A state of disobedience

Marietta, Oklahoma

Nobody felt like singing "Garryowen" this morning.

It was a perfect time for it; the sun rising in the east, the smell of fresh diesel and motor oil on the gentle breeze, hundreds of thousands of tons of steel rolling in a long massive pike down the highway.

Still, nobody felt like singing.

Third Corps was coming back. They had left at command and now they were returning at command. They had left with reluctance and now they returned with much the same feeling.

Silent and sullen, the drivers and commanders scarcely risked a glance at the protesters lining either side of the highway. Yet they did glance from time to time and they did read some of the signs the protesters carried. "Don't mess with Texas," said some. "Thou shalt not kill," said some few others, a message pretty much lost on the professional killers of the Third Corps.

"The South shall rise again," "Lee surrendered; we didn't," and "Get Washington off our backs," were sentiments many, many of the officers and men of the largely southern and largely rural corps shared fully.

Moving at full speed, which is to say—roadmarch speed, the point of the Corps took little time in reaching the Texas-Oklahoma line. There it paused, briefly, waiting for federal police to come and clear away the eight or nine thousand Oklahoman protesters who put their own mortal bodies between Texas and harm.

These same federal law enforcement types had known of the protest and had stationed themselves fairly far forward in the long snaking column of medium armor. With truncheons and dogs, they set into the protesters quickly. Even so, since the protesters seemed willing to be beaten or bitten rather than simply leave, dispersing them took some time.

Curiously, though there were news reporters at the scene, not one report that day on national television showed the weeping women, the split and bleeding skulls, the canine chewed faces the federal police left in their wake.

Still, though the nation did not see, the men of Third Corps did. And this was not without significance.

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