Western Sunrise

By Walter D. Rodgers

Western Sunrise is a future history, including and ending with the successful conclusion of the next Gulf War, which begins in the summer of the year 2004.

The precipitating event of that war will not be described here; it would give away too much. The technology involved is similar to that which might be featured in one of many techno-thrillers.

The narrative begins with the end of the Vietnam Conflict, touches on the Panamanian invasion of 1988, describes a Mideast assignment, Desert Shield/Desert Storm, and peacetime service in the Army Medical Department.

The realism, twists, turns, counterplots and colorful characters (such as Old Franz, the headwaiter, late of the 11th SS Armored Division, and Miss MacTavish who may or may not be an agent of MI6) make this short volume a page-turner, impossible to put down.

It is told from the viewpoint of a career military surgeon, assigned out to pasture, or so he believes, after Desert Storm, until it's time for him to retire. Except that his various mundane jobs' requirements are highly classified and contradictory. When he tries to connect the dots, he's quickly ordered not to proceed further.

Without a plausible explanation, he is kept on active duty long after his date of retirement in support of something mysterious, compartmented and unexplained until the last ten pages of the novel.

Buy it for a man who likes action-packed stories; if he likes W.E.B. Griffin, he'll love Western Sunrise

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Dec 20, 2005
• ISBN: 9781412252904

Walter D. Rodgers

Walter D. Rodgers is the pseudonym of a retired family physician who lives across the Narrows from Tacoma, Washington. Dr. Rodgers is a life member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, who practiced in the American Southwest for 33 years. He has been board-certified in family practice since 1975. He has served as a hospital chief of staff, vice-chief of staff, and as chairman of numerous hospital staff committees and departments. He was elected president of his home district's division of the American Medical Association in 1987 for a two-year term. He was an adjunct professor of family medicine from 1980 to 1994, and an assistant professor in the same department from 1995 till his retirement in 1998. Dr. Rodgers represents the generation born in to the Great Depression, which grew up during World War II, and who were the active members of the force-in-being that, over forty-five years, won the Cold War. Dr. Rodgers served as an enlisted man in the peacetime Army of the 1950s, and was commissioned after completion of Field Artillery Officer Candidate School in 1961. He changed his branch assignment to Medical Corps upon graduation from the Kansas City College of Osteopathy and Surgery in 1966. The author has also been awarded the Combat Medical Badge, the Bronze Star Medal, the Army Meritorious Service Medal, five Army Commendation Medals, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with bronze star device, plus seven other lesser decorations and is entitled to wear the ribbons of three unit citations. He is a qualified military parachutist. In 1985 he was named a Distinguished member of the 502d Infantry Regiment (Airborne) based on his combat service in Vietnam. Dr. Rodgers is a life member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Association Military Surgeons on the United States, of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and of the Disabled American Veterans. The author is also a graduate of the National Defense University, Class of 1990. His thesis was a comparative study of ethical behavior in the military and in civilian society. Dr. Rodgers served for one year in Vietnam and for six months during Operation Desert Shield. Additionally, he served 42 years in the Army Reserve's Active Troop Unit Program, retiring as a full colonel in 1996. Also by Walter D. Rodgers: Army Green Western Sunrise

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Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

1986

CHAPTER 3

1987

CHAPTER 4

1988

CHAPTER 5

1990

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

1993

1994

CHAPTER 8

1995

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

1997

CHAPTER 12

1998

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

2001

CHAPTER 14

2002

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 28

About the Author:

For Mickey:

Thanks for hanging in there for Act III. It can’t have been easy.

And for my late Mother, whom I didn’t appreciate nearly enough during her lifetime.

-WDR

This book is a work of fiction.

Its entire world, its characters, its premises, and its story originated in and are completely contained within the fevered brain of the writer.

Should any reader see himself in any of the above areas, he is advised to forget it. He’s wrong.

WDR

In the heart of every soldier, however loyal he may be, lies a tiny nidus of treason.

Anonymous.

CHAPTER 1

1 October, 2004 Brooke Army Medical Center San Antonio, Texas

San Antonio is hot as hell most of the time, except during the sixty-two consecutive days of December and January. Even now, in early October, it was barely tolerable. Thank God for air conditioning and the nuclear power to run it, the elderly doctor thought.

The only place Wilson had seen that he thought was worse was Houston, 190 miles to the east.

Doctor Bill (Willie) Wilson had the night duty at the Burn Unit.

The faint smell, something like a mixture of over-roasted pork with just a hint of burned feathers, and overtones of janitorial germicide, had bothered him at first, professional man or not. Now, like everyone else who worked there, ten minutes after he signed into The Unit, the odor was completely unnoticeable. He’d been assigned to BAMC since just after the war had started, a month and a half earlier. Willie was supposedly a recalled reservist, 66 years old, older than dirt, older than God.

But he wasn’t.

Fort Sam Houston’s Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) was the world leader in burn treatment and research, had been since 1943. When Wilson had made O-3 (Captain), in mid-1967, he’d been taught by COL (Doctor) Basil Pruett, the unit’s founder and perennial director. Taught, in fact, most of what he knew about burns and their treatment. Pruett had been the world’s foremost authority in the field. He had stayed in the Army forever, content to remain a colonel, as long as he stayed director of his beloved Burn Unit. Now, he was over eighty, and long-ago retired. Still, his treatment methods, and therefore he, were not forgotten.

Anyway, tonight, Dr. Wilson, also an over-ranked full colonel, had the night watch, a job that any captain O-3, second-year resident could have, no, should have, been doing, and probably done better. He’d have smoked up a whole pack of cigarettes over the twelve-hour shift, if he hadn’t quit in 1979. On nights like this, he still missed them. That left him to face endless cups of coffee and a few medical journals to fill out the hours till 7 AM that he wasn’t needed in actual patient care. He couldn’t even joke with the night nurses for fear of a sexual harassment accusation, how-ever innocent a remark might be intended to be. The Army had definitely changed over the past few--well, twenty--years.

Most of the patients here tonight (all male) were left over from the more intensive early days of the Third Gulf War, first against Iraq, and the invasion of Western Iran five weeks later. Their post-operative ward was filled with twenty-four late-phase, relatively-minor reconstructive surgical patients.

Now, the President and SecDef were quietly (and very privately) eyeing Northeastern Arabia (and maybe a future Protectorate of Kuwait within The Trust or as one of the United Arab Emirates) for invasion with democratization to follow hot on its heels. What, they thought, did we owe the Emir of Kuwait or the House of Saud? They were happy to have us intervene in 1990, when their ox (or had it been their camel?) was being gored, and they had used us, shamelessly and unapologetically, that winter.

If the Burn Unit got any more initial-or recent-injury cases, the desert battles they’d be coming from would probably happen there, along the current borders and cease-fire lines of this most recent Gulf conflict. Those future battles, if the past few months were any example, would be sudden, would move fast, and would involve overwhelming numbers of men and machines.

Not all the men who were admitted here for burn injury, or for that matter to the rest of BAMC for wounds were American citizens.

At least half were Trust troops of Eastern European birth, though all of them spoke good English. Wilson recognized some of them. A lot more of them remembered him; he’d done their induction physicals several years before.

01 October 2004 4 PM

Nikolai was in the third bed from the door on the left.

He and Wilson had remembered each other from four years before, at Nellis.

There was a brand-new Air Medal pinned to Nikolai’s pillow. Its ribbon gleamed with a clutch-on V device indicating that it had been awarded for a valorous achievement. The medal hadn’t been there the evening before. It had been awarded by an Air Force brigadier the morning of October 1st.

Nikolai grinned broadly as they met for the second time.

Hey, Doctor. Long time, no see. But that vasss the idea, I think.

He was trying to sound like Gregory Ratoff or Bullwinkle’s Boris Badenov; Wilson couldn’t be certain which.

I’m sorry to see you’ve been wounded, Wilson said.

Is nothinggg, now, Nikolai said in his fake, thick, intentionally stereotypical Russian accent. Issss just one percent third-degree and two percent second-degree burns two weeks ago. Worst is over.

What happened? Wilson asked.

I had to eject over Basra, Iraq, said Nikolai. I was flying a Tu-pelov-95, what NATO calls a ‘Bear’ bomber. He had lost the accent. I’d just dropped 20 tons of high explosive bombs and was exiting Baghdad’s air space when a SAM-2, or maybe a SAM-4, exploded about fifty meters off my right wing.

How did you get to Basra? Wilson asked.

"I was able to keep directional control, but was losing altitude, and then a fire broke out in the Number Three engine. We started a very wide, shallow corkscrewing right turn, losing three hundred feet or so a minute. I could see we wouldn’t make it to the border with Kuwait, so I ordered the crew to abandon ship. When I was sure everyone else was clear, I jumped, too.

"Everyone made it out all right. There was no wind, even any gusting, so we were able to keep our parachutes together in a fairly tight group.

We landed a hundred meters from one of your Naval Infantry--

Marine Corps, Willie corrected him. ....artillery battalion headquarters. Nikolai finished the sentence.

He continued: One of your Navy medics-- Hospital corpsman, Wilson corrected, gently, again.

...right, corpsman, was there, plus a young Navy medical officer. The two of them treated our injuries. From there, we were--what do you call it--med-evacked? up the chain of hospitals--much better than the Russians,’ by the way--till we split up in Germany a week ago, and I was brought here in a C-141 hospital plane.

I’m really glad it turned out all right for you and your crew, Wilson said. "I’ve often wondered what had happened to all those enlistees over the past few years.

Now, Staff-Segeant Nikolai Sergeivitch, he changed the subject, assuming a slightly more formal tone: "there’s some business for us to do. You already know you will have surgery in the morning. Your heart and lungs sound perfectly normal; there’s no reason your procedure should go anything but well.

The aides will take away your water carafe at midnight. Please don’t eat or drink anything after that; it would increase the risk of vomiting and aspiration during anesthesia. The doctors will start intravenous antibiotics during surgery. Your procedures will take about an hour. You should be awake in time for lunch. Any questions?

No, Doctor, Nikolai replied. I feel lucky to be here, in Texas, and not in Baku or Rostov. You rich Americans treat your casualties well.

"You are one of ours," Wilson said as he turned away.

He moved on to the next patient, an Airman First Class, USAFR, from Armenia, who’d sustained second-degree face and neck burns two days before, during a hangar fire.

CHAPTER 2

Wilson was a general surgeon.

He had graduated from the Kansas City College of Osteopathy and Surgery, tied for first in the Class of 1966.

After his internship, now-doctor William F. Wilson volunteered for the draft, for The Airborne (jump) School, and for duty in South