he has left a black and white blanket, a serape it appears, draped over the fence. Chris runs over to check it out. It is still wet from the storm last night, obviously it had been on the ground. When we report it, Gary confirms that he saw it on the ground at this spot on his preliminary recon. So, the deputy hung it over the fence. Why? We would discuss this off and on all week, but the fact of the matter is that it looked for all the world like a flag for a dead drop to me. What did it mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Corrupt law enforcement is an integral part of cartel operations, though. Boy how I wish we'd got the number on the vehicle. Chalk it up to lost opportunities.

After the first mile marker, we proceed back down the road to Old Baldy, checking the dirt road down to the old railroad embankment where we discover no vehicle tracks coming from the left but plenty turning from the dirt road onto the embankment to the right. We follow the embankment all the way to road aiming to recover the sensors we left the night before. On our way, we discover an insulated black and white beach bag wedged underneath a bush facing the railroad bed like a freeway offramp marker. Checked it carefully for those nasty little wires before examining it. (Laugh if you want, but I've made it the last thirty years without losing any fingers or other more important body parts and I don't intend to start now. These ARE the same guys who are killing each with RPGs in Nuevo Laredo, you know.)

Turned out, it contained only a plastic picnic ground cloth. We replaced it where we found it and continued with recon. Recovered sensors and mapped most, but not all, of the backside of Old Baldy. Returned to HCC and reported to Gary. He, like us, is excited by what we'd found. We hoped to go back to Old Baldy that night as a team without the lightning, the rain and the organizational problems to reap the fruits of our labor. It was not to be.

We are ordered to base camp for the briefing for tonight's major op-- we are going back on the line which is moving farther south toward Antelope Wells and the Mexican border. All hands are needed. With Bob and Gary absent ironing out last minute details, the briefing becomes confused, repetitious, time-wasting and even contradictory and counter productive. Valuable time is lost. If we are to surprise the opposition we must get into position before dark.

The plan is to move south in convoy on 81 to a rancher's access road to the right of the highway, set up along it at .4 mile intervals. We will be Station 8 on the right flank with our seismic sensors placed out farther to the right just across the road.

Now leading volunteers is like herding cats and chickens simultaneously-- it can be done but it is exhausting work attended by hisses and ruffled feathers. Tonight was the op that proved that rule. Everything went wrong, beginning with the fact that the vehicles were not sorted out in their proper order before pulling out. Worse, we had a reporter, Rene Romo of the Albuquerque Journal, imbedded with our team. Every screw up was evident to him, not the least because every screw up of other line teams caused us to curse fluently. I suppose I cursed more this night and the following night since I rededicated my life to Christ. It was extremely frustrating to witness our worst performance to date.

To begin with, it was dark when we got there. No stealth about our setting up, that's for sure. Even a blind man would have HEARD us, we were so noisy. As I said, the vehicles were not assigned positions in the convoy that corresponded to their place on the line. In retrospect, we had plenty of room at the base camp to have lined up each position from 1 through 8, and then pull out in sequence. They did have a "shepherd", a line supervisor who was supposed to post them correctly. Lord knows he tried manfully, but the convoy members were so confused and balky in the dark that even he got turned around and led the last three cars past our position. (We had simply paid attention to the briefing and marked off the four tenths mile increments as we drove down the road, so we passed the stalled traffic and ended up where we were supposed to be, but nobody else near us was.)

Once he realized his error and got turned around, for some unaccountable reason the other vehicles didn't follow him and remained confused on our right flank-- the flank we were supposed to anchor. They were actually in the process of deciding to turn back around and go out even further to the right when I ran down the road and got them headed the way they were supposed to go. It was quite dark by now.

Light discipline was non-existent. For hours vehicles were jockeyed back and forth, some to try to establish reliable communications, others because they just seemed to want to be doing something. From our perspective on the end of the line we thought Border Patrol was operating in front of us. It wasn't.

There were lights in Mexico that we could see but they were fixed, probably on structures. No, this night we were our own worst enemy. Somebody on my team even quoted Pogo, "We has met the enemy, and he is us!"

Talk about screwups, well, we owned some too. We had hurriedly placed our sensors and although we put them across the road we didn't extend them far enough. Even if someone was trying to sneak around our line that was lit up like Broadway, we had less of a chance of catching them on seismic. We also did not place them where they could be easily confirmed by night vision. Again we were using the PSID/TRC-3 radio sensors, so they did not give us the information that a geophone would. We failed to take this into account.

So there were mistakes all round. Again the night was bitterly cold with little cloud cover for the most part. We rotated trying to sleep and discovered that Big John was a big snorer. At one point I had to wake him because we had beeps from the sensors. But because they were so badly placed or because the creature disturbing them was not human we could not confirm the sensors with night vision.

Shortly after that, Chris and I heard one very human-sounding cough less than 30 yards away across the road to our direct front. Then we heard another. It scared the crap out us, but night vision again showed nothing. This incident again showed the limitations of our decades-old seismic equipment. What we need is a radio link sensor like the PSID/TRC-3 with the geophone reporting detail of the PSR1A. The Army tried to come up with such in the PEWS (Platoon Early Warning System) in the 80s and 90s but it was a boondoggle with a dismal record of failure after failure in the field. One of us owned a set that we were never able to make work. They would circuit test fine, THEY JUST WOULDN'T WORK. Other Minutemen reading this shouldn't waste their money on PEWS-- they are just fancy collectible junk and a sad example of your tax dollars at work.

Command ordered the line out of the area earlier than planned because the rancher needed the road to pickup the cattle who could be heard mooing all night long behind us. So we pulled out, bringing up the rear and as tail-end charlie we were grabbed by command staff and detailed to dismantle the antenna on the radio truck. While we operated out of HQ we were always getting jobs like that-- partly because we were handy and partly because they trusted us not to muck it up. Competence is its own curse.

On the way back to base camp I was so exhausted I couldn't keep the Blazer on the road. My passengers staged a minor mutiny and I turned over the helm to Chris. We staggered into the HQ around 0500 and I collapsed on a cot that some Christian soul had found me. I was grateful not to sleep on the floor, but it wouldn't have mattered. I was out like a light.

Look here. Yes, the PEWS was a dismal piece of crap, but there's MUCH better equipment available now, some available from foreign sources.

And the old AN/PPS4 and PPS5 ground surveillance radars work pretty well out to around 10 klicks or so....

Yes, the PEWS was a dismal piece of crap, but there's MUCH better equipment available now, some available from foreign sources.

True enough. However they cost more than the PEWS. Had those who had promised donations actually delivered on their promises, we might have been able to afford more reliable equipment.

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