The Last Centurion

Chapter One Stick, Shit End, One Each

So there I was, no shit . . .

January we got our warning on H5N1. February, late, we got our innoculations. By then there were more reports around and Patient Zero in Chicago. March was when the Plague hit in earnest in the States.

We were sitting in Fars Province as things went from bad to worse in Iran. It didn't take the Plague hitting (it hadn't, really, yet) to screw things up in Iran. All it took was Iranians.

Look, Iranians are, by and large, good people. I'm not talking about the jihadi assholes, obviously. I'm talking about your regular low to middle class Iranian. They like to talk, they like to share green tea. They're even reasonably hard workers (unlike the fucking Arabs).

But they're also massively screwed up. There's a bunch of reasons, but I can easily detail two.

One: They're arrogant as fuck. Look, ever seen a movie from pre-Plague called The 300? Bunch of stupid Greeks hold a pass against the whole Persian army. (That would be Iranian, by the way.) Three hundred (actually, more like a thousand with battle squires and allies) against two hundred thousand. Go with the thousand number; they're still outnumbered two hundred to one.

Worse, back then Persia (Iran) was The big superpower. Persian emperors spotted a place they liked, invaded and took it over. They were too large and powerful not to be able to take anything they wanted.

Back then, Persia was The Thing.

(Of course, not too long later historically they were subjects of the Greeks, but I'm not writing a book about the ascent of democracy and why shock infantry always wins over alternatives.)

Iran, even in pre-Plague days, was a third class power.

First Class powers were ones that if they got really busy were going to trash the shit out of any non-First Class opponents. Basically, just pre-Plague, that came down to the U.S. and China. The U.S. because we had, hands down, the best military in the world and we were "the world's economic turbine." China because it was just so fucking big and so was its army. They might not have been able to trash us, (see Greeks vs. Persians; size does not always matter) but if they got it into their heads to invade, say, Cambodia, Cambodia might as well roll. And they were pretty powerful economically as well.

Second class were places like Japan and Western Europe. They had large economies, they were world players and they had small but functional militaries. (Some very good. Australia comes to mind. Then there's the French. It varied.) Throw "academia" and "artists" into this if you wish. Military and economic were usually followed by more or less equal values of the other.

Third class were countries that had some economic power (mostly oil), some semblance of a real economy and were regional powerhouses. They were often big frogs in very little ponds. Brazil, South Africa and Iran all come to mind. Russia might have been second class, might have been third. Not worth debate.

The problem is, Iranians just could not get over the fact that they used to be the big frog in any pond. They still thought they were. And because of that, they thought they knew everything. How could some upstart from a country only two hundred years old know how to do something better than they did?

Well, maybe because the world's changed and we're not still doing it the way that Xerxes wanted it done.

The second problem with Iranians might be an effect of Islam (it's certainly consistent in most Islamic countries) or it might have been something that was a long-term meme. Don't know. Read well researched arguments for both. Anyway, the second problem was they were fatalists.

Look, anybody who has ever been in heavy fire and survived mentally is somewhat fatalistic. "I'm alive so far but if there's a bullet with my name on it, oh, well . . ."

But Persians raise this to high art. The term is "In'sh'allah." "It is as Allah wills."

Bus about to fall off a road in the mountains? "It is as Allah Wills." Circuit board not precisely put in place. "It will work if Allah wills." Foundation for a building made out of quicksand? "It will stay up if Allah wills." In'sh'Allah.

Need a group of workers at a certain place at a certain time? "They will be here if Allah Wills."

For a Midwestern farm boy and military officer, dealing with In'sh'Allah was less than pleasant.

Kipling wrote about it once, talking about people who are not like that:

Ayrabs and Iranians are not the sons of Martha.

But the point is, when the first news of the Plague hit, the entire country went into a spasm. Trust? Familial trust society. If you're not family, you're nobody. You'd better have a hard power control to get anything done.

Familial groups started shifting and contacts started dropping off the screen. Getting anything done quickly became flat impossible. Except getting shot at and bombed which continued right up to the point of Plague hitting Iran in earnest and then just got more random.

Meantime, things were going to hell in a handbasket back home and we were stuck in the ass end of nowhere attempting "reconstruction duties" while the world was deconstructing around us.

March 5th I got the e-mail I'd been dreading. It was from Bob Bates, Dad's senior manager and vice president of the corporation. Dad had contracted H5N1.

Mom died of ovarian cancer when I was ten. I didn't have any brothers or sisters. (Turns out Mom's uterus was pretty screwed up to start with.) Dad was all I had left.

Growing up with Dad had never been real easy. Don't get me wrong, if he backhanded me or gave me a spanking I deserved it. But while "negative conditioning" was high on his list, "positive conditioning" was less so. The flip side is, when he gave praise it was because you deserved it. That made the slightest hint that you'd sort of maybe not screwed up entirely worth gold. I learned a lot about leadership from my dad.

But Midwestern farmers, despite this little missive which is much bigger than I'd intended, don't talk a lot. They spend so much time in their own company, they just learn to absorb the silence. Slowly over the years they tend to become more and more like a Minnesota winter, cold, silent and powerful.

That left me wondering what to say to a man with whom I'd exchanged barely ten words in the same number of years and yet whom I loved beyond measure.

"Get well soon. I love you."?

Oh, GOD no.

"I need you in my life so you'd better pull through."?

If he did live he'd kick my ass! (And despite being in his fifties he could probably do it.)

"Dear Bob:

"Tell Dad that if he doesn't pull through he's a wuss."

Yep, those were the last words from me my dad ever got.

I'm morally certain he understood the love buried deep within them.

The rest of the e-mail from Bob, and it was long, was about the farming situation. Distribution was getting bad. They had laid in rye for the planting season but he wasn't sure when they could get it in the ground. Even rye needs a certain amount of soil temp to sprout and soil temperatures weren't even beginning to flicker upwards. By early March you usually saw some thawing and it just wasn't happening. He also wasn't sure about getting a herbicide and fertilizer delivery. They might have to do some "organic" stuff but that required hands. Which were not available.

They'd also gotten word that the big combines might not be available for harvest. They could till with the cultivators on the farms if they could get the bodies but those were scarce. They'd had to close one of the milk farms because they didn't have the four guys to run the milking machine.

Hell in a handbasket.

March 21st was the day I got word my father was gone. The Iranian New Year. Normally a time of high holiday in Iran with lots of celebrations going back before Persia tried to knock off Greece. Not much celebrating going on in 2019, though. The Plague was starting to spread and people were dying like flies.

Also the spring solstice. There wasn't much spring in the air in Fars province. It was a high plateau more or less surrounded by mountains, and the major farming area of Iran. It generally had the weather of Virginia in terms of temperatures.

This year it was more like Minnesota in the spring. A normal spring.

The funny thing was, I knew there was a "cooling trend" going on. The Army knew there was a cooling trend going on.

Couldn't tell it by the news. We were still getting CNN and between the reporting on the Plague they had occasional weather reports. I stopped counting the number of references to "global warming" I got after fifteen in two days. I just quit listening after the damned meteorologist said:

"We're having a cold and wet spring on top of everything else that's going on due to global warming affecting world-wide ocean currents."

Ocean currents.

Ocean currents have a lag that runs from five hundred to ten thousand years. Anything that ocean currents were doing, now, was because of something that happened a long time ago.

And there was no "global warming" anymore. Yeah, there had been a slow warming trend going back to a mini-iceage back in the Middle Ages. But we'd stopped warming. Given that it was Old Sol driving it, we might go back to warming soon. From the solar physicist's predictions, though, it wasn't going to be any time soon. Not the rest of 2019 for sure and probably not 2020.

We were cooling off. Fast. And people were still beating the drum of "global warming."

Here's how it really works. And it's more complicated than "CO₂ makes the temperature rise! Reuse, reduce, recycle! SUV owners are global terrorists!"

But not a lot.

Cosmic rays are produced from big stars exploding a long way away. They're all over the place in any galaxy and Earth is constantly bombarded by them.

Cosmic rays hitting water droplets in the upper atmosphere form clouds. Those clouds cool the Earth.

Cosmic ray impact is controlled by solar winds. What are solar winds?

The sun is a big ball of fusing hydrogen that pumps out an enormous amount of power every second. It not only emits heat and light but particles that fly out headed for deep space. Solar wind. When there's a lot of solar wind, it "blows back" the cosmic rays so less get to Earth.

Less cosmic rays, less clouds. Things warm up. More cosmic rays, more clouds, things cool down.

Decreased solar activity equals decreased solar wind. Decreased solar wind equals more cosmic rays impacting the Earth. More cosmic rays impacting the Earth equals more clouds. More clouds equal cooler temperatures.

QE fucking D.

That can be reduced to: Less solar output equals cooler temperatures.

But not by direct effect.

This had been studied repeatedly, proven rigorously and was the reason for Earth's long-term heating and cooling trends. Or, hell, short term.

"But CO₂ tracks with temperature!"

Sort of. CO₂ increases lag behind temperature increases. CO₂ increases in the atmosphere are a result of temperature increases not the cause of temperature increases. They track eight hundred years later. Something that changes eight hundred years later cannot be a cause. It's an effect.

Why? Boyle's Law. Go see "oceans as CO₂ repositories." It's okay. I'll wait.

Back? Okay.

Less solar output equals colder temperatures. (Also, in eight hundred years, less CO₂. In the meantime, it's going to keep increasing.)

Sunspots had been tracked for centuries. And sunspot activity had been found to be a, pardon the pun, stellar indicator of solar activity.

The sunspots on the sun were going away, one by one. They had their own lag. But the layer of the sun that caused them had gone into "recessive condition." That is, it wasn't working.

Bottomline, the sun was cooling off. Big time. And so was the Earth. Because less solar wind equalled . . .

And all the fucking weathermen could talk about was "global warming."

AND PEOPLE WERE STILL BUYING IT.

Christ. I lose hope for humanity sometimes.

The same lack of sunspots had last been observed in that mini-iceage back in Medieval days I mentioned. Reporting on its effects when it first kicked in was spotty. But archaeological evidence showed that it kicked in fast. Bogs have been found that had frozen practically overnight and then been covered by glaciers. Things got cold, they got cold fast and they stayed cold for a long time.

It looked as if that was what was happening. And the people responsible for reporting the weather were still talking about global warming.

(Yeah, kids, I know. What the Fuck? I mean, you all know that they were fucking idiots as you wrap up in your coats and blankets. But back then, Global Warming was going to end civilization as we knew it. And it was all Man's fault. If we only cut back on CO₂ emissions we could all sing kumbaya. I know, it's hard to believe. But go look up things like "The Dutch Tulip Frenzy" and "The Internet Bubble." Humans are pack animals and when the pack stampedes they tend to follow.)

Don't get me wrong. There were people out there saying the opposite. Climatologists were screaming about it. But the ones who were doing the screaming were "global warming deniers" and had been put in the same category as Holocaust deniers (not going to explain that one, go look it up later) and thus were tuned out by the "balanced" news media. They were getting no airtime. "Too busy reporting on the H5N1 catastrophe and how our Glorious Leader . . .sorry, our First Female President is gloriously responding! All is well except for that continued pesky global warming and, you know, this Plague thing."

Lose. Hope.

Anyway, it was getting cooler, H5N1 was running rampant and the world, warming, cooling, whatever, was indeed approaching the end of civilization as we knew it.

The support contractors were already pulling out. International air travel had been suspended but they could still get charter flights under local government (where they were landing that is) rules. There was fucking nothing we could do positive in Iran and we sat there all through March, watching the reports from the U.S., getting hit by the occasional attack, people starting to line up outside the FOBs looking for safety, food, shelter, anything to survive.

April 1 we got our warning orders for movement. The U.S. military was pulling out. Everywhere. We had too many problems at home to try to deal with the rest of the world's problems.

But.

This was only a temporary emergency. Warrick had stated that we were going to maintain our international obligations. And since we were coming back, any day now, well . . .

Okay, we couldn't move all the fucking equipment we had in the Middle East. Just wasn't feasible. Moving it over there had taken years. Minimum redeployment time, under optimal conditions, was considered to be six months. A. We needed to get home, now. B. These were not optimal conditions. Most of the ships we would have used to get us home were either sailing in circles trying to avoid the Plague or tied up alongside piers with mostly dead crews or crews long disappeared.

This didn't even cover the stuff we had in Europe, Korea, Japan . . .

But the troops were going home. We mostly had unit "sets" (all the equipment a unit needs) Stateside as well. So the troops were pulling out.

What to do with the equipment? We're talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of inventory. One report I saw said that the pre-Plague value of the total mobile overseas inventory of the U.S. was at least one Trillion in old Dollars.

Well, in countries that were allies instead of totally fucked like Iran, we could just leave it. The units pulled their equipment and supplies, all of it, into holding areas and from there it was up to the local government to secure.

In countries which weren't allies and in which we had "security concerns"?

We were leaving it. With guards to "maintain and secure" it "until relieved."

Each area was different. I can only speak for Iran. (MY can I.) We had six brigades and all their supports in Iran. We had four separate major logistics bases and I don't know how many FOBs and COBs.

The Big LOG base, though, was in Abadan. Abadan is a city that sits on the Shat Al Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, and is right on the border with Iraq. For a lot of reasons, (security) we used Abadan rather than Bandar Shapur or Bandar Abbas for our prime logistics base. And it was a monster. Keeping six brigades fed and watered, not to mention the units that fed and watered them fed and watered, was a major undertaking.

People just don't understand the enormous mass of materials that modern units require to keep doing their jobs. I'll put it this way. Think of a really big football stadium. Now, imagine filling it to the rim with . . . stuff. You don't want to break stuff so you put tanks at the bottom. Put armored personnel carriers on top. Keep stacking. Fill it from side to side and all the way to the top. Ammunition, parts, rations, tents, snivel gear, weapons, batteries. (My God do we use a lot of batteries. Remember, I was responsible for making sure the guys in my battalion had all this shit. I know whereof I speak.)

That's the logistics we had in Iran for ONE brigade. A full stadium of . . . stuff.

One.

We had six in country. And all the supplies for the camp followers. (Support and supply.)

Over the course of April and into May we moved it all back to Abadan.

Well, okay, some of it we left. We left a lot of rations in place. Units that were in the last detachments to pull out said that there were riots as people flooded in to strip the camps. We left most of the tents and shit that couldn't be used directly as weapons.

We pulled out everything else (and most of the rations) and moved it to Abadan. And piled and piled and stacked and parked and stacked on top of parked and parked on top of stacked.

An ammo dump is a very scary place under any circumstances. Good ammo dumps have massive internal berms (big dirt walls) or big really tough bunkers to prevent one set of ammo going boom and making all the others go boom. And only ammo that is pretty much assured not to go boom should go in an ammo dump. And only so much in each sector.

We had to build another ammo dump for all the ammo that was brought in. And we were still stacking it to the top of hundred-foot berms. It was very spectacular when it finally got blown up.

Rations?

The Army does not run just on MREs. Most "long storage" rations are in large cans (called Number 10 for really obscure historical reasons.) Unless you've got really huge hands, you can't get two around them.

We had forty-two ACRES of "long storage" rations. Boxes of Number 10 cans stacked two stories high. We had another fourteen acres of MREs.

When you're discussing MREs in terms of acres you know something has gotten truly screwed up.

The total coverage area of all the mass of material that was to be "left in place" and "secured" was right at two thousand acres.

Unless you live in someplace like Kansas or Nebraska, you've probably never seen two thousand acres. That's three square miles. Think a box a mile and three quarters across and wide covered in . . . stuff. Tanks, trucks, water blivets, stacked tents, weapons, internal bermed areas for ammunition dumps. Concertina wire, thank God.

It was amazing to look at. And very very scary. Especially when there was just one.

As units finished their "phased redeployment" (euphemism for "run away, run away!") they were flown out. Yeah, international air travel was suspended. Which just meant there were a lot of planes sitting around. And pilots could be scrounged up. We had 747 after 747 roaring out of Abadan airport (which we secured) morning, noon and night.

And then there was one.

Somebody was supposed to stay behind "until relieved" and "ensure inventory, maintenance and security" of the enormous mass of material.

Units were needed in the States. Things were going to hell and the Army had a job seeing that things didn't come apart entirely. Every body that could be spared was going home.

I don't know what fucking lottery led to our battalion being tasked with leaving ONE COMPANY to do the job of a fucking BRIGADE but we got handed the shit end of the stick.

Remember me mentioning the Bravo Company commander? One of my former JO's and not the battalion commander's fair-haired boy?

You guessed it. The battalion was tasked with leaving "one company of infantry and minimal necessary supports" as security for an area you couldn't walk around in an hour.

And "a logistics officer" to maintain inventory of the "stored equipment."

Gulp.

Chapter Two There's this Duck Video . . .

The Emperor Trajan once ordered a legion of Roman soldiers to "march east until you come to the end of the world." Everything but that is spotty history but they're believed to have been destroyed in battle by, well, the Iranians somewhere not too far from Abadan. They're remembered in military legend as "The Lost Legion."

(It's possible, though, that some of them made it as far as Western China. There's a very odd tribe over there. But that's ancient history at this point.)

As we watched the last trucks headed for the airport, watched the eyes of our fellow soldiers who were headed home, leaving us behind to "maintain security" over an area that was impossible to secure . . .

Well, we wondered what history would call us. If anyone remembered us at all.

We weren't the last people in Titan Base. (Don't know who named it originally but it had gotten fairly titanic that's for sure.) All the contractors hadn't pulled out. There were a few Brits left. They'd been in charge of the mess section for the original Titan Base. They, however, had to leave on a plane at the same time as our guys or they figured they'd never see balmy old England again.

They were in charge of the mess section. They didn't do the scut work. The scut work had been done by a lot of different laborers. Most of those had gotten out. But they still were in charge of sixty Nepalese.

And while there was transport for the Brits, there wasn't any for the Nepalese.

The guy in charge had been a British Army cook then worked in one of the universities. He was a specialist in producing large amounts of good to excellent food. He also was a stand-up guy. Which was why he stopped by my office as the battalion was loading up to "redeploy."

"Old chum, got a bit of a bother."

(Okay, he was a stand-up guy. But he also had a very affected Oxford accent. It's a Brit thing. Think Keeping Up Appearances but a guy.)

"Go," I said, not really paying much attention. Look, Captain Butterfill was, technically, in charge of security. But, one I had time in grade on him and two he wasn't in charge of inventory for all this shit. I was up to my eyeballs in the paperwork regarding inventory for two fucking divisions.

Look, nothing had been inventoried. What I had were the inventories for the units. And inventories, notoriously, are inaccurate. Oh, not stealing. The Army had an incredibly minor problem with that. Usually just bad paperwork.

But in this case, shit had been picked up and then dumped off. There'd been a general with a huge staff in charge of the base. Before all the shit was "redeployed."

I knew, deep in my bones, that at some point someone was going to be asking me pointed questions about where a case of DL123 batteries went. Okay, four truckloads of batteries.

It took me a couple of days to grasp the futility of my job and revel in the fact that I really didn't give a shit. But at the time I was trying to be a good little Assistant S-4.

"I don't have transport for the Nepos."

"Nepos?" I asked, wondering what in the hell Britishism that was. Soap? Guns? Hell, with Brits it could be anything. They were worse than pharmaceutical companies. Why not just call Viagra "Dickerector"? I think it's a plot with the Brits.

"The Nepalese," he said, pretty patiently given that his driver was honking the horn. "The cooks and whatnot. Been screaming to home office about it but Nepal's gone quite isolationist what with the whole birdie thing and Foreign Office won't take them in. The rest have gotten transport out or bunked off. But there's the Nepos, you see."

I did see. What he was telling me was that there were a bunch of foreign civilians left on the base with no way home.

What to do? It wasn't like I could just kick them out. The Nepalese are not Iranians. They couldn't get integrated into the society. And things were coming apart, fast. Hell, there was still, technically, a government in Tehran but if it controlled anything past the city borders I'd be very surprised. Kicking them out into the wilderness Iran was quickly becoming would-be murder.

"Vaccinations?"

"Up to date," he said, handing me more fucking paperwork. "Good chaps. Willing. Couple of them speak English. Sort of. Don't suppose you've got a Gorkali speaker?"

"No," I said, coldly. We had one translator, an American born Iranian who'd been raised learning Farsi. He'd grown up in L.A. and really wanted to go home. He also spoke a smattering of Arabic. I'd been told by one of the Iranian officers I met that he was very nearly incomprehensible in Farsi. Basically, what he spoke was the Farsi equivalent of Ebonics.

"And?"

"I can't be sure we'll survive, much less your 'Nepos,' " I said. "But I'll do everything I can to keep them alive."

"Thank you," he said, clearly moved. It was apparent he liked his "Nepos" and felt like shit leaving them behind. Well, there was a lot of that going around. "Good luck, old chap."

"Same to you."

Well, I learned why he liked his "Nepos" over time. Pretty quick I started to learn but it took more time to truly learn. If there was ever a race destined for greatness who just ended up at the wrong place and the wrong time, it's the fucking Nepalese.

I've dealt with lots of cultures and races in my time. Most of them I don't care much for. Arabs are lazy as hell, Iranians are arrogant. But Iranians don't have a touch on the French and probably work harder even if they fuck much of it up. (Call it the Active/Stupid culture.) Kurds and Americans get along pretty well, all things considered, but Kurds treat their women like shit.

If there is a finer group of non-Americans than the Nepalese I have yet to meet them. They're some of the hardest workers I've ever met, tend to be fairly intelligent, have got a very broad sense of humor and are just tough as fucking nails. Disciplined, too.

Ghurkas, who are some of the finest infantry in the world, are drawn from some of the Nepalese tribes. Our guys weren't (mostly) Ghurkas. But working with them I learned why Ghurkas are so highly regarded. If the Ghurks are better than my Nepos, that's pretty fucking scary.

But at the time it was another pain in the ass I didn't care for.

So about that time Butterfill stopped by.

"Yo, Bandit. What did the Limey want?"

He was a captain now. He could call me Bandit.

"He couldn't get out his Nepalese. They're ours now."

"Well, that's the mess section settled."

"So, what are you going to do?"

It was a big question. As in, square miles and umpteen billions of dollars of gear big.

"I have a very complete action plan provided by the battalion commander. Actually, the S-3 working from the BC's concept plan."

"Uh, huh."

The S-3 was a pretty good guy. But if he had to create a plan from the BC's concept, it was unlikely to be good.

"We're to maintain continuous three-man roving patrols around the perimeter," Butterfill said. "Six of them, which means a platoon on patrol all the time. And one platoon on standby for reaction."

I winced. What he'd just said . . . Well, there were so many things wrong with it.

First of all, three-man patrols in uparmored humvees or Strykers were just waiting to get picked off. Attackers weren't going to hit us near the main base. They'd wait until a patrol was on the far side, separated from other patrols, and set off an IED or burn in with RPGs and light them up.

In a high-threat environment, and we were a very big and juicy target which was going to make this a high-threat environment, you did not send out three-man patrols.

The other thing was, there was no downtime built in. Eighteen guys on patrol meant a full platoon on duty at all times. They could do that for twenty-four to forty-eight hours, max. Another on "standby" and covering internal guarding meant they weren't exactly getting downtime. It would be better than being on patrol duty but not much.

And there was stuff that would have to be done. Technically, we were supposed to keep up with training. I figured that was out the window but still. And there was maintenance. Stuff did not run itself. We'd been left with one "support" platoon, most mechanics, to keep stuff running. But they didn't have enough hands to do it all. And, hell, if something broke it's not like we couldn't go out and find a replacement. But there was work other than patrolling that was going to have to be done.

Nobody would have so much as a day of downtime. Of any noticeable degree. And if we got hit by a big attack, we'd have a third of our unit scattered to fuck and gone. If the attackers were smart and put in an attack on a patrol, pulled out the duty platoon . . .

"And your opinion of that, Captain?"

"Six patrols aren't going to be able to prevent pilfering . . ."

"Pilfering, hell," I said. "I'm worried about getting fucking overrun."

"And then there's that."

Even the core base was too large for one company to secure in the event of a heavy attack.

"Technically," he added, causing more heartburn, "You're in charge."

"You're in charge of security," I pointed out. "I'm in charge of the support section and 'responsible,' fuck me, for inventory of all this crap."

"You're the senior officer."

"Oh, thank you very much."

"So if you have any . . . alterations you might suggest, I'd be under orders to implement them."

"Putting me in the position of violation of a direct order."

"There is that. On the other hand . . ."

"I don't want to end up as a trophy for some fucking RIF."

Well, hell, all that material was just sitting there.

The whole camp was protected by berms. But you can climb a berm. Teams of guys can climb a berm and "pilfer" quite a lot of stuff. Like weapons. And ammunition to go with the weapons.

Berms weren't going to keep the majority of them out. The roving patrols might slow them down. But only slow them.

So I started looking in the inventory.

Concertina is a razor wire that's wrapped in big rolls that open up into about three-foot circles. You might have seen it up on fences around prisons.

It's very nasty stuff. One strand was not so much. A bunch of strands made for a very tangled situation. You could get through it, but not easily.

You don't want to know how much concertina was in the inventory. More, by volume, than the MREs. Acres.

Wire, by itself, though, wasn't going to stop the RIFs.

Want to take a square area guess how many mines we had in the ammo bunkers? Cubic, actually, their boxes stack quite well.

Army engineers are normally the guys who put in major defenses. There had been a lot of engineers in Iran. (Sorry for calling you guys and gals "camp followers.") And over the years they've gotten tired of doing things by hand so they have some interesting equipment to do it for them.

They had, I shit you not, a big ass semiarmored . . . thing that could put in fence posts (big ones, twelve feet high) and hook fencing to it, all automatically. It looked like a big dump truck crossed with a factory. Another big ass . . . thing from the same family could lay down concertina at the rate of one mile an hour for as long as you fed it concertina.

Last but not least, they had an armored vehicle that could emplace mines for you as long as you fed it mines. In series, which means not just one at a time but three in a pattern.

And, hell, the Nepos were just sitting there.

But we didn't start with securing the whole base. First things first; make sure we survived.

Titan Base had had a permanent population of nearly five thousand, with military personnel and contractors, as well as a floating population (since it was used for replacements) of another thousand or so at any time. Since everybody was in tents and trailers, that was . . . Think acres again.

The core of the base, though, was smaller than a FOB. That is, the central offices and some senior officers' quarters that were still trailers but with slightly better amenities.

The latter, however, wasn't disconnected from the majority of the base in any way.

Well, the bulldozers were just sitting there, too.

I don't think the last plane was off the ground before we got started. One of the mechanics knew how to drive a bulldozer.

Look, technically we should have taken down the tents and possibly moved the trailers or something. We didn't have time and we didn't care.

Over the next three days we bermed the central area, renaming it Fort Lonesome, and started laying in wire. There were three kinds: Military link (sort of like chain-link but welded and much thicker), barbed wire and concertina.

Eventually, over the course of the next several months (yes, people, months) we got Fort Lonesome to look like this:

Tanglefoot barbed wire (barbed wire strung tight at about shin-height) covering a thirty-meter cleared zone all the way around the fort except for two entrances. Get to them later.

Six strands of concertina piled against a twelve-foot military link outer perimeter fence. Three strands on top.

A cleared zone that was mined like a motherfucker. You had to work hard to get to the mines. Anybody that got to the mines got what they fucking deserved.

Another set of tanglefoot, this one laced with command detonated mines (claymores).

More concertina, staked down.

Berm with ground-level sandbagged bunkers heavy enough to shrug off a 105 round. (Aluminum aircraft pallets are great for making those. Don't know why we had . . . well a bit less than an acre of pallets but . . . They were just sitting there.)

All of the bunkers mounted M240 medium machine guns except for "heavy defense points" which had .50 caliber. I thought about putting .50 caliber all around and we might have gotten to it, but . . . Ah, hell, getting ahead of myself.

We weren't done.

The area was flat as a fucking pancake so a raised central defense area was out of the question. But we put the final defensive zone in the middle. There we had another berm with three exits, more concertina, mines, fences, etc. Covered trenches to the central redoubt. And enough armored vehicles that if it got down to brass tacks we still had a chance to fight our way out. I brought in two Abrams, along with six Strykers and two Bradleys. We also had fuel trucks, maintenance equipment and what-have-you in there.

That was Fort Lonesome. Inside its nigh impregnable defenses we could lay our heads with peace.

About the Nepos.

So while Butterfill was getting his act together, I wandered over to the mess area to see what I'd been left.

The barracks for the Nepos were halfway across the compound but most of them were gathered in the (vast) combined mess hall. And they looked dejected. About the only time I ever saw Nepalese looking depressed.

"Who speaks English?" I asked walking across the mess hall.

Lemme tell you about that. Imagine a high-school gym. No, imagine an aircraft hangar. Fill it with tables and those benches you ate on in school. Position lots of garbage cans. Have a serving area at one end. Cordon off a small area where there are more "civilized" tables and chairs and, you know, tablecloths and silverware.

Behind the serving area is the kitchen. You don't want to try to imagine the kitchen.

These guys were sitting or standing down by the serving area. The mess hall was, otherwise, completely empty and I'd never realized how much it echoed until I had to walk the whole length in near isolation.

"I am speaking English, sir," one of them said. "I am Samad."

Samad was not a Nepalese name. I, to this day, don't know why my friend is named Samad. I've never asked and hope to be able to refrain.

Samad was the straw-boss for the rest of the Nepos. Mainly because he spoke some English (it got better) and because he was a former Ghurka. He says he was a subadar major, a sergeant major or master sergeant. I figure he was a sergeant, maybe even a private. But I've never challenged him on it.

Ghurkas (okay, technically "Ghorkas") are all Nepalese but not all Nepalese can become Ghurkas. Ghurkas are recruited from four tribes in Nepal and the position has become to a great extent hereditary. And there's not much you can say that distinguishes Ghurkas except they're short, tend to be kind of barrel-like, have very tough skulls, smile a lot, are very disciplined and fight like ever-loving bastards.

Samad was the only Ghurka among the Nepos but all of the Nepos turned out to follow the same pattern. I told Samad that we'd been left behind and that they were working for me now. He translated and the whole group started to give those grins that are the trademark of their race. They had somebody to tell them what to do again. What it would be didn't matter. Just tell them what to do.

There was a lot of initial movement. The company wasn't barracked near the area we were planning on building up. Stuff had to be toted.

There were vehicles but it wasn't that far to walk. The guys picked up their personal gear and walked.

I told Samad the Nepos were going to have to barrack in with us and we headed over to where the procession was forming. The Nepos didn't even ask for orders, they just started grabbing gear, including packs from the troops. That took a bit of sorting out and we finally convinced them that infantry could carry their own packs a few hundred meters.

Samad was everywhere. At the time he had no real clue about how to expand on an order and acted a bit "active/stupid." Some of the things he had the Nepos doing were useless or counterproductive. It's one of the reasons I think he was a private not a sergeant major. But eventually we got over it. Took a while. I'll cover "training" later.

We moved. And we moved again. Then we started clearing.

We did send out patrols. One. Two fully loaded Strykers moving together. It was a deterrence patrol, not a guard.

You see, Titan Base was well out on the plains east of Abadan but people were making the trek anyway. Abadan was headed for the sort of hell only the worst areas in the U.S. experienced (see L.A. and Detroit) and people were trying to get away from the Plague and the chaos. People may rant and march and burn effigies about the U.S. when things are good, but as soon as the shit hits the fan they turn to American troops. Trust. They may not trust their government but all the propaganda about "abuses" in the world doesn't break the trust of people in the American soldier.

Problem was, one company could not do shit for them. Later on we figured ways to help, a little. H. R. Puffinstuff; we could do a little but we couldn't do enough. But that was later.

We moved. Then we started tearing down and rebuilding.

My office had actually been in the central command zone. I'd had one over in the Battalion S-4 shop but as part of the "reconsolidation" I got a new one, with more paperwork, in the central area. Actually, all the paperwork wasn't in the office. There was a trailer next door that had all the paperwork. All I had in the office were the summaries of the summaries of the summaries of what was in the trailer. And on my computer the "physical location for inventory" of all the fucking stuff that had been dropped off.

It had been a scramble pulling all the stuff in. And some of the stuff wasn't where people said it was. But given the scramble, the place was amazingly well organized. That general and his staff knew their stuff.

My main worry was the ammo. Without the ammo all the Tinkertoys we had stored weren't worth dick. But even the ammo bunkers, which were mostly on the other side of the base from our area, covered one hell of a lot of ground.

It was actually while we were moving, the first day, planes barely off the ground, that the "deterrence patrol" had to do some deterring. Two "military grade" trucks with Iranian Army markings came up the road from Abadan and turned towards the entrances nearest the ammunition depot. The patrol had been on the far side of the area when they started out and only got up to them when they were nearly to the gates.

They stopped when the Strykers came in view and a man in "military garb" got out of one and waved for the Strykers to approach.

Only problem being that the drivers of the trucks weren't in military garb. Oh, maybe they were laborers and maybe the guy thought he had some right to U.S. Army ammo. Didn't matter. The lead Stryker fired a burst of .50 caliber off at an angle while the trailer moved over to the gates.

The trucks turned around and went back towards Abadan.

It was duly reported and the deterrence patrol continued.

They also ran into clearly civilian groups. People were walking or driving out. The gates to the place were shut and the patrol fired warning shots to scatter them. We just couldn't do a damned thing for them. Not then.

Normally, American soldiers ride fairly openly and are notorious for handing out candy and food. Kids love them and vice versa. We couldn't be kind. We had way too much to do.

People started camping out. We were in the middle of a flat fucking plain ten miles from the nearest town, Abadan, and people just trickled out there. I don't know what they thought we were going to do for them, but they came in droves. And they stayed in ramshackle huts cobbled together from shit people dragged from the city.

Living on a desert plain with no water or food in sight is not a good option. Unless the alternative is worse. Gives an idea what it must have been like in Abadan.

And they died. We weren't interacting with them at all at that point. The patrols had orders to keep people at least five hundred meters from the berms and any time people tried to approach they'd open fire. Usually a warning burst from a .50 cal would turn people away. Not always.

Fucking drivers in the Middle East are the worst drivers on earth. And more totally oblivious than a blonde on a cell phone. They started to get the point after the fifth or sixth shot-up wreck on the road to the base. Yes, they were civilians. Probably. None of the cars blew up. And, yes, there were women and kids in the cars.

Did we like it? No. Was it necessary? Yes. Why?

Follow the logic. By the end of the first day there were three or four hundred people gathered not far from the main gates. The gates had six guys on them, all we could spare. They were in bunkers, but only six guys. Everybody else was busy creating someplace we could huddle "until relieved." Two Strykers trying to cover the entire perimeter and six guys on the gates.

So we let a car come up to the gates. People go in the direction of the pack. All those people wanted inside our walls for protection from . . . Well, it was probably pretty bad in Abadan.

If they weren't firing to kill, think six guys could keep three or four hundred desperate people from overrunning them? And then there would be three or four hundred desperate people running around the base. Think we could have maintained any semblance of order with a bare hundred soldiers? While trying to keep the rest of the base under control?

Later we helped out. Things got complicated. But for then, there wasn't anything we were going to do.

Oh, except keep it from becoming Abadan.

The evening of day one people had settled in. And two "military style" trucks approached the main gates, then turned off into the area where people were huddling. At that point, they barely had any shelter. It was just . . . people. Sitting in a fucking desert. (Yes, it was fucking with us, okay? We're American soldiers. Believe it or not, most of us are paladins somewhere in our heart of hearts. We did not like it.)

The trucks stopped and "males in civilian garb" began unloading and "attacking" the refugees. They were stealing what little food and water they had and apparently engaging in some rapes. Or started to.

The gate guards put in a call for the on-call platoon, which was mostly still engaged in moving shit, and the roving patrol. But the roving patrol was up by the ammo bunkers, about a mile away.

The main camp of people was about five hundred meters west of the gates. Five hundred meters is a long shot for any sniper especially into the sun, which was setting.

Captain Butterfill, however, and it was his idea not mine, had put two of his company snipers on the gates. Not a normal choice but it turned out to be prophetic. They "engaged the attackers at long range with careful aim." Apparently got three of them before the rest got the idea. Some people might have been kidnapped from the refugees. See also "raped." But the two "military grade" trucks drove off. Last we saw of that group of problem-makers but we were to have many many more.

By evening the movement was complete. Nothing else but we were centrally located and close to the gates. (We hadn't been before.) Units were rotated. A third Stryker was parked outside the gates. There were Klieg lights over the gates (and all along the berm although most eventually had to get shut off). They could still see the edge of the refugee camp.

A mortar carrier was sent out with an infantry Stryker in support. The Stryker stayed back while the mortar carrier approached the refugee camp.

Look, we're human, okay? People were dying in the desert and God wasn't raining mana. Well, maybe He was but the "mana" said "U.S. Army" on the side and it came in brown plastic packages.

Somewhere in the mass of shit were large numbers of "emergency civilian disaster support packages." They were sort of like MREs but they were made to fit just about any religious taboo and came in yellow packages instead of brown. We didn't have the time or interest to find them. We had MREs. We took MREs.

And bottled water. We had that, too. Not quite acres but a shitload. We also had a water processing plant and all sorts of shit we didn't know how to run. We were to figure it out.

In the meantime, we had bottled water. We took that and MREs out to the refugees.

Mistake? I dunno. Maybe. Maybe if we'd been hard-hearted enough to just ignore the people dying in the desert they would have gone away. Or maybe not. Maybe we'd have had a few hundred or thousand corpses from dehydration and malnutrition.

Saw this clip one time on a funny video show. First part was two ducks swimming in a pond. Mallards. The people were ooing and aaahing. Cool! Ducks in the pool.

They apparently fed them and the ducks eventually continued their migration well fed and able to prosper.

The next bit was the following season. The ducks had apparently reproduced or found friends. Ten ducks. Cool! Ducks in the pool.

The next bit was some following season. Must have been over a thousand ducks trying to get in the pool. Water was splashing twenty feet as they nose-dived into the throng.

Yeah. It was like that.

But we knew not what we did.

There were no attacks and people weren't trying to overrun them. They handed out one MRE packet and two bottles of water to each person who approached. They had extras and they left them behind. I'm sure that the toughest and the strongest grabbed the extras. Law of nature.

The guys also dropped off shovels and pointed to the corpses which, thus far, had been left to rot.

There were no major incidents.

Day two was spent digging out stuff we needed to toughen up our defenses. We found the engineering equipment we needed right where it was supposed to be. You couldn't miss the wire storage area; piles of concertina that high are noticeable. We drove construction equipment over and got to work.

More refugees. Hovels were going up.

This time before dark we sent out the food wagon. The corpses were just sitting there. The guys on the mortar track pointed to the corpses and went away.

Some people tried to run them down. The Stryker fired warning shots.

About an hour later, the gate guards reported that some people were burying the corpses of the guys who'd been shot the day before. When the mortar carrier went back out, the guys on the gate went with them. (There were replacements on the gate.)

They pointed out the guys who had been on the burial detail. They got extra rations and the translator told them to dig some slit trenches or find somebody to dig them for latrines. Or the food wouldn't come out the next day. And if there were dead bodies, bury them.

Day Two: No major incidents.

Oh, one but not about refugees or attackers. The BC called. He told us we were doing a great job and that our contribution was extremely important. I asked how long we were going to be stuck in this armpit. He said that hadn't been determined yet but finding out a fixed timetable for redeployment was at the top of his list.

Yeah. Right.

Day Three.

Everybody didn't walk out to the refugee camp. There was a fair car-park building up. People were using them for shelters and such.

A line of "civilian style trucks, vans and cars" came out from Abadan.

Same shit as Day One. Guys started unassing and robbing everyone in sight.

The ROE had been adjusted. And this time we had a response platoon. (The Nepos were taking up a lot of the work.) But we didn't really need it.

The gate Stryker rolled out. It got close enough to "engage the vehicles with careful, aimed fire" and started shooting them the hell up. It continued rolling forward to the edge of where the refugee's shit was scattered and fired more shots over the group.

Now, by this time the attackers and the refugees were sort of mixed up. The refugees were mostly trying to run away, but some of them were fighting. The stuff they had was all they had. They weren't just going to give it up.

Many of the "attackers," though, were armed. And quite a few refugees got shot by them.

But when the Stryker rolled up and started lighting up their rides, they fired at the Stryker, which was buttoned up and thus a lousy target, and started trying to run.

We did not give them the opportunity. Every single "armed person" was engaged and all the "convoy" was fired up and destroyed.

Quite a few bodies to bury, though. So we rolled an engineering vehicle out and dug a slit trench. We were going to roll it out the next day but somebody had already filled it in. And the bodies were gone.

Were there wounded among the refugees? Probably. Were we going to send one of our two medics out to find out? Or if anybody had eye problems or goiters or a host of other shit we'd fixed around the world?

Nope. Not then.

There were some shots from the refugee camp that night. Didn't know at the time if it was happiness that they had weapons or people settling personal disputes. But there weren't any bodies in the morning.

There were the day after. And pretty much every day as time went on. But they got buried and that was all we cared about.

Was there "pilfering" going on? Yeah, probably. Some. But, remember, we were in the middle of a big ass flat fucking plain. I mean flat like the flat parts of Kansas. And we were slightly elevated. (Slope of the plain coming up from the river. There weren't any hills, trust me.) We could see all the way to the Shat Al Arab, Abadan and the refineries. The closest point of concealed approach was about four miles and that was from a line of trees by the refinery. That was to the west and southwest. To the north there wasn't much but the trace of the highway (big one) running to Awhaz. To the south, flat plain that eventually became one of the world's biggest and flattest salt marshes. On a clear day, and there weren't many that clear, you could see the edge of the Gulf.

To the east, way the fuck away, were the Zagros Mountains. You could tell the progression of the seasons by the way the snow on the top slid up and down. Point is, you could see them.

Anybody approaching with any sort of vehicle we were going to detect miles away. Well, once we got eyes in every direction. That took about four weeks.

Chapter Three Pax Americana

What was happening in that four weeks?

Inside the berm, a lot of changes. We cleared an open area around our zone and rebuilt a FOB inside the LOG. (Fort Lonesome.) It was pretty big for even a company to hold but every time Fillup and me figured we had everything we could possibly need we thought of something else.

I'm from Minnesota. I don't know any Minnesotan, not a real Minnesotan, who's not a pack rat. It's in our genes. I could never have enough parts, rations, water, fuel, to satisfy me. Okay, maybe I was in the right place being an S-4. I hated being left to guard this fucker, but having it all? Mine all mine? The only person to tell me I didn't own it a face on a videophone who was way too far away to force me to do anything? Heaven.

Mine, mine, mine.

Speaking of mines.

We got Fort Lonesome minimally prepared to withstand a significant assault. Then we got started on securing the whole base.

We shouldn't have had to do it. But the ROE that came down on high (which we were still, technically, under) did not permit laying in mines. Don't know why we had so many of the fuckers, but we did. And we didn't lay the mines down first.

First came the outer perimeter fence. That was just to keep kids and dogs out. It took two weeks to lay in and used up just about all of our remaining military link. It was right at six and a half miles around the perimeter. That's one big fucking fence.

We put in gates by the main gate. (Later we played with that extensively.) The main gate had a series of berms, concrete barriers and such to keep suicide trucks from getting to it. The fence linked into the edge of those and we put in outer gates.

Then we got started on the inner defenses. More concertina. (The stacks were, to my amazement, dropping. Who could have known?)

Most of this was getting done by the Nepos. We had multiple patrols working, the gate guards, security for the workers on the fence and a reserve force. The troops didn't have time to do the manual labor.

I'd been pissed at getting the Nepos dumped on us but they were a godsend. Okay, first of all, the troops were, by and large, lousy cooks. The Nepos were decent. They tended to start to cook some odd shit without their British supervisors. If you let them get away with it we would have all been eating vegetarian curry and vindaloo. I'll admit I got a bit of taste for vindaloo but it was not shared by all the troops.

The nice thing, in my opinion, about vindaloo was that it was pork based.

There were problems. Oh. My. GOD were there problems. I'm not talking about security issues, either.

Electricity.

The power plant for the base was a big gas-turbine fucker. Nobody but nobody had any clue how to operate it. But there were back-up generators that were, essentially, diesel-electric railroad engines. Those the mechanics could figure out. And we had one fuck of a lot of diesel in the tank-farm.

We only needed power for the area we were inhabiting. The mechanics and a couple of the Nepos that had some clue about electric got those buildings hooked up to a couple of the generators. But we had a problem with power surging.

So we got on the phone to back home. No, we have no fixed date for your redeployment. You're doing a great job. Keep the faith.

(My fucking dad is dead you bastard and I'm stuck on the ass end of nowhere. All of the troops have gotten word that somebody in their family has died and to say the least morale should be shot. We're keeping it up by giving them shit to do but that's only going to last so long . . . )

Fine, fine, but we need to find somebody who has a clue about generators . . .

Hello. Commo. We had one radio tech. He was not a satellite radio tech. We had this big fucking communications van and no clue how to run most of the shit.

Fortunately, one of the privates in the company had spent time before enlisting working in a satellite shop in a cable company. He wasn't a satellite engineer, by any stretch, but when we lost commo with home for three days he finally figured out how to get us back up. (Without SkyGeek, in fact, this book would never have come about.)

The water for the base was a pipeline from the Shat that ran to a water processing plant. The plant was called a ROWPU. I had to look that one up. Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Unit.

About week three some bastard cut our water line. We had water for about three weeks at current use (big fucking tanks) but after that we were going to be dying in the desert.

Turned out the original base had been supplied by a deep bore well. There was water down there. We weren't all that far from the Gulf and the Shat. Water percolates. There were even limestone layers that carried subsurface water from the Zagros. That was actually what the well was tied into. Crisp, clean water. Don't know why they ever put in that fucking line. It was a tactical weak point.

Only one problem. The well had been rather radically disconnected from the water system. It wasn't even left as backup. Don't know why.

So we had to figure out how to reconnect it. We were not plumbers and so proved figuring that out. And then figure out how to get the very deep water up to the surface.

"Head pressure" does not always have to do with something obscene. I'm a farmer. I understand head pressure. Farmers use wells a lot. However, this one was a holy mother of a bitch of a big, deep well. We got it done.

React, adapt, overcome. We did one hell of a lot of that.

We got the mines laid in. We even found a stack of signs that warned of mines in multiple languages. We shot some guys in a pickup truck who were trying to sneak in the back way. We filled in all but the main gate entrances to the base.

It took two months of work, mostly by the Nepos. But we got the base surrounded by multiple lines of fencing, mines and such whot. We even found a complete "video surveillance" system that had never been installed. We installed it. The reserve platoon monitored.

We fed and watered refugees. There had gotten to be a fuck-load of them. And they'd apparently established some sort of governance body. At least there were guys with guns (scavenged from attackers) who strutted around with angry expressions on their face.

Feeding and watering of the refugees had gotten to be a massive chore. Again, handled mostly by the Nepos. We now had to send out two mortar carriers to carry all the rations. Each of them towed a water buffalo. (A large water tank that had spigots on it.) The refugees would get handed a meal. (We'd found the yellow stuff by then. Some people waved the old MRE wrappers after the first couple of "refugee" meals. Apparently they hadn't realized that was a pork patty and wanted more.) They had to figure out how to get their own water. Doing it that way increased the time but just handing out that many meals increased the time.

Sometimes the guys with guns took a meal away from somebody right in front of our eyes. That really stuck in people's craws. But we weren't going to get off the tracks to give the meal back.

A couple of weeks after that sort of thing started to happen, one of the guys with guns took away a meal from a woman and then started beating on her.

Each of the tracks was manned by a track commander at the .50, two Nepos to hand out meals and three guys with rifles for security.

One of the guys with a rifle shot him.

There was a lot of shouting. More guys with guns came out. The woman ran to the track. The TC jacked a round into the .50 and fired a burst over the camp. The Stryker that was sitting back on overwatch gunned its engine and rolled forward a couple of feet.

Things settled down. The lady was allowed to scramble on the track. Others came over. They were shooed away. Meals were passed out until they were gone. The tracks came back to base with an extra body.

That was the first refugee we let in. It wouldn't be the last and, yeah, that had issues, too.

Specialist Stephan Noton's ass was in a very deep crack and he knew it. The track commander wasn't real happy, either. He had just brought a refugee into the camp.

What was worse was, well . . .

Salah wasn't gorgeous. But after this long in the desert and no fucking women around at all . . . She was seventeen according to the translator and as far as she knew all her family was dead. She had lived in Abadan all her life and was a very good Moslem as far as that sort of thing went. She was a nice girl. We didn't question her about specific events. I didn't want to know if she'd been raped or how many times. Yes and many was probably the answer. I also didn't want to know how she'd been surviving in the camp. But apparently whatever she'd been doing wasn't good enough for at least one of the guys with guns.

I could see the thought percolating through the heads of the troops. Most of them had, at this point, been out feeding the refugees one time or another. And despite the conditions there were quite a few females out there better looking than Salah. And we'd been away from women a long time.

And when you've been starving to death in a desert, you'll do a lot for a cracker and a bottle of cold water.

Hell, I was thinking it.

But I had some capacity to think with my topside head. And various thoughts were percolating. Some of them had to do with maintenance and support.

The Nepos were doing most of that. But as the major construction ran down, I'd been thinking about other uses for them. A company was not enough guys to hold this place against any sort of serious attack. Yes, we could draw back into Fort Lonesome but that wasn't the mission.

We believed as an article of faith that sooner or later we'd be "relieved." Maybe some other unit would be sent out to replace us. Maybe we'd be ordered to just leave all the shit behind. My personal choice was to destroy most of it in place. But something was going to happen. Uncle Sam was not going to leave us out here to grow old and die.

But if we got a serious attack, and one was bound to happen sooner or later, we couldn't do much about it. Unless we had more troops.

And the Nepos were just sitting there.

Well, no, they weren't. They were cleaning our clothes and fixing our food and maintaining some of the support equipment while we were defending the base. Sidenote: It takes ten people to keep one infantry soldier functioning in battle. Yeah, many of those are really "rear echelon motherfuckers" (REMFs) but that also includes cooks, techs and whatnot that are absolutely vital to an infantry unit. We'd been left with a few techs but damned little "other support." "Other support" was what the Nepos were doing.

But as the main job of getting the defenses in place was winding down, I started to give some thought to other uses for them.

Yes, they weren't Ghurkas. But at this point I trusted them to hold a gun while behind me. At least if they could hold a gun and not have an AD. Thing being, I wasn't going to tell the troops they now had to cook. Laundry, sure. Cooking? Not these guys. And the troops were already busy.

Women could probably figure out how to cook and clean. And, hell, it would relieve some other pressures. Might create new ones, but there were some pressures building up right before my eyes I did not care for.

By the way, the Nepos were not entirely straight. Oh, I'm not saying they were all queer as a three-dollar bill. I think it was more like prison, maybe a function of their culture. Samad had a slighter built Nepo who always seemed to be hanging around and that he bunked with. Sure. They were just friends.

For that matter there was, I was pretty sure, at least one "couple" among the troops. I didn't give a shit as long as it didn't affect the unit and it didn't seem to. Don't ask, don't tell.

(For clarification: Once Samad got a wife, I never saw hide nor hair of male "close personal friends." And he thinks the question is funny. Most things the Nepos and Americans see pretty eye to eye on. Some things not. Different cultures.)

So. There was an argument for bringing some of the refugee females, if they were amenable, into the camp. When we got relieved, pardon the pun, we could write them off as "locally hired support staff." Whoever was incoming could deal with that.

The question was, what would the nature of our "relief" be? A new unit to sit on the junk? Or leave it all behind? Or destroy it in place?

In the first case, well, camp followers rarely worry about which camp they're following. There might be some broken hearts and pining. Get over it.

In the last two, though, which at one level I considered likely enough to be formulating plans in the back of my mind, there were . . . issues.

Say that we were told "destroy everything, we're coming to get you." (By the way, that would mean coming in by helo. There was no way we were going to work through the airport at this point. Iran had no government. The place was slowly being reorganized under local strong-men. It wasn't until later that such got functional in the Abadan area and when it did . . . Well, ahead of myself again. Point is, we weren't going out by 747.)

If we got extracted we might be able to argue for extracting the Nepos. But a bunch of local civilian women? Uh, uh. Which would probably leave them worse off than before.

I knew my logic was getting messed up. Normally, I could see a situation and make a decision without any real difficulty. Things were black and white. This looked like shades of gray and I wasn't good with gray.

So I took a walk.

Somebody, probably an overzealous engineer lieutenant, had put a "sentry walk" up on the berm near the main area of the base. It was a lousy item, defensively. We didn't have sentries walk the parapets because normally they'd be dead meat for a sniper. But the area faced southeast, where there was fuck-all for miles and we had thermal imagery cameras set up so anyone approaching, especially at night, would be detected at artillery ranges not sniper ranges.

It was, therefore, a decent place to walk and pace.

I think it was the character Horatio Hornblower who used to pace all the time. I didn't. Pacing, to me, was a sign that the commander didn't know what to do. But the truth was, I didn't. And pacing did help me think.

So I put on my battle rattle, headed up to the parapet and paced.

The night was clear and damned cold for Abadan in the summer. The wind was from the east, down off the mountains as it often was. And it was a cool breeze, lemme tell you. But it also helped me think.

I knew that two aspects of the question were fucking with my logic. The first was "female" and the second was "refugee." I'll take the second first.

About fifteen years back was the only time I think it made the news. But UN aid workers in two or three areas were trading refugee supplies to underage refugees, male and female, for sexual favors.

That was, to say the least, a violation of honor. The people were, hands down, scum. They were given a trust and they violated it.

I was contemplating doing something that was, on the surface, identical. Violation of honor? Would I be "scum" even in my own eyes?

The answer depended simply on whether it was the logical decision given all the factors. That led to the "female" part.

Males have a notable fall-off in long-term critical decision making in conditions of sexual cues. And this situation was one huge sexual cue. So I first had to eliminate, for the time being, the term "female."

One way would be to ignore the females, maybe do something to improve the situation but not bring them into the base, and bring in males.

I could not, in good conscience, take in the local males. After disastrous experiences in the first part of the Iraqi occupation, the military never hired locals or even Islamics for anything where they could be a threat. One remaining hardcore that we let in undetected could gain access to the ammunition and explosives on the base, there was no way to control internally with the forces I had, and do untold damage. Bringing in male refugees for support was out of the question.

Females, by the way, did not have the same security risk. Females in most of the local societies were trained, very early, to be nonviolent followers. They were extremely compliant. That would create its own issues, but it virtually eliminated them as a security threat.

I also was going to have to dig out another decision making tool I often used when unsure. "What would Sergeant Rutherford do?"

Sergeant First Class Rutherford had been my platoon sergeant when I led the Scouts. A harder, colder, more stoic NCO I never met. Talking one time he told me that his secret to getting things done was "Do one thing every day that you don't have to do immediately and you don't want to do." A better definition of stoicism I've never seen. And a better way to get stuff done I've never found.

But the question was, what would he do in this instance? How would he make the decision?

Frankly, he would be able to ignore the fact that he was considering females. Not because he was gay, but because he was an ultimate stoic. I was not, and knew it.

So I did a little change in my mind. I quit thinking of females.

I imagined that there was a group of males, say Salvadorans, who had somehow gotten caught in the refugee camp. Because they were not locals, they were being abused by the guards.

Item One: I needed more hands. There were too many tasks I felt necessary to complete the mission for the personnel I had on hand.

Item Two: I could not trust the local males.

So I imagined the females as these hypothetical Salvadorans. If I had a group of non-Islamic males in the camp from a friendly country, would I bring them in to help out?

Oh, hell, yeah. The logic, that way, was clear. Thinking of the potential support in terms of a bunch of Salvadoran former workers that got left outside the walls made it clear it was a rational decision. What would Sergeant Rutherford do? Bring in the Salvadorans.

Okay, but they're not Salvadorans. They're females. They are compliant local females who will do just about anything for a cracker and some water. If they weren't that compliant before, they were now from the reports I was getting from the camp.

That left the question of how to deal with them inside the walls.

Rule One included the rule "No Fraternization." Fraternization is a nice way of saying "Don't fuck the local females." (It was assumed soldiers wouldn't fuck the local males which in numerous instances turned out to be erroneous. But I digress.)

The way that the Army maintained Rule One with a bunch of horny young soldiers was to virtually eliminate contact with local females. Units went out from the FOB on missions and then returned. Mostly for very good security reasons. But the point was, there were no local females inside the base and when males ran into them outside they were a) on a mission, b) in the company of a large number of other males and c) not going to be around long to chat.

In this case, they were going to be in long-term contact with local females.

A military maxim says: Never give an order you know won't be carried out.

Giving an order you know won't be carried out just makes the commander look like an idiot. "Rule One is still in effect" and mixing horny soldiers with compliant local females wouldn't work. Period. Why?

Some of the soldiers were just going to flat ignore it. They, too, would be affected by the reduction in critical decision making in the presence of sexual cues. I'd have guys slipping away from security posts to screw because that was when they could get away with it.

And the girls weren't going to stop them. Why? Compliance and "anything for a cracker." They would also see the males as their protectors.

Giving an order that's unenforcable reduces trust in the commander's decision-making capability. How can you trust somebody who's stupid enough to give an unenforceable order? That means that unit combat efficiency goes down as the troops second-guess their commander.

Trying to enforce Rule One would, therefore, be worse than saying "Here's the girls. They're yours."

If, however, I put in place logical and rational restrictions under the circustances, it could be handled. Rotas, etc. If the guys knew they didn't have to slip away for a quicky, they wouldn't. They'd do their jobs.

Some of the guys would probably be such paladins that, at least at first, they'd take their "rota" as a chance to snuggle with something comfortable. Others were going to use the girls like the Kleenex and towels they were jacking off on already. There would be issues between those two types. That's what sergeants are for.

And they'd get their tubes cleaned. With a bunch of testosterone laden males stuck in the middle of nowhere, no real way to get home, etc. I was looking at the sort of potential mutiny that led to the Bounty, anyway. Right now, if the guys mutinied, they could set themselves up as local lords and fuck Rule One. There was no indication, at all, we were going to ever get relieved. I'd had the question practically every day. I knew there was talk. Heading that off was a good thing. Getting their tubes cleaned was a way to head that off.

In the end I made, I think, the logical decision. The haunted eyes of Salah, multiplied by hundreds in my head, had nothing to do with it. I'd eliminated that, I'm pretty sure successfully with the "Salvadoran" argument. I think Sergeant Rutherford would have approved. (Found out later he died in Savannah. So I never got to ask. Voodoo fuckers.)

The question remained: How to bell the cat?

Up to this point we were having as little to do with the refugees as possible. We tossed them food from the safety of our tracked vehicles. We treated them like a pack of wild dogs.

But we had Salah for information. Apparently after the attack when we'd killed the whole convoy, some of the men of the camp had grabbed the guns. The leader, at this point, was called Abu Bakr. That probably wasn't his real name, since it was the name of one of the successors of Mohammed. But he had the largest family group in the camp and his family had managed to grab the most guns. The shots we'd heard had not been happy noise. His family or people he trusted had the guns. She'd been on the outs with one of his cousins which had led to the incident that had her in the camp.

She didn't know a whole bunch of the people in the camp. But when it was tacitly suggested that we might, maybe, be interested in bringing some women in for support, she nearly broke down. Apparently things were not going well for women at the moment.

Side note: Any feminist who is against modern technology is an idiot. Okay, I'm being redundant but it's true. Women seem to make up a large majority of the "if we all just returned to nature" kumbaya movement.

Modern technology and Western culture are the only things keeping women from a life of utter hell. Every society where social order breaks down it's not necessarily "the poor" who get hit hardest, it's the women.

Kumbaya only works when you've got guys like, well, me keeping guys like Abu Bakr from making your life hell.

End of side note. I could go on, but I won't.

Maybe later.

Was I going to be a total paladin? Oh, hell no. I told her what I needed, about thirty females, young, decent looking, who would cook, clean and provide other "support functions."

Note, I was working through Hollywood, the translator.

"Other support functions, sir?" Hollywood asked.

"What's that Shia thing about "temporary brides"?"

Shia and Sunni. Think Catholic vs. Protestant but more so. I'm not going to get into a five thousand word treatise about the difference. I did note, though, that Abu Bakr was normally a name that would be associated with the Sunni and this was a Shia region which made things in the camp . . . interesting. But one of the things with Shia is that they have this . . . tradition called "temporary marriage." A mullah can "temporarily marry" a Shia female to a guy and for the time that the temporary marriage lasts, say one hour and that will be two hundred bucks, she is legally married and thus does not suffer "dishonor." The "mullah" gets four and you get one, go find another sucker with two hundred bucks, bitch.

Use "pimp" as a translation for "mullah" and you're getting a very accurate picture.

"Uh, we'd need a mullah for that, sir."

"Yeah, and it's a violation of so many regulations I don't want to begin to list them. Rule One, for example. But we need the hands and we need to be relieved. You an Islamic?"

"Uh, technically, sir."

"Good. Then tell her you're a mullah. I'll get you a pimped out Caddy when we get back to the States. Spinners and what-not. Maybe a big hat with a feather."

"I'm not a mullah!"

"I don't care how you explain it to her, as long as she gets the picture."

I don't know how he explained it. She got the picture.

She didn't even mind. Let me put you in her perspective.

You're a seventeen-year-old girl. Your father—who has been your boss your whole life and will be until you are married and your husband becomes your boss—is dead. Your whole life has been ripped apart. You are barely holding onto life in a desert. You have no control over your life or over your body. Once a day a big metal tracked vehicle comes out of a place and there is food and water. Maybe you are allowed to keep some of it. From the look of Salah, not much. You only get a bit of water, less than most Americans drink in an hour. And it is hot (not as hot as normal, but up in the 90s) and men take you whenever they please and any way that they please and usually more than one at a time.

Beyond the berm is paradise. So far, despite being surrounded by men, you have not been raped. You have been given more food than you've seen in months. You can have all the water to drink that you like. You can even dream of having a shower or a bath, something you haven't had in months. You're in air conditioning.

And all they are asking, asking mind you, is if you're willing to work at cooking and cleaning and, oh, yeah, spending some time on your back. Probably in a bed not the hard desert floor. You're not being told, mind you. You may not quite realize that, you may be thinking that they're being nice now but will change their mind soon. But you're being asked. And asked if others would be willing.

Oh, HELL yeah.

When you've been slowing dying in the desert, you'll do a lot for a cracker and some cool water.

I knew that was the reason she was answering in the affirmative. Did I feel like a heel?

Oh, HELL no.

Because I knew that my guys, and the Nepos, would treat them gently or I'd damned well beat the shit out of them. We'd seen what was going on in the camp. We'd seen the lines from time to time. That was probably when some girl, maybe Salah, was being put in her place. Rape is a technique of power. You teach a bitch, be that a guy in prison or a female under your control, who is boss by raping them. It is very nearly the ultimate loss of control over one's body.

I couldn't take in all the female refugees. But I could do some good in the fucking world. Gray good, but still good.

But how to bell the cat?

I decided that the best way to bell a cat is kill it. Hell, talk about good in the world . . . Hmm . . .

The next day, bright and early, Strykers started rolling out of the front gate of the camp. Nobody was moving in the direction of Abadan except the continued trickle of refugees. There were, in other words, no secondary threats. Good thing because most of the company was buttoned up and coming to call on the refugee camp.

At first people got up and started heading towards the road thinking that it was the daily food and water ration. We'd shifted to morning for various reasons so that was reasonable.

But as more and more Strykers rolled out, the people set up a wail. They thought we were leaving.

The Strykers formed up around the gate, then rolled down to the camp. Then they spread out to surround it.

Each of the Strykers had the commander "out and up" in his cupola. The Strykers had been slightly redesigned over the years so the commander's cupola was now a circle of armor which just his head peeked over. They were not good targets.

What were good targets were the two guys on the top deck. Of course, each of them was holding a military grade sniper rifle. So you weren't going to get many shots.

Behind the Strykers were the mortar tracks with their water buffalos and a ten-ton truck.

The lead Stryker waited until the rest were arrayed and some communications were effected. There wasn't much cover in the refugee camp. Hell, it was surprising that everyone hadn't died of exposure. I was getting ready to start fixing that.

But the first and most important thing was to establish who was boss.

When everything was in place, we rolled up to the edge of the refugees.

Let me try to do justice to this picture.

Take seventy-four cars and array them randomly in the desert. Not all were cars. There were four SUVs, nine minivans and fifteen pickup trucks.

Off to one side put more cars and such but they're all blackened piles of rubble.

Scattered in and around these cars and such, place whatever you can imagine for shelter. Tarps held up by twine. Plastic sheets. Blankets serving as tents.

Into this throw garbage. No food, mind you. Call it trash. Inorganic. I was getting ready to deal with the organic trash.

Add in some small personal posessions. Pile those somewhat less randomly around a cluster of six of the minivans and two of the SUVs. Anything of any real value, put in that cluster. Hell, there were even some unopened MRE and "halal" bags.

Throw in about a thousand people. All of them unwashed. Most of them not in amongst the cars. Just scatter them around the desert, just sitting there. No fires because the nearest wood that wasn't under our control was ten miles away.

There is an almost unnoticed open area between the majority of these survivors and the cluster.

Add in some dug holes that were supposed to be where people shat and pissed. They weren't used much. Add in a lot of piles of human dung, huge clouds of flies around same.

Picture Strykers opening up around this area that covered maybe four acres of hell. Troops unass and start moving through the outer periphery of the refugees. They stop well away from the cluster. They are moving in three-man teams. One guy turns to the rear, the other two face inward. All of them, as if by magic, take a knee with their weapons pointed at the ground. They're in the midst of the crowd.

The crowd gets the picture and starts moving. Away from the cluster.

All of this takes place before the troop door of the lead Stryker lowers. Around from the back comes an officer in a dapper uniform. He is carrying not a single weapon. He holds a swagger stick and uses it to wave away the flies. He is, however, wearing a radio and headset.

He is wearing sunglasses.

He is followed by six troops in heavy armor. Their weapons are not down. They are up and training on anyone near him who might be considered a threat. Two face forward, two to the side and two backwards, walking carefully to avoid the filth.

In the midst of this cluster of troops is a seventh, equally well armed. He is followed by a young woman in a blue jumpsuit that looks as if it has recently been removed from a package. Her hair is clean and brushed. She is clean and brushed.

The Stryker has parked as close to the cluster as it can without running over refugees or their meager posessions. It is a short walk to the edge of the cluster where a number of armed men are now up clutching AKs and looking very angry.

The unarmed and unarmored officer does not appear to care if they are angry. He doesn't appear to notice them. He is whacking at flies and smiling and nodding at the few refugees who are too tired or despairing to move out of the way.

Out of one of the minivans comes a large man. He is at least six feet two inches tall and broad with a hard, dark face and black hair. He is carrying an light assault machine gun and bandoliers crossed across his chest. Also two pistols and at least four knives. He is clean shaven but otherwise closely resembles the sort of pirate Sinbad may have had to deal with.

The officer, by the way, is looking down at him. The officer is . . . not small. However he is unarmed.

There are more armed men emerging. They appear to have been resting in the clustered vehicles. A few young women follow them out. Some of them very young.

Do you have this picture clearly? Fourteen armed and angry men. An unarmed captain who is clearly happy to see them. Refugees scrambling to get out of the line of fire. Heavily armed troops in an array that can cover most of the angles of fire.

It's a clear morning, just after dawn, still reasonably cool but looking to be another hot one.

"Hollywood," the officer says, languidly, raising the swagger stick. "Front and center."

The large, armed, man starts saying something angrily. The interpreter cuts him off and gestures to the officer.

"My name is Bandit Six. I am the commander, pro tempore, of Titan Base. Translate."

This is translated. The large, angry man says something and the others laugh.

"Yes. Having completed all of our initial preparation missions within the base, it seems time to do something about the situation outside the walls. We also require some assistance."

A glare.

"Indeed. We will be taking thirty of your ladies to handle camp chores. And they will be the younger and prettier ones."

A female head is peeking out of the minivan the large man had vacated. The girl is probably twelve. She has a large bruise on her cheek and a cut lip. Her clothes are tatters.

The large man is now more angry and speaking quite angrily. He reaches for one of his pistols and draws it, possibly to wave in the air.

"Open fire."

The officer does not flinch. The six troops and the interpreter hit the ground and light the area up. The young woman hits the ground.

The officer stands there. The large, angry, man explodes apart from a .50 caliber round, blood and less identifiable bits splashing on the officer. The officer does not flinch. He simply waves away some more flies. Rounds crack past his ear, he feels a tug from one on his lower left arm.

When the firing stops, he smiles.

Troops move in and ensure all the vehicles are clear.

"Hollywood, find someone in this rat-fuck who can be put in charge. Have Salah start rounding up the girls. All of these for starters. Don't add any of these below the age of . . . sixteen to the thirty count. Any chosen who have children can bring them as well. And if they might not be their children, that's okay, too."

The camp was moved. Some of the refugees had to be carried, but they all survived. It was moved to the other side of the road. A man who said he was a mullah was put in charge. He never carried a gun. (He was later recognized as one of the "diggers" from the first few days. The guys who got off their ass to bury the bodies. Good enough.) Others were found to carry the guns. The example of Abu Bakr was pointed out to them. Food and water distribution was rationalized. Tents and cots were brought out. A roadblock was put on the road to control who came out to the camp. Latrines, eventually a kitchen, etc.

Of course, that brought more refugees. But . . .

Some good in the world. For a time. A moment.

Pax Americana. It's like a gnat in a blast furnace in the Middle East.

Chapter Four We Get Ammunition?

Did I get my tubes cleaned?

Dude, I was the base commander.

Her name was Shadi. She was eighteen. The reason I know is that I had a conversation with Hollywood.

"How old is this young lady, Hollywood? She's eighteen, right?"

"Uh, sir, she said she thinks she's . . ."

"Eighteen, right?"

"Yes, sir! She's eighteen, sir!"

She was eighteen and she looked, even after all that time in that fucking place, like a god damned model. Long legs, gorgeous face, high cheekbones, aquiline nose, gigantic dark eyes and very nice hooters. She was, by a smidgeon admittedly, the best looking of the young ladies who had chosen to enter the employ of the United States Army.

She was my "personal maid." She kept my quarters straight, shined my shoes, cleaned my clothes, made sure I ate . . . Stuff like that. She also, yes, participated in the general housekeeping chores for the unit. That was the point of it, not to get a personal concubine.

Butterfill got one too. Rank hath its privileges. The lieutenants, four, had two. The senior sergeants I'm not sure how it broke out. And really don't ask me about the troops. I know there was a rota of some sort but I did not get into it. That's what first sergeants are for.

Were there "issues?" Oh, hell, yeah. Guys in their twenties fall in love with anything that's got pussy. But the issues paled before the benefits. I'm not talking personally although the benefits were nice. I'm talking about troops who were more alert and with soaring morale. My morale was better than it had been in a year. And, hell, the girls weren't exactly unhappy.

By the way, did the boys have problems with "rank hath its privileges"?

I'd just stood there cool as a cucumber in the middle of a firefight. The boys do love someone with big brass ones. Those who hadn't previously served with Bandit Six had heard the rep and might have believed it and might not. They knew it now. Big brass ones, calm as hell when the shit hits the fan. Bandit Six rocks.

(I did not tell them I was nearly peeing myself. There'd been a lot of reasons, including the above, that I did it that way. Didn't mean I liked it. Rank has way more to it than privileges.)

Did the boys have problems with "rank hath its privileges"? No. They would have for the fucking battalion commander who hardly ever left the fucking FOB and created no end of trouble when he did. But not for Bandit Six. Or Fillup who was a stand-up guy.

We eventually dipped further into the well for some more for the Nepos. The girls that "assisted" them were getting a bit ragged.

Some of them had kids. Their kids? I dunno. Didn't care. Some of them, despite my best efforts (there was a supply of birth control pills on the base, naturally, and I kept telling guys to use fucking condoms) got pregnant. Or were pregnant when we brought them in. Deal with that bridge when we came to it. Hell, we were bound to get "relieved" . . . more relieved sometime.

Or were we?

Look, the U.S. was a shambles. The military, Army, Air Force, Marines, even the damned Navy, was stretched to the nth degree trying to keep things from coming totally apart. People thought they were apart. They weren't. Hell, television stations were still broadcasting. CNN was up. Fox was up. Networks were mostly showing repeats but if you had satellite and power you could pretend things were normal if you didn't watch the news.

Civilization in the U.S. was hanging on by a thread. Civilization everywhere was hanging by a thread.

Europe looked as if it might survive or it might not. Besides all the shit the U.S. was going through, its average mortality, despite an I'll admit better distribution of the vaccine, was higher than that of the U.S. See that long bit about why and pick what you're willing to believe. Bottomline, they'd gotten hit massively.

Oh, yeah. Might be time to talk about how effective the vaccine really was. They had distributed vaccine. And gotten a goodly part of their population. Type one vaccine. Turns out that the strain of H5N1 that actually broke out almost all had mutated binding proteins.

(What the hell? Mutated what? You mean it stalked around growling "Braaaains . . ."?)

Here's what a flu virus does. A flu virus is a little packet, it can't really be called a cell, that looks sort of like a robot and acts a lot like one. Depending what kind of cell it's "targeted" on, it finds that type of cell and hooks on with proteins that look remarkably like hooks under an electron microscope. Then it shoots a package of DNA into the cell. The package of DNA first tells the cell to make a shitload more viruses then kills itself (lyse) so they're released.

This is the way that immunization works.

Immunization doesn't attack the flu. It tells your body's defenses what the flu is going to look like when you get it. It's sort of like giving the body's policemen a picture of that flu bastard and telling them "Shoot to kill." So when the flu attacks, your body produces a bunch more policemen (antibodies) which attack the flu.

The problem with most flu vaccines is that the "picture" that the antibodies get only describes those hooklike proteins. And it, chemically, describes them precisely. If the antibodies see different proteins, they ignore them. Otherwise you can get what's called an "autoimmune" disorder where your antibodies are attacking you.

A virus can only mutate in a host, therefore who it infects is as important as how—certain human genes control how and when the virus mutates—a blended genetic culture such as U.S. is much less likely to produce a uniform mutation that could spread (see Patient Zero discussion)—so the monocultures in the rest of the world were much more likely to be infected by a resistant mutant that was practically tailored to wipe them out.

Okay, so sometimes there's a point to multiculturalism.

H5N1 had been mutating fast. It had to to become as lethal as it was. Part of that mutation (just minor changes in genetics; not weird zombies) was in its binding proteins.

Slippery little sucker.

Type Two, on the other hand, described the coat proteins of all flus. The outer case of the robot if you will. They all "look" the same. (Bit like R2D2. With claws.) It worked on just about any flu. I haven't had the flu since that one injection that I was bitching about.

That's why I was such a fucktard. I was bitching about the only immunization that really worked.

All the H5N1 that spread didn't have the mutated binding sites. There were, it was later determined, six different "strains" of H5N1. Did they all come from Jungbao? Probably not. They probably mutated later by cross cellular chain mutation . . .

(What's . . . ?)

Look, I'm not going to give another fucking class in virology, okay?

The point being, even when people got the vaccine, it didn't always work.

Europe got hit hard.

But that was only the beginning of their problems. Europe had been "aging" for quite a few years. That is, they had less and less native population peoples to keep up that elaborate retirement pension plan and socialized medicine. More and more of them were retiring.

The bright plan to take care of this was to bring in immigrants. Might have worked, if they'd worked a little harder on being a melting pot. Instead, the immigrants had often created their own internal communities that were reflections of the "Home Country." The U.S. had that a few times, too, but never to the degree that Europe was experiencing before the Plague.

This had created . . . issues. On the surface the Europeans were very kumbaya. That was the official line and nobody was allowed to stray from it. "Multiculturalism is good because we say it's good. Alles in ordnung!" Underneath, however, was the very European mindset that there were US and THEM. No matter how many generations you family had been in Germany, you were not granted full German citizenship if you weren't ancestrally German. France had a slightly different way of segregating the minorities. The basic lesson was clear; you're here to take care of us in our old age but that doesn't make you important.

I don't like radical Islamics but doing something like that would make me radical. It did so in Europe. That was causing problems, bigger and bigger problems, well before the Plague.

Europe, Western Europe, had had a very European response to the Plague. Not "new Europe" which was all sweetness and light. No, it was an "old Europe" response. You know, the one that gave us words like "pogrom" and "Holocaust."

Germany and France, what was called often the Franken-Reich, were the centers of power in what was called back then the European Union. Each had their own way of dealing with the Plague and their "restive" immigrant population.

France dealt with it by how it distributed the vaccine. It didn't go to every clinic, everywhere, all at once. It went to selected clinics on a "trial" basis. This dissuaded some people from seeking it out. But the point was, they weren't doing the "trial" on the Wogs. They were doing the "trial" in clinics that were in primarily native French regions, down to neighborhoods. And there was a shortage of the vaccine. Gosh, before the Plague hit they never did get around to those Moslem neighborhoods!

Germany's was a doozy. It was a very German approach. On certain days, everyone with last names starting in, say, F to H were to go to their local clinics for vaccination. Alles in ordnung! But. The first round of the vaccine was to go to persons with "full German citizenship."

Hey, why didn't you just put a yellow star on them for Christ's sake?

Germany was having riots before the Plague. Which they put down with Teutonic efficiency.

But when it swept through, they hadn't gotten most of their "native" population vaccinated, anyway, what with one thing and another and almost none of their "immigrant." Between that and the fact that the vaccine wasn't all that functional, Germany and France were both hit hard. And the remaining immigrants had gotten really untrusting. There also wasn't much of a military in either country to help out. Germany had a "social service" obligation that was supposedly the same as the draft. But most of the people serving in it did "social services" rather than military service. And most of them were less than available in a disaster.

They were sort of hanging in there. Sort of having a civil war along with eveything else but sort of hanging in there. All the Western European powers were sort of hanging in there. Worse than the U.S. or better? At that point, nobody could tell. It was all a toss-up.

Eastern Europe . . . Poland was doing pretty good. Lower level of immigration and higher trust levels. Pretty good vaccine distribution. Death rates about like the U.S. In the late summer of 2019, Poland looked a good bet to make it.

I could go on. I won't. The "European Union" was hanging by a thread. But it was hanging. They might or might not go into a thousand year night.

In many places civilization was gone. Iran was one. Most of the Middle East. China, southeast Asia except Thailand and Singapore which were just very bad. Vietnam, it depended on which station you listened to. It sounded sort of like they were going back to North and South. Russia . . . depended on if you believed the government or the few news reports still coming in from refugee interviews. I believed the refugees.

China, a Tier One nation, was gone. It had gotten hit brutally by the Plague and it never was really high function anyway. All it had had going for it was a lot of people and some of them very bright. The Plague hammered them.

Japan was hanging. It had been distributing vaccine while the Plague actually spread. (It got hit early.) High death rates. But the Japanese are sort of used to that. They were consolidating in the way the Japanese always do. Economy wrecked but, hey, look at where they were in 1946. At least this time they didn't have atomic ruins to deal with.

The point to all of this being, the U.S. military may care for their troops but the last thing on anyone's mind, right then, was a company of infantry left in fucking Iran.

Problem was, things in Abadan were starting to shape up. And not in a good way. Actually, things in the region were shaping up in an ungood way.

We first got wind of this from refugee reports. We were in contact, now, and stayed that way. Refugees were still trickling out of Abadan and we knew, more or less, what was going on in there.

There were three factions holding various parts of Abadan. The Mahdi Army, The Warriors of Victory and Shia Liberation Front. All three had been at their core local "militias" we'd been fighting and trucing with since we'd been in Iran. Well, most of the Warriors of Victory were the remnants of the local "security forces" (Army, police and such) we'd been training. But we also knew they were connected with the Warriors at the time. Such is the nature of the Middle East.

When the Plague hit, the Warriors had a problem. They were not a family grouping. We'd worked hard on breaking up the clan structure in the "security services." But when the shit hit the fan, they didn't have their old, tried ways to fall back on. So they broke up into small bands.

The Mahdi Army was a family based structure. Oh, it had peripheral families allied to it, but it was mostly clan based. So it had coalesced faster than the Warriors and eaten up some of their little bands.

The Warriors reunited, sort of, in defense against the Mahdi.

The Shia Liberation Front was a minor faction. Very hard-core Islamicists, more hardcore than the Mahdi, who were more interested in secular power. The SLF thought this was the Apocalypse and the 12th Imam was coming any day and they were preparing to fight the great fight, blah, blah.

I think the first guys in the trucks were probably a Warrior faction. But who knows or cares?

Basically, what it was were three gangs controlling the city. There was some fishing going on in the Shat and out in the Gulf. That was where most of the food in the city was coming from along with a little bit of agriculture that was getting going again.

Every now and then there'd be some open fighting in Abadan between the gangs. We'd hear about it in time, but we always knew it was going on when refugees picked up on the road from Abadan.

The SLF were the smallest faction, but they were going to be our biggest problem.

Started off with a probe. A group of three "military style" vehicles came out of north Abadan across the plain. Nothing to stop them; it was really flat. There were a couple of small wadis but nothing you couldn't negotiate.

Now, we could see Abadan. By the same token, they could see us. They had watched us put in the perimeter fencing and decided they had a way to breach it.

As the three vehicles approached the fence, the drivers jumped out of the lead truck and ran. The other two stopped. The truck hit the fence, knocked down a big chunk and then blew up.

The reaction platoon Strykers were rolling out of the gate by then. I mean, they'd had to cross nearly six miles of desert. We had time to get the reaction platoon up and going.

The truck bomb probably took out most of the mines. It also tore up the fence and some of the internal concertina. Guys jumped out of the other trucks and tried to make it up the berm.

We had guard posts on the top of the berm for a reason. They were taken under fire.

By that time we had the mortars up, too. Oh, you think we forgot indirect fire? Hell, no. We'd even set up some Paladins, 155mm tracked artillery, oriented on Abadan just in case we needed it.

Point was, the guys trying to climb the berm came under fire from the machine guns on the berm guard posts just about the time the first mortar round was starting to fall. The mortars never got properly adjusted but they were falling.

The guys on the berm got slaughtered despite the bunker being damned near a klick away. The reaction Strykers were faster across the desert, and much more heavily armed, than the trucks.

Game, set, match.

The next stage was negotiations.

A Humvee (we'd provided quite a few to the Iranians) came rolling up the road from Abadan with a white flag on its aerial. It stopped for the refugee guardpost then came rolling up to the outer gate.

We rolled out the Gate Stryker. I got called.

There was an officer in Iranian Army dress uniform. Think Hussar in an opera but gaudier. Had the epaulets and such for a colonel and covered in awards. I could read the rank but not the awards and didn't care about the latter. The uniform was a bit big for the guy but one thing or another he might have lost weight.

Colonel Reza Kamaran. He was commander of Iranian security forces in Abadan. And he demanded weapons and supplies to be used in restoring order in Abadan.

I said I'd have to get back to him on that. Not my orders. I'll have to call my boss.

It is as Allah Wills.

He said he'd wait. I suggested he come back tomorrow. He insisted he'd wait.

This conversation took about an hour. That's the way Iranians talk.

I went back to the commo shack. I tried to get ahold of the BC. He was "unavailable." I talked to the duty lieutenant for a while. The battalion was trying to feed Savannah and get the port back up. They had had no luck on either score. Shit was bad. Fucking BC's back at Stewart in the rack. Or just hiding. He's not saying much these days. Casualties from gang fire. Voodoo priests. Shit's bad.

Hmmm . . .

My senior officer is unavailable. Come back tomorrow. In'sh'allah. Okay, whatever.

Note. Time difference meant I had to be up in the middle of the night to talk to the BC and vice versa. Actually, if I called in the evening I'd get him in the morning. I called in the evening. He was in a meeting. I left word that we had been contacted by a local group about giving out free weapons and ammo as party favors and I was thinking about it. (The last part being a lie.)

Fucker called me back at 2AM local time.

Don't give out anything. Secure and maintain.

Says he's a colonel in the Army, yawn. Don't know. Name. Local allies.

Don't give out anything until I check with higher.

Okay. When you getting us home.

Top of my priority list. No transport at this time.

Want a security update?

Send me a memo.

Colonel came back the next day.

Where's my stuff?

It is in consultation among my bosses. Come back tomorrow. In'sh'allah.

I quit going out to meet him. I sent the BC a memo. After a week or two he quit coming out. I don't know if he'd gotten tired of the drive or died. Didn't care.

Here's the thing. The refugees, who I trusted more than this guy, said there wasn't any "Iranian Army" in Abadan. There was the Warriors, who were made up of gangs that had fractioned off the Army and police, but they weren't the Army. They were a fucking gang that didn't even give the pretense of being a formed unit.

I figured the guy was one of the Warriors, probably a lieutenant maybe captain by his age, who'd gotten the uniform and decided to come out and stroke me out of gear.

Absent a direct order, wasn't going to happen.

But it got me thinking. More.

Sooner or later somebody was going to come and try to take this shit away. And although we were supposed to "secure and maintain" it, I wasn't going to have a pocket mech division's worth of gear fall into the hands of these yahoos.

The Nepos were, at that point, just sitting there.

Well, sort of. I'd put Samad in charge of training them for guard duty and such. Not Ghurkas, but somebody that we could use as spare rifles if the crunch came.

That was kind of funny. I told him that they needed to be trained. I had them set up a short range inside the perimeter. I told him to take over. Get them to be reasonable soldiers.

Look, the rest of us were busy. I was busier than a one-armed paper-hanger keeping everything working. Shit was always breaking down, working with Fillup on security, I was finally getting the sort of busyness I prefer. Basically, I'm pretty lazy but I get bored if I'm not given something to be lazy about.

I didn't notice for a couple of weeks that I hadn't heard any shots. Well, the boys were starting to use the range a bit, but I didn't hear the sort of crackle you'd expect to find if sixty guys were being trained in marksmanship.

So I went poking around.

Found Samad and the Nepos in one of the areas that had been emptied out to make the defenses. I think it used to hold concertina.

It had been marked off with chalk in a very precise square. The Nepos were out there in what looked like British combat uniforms (turned out they were, don't know how I missed that line item) doing close order drill.

And they were good at it. Damned good.

Of course, when they hadn't been doing their other duties they'd apparently been out there every day, all day, doing close order drill. For two fucking weeks.

I waited until the end of the day to pull Samad aside. I'd taken some time up to write up a training schedule. I suggested to him that maybe just maybe it was time for his guys to start training on something other than close order drill. Like, you know, weapons training, field sanitation, first aid. Here, I have a list.

He looked at it in puzzlement.

"You mean we will be given live rounds to practice?"

There was the fucking ammunition for a division and thirty days of combat sitting in the ammo dump. There was no way that it was ever going to be "redeployed." It was either going to sit there until it rotted or we blew it the fuck up.

"I think we can spare some, yeah."

"Very good, sahib!"

That grin. Okay, so sometimes you had to give him kind of detailed orders until he got the hang. But he had a great grin.

You can't turn raw recruits into a good reinforced platoon overnight. Not even Nepos. But we got them started on the path.

I gave him two weeks of "additional training" before I started my next little scheme. I mean, the demo was just sitting there.

Chapter Five Unofficial? You're Fucked.

I know I'm sort of jumping around but we were getting into late August at this point. There'd been a couple more probes. No more negotiations. One what looked like an attack on the refugee camp. Convoy of vehicles, some of them with weapons on the back (called "technicals" for some reason.) Gate Stryker drove it off by taking them under long-range fire. Might have been an attack on us. Don't know. Wasn't getting close.

But sooner or later a big force would get in motion. Refugees were still coming in and they all said that everyone knew how much booty was in our walls. And people wanted it. Most of them to just fill their couscous bowl but the gangs wanted the weapons, ammo and equipment.

I'd set things up so that we could roll out at any time. There were enough Strykers, trucks, fuel trucks and all the rest, including one hell of a lot of parts, lube, ammo, food, water and most especially batteries, that we could roll to Israel if it came down to it.

That was my plan. If everything exploded we were going to roll out and head to Israel. Israel had held on, more or less. The Plague had hit their enemies worse than them. Maybe they put lamb's blood over their doors, I dunno. But they'd taken about 20% casualties and were still hanging in there.

Oh, that's something I mentioned a while back. All the models said at the point that a society took 20% casualties from a disaster, especially a plague, it broke down.

The H5N1 Plague disproved that. What it proved was that certain types of societies broke down at that point. The models and historical records had never accounted for modern, technological, democratic, high-trust societies. All the previous societies hit with that sort of plague had been preindustrial, nondemocratic or functionally nondemocratic, low-trust societies.

Every society like that on Earth that got hit with H5N1 had broken. Iran and Iraq might have been notionally democratic societies, ditto Turkey, but they were not resilient enough to withstand their casualty rates (which, anyway, ran into the 50–60% range).

The "good" societies held together. Hell, Thailand held together. And they had 60% mortality.

Nobody knows, to this day, what it takes to destroy a society like the U.S. or any of the other Anglosphere countries. Or Japan. Or Thailand or Singapore or (South) Korea. What we know is, it takes more than the Time of Suckage.

But getting back to the point, at some point I figured we were going to pull out. That we'd either be extracted or, it was looking increasingly like, have to self extract. Getting to the U.S. was going to be . . . interesting. Among other things there was an ocean in the way. Flying back was optimal, but we needed to have an airport to do that.

And when we pulled out, whether I tried to pass it off as an "accident" or just bit the fucking bullet, I wasn't going to leave this shit for the enemy.

Got any idea what it takes to really destroy an Abrams tank? I mean, so it's not even vaguely useable as a tank ever again?

Yeah, neither did I.

Or a Paladin. Or a Bradley (we had a lot of those). Or a Stryker.

Trucks and such were pretty easy. Oh, it was time intensive and manpower intensive but the Nepos were just sitting there.

Take one 155mm round. Place it on the engine block. Place another in the cargo compartment. Daisy chain them together with det cord and a small "initiator" package of a half a block of C-4 per round.

All that could be left to the Nepos. At this point you have two explosive rounds that aren't going to go off short of blasting caps (which weren't installed) and maybe not even then tied together with some funny looking cord.

In the meantime, the boys of Company B were getting an intensive course in demolitions safety. This was not "do I put the blasting cap under the sandbag before installing the claymore?" demolitions safety. This was "if you don't do it in these precise steps, everybody is going to blow the fuck up including you."

You see, none of that stuff was going to blow up short of blasting caps. Military explosives are very resilient. They have to be; they're handled by soldiers. Soldiers can break just about anything.

Stuff like 155 rounds were designed to survive handling by soldiers. They were tough as hell.

But put blasting caps in the mix and you are dealing with a different situation.

Frankly, I would have preferred that all the blasting caps be put in place and wired by myself or Fillup. But that simply wasn't possible. He had good sergeants, though, and we were very careful.

Wiring the whole damned camp, though, took a long time.

Oh, we didn't wire everything. I mean, I figured leaving all the food and shit was fine. But just wiring the vehicles and ammo was interesting.

How do you bust an Abrams tank so nobody was ever going to be able to use any part of it again?

It's not fucking easy. There are five separate sealed compartments on an Abrams. Each of them is, more or less, capable of withstanding any reasonable explosion in the other. Driver, control area (turret and crew compartment), engine and chassis. That's four, right? The gun is such a tough motherfucker it's going to resist most explosions. And it's the part that, in the end, counts so I wasn't going to leave any functional if I had my way.

The tanks were not loaded with their rounds. All of the vehicles had been stripped of ammunition before parking. (Ammo specialists had destroyed most of the onboard munitions; they weren't considered safe enough to store.)

Well, the ammo was just sitting there.

Five 155 rounds in the central compartment. Another in the driver's compartment. Another in the engine. Anti-tank mines under the chassis. A tank round up the breach preceded by a charge of C-4. Partially close the breach. When the round detonated something was going to happen to the fucking gun. Didn't know if I could destroy the fucker, but I wouldn't want to ever use it again.

Daisy chain. That is, hook them all together so they'll go off at once.

The problem being, I'm doing all this without orders. I'm getting prepared to destroy a whole bunch of billions of dollars worth of Uncle Sam's equipment (nineteen billion and change) and nobody in my chain of command has suggested that is a good idea.

It was early September when we started. Compared to some deployments we hadn't actually been left in place all that long. Three and a half months since we'd been left.

But this wasn't a normal deployment. Look, we had one guy get sick. Doc didn't know what was wrong with him. Thought it was appendicitis. (Turned out it was food poisoning. His honey had fixed him some "special" food and hadn't been quite as sanitary as she should have been.)

I got on the horn to the States. Got a soldier with possible case of appendicitis. Request evac.

Nada.

Fucking NADA.

The U.S. mililtary does not leave you to die. They've killed crews trying to save civilians. What they do for their own sick and wounded is astonishing.

There was no way to get us. No. Fucking. Way.

The only possible choice was to move a whole fucking Marine Amphib unit into the Gulf and fly helos up to us. Maybe just a frigate.

Only problem was, all the ships were back in the U.S. zone.

The nearest "stable" zone, barely, was Israel. And there wasn't a helo on earth that could make the run. Oh, there was a way to do it with tankers and special helos. But the Israelis didn't have the capacity, even if they were willing, and our tankers and helos were in the States saving lives.

We didn't have a doctor. We didn't have a hospital. (Well, we had one but no clue how to use it.) We were on our fucking own.

The point being, this was not a normal deployment. Hell, women cooking and washing and providing "aid and comfort" weren't a normal deployment. I cannot for the life of me recall where I heard the line. Something about "and the last centurion took a barbarian wife . . ."

That was us as far as we could tell.

I didn't want to start up a local dynasty. But if I did start one, I wasn't going to let all this ammo and gear fall into the hands of my enemies. And it was way more than I could ever use.

And if we did what I figured was most likely, the bug-out boogie to Israel, I wasn't going to leave it to the RIFs. Surely there was an adult in my chain of command who could get that logic.

The problem being, the next guy in my chain of command was the battalion commander.

Chain of command is holy writ in the Army. You do not violate the chain of command.

But I was getting dick all from the BC. I violated the chain of command.

We had commo information for higher command levels. Hell, this thing had a commo link to the National Military Command Center but I wasn't going to call NMCC. I called the Brigade S-3.

Yo, Bandit, wassup? (He'd been a company commander in a sister battalion when I was a lieutenant. He could call me Bandit, too.)

What the fuck? No medevac. No deadline for "replacement"? What the fuck?

No medevac?

Appendicitis, we thought. Got over it. No evac.

Fuck. Bad shit here.

Bad shit everywhere. Refugees. Attacks. Replacement?

No fucking idea.

Plan if we get hit bad? Bombers? Nukes?

No fucking idea. Battalion?

()

Okay, point. Plan?

Blow and run.

()

Go-To-Hell-Plan. Replacement. Reinforcement. Redeployment. What The Fuck Ever. None? Blow and run.

Battalion? Told?

(Video link. Stand up and wave hands around ass.)

Okay, point. Send memo. Chain of command.

(Stand up . . . )

Situation? Seriously.

Official or unofficial.

Official then unofficial.

Official: Nominal. Security Threats. Action plan. Insufficient force. Unofficial: If we knew when we were going home and weren't worrying about getting overrun, not bad. Nepos and local civilian personnel left behind. Gets weird.

Try Savannah. Voodoo doctors. Send memo. Stay frosty.

Fuck you.

Sent the memo. I attached my full "action plan" in the event of "action by superior enemy force." Which amounted to "kill as many as we can, blow the place the fuck up and run like hell."

Rigging the place had required a detailed destruction plan. I attached it.

Got a call two weeks later from the brigade commander.

"Bandit, Colonel Collins."

"Yes, sir."

Shit bad here. Unofficial: You're fucked.

How fucked?

"There are no forces capable of evacuating your unit closer than Japan. And they're not going to be redeployed to pick up a straggler company of infantry. The shit everywhere is just too screwed up. There's a MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit: Brigade of marines and ships) in the Med but they're tasked out. The official line continues to be that all stored material is to be "maintained and secured." Think you're bad off? We left a damned unit of SF in Colombia. They've dropped completely off the net; no clue what happened to them. Unofficially, and I'm told from a very high level, in the event you are hit by forces you cannot resist, blow it the fuck up and run. But you'd better be able to justify it pretty well. And even then, I can't guarantee that you won't end up in Leavenworth even if you do make it back to the States."

"Yes, sir. Can I get an official order to implement my action plan in the event this unit is faced by an overwhelming force?"

Long silence. Much forehead rubbing.

"Send your action plan to your battalion commander." Hand goes up to forestall protest. I wasn't planning on making one except in my head but he must have seen my face. Of course, he also had to deal with my BC on a daily basis. "Send it to your battalion commander. It will be approved."

"Thank you, sir."

"What, you think I like one of my fucking companies being left out to rot? But shit's bad everywhere. If you lose commo for any reason, all I can say is good luck and good hunting."

So I sent the action plan to the battalion commander.

What the fuck? No fucking way! Are you crazy? If you were here you'd be relieved and I'd make sure you spent the rest of the emergency as a private, you complete dickhead moron, who the hell could think you had the authority to blow up nineteen billion dollars worth of . . .

A week later I got the action plan back. Redlined. That is, he was telling me all the things wrong with it and wanted me to do "corrections" of all the items.

Which was weird because that meant it was conditionally approved.

Of course, it was also fucked up because he'd left out blowing up half the shit and most of the changes meant nothing would get blowed up. Most of it had to do with "demilitarization" of material. Yeah. Like we had a few thousand people available to do that.

(Demilitarization: Drill holes in the guns. Drilling holes in an Abrams gun requires very serious drills which we didn't have. Thermite barely scratches the motherfuckers. I know. I experimented.)

And we'd already done most of it my way. Sure as shit wasn't going to do it his way.

I sent the redlined plan off to the Brigade S-3. Then I wrote it up his way. Hell, he wasn't going to know if I did it that way or not. I was seven thousand miles away and it wasn't like the fucking IG was going to drop by.

Two days later I got an action plan from the BC. Less redlining. Still stupid.

Off to Brigade S-3.

Got back the original plan. Approved. By the Brigade commander.

Good thing, too, because we were about done.

Talked to the S-3 later. Apparently it had gone like this.

Battalion commander gets the plan. Throws a shit fit. Chews me out. Starts charges.

Brigade commander, a few days later, calls him up and asks what's happening with Bravo Company.

Battalion commander sucks ass. All good. No issues.

No issues? Evac?

Minor issue.

Security situation?

No problems.

Any Go-To-Hell-Plan?

No need. "Secure and maintain."

Get Go-To-Hell-Plan. SF battalion. Bad shit. My boys. Send me copy. Out.

I get GTH redlined. Send back corrected plan. Copy to Brigade. BC sends to Brigade.

Brigade commander. Don't like. (He'd seen my original and the redlined one.) Like it this (my) way.

Battalion commander sends up next plan.

What is it about "do it this way" you cannot understand? Original plan approved.

I now had legal authority to blow the place the fuck up if I had to.

Which was good. Because we had to implement our "Go-To-Hell-Plan" sooner than I'd thought.

Chapter Six Actioning by Transformational Defenestration of Obstructors

What is it about Mondays?

Okay, so you had a good weekend and maybe you had a bit too much to drink. You don't want to go back to work. Mondays suck.

But that wasn't the case with Iran. We were working every day, more or less. Oh, there was a rotating "down-time" schedule but with increasing probes the guys weren't getting much rest.

So what is it with Mondays?

Guess you figured it was a Monday when the shit started to hit the fan.

Actually, we got some wind of it early. Scatter of more refugees. Then the food detail got told there was a new problem.

Remember the Shia Liberation Front? Seems they'd maintained communication with fellow travellers. Said fellow travellers, the "Husayn Ali Martyrdom Brigade" (HAMB) had managed to avoid enough martyrdom to consolidate their hold in Awhaz and were now looking to establish "true shariah" in a wider region. Which really threw a monkey wrench into the whole Abadan area.

Okay, background:

Who or what the fuck is "Husayn Ali"?

Husayn ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib was a grandson of Mohammed by one of his numerous wives. (Mohammed's wives that is.) Husayn is one of the guys who's a founder of Shia. Remember the whole thing about Shia and Sunni? Most Moslems are Sunni. Iranians and a cluster in southern Iraq and down into Saudi Arabia are Shia. I won't get into details about the Umaayids and shit. He revolted in favor of "true Islam" and got his head cut off. Just know he's one of the Shia's big "martyrs." Got killed near Al-Najaf where there's a big temple in his honor and, I shit you not, every year guys gather there and whip themselves with flails. I've seen weirder shit, but not much.

But the Husayn Ali Martyrdom Brigade wasn't just religious wackoes. It had been formed around the family of an Iranian colonel up around Ahwaz. Was he a religious wacko? Sort of.

Okay, one of the "lessons" we learned in Iraq was "don't completely dismantle the standing government and military." We shut down the Iraqi Army in Iraq and then tried to rebuild it "right." The problem being, that when soldiers are out of work they'll work for anybody. And a lot of the guys we were fighting, at first, were former soldiers all the way up to senior officers.

So when we went into Iran, we kept the Army together as much as possible. Oh, some of the units like the Revolutionary Guard and stuff were stood down and mostly rounded up for questioning, etc. But we didn't stand down the whole Army.

Well, the mullahs had wanted to keep the Army under their thumb as much as possible. So a bunch of senior commands were held by "fellow travellers," guys who thought the way the Mad Mullahs in charge thought or were family. (Which amounted to the same thing.)

Farid Jahari was one of the guys who wasn't rounded up for questioning. Oh, later, I found out he had been tagged as hard-core Islamic, but he was making all the right noises and following the New Way so nobody fucked with him. Despite "credible" reports that he had maintained contact with the RIFs and might be supporting them.

Whether he'd been playing both sides against the middle or what, when the shit went down, he managed to hold together a "coalition" in Ahwaz. It had taken him several months to consolidate his power and get things functioning. Now it was time for the next step.

Shooters he now had aplenty. What he didn't have was equipment.

And guess where the biggest store of equipment around was?

The "probe" with the truck was probably his idea. And they'd apparently been watching how we were guarding things.

The first inkling we had that things were going to be going astray was increased traffic on the Ahwaz Road. (Highway 9 for people who care.) Vehicles were headed into Abadan. And then the flow of refugees picked up as street fighting broke out.

The good colonel had the cachet of being military. The Warriors and the SLF, now a branch of HAMB, called a truce. Together with some "special warriors" from HAMB they took down the Mahdi Army in about two days' fighting.

Didn't hurt that they took out the command structure, first. They called for peace talks to "begin the reunification of our peoples." Not all the senior people from the Mahdi Army turned up, but enough that it mattered. They weren't trusting, mind you, but they also weren't expecting a big truck bomb.

We heard that on Monday. Big ass explosion down in Abadan kind of near the docks as far as we could tell.

Took the Warriors, SLF and HAMB about three days to clear out the Mahdis. Some of the refugees we got were "dependents" of the Mahdis. That's where we got the story. (Also a couple more workers. The Mahdis had clearly been picking and choosing carefully. Woof!)

(Wife Edit: It's amazing what you've left out over the years. I thought I knew all your stories.)

Fuck.

Anyway, we really knew shit was bad mid-week when two T-62s and some trucks came rolling down from the direction of Ahwaz.

Found out, later, that was the sign Herr Colonel had come down to show the flag. Until Abadan was "secured" he'd stayed up in Ahwaz. Now it was time to spread the joy.

So we got another delegation.

This time it was a civilian truck but the guy who got out of it was in uniform. Pretty correct. Unlike the first joker he seemed to fit it and it wasn't exactly loaded with medals.

I got called out.

"General Farid Jahari, Commander of the Faithful, Sword of The Prophet, Warrior of Islam . . ." etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, "sends you his greetings. In his beneficience and munificence, his overriding goodness that extends beyond the ability of mortal men . . ."

We had three days to pull out. We could take anything we could carry. We had to leave all the rest and open the gates.

Took, like, fifteen minutes for the guy to get to the point. I said: "Ain't happenin'."

"Captain, you cannot understand. The armies of the Prophet cover the ground like the sands of the desert . . . !"

We know your strength to the last Nepo. You're badly outnumbered and we're going to kick your ass.

All I could do was fall back on something I'd heard back in ROTC and many times since over the years.

"Convey my message to your commander exactly. This is the message. Nuts."

Okay, so it was an airborne unit. Big fucking deal. It was a good line.

What wasn't good was what we didn't know. The Commander of the Faithful was not an idiot. We had a fairly good feel for the numbers in Abadan at that point. The Warriors, if they hadn't taken a bunch of casualties, could field maybe six, seven hundred troops. The SLF had been about a hundred. From the count of vehicles going to Abadan, we were looking at, at most, another hundred or so.

Okay, say a thousand against our one company. Two tanks. I knew how we were going to deal with them. Adverse correlation of forces, but we had pretty good positions and good vehicles. And we had them in view the whole approach. They were going to get slaughtered.

Well, I thought they were going to get slaughtered. But I hadn't figured on the Commander of the Faithful being smart.

Ahwaz wasn't on the Shat, but it wasn't all that far, either. You had to cross into Iraq to get to the river (the Tigris, actually) but nobody gave a shit about borders. Turns out he'd sent a bunch more fighters down on barges. And we didn't know about them. The refugees had cut off to nothing. No satellite intel . . .

Okay, I had a couple of UAVs in the place. I'd even gotten a couple up and ready to go. But they weren't Predators, they were short range and duration. Even if I had gotten them out and done some surveys, I wasn't going to get any more intel.

Now, a thousand vs. a little short of two hundred with the Nepos might have been enough to change a guy's mind. Maybe should have been. But American forces had faced odds like that before and won.

Problem being we were going to take casualties. And there wasn't a doctor nor any evac.

That was going to purely suck.

So I called home. I didn't bother with calling the BC.

"Brigade S-3. Assistant S-3 speaking. How can I help you sir or ma'am?"

"Tell me to cut and run."

"What's up?"

"Security is no longer nominal."

Thousand of them. Two hundred, sort of, of us. Three days.

"What did you tell them?"

"Nuts."

"That's what the 101st said!"

"I couldn't think of better line. Go fuck a camel just wasn't as succinct." (Heh. I used a big word.)

Chain of command.

Duck's bottom.

Call you back.

Ring, Ring!

"Fort Lonesome. We've got the ammo if you've got the money. If not: Go fuck yourself."

Call your boss. Brigade Commander said "Nuts" though and he couldn't think of a better line, either.

Yo, BC, security situation no longer nominal.

You're a bad boy! You should have negotiated! Bad boy! Bad boy! No biscuit! Take off your skin so I can use it as a shawl!

Gotcha. Give 'em the stuff.

Calling higher.

"Fort Lonesome! Security situation is in degradation mode and headed for sucky!"

Brigade Commander said "Nuts."

The 101st said that. Couldn't he think of a better line? Medevac?

Nope.

Reinforcements? Fighting soldiers from the sky?

Nope. Get fucked. Bad things here. And where's that human skin I ordered?

Blow it and run?

Maintain and secure.

So then things went from weird to weirder.

Friday, I think, evening, anyway, I was "pondering the security situation" when I got a call at the office.

"Bandit, sir, there's a reporter on the video link. She wants to talk to you."

Now, this is a secure military video link system. How the fuck a reporter could have gotten onto it was beyond me.

I never considered the incredible boneheadedness of my boss.

So some reporter from CNN is chatting him up as he is delivering "aid and comfort" to the voodoo doctors in Savannah. (There's another essay there, but it's not mine. Things got very weird in Savannah at one point.) Good people doing good work for good people who are all good and it's all good and we all love each other.

(The battalion took more casualties in Savannah than we did during most of this mission. Khuwaitla, Instanbul and all.)

And somehow the point that he's only got two companies helping comes up. And, wow, there's a company in Iran? Really? Could I talk to the commander?

I don't know how she sweet-talked the BC into that. Bandit Six was the last guy he'd ever want to give air-time. That would take it away from him. And I don't know what strings he pulled to get her on our vid-link. Maybe CNN did it.

Fuck.

I got out of bed with Shadi, checked to see I was shaved, put on my battlerattle and went over.

"Captain Bandit Six. What's it like in Iran?"

"Our mission plan is to maintain and secure."

"Have you had any problems?"

"We have rectified all our action issues with transformational deconfliction."

(That one I remember. What a classic. I saw it one time on a poster and nearly shit myself.)

Refugees?

Adjusted with transformational synergy. (I think. Something like that.)

The last fucking thing I wanted to do was tell a reporter:

"Well, we're outnumbered something like five to one, and some of our 'one' are Nepalese tribesmen that just learned to turn on a light-switch and you got me out of bed when I was 'aiding and comforting' a refugee. And if we get hit we're going to blow this pizza joint sky high."

I doubt she understood word one of any of my replies. I don't think I understood most of them and I'm pretty good at buzz-word bingo. I do know that the troops were laughing next door so hard I could faintly hear it through the extremely soundproofed walls of the commo van.

We were deconflicting and transforming faster than a battle-bot. We were synergizing and action iteming like a couple of water beetles in mating season. We were defenestrating obstructors at one point, I think.

Went on for about fifteen minutes of me just a shuckin' and jivin' as fast as I could.

There's a point to the media in a democracy. It's there to make sure that people have the information they need to make rational decisions about their actions. Especially their actions in regards to who is going to be elected King or Queen or Duke or whatever.

I won't go into media bias. There's reams and reams of papers on it at this point. And it's still biased. It's going to stay biased for another fifteen years or so until the people who have lived through the Time end up as bosses in the media and start choosing different producers and editors. Hopefully, they'll choose wisely.

But at that point, the media was the military's worst enemy. They were the enemy, no more and no less. They never reported anything straight and always took the side of whoever was shooting at us.

They weren't fucking murdering terrorists who killed their own people faster than they killed us. They were "freedom fighters" or "irregulars." We weren't the freedom fighters, oh no! How could we be? It was rare that they called us what they really thought of us, but every now and then one would slip. Mercenaries. Murderers. Continue in M and go back and forth for every evil word for people you can dredge up.

When one of our number, usually a grade A asshole to start with, would fuck up, it was "all soldiers are like that! They're all evil murdering lying scum!" When one of their number fucked up, if you learned about it, they were "confused" or "overwrought" or there was nothing fucking wrong with them at all. Circle the wagons. We'd sit there and prove that some story about atrocities was bogus and the fucking media would sail on as if nothing had happened. Anything bad about soldiers or the very hard job we did was major news. Anything good we did wasn't covered.

Don't think that the Plague had changed anything. Every fucking screamer with some sob story, no matter how wrong, was instant headline news. The 4th ID got reamed when some woman got a reporter on ABC to put her on telling about how a whole bunch of those poor fucking grasshoppers had been "gang raped" by a bunch of soldiers.

Was there ever any proof? Not a fucking shred. As far as anyone can tell she made it up.

Back in the Iraq Campaign there was some fucking Air Force sergeant who got some reporter to repeat her sob story about "thousands of women raped" and how she had been.

Were female military members raped in Iraq? Yep. And any time we could track down the bastards that did it we'd put them on trial and sentence them to max punishment. But when you have males and females together, you get rape. It's like sunshine and flowers and April showers. Fucking happens. Pardon the pun.

Were "thousands" raped? No. Despite there being nearly a million females rotating through the AOR over time. The rape rate was way lower than on a college campus despite pussy being rare as hell.

And the Air Force sergeant in question?

Not only was she not one of the "thousands," at least she'd never reported it at the time or since, she was never in fucking Iraq! She'd made it all up. And the news media fucking ran with the story anyway!

Any lie by anyone who hated the military was repeated endlessly. Any truth was ignored.

I did not and do not like reporters. Is that clear? Even after the whole Centurions thing I maintain my opinion.

Sherman said it well:

"If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world but I am sure we would be getting reports from hell before breakfast."

Oh, and about democracy.

The purpose of a free press, in which I believe believe it or not, is so that people can make rational decisions in a democracy. They'd already perverted the process so bad that was hard, but the point is valid.

So why give her the runaround? Why not answer the questions straight?

There was still Plague running around. Most of the cities were (or should have been) free-fire zones. People were starving to death. And there was an impending climate catastrophe they were completely ignoring.

What the fuck did a company stuck in Iran have anything to do with making rational decisions about how to survive in the current conditions?

Nada. Dick. Nothing. The closest you can get is deciding whether Warrick was a fucking idiot and the reality was all around you. It didn't take a rocket scientist. Not that the media was going to admit their annointed was a fucking fruitcake.

She was going for a "human interest" story, that most idiotic of media exercises.

Well. Fuck. Her. Try making a robot interesting.

The company dayroom was right by the commo van. When I stumbled out, unbuckling my helmet and swearing under my breath, the troops had lined up to give me an ovation.

"God damn, sir, you sounded like a Pentagon spokesman!"

"They're going to put you up for Chief of Staff!"

"Defense Secretary!"

"Fuck you all. I'm clearly not working you hard enough."

In truth, I wasn't. I wasn't working them hard, I wasn't working me hard, I wasn't working Fillup hard. Why? Because I knew we were all going to be working our asses off soon.

Bill Slim was an interesting guy. British General in WWII. Probably the best Brit general of his generation and certainly the best one that got anything done. (Way better than Monty.) Wrote a hell of an autobiography. One of the things he said stuck with me. (Well, a lot did, but I'll just get into this one.)

"A General should take as much rest as he can in peace because when battle rages he will get none."

Paraphrase but that's the general idea. I knew the shit was about to hit the fan. So I and everyone else was getting as much rest, food and water as possible.

Good thing I did.

Chapter Seven All Good Things Come to an End

Yeah, that was Friday.

Friday is a holy day for Islamics. Not quite like Sunday or Shabbat, but it's the day they sort of celebrate the same way. They sure as hell weren't going to kick off an assault on Friday.

Saturday? Don't mean dick to them.

The best time to assault somebody is right before dawn. It's called "Before Morning Nautical Twilight." (BMNT) Its that time when the world is still and the light makes things look sort of blue. You can't tell a white thread from a black. It's not dawn; it's not night. Night vision systems get screwed up by the light levels.

It is, generally, when people are at their lowest ebb. Sentries are sleepy, those who are sleeping are generally sleeping hard and don't wake up well.

You'd have thought they'd attack at dawn. Think again. Iranians, remember. In'sh'allah.

I don't know if they meant to attack at dawn. I do know that our sentries, who were very bright eyed and bushy-tailed, let me tell you, said that there were some vehicles moving around down by Abadan and the refinery. It was easy enough to see them with thermal imagery cameras of which we had a fucking slew.

So I set up in the command post. Things had adjusted. The Nepos had positional security on Fort Lonesome. The U.S. infantry were taking the gate, surrounding bunkers and such. But mostly they fell out and into their Strykers.

We sent out a team to tell the refugees that things were about to get busy and they were not going to like the neighborhood soon. They were in a truly fucked up situation. The armed guys wanted to help us, or said they did. We weren't having any of it. We just told them to move off to the side with what they could carry and dropped one more set of rations. It was more than they probably could carry, we used a couple of forklifts to carry it out. But that was the point.

Temperature-wise, it didn't get hot. Not a bit. Abadan in mid-September is normally hot as shit. Not that year. We hadn't had a snow, yet, but you could see it creeping down the mountains. That day it never got above about 70.

Got pretty fucking hot otherwise.

So some vehicles came out. And went back. And came out again. The troops opened up their battle rattle and snoozed. We'd been up since before dawn. I called the Nepos and had them get the girls working on a hot meal. There was time.

The guys ate chow. It was about nine AM before there was much movement. More vehicles came out. Some started to head up the Ahwaz highway and then turned and headed for the end of the base, the end with most of the ammo bunkers on it.

I let 'em come for a while. They were probably going to replicate the suicide bomb truck trick. Okay, got something for that, now.

When they got to about two klicks, two kilometers, I told the Mk-19s to open up. Mark-19s were originally developed for the Navy but the Army fucking loves them. 40mm grenade launchers, they pack a hell of a punch and just keep on firing.

Bud-a-bud-a-bud-a-bud-a-bud.

Three Mk-19s opened up from bunkers. Two klicks is a long range for the Mk-19. Max effective range is 1600 meters. Max range is only 2200.

The point wasn't to kill them. The point was to throw off their aim.

Fuckers kept coming. Don't know if it was a suicide run or what.

So they got down to the range that they could be engaged effectively and started getting hit.

Three "military grade trucks," Mercedes ten-tons, probably loaded with ammonium nitrate and all the rest that makes AMFO, and four pickup trucks loaded with guys with light weapons. The pickups were keeping wide of the big trucks, which gave me a clue they were bomb trucks.

The Mk-19 is a pretty effective "anti-material" weapon. It's even better when it hits a big assed bomb.

The term is "secondary explosion." One of the Mercedes just fucking disintegrated. I mean the fireball was probably a hundred yards across and made a mushroom cloud. Very big explosion. Another one rolled over. The third continued on. For a while. Until a couple of rounds hit the engine. Then it rolled to a stop smoking. The driver got out and ran for it.

Not far. By then the group was in range of all the bunkers on the berm. And both the Mk-19s and the .50s were lighting them up. They wiped them out.

Here's military law. Don't ever imagine I wasn't skirting some issues. Use of "local" personnel for "aid and comfort" was against so many regulations I don't want to start. But we're talking about military law.

In a combat situation a military unit must give the other side a chance to surrender. Under certain conditions.

1. The enemy clearly signals a desire to surrender or is hors de combat.

2. Taking the enemy prisoner will not endanger the receiving group.

That's right. During most of the War on Terror we'd been accepting surrenders that, under the laws of war, we did not have to. A side that uses "irregulars" has three days to give them all some identifying mark saying "this is our side." If they don't, they are known as "illegal combatants" and have exactly no rights under the Geneva Convention or any other law of war. They are legally the equivalent of spies with guns and the Convention is clear that you can shoot spies. They're given a swift and not particularly just trial, guilty unless proven innocent, and after six months you can justly and legally shoot them.

That'd clear out Guantanamo.

Okay, so we're the good guys. We cut the bad guys some slack. I get that.

You think I'm going to take prisoners when I've got one company of troops cut off so far behind enemy lines you can't see the good guys with a fucking satellite?

Not hardly.

My orders had been simple. "No quarter. We can't afford it."

The boys had no qualms with that. They knew what a cleft stick we were in.

So there was a blown-up truck, another rolled over and a bunch more shot to shit.

Round One: Bandit.

At the same time there'd been some movement from town. More vehicles. Including the two tanks. They were followed by a whole bunch of people. More people than I thought were living in Abadan at that time.

We didn't have a way for me to automatically use any of the sights we'd set up. I had somebody hand zoom on one.

The vehicles had stopped. The people were herded out. And I do mean herded.

The front rank was women and kids. Mostly. There were some old farts.

I don't know how they'd been chosen. Never did bother to find out.

Bottomline: The fucker was using us being the "good guys" against us. Behind the women and kids were more soldiers than I'd thought could be in Abadan. That was when I knew I wasn't holding the base. It's also when I figured there was no way I was going to lose.

They were headed for the same part of the base as the trucks; the part with all the goodies. That was fine by me.

Fillup started getting queries when they got close enough most of the bunkers could see what the group was made up of. They'd put the vehicles, "technicals" and the tanks and one APC that was a surprise, in behind the women and kids. But most of the "soldiers" were interspersed. There was no way we were going to be able to take them out without killing the noncombatants.

Again, there's a military law that covers this. I could have lit them up. My boys would have done it if ordered. I'd have been covered, technically. My name would have been mud, I wouldn't have liked myself much and I don't want to think what it would have done to my All American boys. The Nepos would have just been professionally chagrined.

Thing was, I figured I didn't have to. Oh, to hold the base and all the gear I would. But I'd kissed that goodbye the moment I saw how many soldiers we were up against.

"Make sure we get fucking video" was all I said.

The whole group shuffled forward. They weren't moving fast. A few fell out, heat stroke, exhaustion, whatever. Some more were shot "pour encourage l'autre." We just let them shuffle.

Six miles from their main point of departure to the fences. Gave me time to get a good look at what I was up against. Couple of 20mm anti-aircraft guns mounted on trucks. More with machine guns. Couple without any weapons. The two tanks. One APC with a 30mm gun. About six thousand infantry. That had required some logistics, that.

The plan was, apparently, to just shuffle up to the fences. I was good with that. Was interested to see what they'd do about the mines.

Six miles. Took three hours. It had taken them about an hour to get set up. Was two PM before they got close to the base. They stopped about a half a klick out.

The three trucks that weren't carrying weapons pulled through the group. They weren't moving fast; getting the civilians out of the way wasn't easy.

"Get some Jav teams up on the berm. Let them get a look at what they're facing. Don't show the Javs."

The trucks eventually got through, spread out and headed for the fence.

We'd repaired the previous damage. They derepaired it. All three took out sections of fence and the concertina.

"Tell the gate guards to get ready to open up and then hunker."

"Roger."

"Samad?"

"Yes, sahib?"

"May be some leakers. Do not let them take my whiskey."

"They will not pass us, sahib."

God, I love the Nepos.

They hadn't opened fire at us. We weren't opening fire at them.

I started to wonder just how much this colonel knew about our internal defenses. I'd made sure that once the girls came into the compound, they didn't leave or pass messages out. I wasn't going to have the sort of intel we were getting from the refugees get out to my enemies. But he clearly knew we were on this end, primarily. He was staying well away from our living area. Like he was saying "We're just here to take the silverware. Don't mind us."

The problem being, he was going to have a hell of a time getting everything out over the berm.

Which meant he probably intended to assault through the holding encampment. More cover there so it made sense. Use the people to get up to the berm, blow the defenses, charge over the berm then fight forward through the gear in the base.

The big question was when he was going to drop the civilians. He'd do it at some point. Keeping them would make a battle impossible. At least coming through the gear park.

The answer was, as I'd guessed, at the berm. Some of the infantry, along with some civilians for cover, cleared out the last of the concertina. Then they formed up a wall of civilians on the berm as cover and started marching over into the gear park.

Worked for me.

Remember, it was rigged like a motherfucker.

We could hear them hooping and hollering all the way to the base. Most of the civilians, with the "infantry" over the berm, were beating feet back to Abadan much faster than they'd come. They left a trail of stragglers behind including some kids. See what we'd do about them later.

The colonel apparently had good enough people they stopped the sack before it got started. The thing was, to get it all out, short of major engineering, he had to take Fort Lonesome. We were blocking the gate.

We had internal cameras. I could see them moving through the stacks of gear, the tanks, the Bradleys, Strykers and Humvees. I was wondering when they'd notice all the wires and shit.

"Get ready to roll," I said as soon as most of the guys were over the berm.

I saw at least one of the guys who caught a clue. Young guy, looked about twelve which probably meant seventeen or so. He saw one of the wires and followed it back to the hood of the Humvee. Looked under the Humvee. Got up and started shouting.

There was more shouting by that time. But the guys were spread through the park and didn't have much in the way of commo. Some of them were heading back. There were arguments.

Iranians and Arabs are okay fighters until you throw them a loop. So far, everything had gone according to plan. The plan had just changed.

Bunch of them had gone into the secondary ammo dump, the one where we'd dropped most of the ammo from the FOBs we'd had scattered around Iran. I figured I'd light them up first.

Wow, that was exciting.

I'd tried to make sure shit actually blew up. You'd think ammo would just blow up and stay blowed up.

Now I knew why those ammo guys had so carefully fired every single Carl Gustav.

The explosives went off then the ammo started going off. Or not going off. Some of it was just flying through the air. In every direction.

Big, big, big explosion. Lots of secondaries. Lit up the sky despite it being broad daylight, sort of an orange-purple. And it kept going. Shit going off overhead. Shit hitting the ground and exploding.

It was hitting us and exploding.

Oh, not a lot. And we were mostly in bunkers. But it was popping all over the place. We didn't take any casualties but it was mighty damned exciting.

"Right, Fillup, get rid of their vehicles for me."

Javelin is one hell of a weapon. Absolutely sucks to be up against, mind you. But that's the point if you're holding one.

They make, like, no signature. The missile pops up under very low power and then ignites about twenty feet up. And the signature even then is really small. Something about very efficient combustion.

The really nice part, though . . . Well, there are so many nice parts about Javelin.

Nice part one. They're fire and forget. You lock them on the target, fire them and they just track right the fuck on. Forget the old days of having to keep the sight on the target like TOW and Dragon. Fire and fugedaboudit. Fucker is going to hit the target five times out of six.

Second nice part. The target is going to be smoked. Take a tank. Armored like a motherfucker, right? Sort of. They can't armor them like a motherfucker everywhere. So the majority of the armor is up front, where you'd expect a round to hit anyone but the French.

Javelin? Comes down from way the fuck up. They went damned near vertical at that range. Came right the fuck down. On the softest part of the tanks.

Third nice part about Javelin? Really easy to fire another one. Drop the launcher, slap on the sight, get another target.

Fourth nice thing about Javelin? Range. Dragons were about a klick. The vehicles that were the target would have been out of range. (And Dragon had a minimum range of six hundred meters. So you had a four hundred meter engagement basket. Sucked. Oh, and they used to blow the fuck up when you fired them. Better than nothing if you were up against tanks but not by much.)

Now, the manual said that the maximum range on Javelin employment was 2000 meters. At the range, it had been found to be at least 2500. And one SF team in Iraq had gotten a kill at over 3000.

These guys were at about 1500 meters from the Javelin teams. Clap shot.

They could have fired back if they were looking the right way. And if they'd seen the teams pop up and fire. They didn't get much of a chance.

The company had four Jav teams. They'd talked it out and engaged the two tanks, a 20mm gun and the APC first. The thing about the Javelin was . . . Okay, another nice thing. They went way the fuck up. Time of flight for a short range shot or a long range shot was about twenty seconds. If you were in a hurry to take somebody out, not so good.

If you were in a hurry to take out a bunch of things, pretty good. Because our guys could reload, target and fire in less than ten seconds.

Second flight was off before the first had hit. Targeted at . . . the two tanks, a 20mm gun and the APC.

Never do unto others unless you do unto them hard.

Then they slid down the berm and displaced. Just in case.

Meantime, the guys in the gear park were freaking out. Some of them were running forward. Some were running back. The ones near the ammo dump were just rolling around on the ground.

I do so love my job.

So I figured, what the fuck? Everybody survived the first ammo dump . . .

I had no need for any of the ammo. I had all I could carry in Fort Lonesome and then some. And, what the hell, ammo is cheap.

This one, fortunately, was further away than the first. It was also bigger. Less rained down on us. More rained down on them. Most of it didn't explode, mind you. Clearing the area was going to be an interesting job. And, okay, there was going to be some ammo for the locals to pick up and use. It was going to be on each other. They'd been doing that since Sargon; some scattered and very fucked up ammo wasn't going to change things. But the "Husayn Ali Martyr Brigade" was not going to be using it if I had my way.

So three "technicals" had survived, all mounting 14.7mm machine guns. They were now looking for whatever had killed them. I doubt any of them had ever faced Javelins. They were pointing the guns into the sky.

The Jav teams displaced. They popped back up. They only fired once this time.

Smoke three more technicals. Round two to Bandit.

Now, the gear park was about a mile long. And it could be confusing as hell if you didn't have a map, which I trusted they didn't.

Well, I more than trusted. I couldn't figure out, anymore, who was trying to attack us and who was running away. Except the running away ones were probably the ones running up the berm and sliding down the other side.

Into concertina. Hadn't intended it for that use, but it worked.

"Barriers that are not covered by direct fire are of no use except annoying an enemy." Don't know where I heard that, AOC maybe, but it's true. If you put out barriers, wire, mines, tank-traps, and don't have fire on them all they do is slow the enemy down, slightly, and annoy him. You might kill a few but most get through unscathed.

Unless they're panicked and stuck in concertina. In which case, as soon as they get unstuck, they start running again. Into mines.

And then they had to get past the fence. Which most couldn't. And thus tried to run to the openings. And if they hadn't seen their buddies getting blown up, they ran into mines. Those that had mostly hunkered by the fence and wept.

Let's go for round three. I hit my last charger and started to watch umpteen billion dollars of Uncle Sam's gear go up in flames.

Most of it was pretty unspectacular. A tank getting hit, when it's fully loaded, is an awesome sight. A pillar of flame from its exploding ammunition, turret flying off, etc.

The ones hit by the Javelins had just burst into flame and cooked the crews. Not too spectacular. I was disappointed.

The mortar carriers were okay. They tore apart. Trucks went up like bombs, as should be.

Strykers, even, were quite spectacular. One round on the engine, two in the crew compartment. They really tore into ribbons.

Fucking Bradleys?

Same load out. Turret came off of a couple. Burning like shit, don't get me wrong. All sorts of plastic and stuff. But not the earthshaking kaboom I'd hoped for.

The damned Abrams with five God-damned artillery rounds and C-4 and tank rounds in them?

Puffs of smoke. I couldn't even tell for sure if they were damaged. Pissed me off.

Oh, the guys caught in this?

Man, we'd put all sorts of explosives in there. And when shit blows up, it throws stuff around. Think various sized pieces of metal, wood and plastic going through the air at a very fast rate. Not pleasant to be around. Then there were the fuel trucks.

Now, they were empty, mind you. But I'd sort of forgotten there were going to be fumes. And fumes, generally, blow up better than liquids.

Okay, they were spectacular.

I was running out of eyes at this point, there had been various effects on my video surveillance system, so I got on the radios.

"Samad?"

"Are things going to stop blowing up, sahib?"

"Yeah, pretty much done. Hey, you guys did most of the work. Good job, by the way."

"Then may Buddha forgive us, sahib."

"Still some guys crawling around in the ruins last time I'd looked. Keep an eye out."

"Your whiskey is safe, sahib."

(Oh, where'd the booze come from? This was a big ass LOG base before we packed it with all the shit from Iran. Yes, Rule One, no drinking, pornography or such was in effect. But when big civilian brass visit they don't want to hear about no fucking Rule One. One of the things I'd found in the inventory was the storage for booze for the Distinguished Persons. And, trust me, brother, it was the good shit.

(Okay, logistics sidenote. I didn't know that there was booze out there in a CONEX. But after Samad turned up those Brit uniforms, I decided to see what weird crap was stored here. Figuring that "weird" meant small amounts, I sorted the full computer inventory of the original LOG base for smallest number of items. Also where I found the swagger stick, which I still have. As well as a bunch of really odd things. I don't know what dip-shit left behind several pounds of gold in thin sheets but it was packed on the evac vehicles along with a stash of random currency also left behind. Really, you wouldn't believe some of the shit I turned up. The "less than twenty items" went to fucking pages and pages. Most of it "case, one each." I kept expecting to find the Arc of the Convenant.

(I said I didn't like being a logistics puke, never said I wasn't good at it. End sidenote.)

(Wife's Edit: Is that where that silver tea service came from?)

(Shhhh! And the answer is sort of complicated . . . )

Where was I? Radios. Oh, yeah.

Wasn't really radio. I just swiveled around in my chair.

"Fillup, I think the rest of the party is yours. I'm going to go hang out with Samad."

"Roger," Captain Butterfill replied, heroically or some shit. "Thanks for leaving something for us to do."

So the Strykers rolled out the gates and turned north, up the outside of the base. There were now some of the bad guys up on the berm. Some of them shot at the Strykers. They didn't get more than one shot.

Two platoons unassed by the breaks in the berm. Where the footprints crossed the gaps it was clear the mines were gone. They got up on the berm and started working the remains of the gear park.

The third platoon, which was short because it had supplied the guards on the gates and in bunkers, continued a sweep around the base. Any enemy they spotted they engaged with "direct fire."

A few of the guys had made it through the gear park, what was left of it, and into the open area in front of Fort Lonesome. I got to the main control bunker as firing started up from the lines.

"Samad. What are you doing letting people get this close to my whiskey?"

"They will not get your whiskey, sahib."

"Or my women."

"Or your women."

And they didn't. There was some long-range fire that might have been an issue if a. the Nepos hadn't been in bunkers and b. the RIFs could shoot worth a shit. Since a. equalled value "yes" and b. equalled value "no" it was a nuisance not a threat. And the Nepos had gotten to be some really good shots. I wouldn't trust them on a patrol, not yet, but firing from their bunkers they were racking up some kills.

But there were still guys in the gear park and they were going to have to be combed out. With a bunch of unexploded ordnance in their midst.

It wasn't, by the way, getting dark. I looked at my watch when I got to Samad's bunker and it was 1430, two thirty PM.

The whole "battle" had taken thirty minutes. Round Four was done.

So what to do next?

Wait for dark.

Fillup arrayed snipers up on the berms, including what was left of the ammo berms. Sometimes they took fire from rats hiding in the remaining gear. We couldn't actually level the place and there was plenty of cover.

Then we waited. And had a drink of water and some cold MREs. I ordered Fillup and Samad to rotate guys for downtime; it was going to be a long night.

When it got dark we went to Round Five.

It was tedious and it was dangerous but that describes a lot of shit that soldiers do.

As soon as it got dark, it started without any help. The RIFs, thinking they could escape under cover of darkness, started trying to slip up the berm and away.

Sniper rifles come with thermal imagery scopes.

Our enemy did not have thermal imagery equipment. It was a moonless night and just about as black as pitch with all our lights shut down.

To them, we were invisible.

They glowed in the fucking dark under thermal imagery.

I moved over to the berm to watch. The whole group was arrayed on the west and north sides of the berm. Samad had the south exit from the base covered.

The guys had been firing at the RIFs hiding in the garbage during the afternoon. The RIFs knew they were on the west and north side. They'd figured out, from the firing in that direction, that the south was blocked. They went east.

To get out on the east side, they had to climb the berm.

That was not a fast exercise. It was fifteen feet high and steeply sloped. And there was, mostly, an open area before it.

And they glowed.

Under thermal imagery, good thermal imagery and the scopes were sixth generation, a person glows white-hot. Their footprints glow white for as much as twenty minutes depending on conditions. When they move through concealed areas, the heat of their body rises, as it did this night, and you can see a faint trace like a ghost moving overhead.

And if you're a sniper with an assigned area you wait for that trace to come into view and you shoot the guy in the chest. If he's still moving, then, you shoot him again in the head.

The base wasn't a box. It was a long oval, more or less, curved a bit like a kidney. It was seven hundred meters across most of the base, berm to berm. Long shot for a sniper. But they'd gotten settled in, stacked sandbags, used laser rangefinders. There wasn't any wind. It was still as death. Except for the occasional crack of a shot, echoing off of the berms. Sometimes there'd be another. Not usually.

I didn't interfere. I just walked behind them, listening.

"Sector two-five."

"Fucker is smoking a cigarette. How fucking dumb can you be?"

Pause.

Crack.

"Hope he liked his last smoke."

A sniper works with a spotter. The spotter, well, spots the targets and gives the sniper information on distance, weather, what he should have eaten for dinner.

All the sniper has to do is dial in the information on his scope, take a good steady stance, breathe deep the gathering gloom and terminate.

Bravo company had some very good snipers. Lord Love my boys. Okay, Fillup's boys.

I also had some good guys at "Close Quarters Battle." Not that, I hoped, there would be any of that tonight.

But when the movers settled down, the guys still in the area apparently being of the correct opinion that trying to leave was suicide, the rest of the company had to get into action.

Teams spread out and moved through the park. They'd done it before and knew their way around. But it was somewhat different after a. murthering great explosions and b. said explosions having scattered unexploded ordnance around.

The teams, though, weren't there to fight. They were there to flush. They, too, were using thermal imagery and were in contact with the snipers. Very direct contact. As that part of the battle started, the snipers shifted around. Each was assigned a sector and a team. And the two talked. A lot.

"Okay, you've got me, right?"

"You're right by that fucking blown-up Humvee."

"That describes a lot of this sector. There's, like, two hundred Humvees here, all blowed the fuck up. I'm waving a chemlight over my head. You've got me, right?"

(To add clarity to this exchange: A chemlight is a plastic tube that has some chemicals that mix when you bend it and make light. Think those necklace thingies. Well, the military has chemlights that give off invisible light. I shit you not. There are both infrared and ultraviolet. If you break one, you can't see the light unless you've got thermal imagery in the first case or UV imagery in the second. This is the type of chemlight the guy was waving. The world is a very strange place when it has chemical lights that don't give off light.)

"So is . . . Second Platoon's One Alpha, I think. Yeah, man, I got you. The dumbass by the blown-up Humvee waving the UV chemlight. The other guy is by an Abrams."

"Okay, we're moving south at this time."

"Trust me, I've got you. I could smoke you and fuck your girlfriend. And there's a heat source in that next Humvee to your . . . left. So watch your ass."

Unexploded ordnance could get one of the guys. If he wasn't very damned careful. It was all over the fucking place. One thing I hadn't counted on. Also fires which fucked with the thermal imagery.

But what I was really worried about was one of the snipers taking out one of the flushers.

Seemed to be working out all right.

It took all fucking night. Snipers got rotated. You could only look through a scope so long before your eyes started getting fuzzy and we did not want fuzzy snipers. The guys doing the flushing went in then out and got some downtime, if nothing else a few minutes to not be in wracking terror between stepping over unexploded cluster munitions and not knowing if some RIF was right around the corner. The Nepos got some Zs. I forced Samad to rotate them; he thought they were just being lazy. I forced him to rack out.

Me? I kept moving around the base. There were problems, there always were. That was what I was there for. Me and Fillup who also didn't get any sleep.

By dawn's early light the broad stripes and bright stars were still gallantly waving. And, yes, there was a flagpole. Before the rest of the fucking Army pulled out, along with all the Non-Governmental Organizations and the Press, there had been, like, nine flags up. Ours, Iran's new/old one, various countries (Britain) that had something to do with the LOG base, a fucking UN one.

When everybody left we took them all down. (We burned the UN one. And the French.) Except the Stars and Stripes. And we had fucking reveille every morning with a raising and retreat in the afternoon complete with badly rendered bugle over loudspeakers.

I'd left it up that night. And there she was in the morning, Old Glory still gallantly waving.

Okay, she was sitting flat down the pole because there was, like, no fucking wind. But work with me here. Point was, the flag was still up and the enemy was toast.

Of course, our mission was also toast.

Chapter Eight It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

So it was time to report in.

I'd prepared for that pretty well. Okay, I'd been out with the some of the sweep teams. There were burning vehicles. (Not the fucking Abrams, of course!) You had to get in close to those to make sure nobody was still hiding out. Very smoky, very sooty. Fun as hell.

I'd checked myself in a mirror before calling in. Stubble check: Manly. Soot-covered face? Stopped in a line where my helmet band crossed my forehead. Quick wipe with a cloth and the soot was mostly standing out in the scars on my left cheek.

Perfect.

"I need to talk to the battalion commander. We had an incident overnight."

BLEW IT ALL UP? Bad boy! Bad boy! No biscuit! Flayed Skin! Still beating heart!

Yes, sir. Request new orders since "maintain and secure" is now inoperative.

Bad boy! No biscuit! I'll get back to you. Bad boy! Flayed skin!

So then I took a shower while Fillup and his XO and SkyGeek did some good works. They'd actually starting working on it the night before. The brigade commander was not going to be impressed by stubble and soot. He'd had plenty of stubble and soot in his time.

"Did you really have to blow it up?"

Freshly pressed uniform (thank you, Shadi, and for the quicky), cloth cap neatly placed, destubbled.

"I'd like to squirt you some video, sir. It's about ten minutes long. I'll include everything in my full report. In my professional opinion, we're lucky to be alive. Sir."

Sent him the video. Said he'd get back to me.

Now, it's night in the States. Getting on to, anyway. Sunday. Colonel is still at work, though. Good man.

Called me back two hours later. Middle of the fucking night.

What was on the video?

Shots of the approaching army with close ups of the civilians in their midst. Good view of the Abadan refinery for perspective.

Close ups of the tanks.

Troops rolling out of the barracks in battle rattle. (Did not note that they'd done that hours beforehand.)

More of the approach. Let that one loom. It looked like "all the sands of the desert" if you didn't notice that more than half were unarmed women and children.

Them blowing the fence with the suicide trucks.

Thousands of heavily armed shooters pouring over the berm and celebrating.

Explosions. More explosions. One shot caught bodies, literally, flying up in the air. Well, parts.

Javelins firing.

Tanks blowing up from Javelins. Technicals blowing up from Javelins.

The Nepos holding the compound. We had to work with that one to make them look really seriously endangered, but the geek managed.

The Strykers rolling out of the base in an unstoppable wave. (Again, careful editing.)

Snipers on the berm. Day shot.

Thermal imagery of the sweep teams and a really lucky shot of one of them engaging a small group of hide-outs. Guys dropping from snipers.

One totally trashed compound. Bodies scattered everywhere.

A last shot of the stars and stripes waving in the wind.

All to music from the Halo movie. Well, and "O Fortuna." "O Fortuna" and Mjolnir Mix for the approach then "Blow Me Away" for the rest. Okay, it's more like 11 minutes. I didn't hear any bitching.

(And, okay again, the flag was cheating. There was this video that was like some sort of marketing video for Titan Base. Didn't know the U.S. Army did marketing videos. Oh, well. Anyway, we took it from that. But work with me, here. A flag hanging limp wasn't going to do it. SkyGeek was a real find. Same guy that fixed our satellite shit. I was protecting him very carefully.)

Did we carefully edit for "we're going to get fucked" and then "we survived and kicked ass!"? Oh, hell yeah. Was it propaganda? Yeah, probably.

But I'd just trashed something like nineteen billion dollars worth of stuff. (Actually, less, but none of it was coming home.)

I needed some propaganda on my side.

So the brigade commander called me back.

"That wasn't, exactly, a report. Where'd all that video come from?"

"We had prepared the base with an extensive surveillance system, sir. We were only one company and it was a very long perimeter."

"And some fencing, I noticed."

"Yes, sir."

"Busy little beavers. Actually, that was the corps commander's comment."

"The Nepalese did most of it, sir."

"The ones you armed. That was your battalion commander's comment."

"I have been doing the best job I can, sir, to maintain and secure this environment. I may have taken some unorthodox steps, but I considered them necessary to ensure the security of myself and the troops and noncombatants I am responsible for. Sir."

"The corps commander's question was actually 'Where'd he get the fucking Ghurkas?' I explained. He felt it was 'a pretty optimal use of available personnel.' He also mused about whether we can keep them."

"Yes, sir."

"What was your count on the threat? I was looking at better than two grand. I thought you said there wasn't that much threat in the area."

"Faulty intel and things accelerated, sir. Sir, we're one company. I don't have an intel guy. Or overhead. Sir. And our rough count was six thousand. We've got enough video to do a hard count when it comes to it. But that was our estimate."

"Before I showed it to the division commander and his staff I asked for their count of what they considered 'overwhelming force' in the circumstances. His answer was around a thousand. Same for the corps commander when he was asked. He's sending it on to FORSCOM with his comments. But you're going to need to do an actual report."

"Yes, sir. Breaking the chain, sir. Extraction?"

"Still nothing. Brought that up, too. You're probably going to have to roll to somewhere. Ensure your own security and make plans for that. The last is probably redundant but you didn't destroy all your ammo and equipment, right?"

"I'm an S-4, sir. You really think I'd destroy all my equipment, sir?"

"Yeah. We need to unfuck that when you get back."

Yes!

"Out here."

So we were out of the woods for now. The Chief of Staff might be less forgiving, not to mention the Secretary of Defense, and I figured it would get that high what with a billion here and a billion there.

But for now, we were out of the woods.

Well, actually we were stuck deep in them. But we could see some paths and shit. Maybe.

Then we had to deal with the State Department.

Most of the "governments" in the world were, essentially, thugs. We'd had embassies overrun in a dozen countries. And then gotten in contact with them and said "no harm, no foul." (Look, a dead ambassador, not to mention the Marines, was foul.) The "governments" were whichever group happened to have commo with the States at any moment.

I'll give you an example that actually mattered. Turkey.

The capital of Turkey is Ankara, which had been a fairly big city in the middle of fuck all. Our embassy, there, was evacced by that MEU in the Med when "the security situation deteriorated."

Subsequent to that, the U.S. had been contacted by three separate groups, all claiming to the be "the official government of Turkey."

The "official" official government was the one that the Turkish ambassador to the U.S., who lived, said was the official government. Sort of.

See, the Turkish Ambassador to France was buddies with a different faction. So the French were recognizing them.

The Turkish ambassador to the UN had also survived. And he was saying the third faction was the "official" government.

And the State Department was in a dither. Which was the official government of Turkey?

I can tell you that from my experiences. None of them. They were three groups of thugs who had satellite phones and the ears of three more thugs who happened to have the ear of idiots.

There was no "official" government of Turkey if you count "official" as having control over most of the territory. Or even a big segment of it. Say, half. Not at that time.

There was an official government of Israel. New prime minister; the vaccine hadn't worked for the last one. Somewhat reduced Knesset was in session. Elections were in the planning stages.

It was willing to take us in. But not the Nepos.

What the fuck?

They were still afraid of the flu. Okay, there was some constant to that. But I had documentation that the Nepos had been vaccinated with Type Two. (I wasn't mentioning the girls at all. Just a vague mention of "local contract staff." Besides, we'd vaccinated them too.)

For some reason, well some pretty obvious ones, they were willing to take a company of American infantry, but not the Nepos.

And then there was the problem of how to get there.

Remember my discussion of Turkey?

To get to Israel, we'd have to pass through Iraq and Jordan.

Get this, there were four semi-official governments in Iraq and three more in Jordan. The really "official" government in Jordan was the one led by the son of King Hussein. Kid was a former tanker and he'd actually managed to gather a pretty decent body of troops and stake out some serious territory. But there were two more who were recognized by various ambassadors who'd survived.

The King Hussein faction was okay with us rolling through. Actually, they were asking for our help. The other two were against it and raising holy diplomatic hell.

Then there's Iraq.

Okay, one of the factions I could dig with. The Kurds had managed to hold things pretty much together. Really high death rate, but they were tribal based already and the tribes had things worked out between them pretty well. And the Kurds just react, adapt and overcome. I'd say it's a mountain people thing but that doesn't explain the U.S.

Anyway, the Kurds were one faction. They didn't say they were the government of Iraq, they were the government of Kurdistan. Which by their maps included some parts of Iran and Turkey.

They didn't have an ambassador in the U.S. The State Department didn't recognize them at all. Of course, they just had the most effective control over the largest area in the Middle East. But they were, officially, nonexistent.

Then there's the other three (major) factions.

Note, these guys weren't, any of them, as big as HAMB. At the rate General Dead Meat had been going he was well on his way to taking Iraq and turning it and Iran back into the Persian Empire.

But all three of these guys were recognized by one or another government and none of them were willing to let us through "Iraq."

Truth was, territorially, we weren't going to be dealing with but one of them, depending on our route to Israel.

If we even went to Israel.

"State Department thinks they can talk the Iraqis around. But Israel is not going to let your Nepalese in."

I'd stopped dealing with the BC. I mostly was talking to the Brigade 3 these days.

"I'm not going to leave my Nepos behind."

"With the Jordanians?"

"I'm taking them to the States. If I have to canoe over."

"Nobody is willing to let you through."

"And that's going to stop me exactly how?"

I didn't know how much hell I was causing at home until one of the guys called me in to watch TV.

Yeah, I know. Here we are in a compound filled with rotting bodies and still burning equipment and the guys are watching TV.

What else were they going to do? There weren't enough hands to bury all the bodies.

Actually, we'd done something on that score. Basically, we sprayed as much of the compound as we could reach with diesel and lit it up. Burned for a day or so (we used a lot of diesel and it soaked into the soil) and most of the bodies were crispy.

But we couldn't get all of it and they were a health hazard. People were staying inside away from the flies as much as possible. Flies that have been on rotting bodies are not good for the body. We were immunized against every fucking thing in the world but they still weren't good.

"What's up?"

The day room is the province of the troops. Good officers go in only on duty or if called in. The lieutenants and I had our own official "O Club" which we had tarted up with some stuff from the "low-inventory" stores. Would you believe there was a fucking Ming vase in there?

(Wife Edit: So that's where that came from.)

(Shut up.)

So, anyway, I was walking out of the commo van after another fruitless conversation with Brigade when one of the troops waved me into the day room.

There, large as fucking life, on fucking Fox, was our video.

Oh. Holy. Shit.

The troops loved it. They'd replayed it a couple of times themselves for shits and giggles and then played around with the video some more. That one concentrated more on dying ragheads.

But this was the one I'd sent to Brigade and then had, apparently, been marched up the chain. Fucker was supposed to be secret.

Holeee shit. I was fucked.

Don't get me wrong. It was a good video. For a certain audience.

But viewed in the wrong context? Scrambled around a little bit by the media? With CAIR doing a voice over?

Holeeee shit.

"Hell, yeah!" I said, grinning. "You're all fucking heroes, now."

Hollllleeeee SHIT.

I went back to the commo van. The on-duty RTO was already running to get me.

Fecal storm incoming.

Chapter Nine Cross that Strait When We Come to It

Nobody knew how it had leaked out. I guess we did too good a job. Some Fobbit SOB just had to send it to some friend on the Internet and then it had all gone bad. It had one of the highest hit counts on record on YouTube (which was back up). I tried to figure out if there was some way we could get residuals, given that we'd sweated blood for it. And were about to sweat more.

But that wasn't the problem.

Was all that force necessary?

They destroyed how much equipment?

Why was the equipment still there? Hadn't all the troops come home?

Why did we still have troops in Iran?

Are we still going to have to fight terrorists as well as the flu? Isn't it time for peace to have a chance?

Where had the Ghurkas come from?

Britain had sent an official query asking how an American unit had come to be in command of their troops. So had Nepal but that one took longer to be noticed. Except, as far as either knew, they weren't missing any Ghurkas. But they had on the right uniforms. They were even wearing kukris. (I told you there was some strange shit in that place. Hell, there were cavalry sabers and saddles and . . . You wouldn't believe the list. I wish I could have kept it but there was no fucking way.)

Congressional investigation. Congressional fucking investigation.

Except for one problem.

Witness A would be me. And I was in fucking Iran.

They wanted to video-conference me in.

It ended up with the Army Chief of Staff explaining. On national TV. Bet he loved that.

"By order of the President, we had over fourteen 'support and maintain' detachments scattered in as many countries around the world. Six were evacuated when the security situation reached critical. And in all six cases the equipment on site had to be destroyed or fall into the hands of the enemies of the United States. As of this date, there are two units responding, including the unit under the authority of Bandit Six. The other six units have all been lost. Two we do not know what happened to them. They simply stopped responding to requests for update. The other four are confirmed by reports at the time and satellite imagery to have been overrun. Total lost military personnel over one thousand, making it the highest KIA/MIA single action operational loss since the Vietnam War! One of them destroyed some or all of the material under their control. That was Bandit Six and he was under orders to do so rather than have it fall into the hands of enemies of the United States.

"I've been watching my men being overrun one by one sitting on material that has exactly no value to the United States under the current world conditions and you want me to explain why a captain and one company, a hundred and sixty troops, had to destroy the material in the face of SIX THOUSAND? Is that what you want me to explain, Senator? Senator, I'm glad my boys are ALIVE!"

Most of the damned session, as is normal with congressional hearings, consisted of fucking idiots talking about nothing and then asking a koan. Four minutes of the importance of the Health of Children Opportunity Bill followed by "Why did he use rock and roll music?" I swear, they must slip some sort of fucking psychodelic into the water in DC. But a few of the questions, from Republicans naturally, were on point. Okay, actually the best Q&A came from a Democrat.

"You were ordered to leave the equipment in place by the President?"

"Yes, Congressman. There was no logistical option. That is, we couldn't pick it up and bring it home. Things were and are in a situation such that disaster relief takes priority."

"Understood. And to bring back all but, and I quote, 'absolute minimum forces. No more than a company to be left behind.' Is that correct?"

"Yes, Congressman. That was the order from the President in consultation with the Secretary of Defense."

"What did you think of that order?"

"I was given an order by the Commander in Chief and carried it out to the best of my ability. In situations where a company was unavailable I tried to leave equal or better forces. Such as the SF battalion in Colombia which had the approximate firepower of a company. And which was the first we lost contact with."

"But what did you think of the order?"

"I thought I was being given an order, Congressman."

"You're a member of the Joint Chiefs, correct?"

"Yes, Congressman."

"And your job, as a member of the Joint Chiefs, is to advise the President on military matters. Were you asked for your advice in this case?"

"Yes, Congressman."

"And what did you advise?"

"Destruction in place and recall of all personnel. Barring that, choosing force levels sufficient to ensure security and maintain an ability for extraction."

"And your advice?"

"I was given a different order, Congressman. I carried out the order I was given."

"General, I was a captain in the Army, you know that, right?"

"Yes, Congressman."

"General, you left units scattered all over the world with no way to get home. No plan to get them home. Thousands of troops that could have been brought home if we just destroyed the equipment in the first place. I'm not asking about how you felt about the order. I'm asking how you felt about that situation. It's a subtle difference; I want to hear your answer."

"Congressman, I was ordered to leave guys out in the wilderness to die. The fact that we got back six of the packets is a miracle. If we get back Bandit Six and his boys or the unit in Kazakhistan it's going to be more of a miracle. How do you think I feel about that, sir?"

But the classic was:

"I don't understand why there are Chinese troops there, General. Can you explain that? Aren't they a risk for the H5N1 virus?"

They're Nepalese not Chinese. Look, let me show you a map. I thought this might be asked. See? Different countries. Good light infantry. Also some other contract personnel . . . Hoping to get them all back to the States for either residency or eventual repatriation when that becomes possible.

So the Chief of Staff was on record asking for me to bring back the Nepos.

But the Israelis were still balking.

Then The Bitch apparently got involved.

People had a different opinion of the world, and of soldiers, after the Plague. The good people of America were getting fed by soldiers every day. They were getting medical attention from the Army. They were, now, interacting with soldiers day in and day out. If there had been a military coup in late 2019 nobody, I think, would have batted an eye.

Sure, there were lots of bitchers about the government. And every bitch about soldiers was being picked up by the news media. Fewer were getting broadcast about people bitching about The Bitch. That didn't mean they weren't.

Warrick wanted me off the news. Big time. The "Lost Company" was now big news. Human interest. Actually, maybe it did make sense.

The majority of the print and broadcast media, Fox being an exception, was pitching us as murdering and destroying bastards. The "nineteen billion" number was repeated again and again. Along with suggestions that we'd fired on the civilians.

Fox was showing the RIFs pouring over the berm in an unstoppable tide.

Thing was, people still didn't have power and TV, period. But that didn't mean that stuff wasn't getting around. A lot of radio stations were back up. They were the main medium of news. I hadn't realized it at the time, but that really helped.

You see, most of the news stations were still "talk radio." And that had been dominated by conservatives for a long time. Liberals had tried again and again to break into it and bounced. You had to have some logic to be able to work in talk radio. Not to mention a sense of humor which tofu-eaters were notably lacking.

Oh, there was some backlash. Warrick had used her FCC and "Emergency Powers" to shut some down for "hate speech." Which got broadcast by others. Which had caused a bunch of questions in Congress. Which was getting restive under some of the shit she'd been pulling.

Elections were coming up. Everybody wanted to blame somebody else for the fucking disaster in the U.S. Deflect some of the fucking damage, politically.

The one group that was coming out smelling like a fucking rose was the U.S. military. The congressional investigations about my little destruction spree were supposed to kill that, to tarnish our image. Make it look like Abu Ghraib or some shit.

It was doing exactly the opposite and they quickly saw that. The Army, which was the only group that seemed to actually be doing anything for people, had been ordered to abandon its troops, America's troops, in wastes far from our blessed shores by the same woman who had screwed up every step of the disaster.

Warrick wanted us off the news. To get us off the news she had to get me back to the U.S. and into a quiet grave if she could arrange it.

But the Israelis were still balking. Warrick had pulled some shit about Israel in her time. She was not a fair-haired girl in their estimation. They shucked and jived very good. They'd gotten better spokespeople lately. Flu threat. Security problems. Flu.

Send a MEU?

The one in the Med was on its way back to the States. They'd done all they could do. And send a MEU for one fucking company? That would look great on the news. Helos, ground threats . . .

Fly us out?

From where? Abadan airport was too big for us to hold. Any airport capable of supporting planes big enough to fly us out was too big for us to guarantee security.

I got told by the 3 that somebody, I think it was the BC, had suggested dropping a Ranger Battalion in to hold the airstrip while we evacced.

Look, Rangers are tough. I went to the school. Yada, yada. But my fucking company had more firepower than a Ranger battalion. Rangers are always portrayed on the news like they're the heaviest infantry in the world. Not hardly, brother. Heaviest infantry in the world was a full up Mech unit with Bradleys. Next down the way is us. The Stryker boys. When you care enough to send the very best. Sending a Ranger unit to "support" a Stryker unit is like sending a PeeWee league to pitch for the Yankees.

The order, for once, was not micromanagement on her part.

"Tell them to get out of Iran and off of the news."

We were headed home.

But how?

Israel was saying not only no but hell no.

There was a port in Jordan down on the Red Sea. There was a bare possibility of getting a ship in there.

Only problem was, it was held by the wrong faction. And they were tough. We, possibly, with the help of Hussein, Junior, could have shifted them out.

But we'd take casualties.

And there weren't many ships.

Fly out from Jordan?

Again, no good airstrip and birds were blocked out, big-time. I think that the brass were, at that point, using us to stick it to the Bitch. Just being passive aggressive. "Can't do that, can't do that . . ." Wasn't sure how I felt about that at the time. Despite the hell we went through, I'm good with it, now.

Why? Because the Bitch needed to be taken down. Not by a military coup. By showing the American people what a fucking fruitcake they'd elected.

I don't get or like human interest. Back before the Plague, it had ruined all sorts of stuff. The Olympics for one. Back when I was a kid, you'd watch the Olympics and it'd be about sports. By the time I was a teenager it was all about "poor Bobby was born with a heart defect but he managed to overcome it and become an expert male syncronized swimmer!"

The fucking Olympics are about who wins and who loses. Period fucking dot. I don't give a shit if Bobby has a heart murmur. Did he get a gold? No. Fucking loser.

But, I don't get most people. The world's a very black and white place to me. That's good in a soldier. Not so good in a politician. And to be a senior general you have to be a politician. It just goes with the fucking job. You cannot do your job if you're not one.

Well, we were good human interest. Poor homeless waifs that, nonetheless, were carrying the flag. Good boys. Have a biscuit.

It pissed the hell out of me, but there you are.

Questions about the Battle of Abadan were opening up other questions. Why had the immunization distribution been fucked up? Why weren't we cracking down on the violence in the cities?

The latter had started to spill over. With most of the food shipments cut off, the gangs had been moving out looking for food, loot, women, whatever. There had been "encounters" between them and not only military and police units but some of the "random associators."

(Fox called them "local volunteer organizations" which was pretty accurate. Every other broadcast and print news organ seemed to call them "right-wing militias." This, of course, being a code for "Bad Dog! No Biscuit!")

Warrick realized her orders were being circumvented. But even the Mainstream Media couldn't always cover up that the people she wanted supported were mostly murderous thugs. So she didn't push the issue.

But she also didn't push for a crackdown. "Negotiate." "Collaborate." "Minimal force." Kumbaya. Whether, at that point, it would have worked or not, I'm not sure. But the point was, she was sitting on the fence as much as possible.

And things were getting ugly. Er.

So more and more questions were getting asked. Not congressional investigations. Oh, no. Democrat Congress. They could squash those.

Right wing radio? Oh, yeah. Fox? Some.

Internet?

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

It seemed like the whole Internet had shifted. Most places it still wasn't up. But the places it was up all seemed to be in the "red" zones. That is, fly-over country.

Things were coming up in fly-over country much faster than in the kumbaya lands. This was pitched by the media as some sort of plot. Possibly by the military.

Nope. It was just that the people in fly-over country weren't taking the shit that the "blues" were accepting. Governors were using state police, National Guard where they could get away with it and even "right-wing militias" to take back their cities. With very liberal Rules of Engagement.

Things were starting to resemble civilization in parts of fly-over country again.

The lower population density and survivablity, in general, also worked.

And in "blue" country, times they were achangin'.

Okay, maybe it's time to talk about California.

California is a desert. Not quite, but close enough. Southern California, at least. Northern much less so especially in the Valley. But southern California is a desert made green by much effort.

California was also densely populated. After the Plague it was still pretty densely populated. Temporarily.

Most of southern California's water came from a very complicated system of canals, tunnels and pumps. They had some local reservoirs, but mostly it came from way back east. They'd been in "drought" conditions (actually, quite normal conditions) for fucking ever. They were always short on water. And power. And everything else that makes for a modern industrialized society except people.

When the Plague hit, they lost a good half their population. It had a lot of people. It even had areas of high trust. But they were, pretty much, fucked.

California had a lot of agriculture, too. But much of it was dependent on irrigation. The whole Imperial Valley for starters. And there had to be people to run the irrigation canals and weirs and locks.

So they ended up short on food and short on water. Things got very ugly very quickly. Lots of low trust areas. Borderline civil control in a lot of areas already. No food. No water.

L.A. pretty much started to empty out by May. The only problem being, there weren't any better areas around. Water was scarce everywhere. And going east was just going into areas with less water.

San Diego was a bit better off. They had Pendleton Marine base and a Navy base there. The Navy ships, those that weren't tasked elsewhere, had big desalinators for water. Between the Marines and the Navy they managed to keep civil order. Wasn't easy. There was pretty much an invasion going on from Mexico. The Marines had machine guns.

A lot of people from L.A. headed south. Not all of them bad people, mind you, but there were enough that it mattered. There was a lot of killing in the areas south of L.A..

But it's a long way to San Diego on foot. And much of it is Pendleton, which isn't exactly overrun with food and water. There are a few streams. The term here is "dysentery." Which means you dehydrate faster than you consume.

Cars? California was the car capital of the U.S. The roads were choked. As in, not moving.

It was a fucking death-trap.

Marines and the few National Guard that had assembled did what they could. And a couple of NG units were wiped out for it. But something like two million people are believed to have died in the area south of L.A. That's on top of the estimated four million from the direct effects of the Plague.

Some made it over the mountains into the Valley. The Valley was better. Services were starting to come back, there was more water and such.

Then Fresno got hit by about a million refugees from Los Angeles. Most of them the toughest and meanest. Things were ugly for a while.

Estimates again. Deaths in the L.A. metropolitan area, total population about 12 million pre-Plague.

Four million direct effects. One in three again.

Maybe another four million in the first breakdown of order.

One million or so from secondary effects and secondary epidemics in the next four months.

Evacuees?

Well, Orange County, as of last census, has about a half a mil as noted. Rattling around like peas. Total L.A. metro area is a mil and change. Say a mil and a half.

And most of those went there after the Plague. Still not a bad place to live. If you're not addicted to water.

Like I said, it emptied.

Point is, a lot of the "blue" areas were like that. L.A. is worst case, but it's not completely off.

San Francisco got hit hard by direct effects of the Plague. Okay, one of the reasons, frankly, was AIDS. The drugs that HIV "sufferers" took kept them alive. It didn't rebuild their immune systems. But that was, at most, a couple hundred thousand. Nobody quite knows because the records were "secret" and nobody's bothered to dig out the no longer secret records.

But they had something like 40% mortality rate from direct effect. Worst noted mortality in the U.S. Reason? Nobody quite knows. See all the previous factors and reverse them is my guess. Low societal trust, healthy eating . . . Water, again, became an issue. They got it from across the Bay. Pumps weren't working. No water eventually equals death. Movement started, north and south.

South was The Valley again. The Valley had gotten hit, too. But there were big pockets of "high trust" zones. Suburbs, yeah, but farming communities, too. Those that hadn't gotten eaten by the suburbs.

The Valley mostly was able to absorb the refugees from the Bay area and even L.A. Not easily and the fringes in both directions got hit, hard. But they managed to absorb the blow.

Thing about it is, the Valley was one of the most conservative areas of California. The "blue" people from the cities were dependent on the charity of those evil "red" people. Who were clearly busting their ass to help.

Bottomline: Various and sundry effects of the Plague hit liberals hardest. Oh, the "poor" too. But if you look at the demographics of the Democrats they tended to be uppermost echelon of income and lowermost echelon of income.

The Plague, except for the tiny fraction at the very top, tended to hit both groups harder than middle class.

And if you looked at the demographics of the Republicans, they tended to be middle class.

There's one last point. Prior to the Great Depression, the Democrats were a minority party. The Grand Old Party (GOP: Republicans) had dominated every Federal office since the Civil War.

Hoover killed that. His response to the Great Depression was to tell people to pull up their socks and quit complaining. Not a functional response. People couldn't afford socks. It went over as well as "let them eat cake."

FDR simply did things that made sense to people. Oh, they were considered "communist" at the time, but they made sense. He put people to work. He made sure people got fed. He led. "A chicken in every pot" was his mantra. (Back then, chickens were high-cost food. They were hard to raise and focused primarily on egg production. The modern chicken farming industry was started at least in part by it being a "Hero Project" if you will.)

Warrick's response to the Plague had been:

Screw up the vaccination distribution. (The vaccine worked sometimes.)

Bitch about conspiracies.

Ignore all the experts on recovery.

Pour all her efforts into places that were free-fire zones.

Play the victim card.

Start seizing every business in sight and proceed to run it further into the ground.

Talk about the wonders of socialized medicine.

Talk about the environment.

Play the race card . . .

It was getting old. People were as tired of her "Plan for the Future" and "Conversation with America." They were tired of her waffling and she was starting to look a bit weird every time she was on TV. Like a robot or a brain-eating zombie. (Heavier and heavier doses of tranquilizers as it turns out. Good ones, too.)

Even liberals will see sense when survival was on the line. Just as a lot of Republicans saw sense in 1932. It's hard to call someone a "mindless myrmidon" or a "babykiller" when he's handing you food. And looks at your kid and gives you some more under the table.

Point is that a lot of good, devout, tofu-eaters were starting to go the other way. And the problem with unthinking zealots is, they tend to stay unthinking zealots.

When a long-term vegan has to eat meat or die, they have to rethink their morals. When a PETA "animals are people" lover has to kill and eat a house cat to survive, they then have to justify their choice. To themselves if to no one else. Ditto some long-term gun-hater who gets a gun for self-defense fighting her way out of L.A. and has to use it. Multiple times.

And if they are truly unwilling to adapt, they just die.

A conservative is a liberal who's been raped. There'd been a lot of that in places like L.A.

The Plague and the depression that resulted were causing a lot of grasshoppers to choose being ants or die.

Warrick was looking at taking her place in history next to Herbert Hoover crossed with Saddam Hussein.

The last fucking thing she needed was her former radical liberal tofu-eaters, now quickly becoming radical conservative fire-eaters, swooning over a company of Hellenic Mold Heroes cut off in Iran.

I was told, later, that my "winning looks" had a part to play in all this. Given the sexual orientation in some of the "switchers" I'm not sure that was a good thing.

And the Brass was being notably passive aggressive.

Then I got The Call.

So there I was, trying to stay away from the flies . . . Really, it was the only reason I was lolling around in bed. Oh, that and that it was, like, 2AM again.

And the phone rings.

"What now?"

"Sir, you've got a call."

The on-duty RTO wasn't real happy. It was either brass or reporters again.

"I'll be right over."

"It's . . ."

"I'll be right over."

So I sit down, wearing my best uniform and at least half awake.

Guy comes on. Colonel in dress uniform.

"Captain Bandit? Stand by for the President."

"Roger."

Oh, holy FUCK. No, no, no, NO!

Yes.

So there's the robot bitch. And to add to the misery, there's the fucking Chief of Staff and the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State on other screens.

I'm a captain. They're the Gods. This was not going to be good no matter how it turned out.

Look, yes, I hated the Bitch. Still do. But she was, after all, the President. Anybody who sits in that chair carries a certain mystic chill. The weight of history, etc. She was sitting in the same position as George Washington and Lincoln and Reagan. Yes, she looked as if she wanted to eat my brains. But she still was the President. Making fun of her in abstract was one thing. Looking her in the eyes was another.

I resolved to put the words "robot" and "zombie" out of my lexicon.

"Captain, I'm told that all standard conceivable methods of extracting your force are impossible to effect at this time."

"Yes, ma'am?"

"And you have . . . issues with moving your troops over to Israel."

"Yes, ma'am. The security situation in southern Iraq is notably unstable and the Israelis refuse to accept my Nepalese attachments or the local contractors. It would be . . . dishonorable to simply leave them behind. I hope to get them to the U.S. Barring that, to some area of relative safety."

The "security situation" I'd thrown in just to throw her. But the Nepalese were a major telling point.

The "Ghurka Meme" had infected the reports. Overnight, it seemed, we turned from being evil murdering destroying bastards to "heroic fighters." You see, the news media had noticed that we had little brown brothers we were helping. That made it all right and good.

Getting the Nepos out was probably right up there with getting us out in her mind.

"So how are we going to get you home, Captain?"

"The Ten Thousand, ma'am."

"Excuse, me?"

Yeah. Shows how much she knew about military history.

Group of Greek mercenaries from various city states at one point hired out to a pretender to the Persian throne. This was between when they'd kicked Persian ass at Thermopylae and Marathon and before Alexander ended up teaching the Persians who was the real boss.

Their side lost. Not far from here, again. Hey, there's a lot of history in this area.

Anyway, they ended up fighting their way home. Look up "Anabasis."

What I was proposing was the same thing.

We were going to march to the sea. The Black Sea in this case. Well, part of it. Sort of.

"Anabasis?" the Chief of Staff asked.

"Yes, sir. Bosporus, actually. I think the Greeks might be more willing to take us in."

"Turkey is not willing to permit your movement," the secretary of State said, cutting off that suggestion.

"There is no Turkey," the Chief of Staff said, giving him the exact value he deserved. "How are you going to cross the Bosporus, Captain? There's a very unfriendly Caliphate in the way."

Fuck.

"Dardanelles?"

"No bridges."

"Cross that strait when I come to it," I said.

The Prez might have been a fuck-up but she wasn't a complete moron.

"So you're suggesting that you march through Turkey to Greece, Captain? Can you do that?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. Fuck it. I was fucked anyway. If the Chief of Staff didn't like it he should have sent me a fucking MEU. Or something. "I have sufficient supplies to take the full unit, including attachments, to the Bosporus. And beyond."

"The security situation in Turkey is not the greatest, Bandit," the Chief of Staff said.

"Yes, sir. Duly noted. I'm better prepared than the Ten Thousand and I've got better troops."

The last was debatable. Those Greeks were kick fucking ass motherfuckers. But I had to say something.

"Approved. Break this down."

That was it. No "good luck." Nothing. Just "Approved."

You know, Johnson used to get on the radio and order around companies. We lost that war.

Then there was the question of the Greeks. Would they let us in? All of us?

"Oh, sure. No problem, buddy. By the way, could you bring some supplies?"

There was one Greek government. Not four. One. All the surviving ambassadors agreed and there was even a U.S. Embassy still open. They'd had some major issues, still did. But they were, well, the Greeks. Sure, they hadn't won a war since Palatia. But they'd been fought for and over and through for centuries and they just kept being Hellenes. As long as there was enough mutton, retzina and ouzo they were good. A company of infantry replicating the Ten Thousand's march. Oh, hell, yeah! Come on over! We'll bring the ouzo! You're cute, you know that? How's your butt look?

Great. Problems settled. All we had to do was fight our way through Iraq and Turkey, over some stone bitch mountains which were already starting to fill up with snow, dragging along some Nepalese irregulars, who might be some good in the mountains come to think of it, and a trail of camp followers.

This was starting to feel too much like the Ten Thousand.

And I hadn't even found out the bad parts, yet.

Chapter Ten Uno Problemo

There were a few details to work out. I paid my second in-person visit to the refugees.

The "mullah" who had taken over was a guy in his forties. He had, somewhere, scrounged up traditional Islamic dress and never actively carried a gun.

Let me explain the quotes. A mullah is, technically, nothing more than a teacher. That's actually the translation of the word: Scholar. He's not a priest specially annointed by God through a chain from some distant past. The Islamics simply don't have that. They have some people, like Hussein Jr. in Jordan, who are descendants of the Prophet and therefore specially important. But they are not necessarily or even commonly mullahs. A mullah is more like a rabbi, but even rabbis tend to go through an elaborate preparation for their posts. The only fixed requirements for a mullah is that he has completed the Haj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, and that he reads Arabic so he can translate and "explain" the Koran, which is a fairly baroque and in place opaque document.

(These "explanations," by the way, are called "fatwahs." A fatwah is not always a license to kill although it often seemed that way to Westerners since those were the only fatwahs we ever heard about. A fatwah can be something as simple as whether you can talk on your cell phone while doing your morning ritual washing. No, by the way. And, yes, there's a morning ritual wash. Why do Islamics often smell like the backside of a camel? Because it's based on people washing in the DESERT. Water is not required. Trust me, as OCD as Mohammed was (and he was very OCD) if he'd been around for modern conveniences he'd have added "And use water you morons! And soap! And maybe some fucking deodorant! You all smell like camels' butts!")

Down south and to a certain extent anywhere in the Bible belt you'll find small churches all over that are set up by a "preacher" who then brings his personal version of the Word of God to people every Sunday. Such preachers range from guys with multiple degrees in divinity (one of the schools Al Bore failed, by the way) or theology to some guy who can barely read the Bible.

Now you know what mullahs are. They're guys who a) went on the Haj, b) can or fake that they can read the Koran and c) convince people to give them money to preach.

And among the Shia they occasionally act as pimps. It's a funny old world.

This mullah seemed a decent enough guy. Whether for propaganda reasons or faith he seemed, also, to be trying to live the life that Shia mullahs had tended to live prior to the Mad Mullahs taking over Iran. That is, he advised and suggested how things should run, but didn't actually run them. Not under "shariah law." It's kind of like, a guy may be one of those small town preachers. He can still run for office. But if he's smart he doesn't bring God into every discussion of a bill. By the same token, his advice and suggestions were taken. Look, I wasn't going to tell them how to run their little society as long as it ran.

They'd gotten the gist that we were pulling out. And, of course, they'd been around for the earth shattering kabooms. The fight, fortunately, hadn't spilled their way but with no defenses and no chance of decent survival if we lost they couldn't have been real happy. And they weren't real happy we were leaving.

People were trying to kiss my hand. I hate that. But they apparently hadn't cared much for HAMB, either.

"We're pulling out. We have a way we can get home."

Hollywood duly translated.

Mullah: That sucks. (This, of course, took about ten minutes.)

Yeah. Well, things suck all over. We're not leaving you in the lurch. You've done good by these people and I hope things go okay for you when we leave. To help with that, we've left all the noncombatant stuff in the base intact. Food, water, a water plant and of course the defenses. Even some AK ammo for your boys.

You rock. (Another ten minutes.) Guy was crying. Yeah, I probably would have cried too.

They were figuring we were pulling out and destroying all the food and shit. I'm a farmer. Food is my religion. Well, and killing all enemies of the Constitution "foreign and domestic."

Bandit: Got a problem, Mullah. The girls. Our "temporary wives."

We'd explained to the girls what the plan was. Then we had to explain again, in more detail.

Look, most of the girls were from pretty reclusive families and they might have been taught their ABCs but that pretty much covered it. Girls only had to know three things in Islamic society: How to cook, how to clean and how to obey men. They mostly figured out having babies on their own.

The world had already gotten to be a very big and unpleasant place with the Plague. Trying to explain to them what was about to happen was hard. Think cheerleaders but with even less knowledge of the world. Not bright, ignorant and with a very short attention span.

When it was finally explained to them so that they understood, and I could see it sinking into their tiny little brains, I explained that it would probably be better for them to stay. We weren't sure we were getting through and if they got captured when we lost, it would be bad for them.

Problem being, it was going to be bad for them anywhere.

Islam was really strict about the whole "premarital sex" thing. The penalty for being raped, not for the rapist but for the girl who was raped, was stoning. Generally the family of the rapist paid a nominal fee and it was all good. Rape was, in fact, a way of exacting punishment on someone in (really backward) Islamic societies. Say a guy was caught stealing. Technically, the punishment was losing his hand. But say that he was the sort of lout who comes from a good family that's politically connected. Just one of those fuck-ups you get when power is in the wrong hands.

Say he has a sister. The penalty for him and for his family was often for the sister to be raped. Not because they cared about the sister as a human being, not because he loved his sister (they never did), but because it was dishonor to the family.

Then to purge the "dishonor" the sister would be stoned to death and everyone was happy.

I am totally not shitting you. There is some shit you just can't make up. We saw it, later. Another story I'll get to. The basis of "Stones."

Technically, if we left the girls behind they'd all be stoned to death. More likely, they'd end up as concubines doing scut work for the rest of their lives.

(Yes, they'd been concubines doing scut work for us. But we treated them with respect. The same would not be the case in most Islamic households. Mohammed the OCD also included precise instructions for how wives and daughters, any women, were to be "instructed" using a cane "no more than the width of a man's thumb." At the time and society, this was actually enlightened like a lot of Islamic law. Problem being, times had changed.)

I told them I'd do what I could to make sure they were better off than that. And this was me trying.

Mullah: This is a problem. I'll do what I can. (Ten minutes.)

Bandit: Yeah. I'm sure that will work. You're a good Islamic preacher, right?

Mullah: Yes. (Maybe three minutes.)

Bandit: Women can inherit under Islamic law, right?

Mullah: True. But a man must manage it.

Bandit, pulling out a bunch of paper: This is the printed out inventory of what's left in the camp as far as I can figure it. I, a male, am gifting to them, for their extraordinary service to the United States Army in times of peril above and beyond the call of duty, all the materials in the camp. Actually, I'm gifting it to their "temporary husbands" who in turn are willing to turn it over to new husbands. Each of them has some of the materials, basically broken up by areas and what I figured you guys would value. Guys who marry these girls, under all official Islamic law and the blessing of Allah the Beneficent and the Merciful, get the goods. As long as they remain their husbands. By the way, the prettiest one was my temporary wife under Shia law. And she got quite a bit of shit. More than the rest is all I'll say including all the ammo and the water supply. How many wives do you have?

Look, I said I didn't like Islamic law, never said I wasn't good at it.

We stuck around long enough for the weddings. All the girls decided they were staying. I had a talk with a couple of the grooms on the subject of how we really liked our former "wives" and that some day I was going to be back and they'd better be just as happy and smiling.

(By the way, they were never in any way officially or unofficially, Shia or American or Chinese law, our wives. I lied. He knew I was lying. He also saw it as an excellent out. Good guy, like I said.)

Did I miss Shadi?

Pussy like Shadi's is very nice. Do not get me wrong. But I like someone I can talk to. And even after Shadi got a few words of English, we really didn't communicate very well. I'd gotten her started on reading before we left but it was at C-A-T equals Cat and then explain what a Cat is.

(She also got me learning Farsi and Arabic. It's called a sleeping dictionary. Most military guys learn the local language that way. For that matter, it's how English came about. No shit. There are benefits to "fraternization" I don't think the brass ever consider.)

I'd done the best thing I could for her. I'd married her to the local strong man who also seemed to be a pretty decent and wise guy. Right age difference according to Islam, etc. We were going where angels feared to tread. Leaving her in the care of a good man was the best I could do for her. But I was going to miss her.

Pax Americana: Like a gnat in a blast furnace in the Mideast.

(Sort of. The mullah? Thaaat would be Mullah Rousham Faravashi. Yeah. That Mullah Rousham Faravashi, former Ambassador to the U.S. and current president of the Persian Union.

(You know his really hot oldest wife? The serious "Islamic women's libber" who goes around unveiled and is on all the talk shows? "Gorgeous eyes?" Also a former ambassador? But more importantly the current head of the PU Secret Service and touted as the next president?

(Shadi is going to fucking kill me. She's got lots of assassins on her payroll. I'm going to fucking die.)

(Wife Edit: So that's why we get that big box of almonds every year. I'm not eating any when this comes out. You can have them all.)

So we rolled.

I'm not going to do an Anabasis and give a blow by blow account of the whole trip. Basically, it sucked. Not quite as much as it sucked for the Ten Thousand, but it sucked.

Oh, hell. Okay. I'll do the whole fucking Anabasis . . . Even if most people have seen it in reruns.

We were starting off, by then, in late September of 2019. We left on September 25th.

Now, in late September in Minnesota, back then you could get some frosts.

Abadan is on the same latitude as Jacksonville, Florida. And for some pretty straightforward meteorological reasons, it has a hotter climate. Way hotter in the summer, rarely as cool in the winter.

The day we had the wedding it snowed. Let's just say that it didn't used to snow much in Jacksonville anytime and it hadn't snowed in Abadan in recent memory even in the dead of winter.

Snow in September.

Yep, classic Big Chill weather. We all know that. Intellectually, I knew that. Problem being, we were headed north.

So that's the climatological issue covered for the nonce.

Second "issue."

We didn't want to go over by Ahwaz. There were still probably remnants of the HAMB over that way. My plan was, as much as possible, to get through all areas with as little incident as I could manage. I knew that there were going to be incidents.

("Incidents." Hah-hah-hah-hah! This is me madly chuckling. "Incidents." Bwah.)

I took a look at a lot of maps and had traced out a route I figured was going to keep us away from the majority of problems. We weren't going near any big cities and were going to skirt towns as much as possible. Unfortunately, for some really simple terrain reasons, we were going to have to get closer to Baghdad than I liked. And because we were moving to the east of the Tigris, which was the wetter side, there were going to be a lot of water crossings. That was going to totally suck.

Might as well talk about equipment, which has to cover personnel as well.

We'd dumped the girls. So there were three groups under my command and control: The infantry company under Fillup, the Nepos, and the technicians under their NCOIC.

One thing I'd done, coldheartedly, was to figure out which were the most important to the mission of getting home and the order was: The technicians, the U.S. infantry, and the Nepos.

Why?

I only had a few technicians. (The satellite/internet/electronics geek from Fillup's company was now in that crowd.) We were rolling with a lot of wheeled and some tracked vehicles. Wheeled and tracked vehicles break. They need maintenance that goes beyond "filler up and check the oil." Commo breaks. Weapons break.

We were going to need to have most of this stuff most of the way through the mission. I needed those techs to keep it running. Lose one grunt or Nepo and I was out a shooter. I had lots of shooters. Lose one tech and I was probably fucked.

So the technicians were going to need careful handling and feeding. They were all, basically, Fobbits anyway. Oh, they could handle themselves in an ambush if they were firing from a vehicle but I wasn't going to be using them for any assaults even if they weren't as valuable as gold.

So the techs had to be protected.

Fortunately, there was a way to kill two birds with one stone.

Military equipment is very heavy. It's got lots of metal parts and then, of course, all that armor. With a few exceptions (and we weren't taking any Humvees at all) you can't tow it with your neighbor's car. You need big fucking metal to tow a Stryker very far.

Thus you have the armored vehicle recovery vehicle. (Heavy Equipment Recovery Combat Utilty Lift and Evacuation System: HERCULES.) Hercules looks sort of like a big fucking tank without a gun. And it's got more power than God. It can tow, I shit you now, two Abrams tanks at the same time. (The suckers weigh in at 73 TONS apiece to give you an idea what I mean by "more power than God.") It's not real fast, unfortunately, but it could keep up with us. We weren't going to be going fast.

There were over a dozen of them in the base. I'd pulled out four before rigging. We ended up taking two. Why two? Redundancy. More on that later.

Now, this was a big motherfucker. And it was designed to carry a "recovery team" of three guys. In other words, I could fit six techs in those.

Then there was another necessity. We were going to be crossing a lot of watercourses. Some of them we could ford. Some of them there were bridges strong enough to take even the recovery vehicles. Others we were going to have to bridge.

Big bridges were out of the question. They take, like, a fucking engineering battalion to put up. But the Army also has a cute little "fast bridging" armored system based on an Abrams chassis. It was the only Abrams chassis we were taking. I do love those big motherfuckers, even if they are hard to destroy. But they just sucked so much gas and were so hard to move through certain areas I had to leave my last two. (And I didn't destroy them. I left them for the mullah. Seemed like the Christian thing to do. And they had ammo.)

Point was, it could span a thirty-foot watercourse. Crew of three. More techs. They could learn as they drove. Driving an Abrams is not hard.

So I had lots of heavy metal wrapped around my techs. It gave me warm fuzzies.

We took two of the big rolling command post/commo vans. They were Strykers with a big ass box on the back and could keep up satellite commo and local radio even on the move. Lots of electronics I rarely fiddled with. They were supposed to be for battalions and above. What the fuck, I was a reinforced company. Close enough. Later I got closer. I'll get to it.

Then there were the Strykers. We had enough for all the guys and most of the Nepos. We could have had them for all the rest of the Nepos but I had another use for them.

Now, Napoleon said "An army travels on its stomach." Since I wasn't planning on walking to the Bosporus, much less low-crawling, this army traveled on more than its stomach. All those vehicles took fuel. Lots of it. Military vehicles are graded in gallons per mile not the reverse. (Strykers are a bit better, but not much.) We were going to need a lot of fuel.

Since I wasn't planning on looting local villages for olives and shit (see Anabasis) we were going to need food. That was mostly going to be MREs and BritRats. The latter were for the Nepos. And they'd brought some of their own food that they might get a chance to cook.

We were going to need water, both for the vehicles from time to time and for our own consumption. Most of the vehicles were towing a trailer. Some of them were water buffalos. We also had a portable ROWPU we could figure out how to use. Had an onboard generator. Quit working? Why do you think I brought the techs?

We needed ammo. We might need lots of ammo. There's never such a thing as too much ammo. There's only too much ammo to carry.

Sideline: A lot of people over the years have dissed the M-16 series of weapons that we were still using in the form of the M-8. It wasn't all that different from the M-4, just a slightly longer barrel and it could be "modulated" for different weaponry and stuff you could hang on it. It fired a dinky little 5.56mm diameter round. That translates as .221 caliber, same as a .22, basically. Big diff.

The difference matters, though. Because it went very fast. And, honestly, with good shot placement was very lethal.

The Army had used .30-06 rounds in WWII. Those were big honking man-killers. Then they'd gone to the .308 which was still pretty hefty. It was what we used in our medium machine guns.

Why go to the 5.56?

Took up less room. More rounds for less weight.

Lots of arguments both ways, but when I was figuring cubic space to carry all this shit, I was glad I could pack 30% more 5.56 into the space the .308 took up. And it took up less than .30-06. And waaay less than .50 caliber. All of them took up less than mortar rounds.

Yes, we brought two mortar Strykers with us. Indirect fire is a good thing. I'd have taken more but I was getting pack-rattish and I knew it. It wasn't the vehicles, it was the ammo. And the fuel to haul the ammo.

Most of this shit was going to have to go on trucks. Several trucks. The trucks were going to be our most vulnerable targets. Therefore the Nepos drove the trucks. They were the least vital group.

Why were the Nepos our least vital group?

It wasn't because they weren't Americans. I'd grown to love the little bastards like they were my own boys back when I had B company. But they simply were not as important as the U.S. infantry. Why?

The Nepos were shaping up to be good irregulars. Given enough time and opportunity and some more trainers I probably could have gotten them up to the point they were just as good as the U.S. infantry guys.

But they weren't. They were good cooks, some were sort of mechanics and they were decent irregulars. They wouldn't run from a fight and they could sort of shoot. Quality on that was coming up and would come up more.

But they were semiskilled. The U.S. infantry were highly skilled technicians on the subject of war. Let me try to explain.

The Nepos could fire their individual weapons pretty well, clean and strip them and put them together. The ones that had been trained on machine guns could fire those machine guns, clean and strip and clear basic jams. They could slap a compress on somebody who had been shot.

The riflemen in the Stryker unit could: Fire their individual weapons, clean, strip, detail clean and in many cases do minor repairs. They could do the same on a pistol, squad automatic weapon (SAW), a medium machine gun or a heavy. Didn't matter if that was their primary job. The Javelin gunners could do the same and most of the guys could work a Javelin about as well as the gunners. They could do close quarters battle, movement to contact on foot or in vehicle, set up an ambush, react to an ambush, perform battlefield first responder actions up to and including inserting an IV and in many cases stitching a minor wound. They could lay in claymores and in many cases more advanced demolitions. They could call for fire from the mortars. They could land navigate using GPS and/or map. They could perform fire and maneuver. They were trained in night movement either in march or combat.

They could all work a radio.

The Nepos, mostly because we simply had not had the time to train them with everything else going on, couldn't do most of that. And most of them, still, didn't speak English. So whether they could work a radio or not was sort of moot.

I didn't want to lose the Nepos. But if it came down to losing them or the guys who were highly trained specialists at survival, I'd take the highly trained specialists over the semiskilled any day.

So the Nepos drove the vulnerable but incredibly important trucks.

The problem being, most of them didn't know how to drive a car.

Foreseeing this as an issue as time had passed, I'd taken some of their training time to ensure they could all drive military trucks.

Driving military trucks is not like driving a car. The ones we were using were HEMTTs (Heavy Extended Mobility Tactical Trucks.) Think a four-wheel drive tractor trailer. Bit smaller than a tractor trailer but not much. They are big, boxy trucks designed to go anywhere tanks or Strykers can go.

Teaching the Nepos to use them was . . . interesting. Among other things, the Nepos turned out to have a repressed size inferiority streak. Putting them in big-assed trucks with cabs six feet off the ground suddenly put them in charge of their destiny.

It's very hard to roll a Hemitt on flat ground. They managed it. Fortunately, they had very hard heads and we had lots of Hemitts. (It's how it's pronounced.)

They eventually got the picture and got over their tendency to race each other.

Strykers:

We had a lot of Strykers. We had more Strykers than we needed. Why? Since they all used fuel?

Look, I'm a big fan of the Stryker. But the things just break a lot. All military equipment breaks. It's a function of how it's used in part. (I won't get into deep conspiracies about companies that then get to provide parts.) And who uses it. Soldiers are specialists in breaking things, not keeping them going. And they're complicated compared to the average car.

But Strykers break a lot. They were, in fact, overengineered. They had way too many moving parts. Frankly, much as I liked Strykers I wished they'd have gone with something like the LAV. Not as complicated and broke less. "Keep it simple, stupid" is a military acronym that weapons designers and generals often forget.

I had lots of Strykers because I figured by the time we got to the Dardanelles at least half of them were going to be scattered on the road behind us. I was planning on fixing any that we could. Barring that, they were going to be left behind.

We had three types. The mortar carriers. These were the latest and greatest things and actually were pretty cool. They were 120mm automortars with automated tracking and guidance. That is, instead of manually moving them around, when you got a call for fire a computer figured all the corrections and they automatically fired. Assuming everything worked. If everything didn't work, there were manual overrides including a way to work them around by hand.

But if we got in the real busy, they might come in handy. Two of them, again. For one thing, the more mortars the better. For another, redundancy. I was hoping that those wouldn't be the Strykers that broke.

Then we had Assault Gun Systems. These had, originally, been the "Mobile Gun System" with this weird-assed 105mm "semi-recoiless" cannon. That had lasted, from what I heard, five years after deployment. Then they all got converted to "Assault Gun Systems." Difference? The well-tested 25mm Bushmaster from the Bradley replaced the 105. The 105 was supposed to be an "anti-tank" gun system. It couldn't stop most modern tanks straight on. Neither could a 25mm but it could from the side. Just like the 105. And it didn't break as much and you got more shots.

Besides, we had Javelins for tanks.

Most of them were "Infantry Carrier Vehicles." Just big rolling boxes filled with shooters and a commander's cupola with a .50 cal. Some of the commander's cupolas had Mk-19 40mm grenade launchers.

Oh, and six recon vehicles. Those were, basically, AGS with more ammo and less room for shooters. Also better commo including a satellite and meteoric bounce system if they got too far away for radio.

All the vehicles had "Block Five" Blue Force Trackers. That is, they would continuously tell me and Fillup where they were and more or less what their status was. There was an automated ammo counter we'd long before learned to distrust.

With all the vehicles, most of the team was driving Strykers at first. Or commanding them or gunning. I figured that would "consolidate" over time. And the Nepos were cross-training on Stryker driving.

I wasn't planning on stopping for much if I could avoid it. I figured that RIFs along the way, if they heard we were coming through, were likely to pile on just to take out an American unit. Not to mention the loot. Oh, speaking of which.

We had ten trucks, two supply, two food, three ammo and three fuel. One Nepo driver and an AD in each. AD manned the .50 caliber. In the case of the supply and food trucks we'd also mounted them up on the back with two more .50s in ring turrets and welded armor.

We did not have enough fuel to make it to the Bosporus. I was hoping for some Islamic charity along the way.

The basic plan was to stay off road as much as possible. The Strykers would stay in a ring around the trucks. Scouts out.

The Scouts were most of Third Platoon. Why Third? I drew it out of a hat. They loved the fuck out of it. Third Herd usually has a touch more esprit than the other two platoons in any company. Why? Well, they're the only one with a cool name, I guess.

They each carried a crew of three and two "dismounts." The dismounts carried rifles and there were some Javs in the vehicle in case it got real busy. Javs were good against not only tanks but anything else that was big as previously proven.

Spare weapons for when one got totally fucked up, spare batteries, spare clothing, parts, tools . . . I created one list that had us with eighteen trucks. Wasn't going to happen. I winnowed it down. Forgot stuff we'd really need. Went back up.

It was the best list I could create is all I can say.

So we rolled. And then we stopped. Did I say something about watercourses?

Iraq, which we entered almost at once, is part of the Fertile Crescent. If you didn't get the Fertile Crescent in school I'm not going to be explaining. See there are these two rivers that run through it, the Euphrates on the west and the Tigris on the east.

We were running along the east bank of the Tigris. The Tigris is the big river in Iraq. It's not huge by American standards, not a patch on the Mississippi, but it's pretty big.

And my God is it farmed. It's been farmed since time immemorial. This is ancient Babylon, Sumeria, Ur, cradle of civilization, blah, blah . . .

So there are, like, four hundred and twenty-nine billion damned irrigation canals running off of it. Especially to the east.

We spent the first week working our way through that fucking maze. Setting up the temporary bridge was fairly quick. Taking it back up not so quick. And when you're looking across one irrigation ditch, which is just too deep and steep for your vehicles to negotiate, at another five hundred meters to the north, well, you tend to see if there's a bridge you can use. Only problem being, most of the damned bridges were designed for farm trucks. So the answer, especially in the case of the HERCULES was: No.

Bridge. Roll. Stop. Bridge. Roll. Stop. Bridge.

It was during this period that we developed the habit, that we kept even during minor skirmishes, of "afternoon coffee."

Yeah, we had coffee. I know there are people who lived through the times that are gritting their teeth. We drew on a big fucking LOG base and I made sure we carried plenty of coffee. An Army runs on coffee. We had coffee.

Specifically we had it every afternoon at 1630. (That's 4:30PM for all you non-mil types.) And we did it right.

All the officers had somehow ended up with Nepo "orderlies." I swear to God it was never ordered. I think Samad did it. But we all had "orderlies" whether we wanted it or not.

Things had gotten pretty weird, obviously. Back in the LOG base we'd had our "temporary wives" and, well, we were stuck in the fucking Middle East with no clear route home. Things had gotten weird.

I remember the day I decided it was a good time to do "coffee." We were rolling out on the second day and I wanted to sort of "brainstorm" what some of our potential threats and weaknesses might be. How to do it? With Samad? He hadn't a real clue. He was coming along in the "anticipate and intelligently expand orders" area, but he wasn't really any sort of military expert. Surprising inputs from time to time . . .

So I decided to do an "officers' call" and "council of war." Those were the technical American Army terms for it. We did "coffee." I called for all officers to come to the commo van at 1630 to "talk shop." Told Samad he was included and suggested we might have some coffee and maybe some MRE crackers or something.

Should have known better than to get Samad involved. Remember, he was trained by the fucking Brits. And he'd participated in packing the supply truck.

So at 1600 my orderly comes into the commo van carrying a fresh uniform. We hadn't stopped. He just opens up the back and pops through, fresh ACU over his arm.

(Despite my repeated discussions of "safety" the Nepos considered the exterior of moving Strykers, at almost any speed, to be quite convenient ways to get around. I swear they were half monkey. But I digress.)

Sahib will be pleased to change before his conference?

Huh? How the fuck did you get here? Why would I change? Sure, I've had the uniform on for a couple of days but, hell, it's good for . . .

Sahib will be pleased to change before his conference.

So I changed.

1615 the orderly opens up the door to the commo van. A thing drops down.

Ever moved yourself with a U-Haul? They've got this sort of ramp thing that you extend and stuff.

Call it a gangplank in this case.

The vehicles have all slowed as if for a LOG, which wasn't scheduled.

There is now this gangplank sort of thing hanging off the back of the commo van. Fillup, in a fresh uniform, looking a little confused, walks down. It's got a railing. It's riding on the front slope of his Stryker. All he had to do was crawl out the TC hatch, grab on and walk down. Simple. Scary, bad safety, but in a way very fucking cool.

One of the Nepos who had sort of taken the position of senior sergeant is standing by the door, on the outside, holding on.

"Bravo Company . . . arriving!"

One by one, all the officers show up. In fresh uniforms. In order of seniority.

"Number Two (XO) . . . arriving." "Weapons (mortar platoon leader) . . . arriving." "Scouts . . . arriving." "Second Platoon . . . arriving." "First Platoon . . . arriving." "Auxiliary Force . . . arriving." (That would be Samad.)

From somewhere, a silver tea service has been obtained. (See, honey, I didn't grab it!) Coffee is served by the orderlies. There are little baked things. There are finger crackers. There are linen napkins and a tablecloth. (Laid over the map table. It is, by the way, a very crowded commo vehicle at this point.)

Sure, all that stuff had been in the LOG inventory. I hadn't brought it.

I think Samad had just been pining for some good old Brit pomp and circumstance.

And here it was.

But we also had a good conversation. The . . . formality of the thing caught us by surprise at first. But after we got over that, it worked out well. There was a point to the way that the Brits did some things. When "it's just you" surrounded by howling savages, remembering you're a civilized being is sometimes a good thing. Yeah, they could take it overboard but . . . Remembering you're civilized is a good thing. Take it from this borderline barbarian.

So that's the story of "afternoon coffee." Just in case you were wondering. And, yeah, we once had it while a murthering great battle was raging but there wasn't much we could do about it at that point so we had "coffee."

Back to the run.

The good news was, there were no major threats. I sweated blood at first figuring we were going to get hit by RIFs from every side. Shouldn't have bothered. The area was more agricultural than the Midwest. And while it was more densely populated, it was spread out.

See, they didn't do the whole "industrial farming" thing with giant combines. That area, you were lucky to have a tractor. Bunch of it was done by ox plow. Good in one way; they had less to fall from the Plague and shit. But not particularly efficient. See "Organic."

So you'd have a farmhouse surrounded by a few trees and some fields. Farming less than a hundred acres cause that's about what you can do with oxen and shit. Then another down the road not too far.

And the area had been hit hard by the Plague. No medical facilities to speak of, not many cities and few towns. Just fucking farms and irrigation ditches.

Most of the farms were fallow and I could tell the irrigation system was breaking down. Places where the water had spread out over fields and was still there. Places where ditches were dry.

We didn't see many people. There must have been a shitload before the Plague but I figure they took at least 80% casualties between the Plague and secondaries.

Up side was that there was probably enough food stored.

But harvests had gotten fucked up by the Plague and the weather. That area normally had at least two harvests a year, three if you did it right. Most of the wheat, millet, peas and what-not was still standing. Most of it was all fucked up for that matter.

There were some fields active. I taught the Scouts to recognize those and we avoided them as much as possible. These people were going to need the food. We could go through the fallow fields.

Not that they were probably going to be allowed to keep it. Places like this never did. Somebody more powerful came along and took it away to feed an army.

We ran into that around Al Amarah. Actually, near a village called Al Halfayah. Group of thugs in a truck rounding up food from one of the functioning farms.

I wasn't going to get into it. Pax Americana. See also: Gnat/blast furnace.

Problem was, one of the thugs spotted our Scout vehicle and took it under fire with an RPG.

Which was really really stupid. The max range on an RPG is about 300 meters against a moving target, which the Scout was. And they were almost a klick back.

The 25mm, especially with stabilization systems, has a max effective range of 2000 meters.

So they lit up the thugs' truck.

We carefully maneuvered around the farm but I sent the gun Stryker with Hollywood on it over to parley and gain intel.

The "tax collectors" had been from a group called the Al Sulemani Warriors' Brigade. They were the big local group based in and around Al Amarah. The farmer didn't know much about them except that they were taking his food and telling him he was now under their rule.

There was a lot of that as we headed north. Every little city had its rulers and was, in effect, a city-state. Al this and Ibn that and . . . They sort of blended.

Mostly we tried to avoid them. When it did come down to getting busy, it was usually against a small detachment like the "tax collectors" that got stupid. Sometimes we saw guys who were less stupid who just let us pass through.

More or less stayed the same until we got up around Baghdad. At which point three things happened in pretty rapid succession, Bad, Good, Really bad. (Or at least I thought so at the time.)

I'll take the "good" first since it leads to the "bad" and the "really bad" is pretty unconnected.

The good was that we finally got ahold of the Kurds.

I've spoken about the Kurds a little but I figure I'll add some detail.

The Kurds are a mountain people found in the mountainous triangle of what used to be Iraq, Turkey and Iran and is now Kurdistan good and proper.

They're pretty much descended from the Hurrians (look it up) and have been in those mountains for fucking ever. Like the Nepos there's some basic similarities between all Kurds:

They're generally fairly tall for the region, not giants just a bit above average.

They're very straightforward compared to anybody else in the whole fucking area, even to an extent the Greeks. You don't spend ten minutes exchanging polite inquiries about their family with the Kurds; you get to the point.

They love Americans despite the fact that we've regularly fucked them over. (Ditto British.)

They treat their women just about as badly as any other group in the Middle East. Perhaps a touch worse. By the same token, they're pretty okay with women in positions of soft power like doctors.

They are hard-core, in-your-face, one-of-us-is-going-to-get-fucked-up-and-it's-you fighters.

Since back in the Bronze age they've gone through periods of conquering the lowlands around them, getting pushed back by a big "settled" empire, raiding said empire until it takes them over, fighting against the conquerors until nearly wiped out, becoming the best fucking fighters the empire has after it tacitly lets them run things in their own area, waiting until the empire falls and repeat.

Suleiman, one of the most famous warriors of Islam and the guy who kicked the fuck out of one Richard the Lion Hearted? Kurd.

That's the Kurds in a nutshell.

So we finally got ahold of the Kurds when we were southeast of Baghdad and trying to screen past.

To our east were the Zagros Mountains. As a foretaste of what was to come they were covered in fucking snow about two thirds of the way down. They also had a bunch of bad-boy Iranians in them and we'd picked up indicators of some organization, a couple more city-state groups, around Ilam and Khorambad. They were reputed to be remnant Revolutionary Guard back in command and had some fair forces. We did not want to tangle with them in mountains. Especially mountains covered in snow.

So we were keeping to the lowlands, hoping to slip through between Baghdad and the mountains and avoid major conflict.

My initial goal was the Kurdish region. Why besides the above?

During the latter reign of Saddam Hussein the U.S. had established a "no-fly" zone over the northern part of Iraq. (And the south but it was different there.) They also sent in SF teams to work with the Kurds.

With no more than "keep the helos and planes off of us" and some spare equipment the Kurds kicked the shit out of everything Saddam sent at them on the ground and established their own local democracy. Saddam purely hated the Kurds; he'd used poison gas on them in his time. He wanted to be one of the guys that conquered them. Good luck, the Kurdish Perg Mersha were not going to be beaten by a bunch of lowland driven wheat-farmers.

But they really appreciated the help, little as it was. And when we went in and hung Saddam, the "Kurdish Provinces" were the only areas we didn't get fucked in.

There were, basically, four cities in the "Kurdish Provinces." Two of them were pure Kurdish; the other two had been "disputed."

The pure Kurdish were As Sulymaniyah—and, yeah, that's "Suleiman"—and Kirkuk. The two "disputed" were Mosul and Irbil.

See, Mosul and Irbil, pre-Saddam and during the first part of his reign, had been pretty mixed cities. They were about 70% Kurdish with the rest being Assyrian Christians, Turkics and a smattering of Islamic Arabs. More or less in that order.

There was just one problem. Oil was discovered in the Mosul Province. And a refinery got built. And what with ongoing resistance from the Kurds, Saddam couldn't trust them around oil.

So he purged a lot of the Kurds (and Assyrian Christians and such) out of Mosul and Irbil and settled "safe" Sunni Arabs in the area.

(See above about the history of the Kurds.)

When the U.S. came in, the Kurds got a partial beny on resettlement. A lot of the Sunnis hadn't wanted to be up there, anyway. As they left the Kurds moved back in.

But a lot of the Sunnis, who made up the most hardcore faction of the Resistance, fought back. So Mosul and Irbil remained war zones until the Sunni were more or less wiped or driven out. (The reason the Iraq campaign really started winding down.)

Even before then, the Kurds had established a "no travel" zone in their core areas including Kirkuk and Sulamaniyah. That is, they'd take in anybody but an Islamic Arab. Turkic? Come on in. Assyrian Christian? Love you guys. Fucking Sunni or Shia Arab from down on the south plains? Fuck off.

Which is why when U.S. units crossed the borders into what everybody called Kurdistan, you could take off your body armor and relax. You could walk around in a market with no more bother than kids pestering you for treats. People fucking handed you stuff like fruit. They loved American troops.

But the battles around Mosul and Irbil never really stopped. The Sunnis always got weapons, money and people funneled into Iraq right up to the time of the Plague. See, Saddam had been a Sunni. Most of the surrounding countries, especially Syria, Jordan and Saudi, were either controlled by or predominately Sunni countries. They did not want the Shia in control in Iraq. That would create the possibility of a Shia Union with Iran.

(Which is more or less what the Persian Union is, except it's secular. Well, as much as the U.S. is.)

And the Sunni didn't just try to take back their "core" areas around Baghdad (what used to be called the Sunni Triangle and through which we were about to pass) they wanted the fucking oil around Mosul and Irbil.

So we get to the good and the bad.

We'd kept in contact with the Kurds. They'd gotten hit, hard, by the Plague. Not as hard as some areas, though. One; we'd made sure they had vaccine through the military. Two: they distributed it pretty effectively. (More in their core areas than around Mosul and such, obviously.) Three: They had, as a culture, high-trust and a huge degree of cohesion.

So they'd lost a lot of people. And they had then reacted, adapted and overcome. Bury the dead, sow and reap.

Oh, things weren't great. But they were hanging in there.

Which, when I found the right guy at the Pentagon to tell me that and give me some phone numbers, was great news. I was going to need a fill-up and some friendly faces would be nice to see. They had fuel and friendly faces, just like Sunoco or whatever.

Which brings us to the bad.

Unlike Iran, which was not yet up to the level of "pacified" whatever policy maker thought was good enough, Iraq was not considered a "threat country." They were an "associated country" with "good relations" with the U.S. Not quite an ally, but on the way.

(I would have begged to differ, but we're talking about policy makers. State was involved.)

So they could be left with all the gear we were leaving behind under the assumption it would be put to good works.

Now, having just described what great fucking people the Kurds are, where do you think we parked all that fucking equipment?

The Shia were marginal allies of the U.S. They hated the Sunni and Saddam and we'd kicked Saddam out and given them a chance to get out from under five hundred fucking years of domination by a Sunni minority. They were, of course, like any fucking Arab or Persian in that you couldn't trust them as far as you could throw the Great Pyramid. And they had lots of guys who wanted to team up with the Mad Mullahs and kick our ass. But, overall, they were nominally on our side.

The Kurds were just our fucking right damned arm. They thought we rocked, most of the guys who worked with them thought they rocked. They could be trusted like the armor on an Abrams.

The main problem, beginning, middle and right up to the end in Iraq, were the fucking Sunnis. Whether the RIFs that trickled in from other Sunni countries around the world with the intent of blowing up an American for Allah or the Ba'athist party thugs who wanted back into power so they could go back to dominating the Shia like a good Sunni should. They were the motherfuckers we were constantly fighting.

And they were concentrated, to the very end, around Baghdad, up to Tikrit and over to the Syrian border.

So where did we park our equipment?

That's right, right in the middle of the fucking Sunni Triangle.

What. The. Fuck?

We get back to the tofu-eaters. Sort of. Actually we get back to State.

State had a long-term suck affair with the Sunni.

Part of that was just numbers. There were way more Sunni countries than Shia. The only major Shia country, Iran, we didn't have diplomatic relations with until we invaded. (If you can call that diplomatic. Most did not.) So there were just more slots for State pussies to suck Sunni dictator dick than Shia dictator dick. So they learned to suck Sunni dick. They "spoke the language" in diplo-speak. "Would you like it slow or hard?" in Arabic appropriate to the local grammar and norms.

The other part was, frankly, money. Filthy lucre. Graft.

The Sunni countries, many of them, had shitloads of oil money. And they tended to throw it around. The UAE, a tropical desert country, built a giant fucking tube of steel to use as a snow skiing slope. I shit you not. Huge motherfucker.

They gifted "chairs" at prestigious universities. They funded think tanks.

Eventually, every government service worker, including soldiers, wants to get out and do something else. For some of us it's buying or returning to the farm. For others it's getting a good academic position or a think-tank position or a spokesperson's position or a lobbyist's or . . . You get the picture.

Pre-Plague the average salary for an ambassador to a "top-flight" nation was $175,000, most of it untaxable, and quite a few perks. Nothing to sneeze at.

A retiring ambassador to Saudi Arabia left government service and was hired into a "think-tank" that "considered Middle Eastern relations with the Western World" for two million and change.

Guess where the money came from? Bunch of small scale middle-class American contributors?

Don't think so. Whole think-tank, all American citizens and mostly former State employees, was funded by the Saudi Arabian government. The former ambassador had been handed his watch by the U.S. government and a Rolex factory by the Saudis.

So where do you think his real interests lay? Including while he was ambassador.

Oh, of course it was never money! Heaven forbid. The Sunni were our closest allies in the region. Sure, just ask the Sunni guys flying the planes into the World Trade Center. Most of them Saudi citizens because a Saudi citizen could get a visa, from State, without any review whatsoever.

State considered Shia to be unwashed monkeys. What they thought of the Kurds, those violent inbred rednecks of the Zagros and Tauric mountains, you don't want to know.

(The Shia, by the way, were mostly Persian or Persian oriented, even the Arab ones. They'd had a burgeoning civilization when the ancestors of the Sunni were still trying to learn how to herd goats and our ancestors in Europe weren't even doing that. Which was why the Shia, and especially the Iranians, called them goat-herds. Or, more often, goat fuckers. And the Iranians didn't think much of us, either. Discussed that.)

So, and yes it was under "advisement" of the State Department, the DOD was told to park all its shit under guard of the guys we'd been fighting for damned near twenty years and fly home.

Did the Sunni bastards grab all our gear? No, but they grabbed enough before the Plague hit to start a decent little, and entirely unreported, civil war to retake the Sunni Triangle. Then the Plague hit. They got hit at about 60% rate. Things fell apart but they fell apart for everybody.

The Sunni, though, had managed to spring back. Now, there was another park of gear down in the south, very dominated by Shia, area. The Sunni had more and better tanks. But the Shia were still more numerous and even if they were a bunch of groups, the Sunni weren't entirely cohesive.

There was an uneasy truce between the Sunni and Shia. Problem being, while central Iraq had all the government buildings and monuments and museums and even some factories, it had dick all for oil. And eventually the tanks had to be filled on those tanks.

But the Kurds had oil.

And the Kurds didn't have tanks. Or even much in the way of APCs. We hadn't left them much at all, in fact. Just some ammo dumps with light to medium weapons.

Think that the Sunnis, once they got reconsolidated over the summer, immediately kicked the Kurds out of Mosul and Irbil and took over the oil fields?

Think again, brother. They were up against Kurds. Who at least had some shit to fight with this time.

Did I find this all out at once? Nope. But I found out a bunch of it pretty fast.

I finally got the phone number, sat phone, for one of the big Perg Mersha commanders.

Oh, the Perg Mersha. It means "fighters to the death" or some such and was sort of a National Guard. More like the original U.S. and Swiss militia. The guys were farmers or factory workers or whatever. Every now and again, on a rota, they'd get called up and either train in peace or raid in war. Every male Kurd had a weapon of some sort ranging from a rifle to heavy machine guns. They'd come in with their weapons and some ammo, get more ammo then gather under a tribal boss soldier and go fight like fucking demons.

Don't get me wrong. They were not shock infantry. Shock infantry goes back to the Greeks again and their hoplites. Every other fighter in the world, back then, were essentially "raid" infantry or cavalry or whatever. They'd charge and poke then run away. Charge, poke, run away. Do that until one side backs up from too many (low) casualties.

It's very conservative of losses. Also a good way to lose a battle if you're up against the alternative.

The alternative is "we're going to keep rolling forward until you're either dust or we are."

Think the difference between soccer and American football. One of them is all about swift moves and GOOOOOOAAALLL! The other is about slamming bodies together until you've forced the ball up the field. Oh, maybe a bit of throwing and such. But without the slamming bodies, the quarterback's toast.

Think of Three Hundred Spartans facing two hundred thousand Persians and allies. And kicking their ass. Marathon: Ten thousand Greeks (Athenians mostly) vs. about two hundred grand, again, this time on a flat fucking plain. And they smashed the Persians.

Put the Kurds on the plains against us or even the Iraqis, who sort of had the concept of shock infantry, and they were going to have a hard time. But the shock infantry people were never going to have a bit of rest. And in any sort of terrain, including urban areas, raid can counteract shock if shock's not done right. (Which nobody did except us in those days.)

So I called this Perg Mersha commander.

Bandit: O Great One, commander of the faithful, a descendent of Suleiman . . . (Three minutes.)

Kurd: American! Dude! Amigo! Great to see you! (Pretty much that.)

Bandit: Sorry, man. I've been dealing with fucking Iranians for so fucking long . . .

Kurd: American! Dude! Amigo! No problemo!

Bandit: Uno problemo. Need a fill up. Willing to trade some gear and shit.

Kurd: Dude. Bummer. Got a problem.

They didn't hold the oil refinery. Or the tank farms. Or any significant stock. And to get to them I'd have to hit the Iranian Sunni force anyway. Maybe they could sneak us up through the mountains. But then we'd be bingo on fuel.

Motherfucker.

This was getting to be too much like the Ten Thousand.

(By the way. If you ever read the Anabasis or one of the really good historical fiction accounts, the guys who really fucked up the Greeks in the mountains? Kurds.)

Okay, well if that was how it had to be.

They don't call us Strykers for nothing.

Chapter Eleven He Turned White. Well, Whiter.

So here I switch right into a battle chapter, right? Good patterning. Build up and then fighting.

Dude, life is never that simple.

I don't know how they found me. They never told me and the investigation has never concluded who gave them the data.

Look, I was up on commo with the States. We were using BFTs. Everybody in the Pentagon and various other places with the right clearance could tell where we were and our more or less status as well as I could when I was in the van.

One of these days I'm going to find the guy with the "right clearance" and feed him his ass. And other parts. Slowly. Without mustard.

We're in consultation with the Kurds. We're going to heightened alert with what they've told us. They don't have much intel on the threat in our area but we're getting some.

We're sweating bullets. Somewhere up ahead is an armored force that's guessed by the Kurds to be about a division in strength. I didn't buy it. The one thing about the Kurds is that they always overestimate. But say a battalion. Even a brigade.

It's way more complicated than this, but this is military structure 101. Three platoons in a company. (You'll already notice ours has four including mortar platoon. And then there's the techs and Nepos . . . Like I said, this is 101.) Three platoons in a company. Three companies in a battalion. Three battalions in a brigade. Three brigades in a division.

More complicated but you get the idea.

Basically, if we're looking at anything like a normal battalion, we're outnumbered and outgunned three to one. And they've got our Abrams tanks, which are a bitch and a half to kill. Not to mention Strykers and Bradleys. Those were all confirmed as well as we could confirm it.

If they've got a brigade, we're outnumbered nine to one. And way outgunned. Then there's artillery which is going to way outrange our mortars. Their mortars.

There were also aircraft. Fighters dropping dumb bombs and some helicopters including a couple of Apache gunships. Those, right there, could rip Strykers a new one without breaking a sweat. The trucks? Toast.

We are on a heightened state of alert.

We've moved to constant movement for the time being. I want to get past Baghdad as fast as possible. The main force seemed to be to the north but the fucking Baghdad area is never good.

So we're moving by day. And I get word that there's a visual contact on a plane. Whoa.

Context for the young people: Back before the Plague there were always planes in the sky. Fucking always. One of the weirdest things about the few days post-9/11 was the lack of planes. And when they started coming back we all cringed. Compared to the Plague, 9/11 was a kiss on the cheek. But it was all we had as comparison back then.

They're coming back, but still not up to the level they were in 2018.

Since the Plague, if we saw something in the sky it had been a bird. I'd never even launched our UAVs. (Hadn't had to. The Scouts had them at the moment and we still hadn't used them.)

Zero planes. Nada.

So when we got reports of a plane, we went on really high alert.

Okay. The LOG had had a lot of shit in it. Among other things, it had had Stinger missiles. Not sure why. The only air threat around was the U.S. Air Force. And while having been under blue-on-blue fire once I could see some benefit to blowing up an Air Force plane, they frown on that sort of thing.

But the fucker had had swaggersticks. What can I say? Maybe the guy running it was from Minnesota.

Point being, we had Stingers. We didn't have any qualified Stinger guys, but we had Stingers. And it wasn't as if my guys couldn't read the manual. And a Stinger is very easy to use.

So we might be able to take out a fighter if it got low enough for a good bomb drop. Probably wouldn't, but then we'd just take our chances.

Problem being, the guys said this was a big one. A transport.

This I had to see.

That was tough.

The commo van didn't have a good way to see out except the commander's cupola. So I pulled the commander out, over his protests, and climbed up in his seat.

Binos. Old fashioned optics.

It was a plane. A big transport. And it was just sort of lazing around up there.

Suddenly it turned and passed south down our west side near Baghdad. Banked around and headed back.

The edges of the Baghdad suburbs were in view to the west. Barely. We were staying as low as we could given the terrain. But while there was some terrain it was mostly pretty flat. There was a bit of haze and I hoped that would let us get past unnoticed.

But this transport had apparently noticed us. I thought, maybe, possibly, could it be a supply drop? Nobody had called ahead. Didn't seem likely.

I had to climb up on top of the vehicle, not a good exercise normally, to see over the box on the back. There were grab handles, thank God. It was lining up behind us. It was a transport but transports can drop bombs. Didn't seem likely, but I was starting to get a puckering feeling. It definitely seemed to be looking for somebody like us.

Passed overhead at about two thousand feet over ground level. Flaps down, going slow. Russian Antonov. What the fuck?

We're still on that flat fucking plain. Still farms and occasional irrigation canals. More widespread on the latter, bigger on the former. More "industrial." Sunni Triangle. Saddam made sure the good farmers got the good equipment.

So we're bounding over this field at about thirty miles an hour and I'm trying to get back in the commander's hatch when the bird starts dropping shit. Not bombs. First there's a set of personnel parachutes. Standard static-line drop, the easiest kind in the world. Then a bunch of parachute bundles.

Are we getting reinforced?

I get back into the commo van and everybody is "what the fuck"ing. So I spread the word we don't know what it is and the scouts are to check out the drop. And I go "what the fuck?" and get on the horn to Brigade.

Brigade knows fucking diddly. No, no transport drops. No transport planes that they know of outside U.S. states and posessions. Most grounded. Cannibalization. Bad here.

Scouts come back while I'm on the phone with Brigade.

"Sir . . . No threat. Need you up here."

It's reporters.

Flying assholes from the sky.

They're scattered across a field but the scouts have helpfully gathered them up and gotten all their bundles for them. It's a team of six. One of them I vaguely recognize.

"Graham Trent, Skynews. Bandit Six, I presume."

(Look, it was his reference, not mine.)

Most people have probably heard the story. It's still in reruns. If you haven't, here goes.

Skynews (I tend to call it SkyNet. Kids, get your parents or grandparents to explain the reference) along with Fox and a bunch of other "media" holdings were owned by this guy named Rupert Murdoch.

Fairly conservative, for a Brit, and a bit of a character. He'd used the character, and a fucking ruthless business sense, to build up a pretty fair business empire.

Skynews was a British satellite news service. The Brits, then and now, had the BBC, the Beeb, which was paid for by the government. (From taxes on TVs. If you had a TV, you paid a yearly tax to watch it, I shit you not. And it went to the Beeb.)

Going up against a government monopoly was hard. But Murdoch knew there was money in giving people something other than the relentless propaganda of the Beeb. Oh, the Beeb occasionally had "alternative view" programming, but not in its news. It's news was pure liberal tofu-eater, rainbow this and global warming that.

So he founded Skynews. And it had made a fair amount of brass. (Brit for change. Got brass in pocket. Money.) That was, up to the Plague when shit was falling everywhere.

The Brits, despite being overall much more socialist than the U.S., had not been seizing businesses left and right. But they also weren't propping them up. And they especially weren't propping up Murdoch. He was barely holding on. He knew that he needed a gimmick to get some viewers. Preferably something he could sell to other networks that still had money.

(Oh, the U.S. "networks," NBC, CBS and ABC, were all being supported by "government emergency support spending." Fox, which was owned by Murdoch, was not. CNN somehow, though, had gotten in on the money. Politics? Nah.)

He needed a show that people were going to watch.

What was the biggest news story in terms of viewership in the U.S. and Britain?

You guessed it.

(The U.S. for reasons previously described. The British because they had a thing for the Nepos as well and, having a bit better history program in school, the whole "Ten Thousand" thing had caught on.)

So he, and it was Murdoch, got a brilliant idea. Send out a news crew to embed with us. It was going to take cash he didn't have, but if it worked it was going to be big news. His stocks, where stock markets were still trading, would go up. He would get more viewers. Might sell subsidiary rights.

He was putting most of his remaining wad on a roulette square marked Bandit Six. Yeah, some days I still dream about walking up to him and whispering "Residuals."

I got this, more or less, from Graham Trent when I pulled him over to the side to get a brief conversation away from the troops. By then the rest of the unit had caught up. Scouts were out forward, the unit had spread automatically. The Nepos were grinning in their turrets. No immediate threats.

There was some sort of building. A pumping station, something, by one of the irrigation canals we were going to have to cross. I could get out of sight for the conversation by pulling him around to the side. Unfortunately, that left us nearly at the waterline.

He laid this all out for me grinning ear to ear. What a lark! Wasn't this grand! Russian bird. Flew in from Greece. Good luck we found you, eh? Make you famous.

I'd asked what was going on and since then just nodded. Calmly. He was pumped up. Turned out they hadn't practiced the jump at all. First time out of a bird. Flying on that adrenaline high. I'll give him credit for brass ones.

I grabbed him by the front of his fucking safari jacket, down to the water, into the canal and then pressed his face under the water. Looking up. I wanted to watch.

I kept him there, despite his struggles, until I could tell he was about to pass out. Then, against my better judgement, I let the fucking idiot have air.

What? What? What's all this, then?

"Listen, you little pissant," I said, slamming him up against the wall of the concrete building. I don't even recall carrying him up the pretty steep and slippery slope. And he was not a small guy. Didn't matter. "Let me tell you what you and your fucking boss have done. You have just probably killed us. All of us. Including you. I figured we had about a one in seventy shot of making it to the fucking Dardanelles. We're looking at having to take on three to ten times our numbers in firepower to have any shot. You've just added six fucking useless mouths to my force. Six seats I have to find room for. Six slots to load gear into. And you're going to want to give fucking 'regular reports' since you're in the news business and every last fucking RIF with a damned satellite dish and power is going to know we're coming and more or less where and when. Last but most assuredly not least, you just did a fucking drop in full view of Baghdad which I was sincerely hoping to slip by unnoticed. My first thought is to just kill all of you. Nobody would ever know. Overrun by RIFs before we got to them. Poor brave reporter bastards. Never stood a chance. Are you listening? Do you clearly understand my dilemma? That dilemma being whether to push in with my forearm and crack your hyoid to leave you to choke in your own blood, walk around the corner and say 'Kill them. Kill them all.'? Because my boys won't bat an eye and they will never, ever talk."

He'd gone white. Whiter. He'd gone white when he realized I was drowning him and not just kidding around.

"We hadn't realized it was that bad . . . I'm sorry. Sorry."

He wasn't pleading to live. He clearly understood what I'd said and realized how badly he had screwed us.

I doubt I could have killed him if that hadn't been his reaction. But I was sorely sorely tempted.

"You're working for me, now. Not Murdoch. You will send what I say and when I say. You will explain to your crew, who I hope all include smart people, just what a fucked up situation they have dropped into."

"You've got it."

"It's going to be censorship."

"If it keeps us, all of us, your Yanks, the Nepos, my crew, alive, I can work with that."

"You fell in the stream. We laughed about it."

"Got it."

The fucked up thing was that I knew what I was going to do before I'd ever pushed him underwater. I knew in a moment while he was talking. Oh, not the details but the outline and it never was much more than an outline.

I hadn't pushed him under because I was negotiating. I really had had as my first plan killing them. Nobody would ever know.

But I went with Plan B.

Rupert Murdoch wanted news to prop up his flagging networks?

We'd give him the same kind of news the MSM had been sending for years: We'd be sending entertainment.

The only thing was, I was hoping to send much much more.

Get news back to what it was supposed to be.

If we survived.

We rolled out. Fast.

Didn't matter. We got hit, anyway.

I had the Scouts echelon to the west towards Baghdad. I figured if there was going to be a threat, it would be from that direction.

Sure enough, they spotted a line of trucks, couple of military grade and more pickups, some of them "technicals" rolling down the highway to cut us off.

When the trucks, in turn, spotted the Strykers some of them pulled off the road. Guys started bailing out. The technicals opened up and started weaving across the field.

Our guys started backing up. There were two Strykers moving by fire and maneuver. One would fire up the convoy moving slow while the other backed up fast, also firing but not as accurately. There was a line of trees they were headed for to get behind.

A bunch of the RIFs had dived into an irrigation ditch. Some of the technicals were smoked.

One of the Scout Strykers blew up. Just blew the fuck up. No clue why.

The other one backed up faster and started maneuvering. They didn't see anybody bail out of the other, which was billowing smoke.

I could see the smoke from the commo van. It had external viewers even if they were lousy for spotting planes. I told Fillup to maneuver his unit and find out what had killed them. There was a marker for the enemy unit where the scouts said it was. Pretty much a klick from where they first engaged, klick and a half to where the Stryker was hit.

Second Stryker maneuvered into the trees. One of them blew up but the Stryker lived.

They had Javelins.

Only two, thank God, but that's what we found when we rolled over their position. One sight and two expended launchers. For one of our vehicles.

DOD, on orders from the Secretary of Defense under consultation with State, gave the whole damned LOG base in Iraq to the fucking Sunnis. Including the Javelins.

We checked out the Stryker. It was toast. They don't have much in the way of internal blast control. The Javelin had hit just behind the commander's cupola and just blew the Stryker up like a child's toy. You could see the little-ass hole where it hit. Little hole, big boom.

We pulled every last body out and into body bags. They went on the supply truck.

I thought about Javelins as we rolled. That and the reporters. At one of the "rest" stops I tossed everybody but Graham out of the commo van and we "talked."

I said "rest" stops because we never really rested through those few days. It went like this. The Strykers had to fuel. Drivers got tired and logy and that led to accidents. Etc.

The guys could sort of rest riding in the Strykers. Not well, but it was "military rest." Like "military law" and "military music." You could close your eyes. If you were very experienced you could sleep the sleep of the just. Generally you sort of floated in a white daze that sort of helped.

Most of the infantry could come out of it fighting as fast as if they'd been awake.

But the drivers had to work, constantly. You had to rotate them. The AFV and the truck and the rest.

We'd gotten it down to an art. I'd order a rest stop at a certain point followed by "Logging." That's what it's called. As in "Logistics resupply."

We'd stop. Drivers would switch. New driver would hop in the seat, old driver would grab a spot and we'd roll on. Took about ten seconds. Think "Chinese Fire Drill."

Then we'd roll slowly. We had four trucks lined up. Food truck, ammo truck, fuel truck, supply (trash) truck.

Stryker would come up on either side of the food Hemmitt. Track commander would hold up fingers if he wanted cases of MREs. Number would be tossed. Speed up a bit to the ammo truck. Shout what they needed. Cases of ammo would be tossed. Speed up to the fuel truck. Grinning Nepo would toss a fuel line. Guys would drag it to the fuel point and fuel as the truck and the Stryker drove alongside. Fueled up, fuel line goes back, roll up to the (supply/trash) truck. Any critical supply needs? No. Toss me your trash. Bag of trash (mostly MRE bags, empty) would go over. Stryker would speed up and get into security position.

We only had to stop moving to change drivers.

The Navy calls it "UNREP," underway replenishment. We called it "logging."

When we had eight trucks and plenty of room, we could do two simultaneous loggings. Later we only did one. Eventually, we'd do a halt. Things were just too fucked up, guys were too tired, to trust logging.

But for then, we could unrep fast.

And later, well, there weren't as many Strykers to fuel.

So while I thought about the fucking bind I was in, I talked with Graham. And, yes, I could multitask it.

I asked him what the normal method of sending out this sort of stuff was. Turned out the answer was "it's complicated." Generally is.

There are two sources of any news, print, video, whatever. The first is "primary source" news reports. That's when you've got a known person standing in front of a news camera or a known "byline" reporting in paper or a known voice doing radio. Twenty-four-hour news cycle, they get a few minutes a day. Unless they get really popular, then they get their own show and eventually become an anchor and senior producer and such. Won't go into career progression in the news field.

But most video people saw on TV, and most news stories and most written stories that got converted to voice, was done by "secondary" sources. Stringers. Stringers were usually locals who had developed some connection within their news area. I'm going to stop talking about print because here's where it got interesting.

Stringers didn't sell to the networks. A bit more about print. AP got most of the news from stringers and then sent it on, sometimes with editing that was a bit, ahem, slanted and getting to pick and choose what was going to be news (people defending themselves with guns was never news, gays beating up straights or blacks attacking whites for hate reasons was never news). That was print. Also much of the Internet news and news reports read on radio. About eighty to ninety percent.

AP controlled all of that news. If they didn't think it was news, it wasn't news. Talk about a monopoly.

Video had avoided that for a long time. In the '60s and '70s, TV news was the networks and they filled a bare hour or two of mostly repetitive news. News from distant lands came in by film and then video tape. It was edited at the national studio, script was written and then broadcast. Local news followed the same pattern but without the flying it in. They got that from their parent network.

And all the networks had fair sized "bureaus" in major capitals. So did print.

But with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle they needed more and more video. So there started to be stringers. They'd go through the local bureaus.

But they needed more and more and more. And at the same time they were cutting back bureaus and foreign reporters.

So the media got together and formed a third party that would collect all the stringer videos. Most of it wasn't used. That got cut. Unimportant? Who knows. Nobody ever saw it. What definitely got cut was anything related to context and the networks never saw any of it. All there were were clips of dramatic shots.

The networks paid for the clips and then did voice-over based on the description the company gave of what the clips meant. That was for, call it "Western" news channels. For other countries, for more money, the company also did voice-over in local language.

Follow the money. Here's the thing.

Most of their clients for voice-over, more money, were in the Middle East and dictatorships with an axe to grind against the U.S. and Israel. So, you've got a clip of Palestinians shooting at Israeli soldiers, Israeli soldiers returning fire and a kid dead in his father's arms.

You're cutting that down to thirty seconds. You've got excellent shots of each of these if each is held as a chunk: twenty seconds of Palestinian fire, twenty of Israeli and ten of the dead kid. (Which is just a shot of a dead kid and a grieving father. No clue what kind of bullet.)

You can make one for the Western market with the Palestinians shooting and one for the Arab market of the Israelis but that takes time. And time is money.

You're a company out to make a buck. Your best paying clients are Arabs.

You make a clip of Israeli soldiers shooting and a dead kid in his dad's arms. The voice-over can be very plain. Just "an outbreak of fighting between Palestinian and Israeli forces left three dead including a twelve-year-old boy."

People never see the Palestinians shooting.

Nobody sees it. Not the networks, not the Arabs, not the Israelis who are watching "Western" TV news. As far as they are aware, the Palestinians were just peacefully singing kumbaya when the Israelis opened fire and the kid can only be dead from the Israelis because only the Israelis are shooting. Right?

In the 1990s the company, based in London, was bought by a holding company from the network "cartel." The holding company was owned by the Saudi Royal family.

By 2001, the vast majority of the employees of the company were Islamic. Sunni to be precise.

And it controlled the broadcast news for the entire world.

Plot?

You betcha.

During a seminar in Arab-Western relations in the 1980s, the future king of Saudi Arabia said that "nothing is more paramount than gaining favorable media attention to the plight of the Arab peoples."

This from a guy who owned more Rolls Royces than you could stick in a very big LOG base.

Well, the broadcast news world was in tatters. It was barely functioning even with government largesse. And the Saudis, for the moment, weren't producing oil or money or anything else. The whole region was a vastly overpopulated desert. It had been L.A. times ten and wasn't coming back soon. I had no clue what was happening with that company in London. (And, no Graham didn't tell me all that. He told me bits, how he and Skynet did things, and I had other bits and I worked the rest out in research later. But I'd heard the basics long before.)

We wouldn't be going through that company, though. The way that Graham did stuff was he shot a bunch of clips, whatever struck his and his producer's fancy, then sent them back to London and Skynet. It all got edited there. They might get a request to concentrate on something after a bit. A particular human interest angle, for example.

They'd gotten video of our blown-up Stryker. Also of the dead Iraqis. Also of the Javelins.

We'd gotten video of them dropping out of the sky. Not as good as theirs but very close.

And while they had good uplink/downlink, we had better.

I also had a couple of aces in the hole.

So I told him what we were going to do. And he got white again. Whiter.

Chapter Twelve Go Do that Voodoo

But, hell, I sort of needed permission.

See, there's this thing. Generally, it's best to do it and ask forgiveness. Especially in the military. Except when it comes to clear and unquestionable violation of regulations. Sure, I could ask for a lawyer but I might as well ask for a last cigarette if I let Graham start broadcasting as an "embed." There was a process.

(Okay, the girls had been a violation of regulation. If it had come up, I was debating the lawyer or the last cigarette. They're both bad for you but cigarettes kill you slower, less painfully and are cheaper.)

I wasn't going to ask full permission, mind you. I was going to present it as a fete accompli. But sending anything out needed some sort of stamp of approval.

Turned out it wasn't as hard as I'd thought.

Brigade S-3: No, we don't have any help to send you. Would you like to call back again when we have some?

Bandit: Bandit.

Wassup?

Know that drop I asked about? Reporters. Skynet. Murdoch. Embed. Kill them? Nobody know.

Shit me?

Shit not.

Be back.

In the meantime, I got my satellite/commo . . . I got the geek.

Here's what we're gonna do . . .

Boggle. No fucking way!

Authority. Boss. Bad dog!

Oh, then "No fucking way, sir!"

Did before.

Geek babble saying "No fucking way, sir! Other simple. No way. No how. No can do. Nada. Zip. Nichts. Nein. Nyet. Impossible."

Don't talk geek. Do.

Try.

There is no try.

That is geek-speak, sir.

No. Because there is no do or do not. There is only do. That is Army-speak.

In the meantime Graham had a chat with his chaps.

You might wonder, as I often have while driving a combine or worrying that some Afghan who knows this terrain much better than me is going to hear or see me sneaking up on his lines not that I've ever done that, how a scene in the news is actually shot.

Here's how it works. There is normally a four-man crew. They have a mobile system that can move the video, live or "canned" (prerecorded) back to the studio, home-office or that place in London. (Which, I found out later, was still in business but now owned by the BBC. Sigh. I suppose it's better than the Saudis.)

The crew consists of the reporter ("the dummy" in news-speak), a sound-man who is almost invariably between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six, has acne that he covers with a scraggly beard and in his off-time is a world-reigning champion at God of War, the cameraman, often on his second career, who is between twenty-three and fifty and whatever his age is developing a beer gut, and the producer, who is either a former dummy or a female "communications major" from a school to the left of Lenin. The producer is, in either case, generally to the left of Lenin or his or her bosses wouldn't let him or her be a producer.

Six is a bit odd.

In the case of Graham's chaps, the producer was a former dummy from the BBC. Never a star dummy (as in a ventriloquist's dummy) he got into producing and jumped to Skynews for the better pay just before the Plague. Nice chap. Bright. Amenable. Ambitious. Which was the card I played.

The sound-man was 22, developing a gut, had a straggly beard and was a world reigning champion at HaloV. I know because I tried to play the bastard in deathmatch and despite the fact that he had the good grace not to respawn camp he waxed my ass so hard I gave up the game in disgust and have never played it since.

Camerman. 28. Second career. First career was British Royal Marines. Six years. Did a stint in Basra. Thought he'd see how Iraq was shaping up, don't you know? Wasn't Para. Silly of me. Better out a fucking plane than bobbing around on a small boat!

He had a beer gut. He looked as if he could chew railroad spikes. I eventually realized that he was wasted on England. He needed to move to Texas.

The other two?

Half-trained camerman and a guy who was sort of thinking about getting into the sound business and could sort of run the equipment. Sort of porters. Sort of supernumeries. Sort of spares "in case."

Sort of dead weight?

Former SAS. (Special Air Service. Brit version of Delta.) Former SBS. (Special Boat Squadron. Brit version of SEALs.)

Told you Murdoch was a character.

Of course they didn't have weapons. Didn't do with reporters old chap. Until I bundled some out along with spare gear and told them to rig the fuck up.

Graham had a powwow with them. I had a powwow with them. The only slight balk was the sound-man who started babbling geek.

I don't speak geek. There is no try. There is only do.

Cameraman? Grin.

"Oh, bloody yes, I think."

SAS? SBS?

Sleepy-eyed stares.

I'll take that for a rousing applause.

Producer?

"This will either make us all bloody famous or out on the street or possibly both . . . I'm in."

They were going for the "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission." I still needed permission.

I had a call.

It was a lieutenant colonel. It was my new battalion commander.

I didn't know him. I pieced some stuff together later.

He wasn't a mech-head. He was light infantry. Airborne and Ranger to be precise.

He'd been transferred to the Corps G-3 shop for his "staff" time. It had to be done, no matter how good you are. They make you do staff. Especially if you're any good at it.

Look, there are probably guys who can only command. I don't know any. Every good commander I've ever met was good to excellent as a staff guy. The reverse is not true. That is, a Fobbit is a REMF is a Fobbit. They may be great at staff, but they cannot lead for squat.

I wish they'd learn to weed them out, better. Last BC? I hear he was great at staff. Lousy at command.

Anyway, this guy was, I found out later, an absolute fucking genius at staff.

As a commander?

"So here I sit. With two companies of line trying to play nursemaid the insane and one I can't affect, at all, under a former assistant S-4 with . . . scattered reviews on the other side of the world. What say you?"

"Not much you can do from there, sir."

"For or against?"

"We do intend to make it back, sir."

"I've seen your intel analysis. And the analysis of your analysis which wasn't actually bad. And now you're telling me they have Javelins. That is a badness thing."

(I pulled some of these from archive. He actually said that. "A badness thing.")

"We will continue the mission, sir."

"Sorry about the scouts. Get me their names and I'll write the letters. If there are any to write the way things are. But you've got enough on your plate. Look, I've got a meeting with the division commander in a bit. New battalion commander and all that. Hail, fellow, well met. Screw that. I don't see why we can't get some sort of air support for you. A damned news company flew in reporters. Surely we can get a B-52 or a B-2 or something overhead! Some damned support! This is just silly."

"Thank you, sir."

"Yeah. Well, I'm not going to joggle your elbow. Good luck and good hunting and all that. Now go dooo that voooodoooo that youuuuu do so welllll!"

Screen blanked.

Holy shit.

Screen came back up.

"Oh. By the way. You just made major. And you've got an okay on the embeds. See ya."

Screen blanked.

Holy shit.

I couldn't figure out if my new battalion commander was a nut or what.

I found out fairly quick.

Graduate of MIT no less. IQ so high he should have had a fucking nose bleed. Spells geek with a capital K. Geeks rarely can command for shit. Infantry don't speak geek, geek don't speak grunt. Me grunt. No speek geek. That worried me when I saw it.

Captain of the MIT football team. I didn't know MIT had a football team.

Former Ranger company commander.

Passed Delta Qual and training. Went "over the wall."

Rotated out as LTC for lack of slots. Longest running field grade officer in Delta history. No notations on that but turned out later he'd been a "squadron commander," Delta's version of a battalion.

Went to Corp G-3 for operations.

He's already on the colonel's list but the Corps commander has a problem. A battalion so fucked up that you can't even call it mutinous. They're just playing whatever rules they want to play because their commander's having a nervous breakdown and everybody has been watching it in slow time. Know you haven't been here long but you seem like the kind of guy could get this battalion going again. Oh, and one of the companies is the guys over in Iran. What do you say? Help me out, here.

Guy's evals didn't walk on water. He walked on the fucking clouds and angels sang around him. His superiors seemed to be writing that they really didn't deserve to be evaluating the messiah.

Nobody was that good.

He was that good.

Was our luck turning?

He couldn't effect diddly except maybe air support. We were facing an unknown but large enemy force ahead and they had anti-tank weapons that were state of the fucking art.

Our luck was turning.

Chapter Thirteen The Last Centurions

Call it reality TV. Call it counterpropaganda. Call it, as many did, propaganda.

The Last Centurions sort of defies description. Sure, I was the real producer and maybe I shouldn't talk about my show. But I'm not the one to say that, I think it was first said by Murdoch at a stockholder's meeting where people were starting to smile for the first time in a year. And it was repeated on news shows, talk-shows and every other medium of communications over the years.

We didn't send them video and then let them edit to choice. We sent them a complete show and told them to air it as is or else. As time went on, we got support from Skynet. And Fox and even the Beeb at one point. But at first, it was all a few overworked people in a bouncing commo trailer, often under fire.

It always started the same. A shot of some sort of horror that had perhaps become banal in 2019. A dead man Arab in what looked like a looted shop. A man blown apart by heavy machine-gun fire with no apparent weapon. A woman battered to death. A voice-over giving the impression that some evil had occurred, probably because of the evil Americans.

Then it would back up in time.

Every show was different, but they all had the same theme, the opening lines in that great voice of Graham's:

"This is a picture. All it tells you is what you see. If you don't know the context you know nothing."

Sure, it was exciting. Violence sells, as does pathos and sex. Last Centurions had it all. It was entertaining as hell. Hell, I lived through it, loved it, hated it, sweated blood. And I still watch some of the segments. Especially the one where Samad is sliding down the hill completely out of control. I laugh my ass off at that every time even though at the time it looked like a tragedy in the making.

And in the middle of it, we'd slip in context. History. Geography. Ethnology. History of propaganda. How news is made and manipulated. Military affairs. Diplomacy. How the two often interact badly.

Putting it together was a nightmare. Not my nightmare, generally, but a nightmare. Oh, I'd input on the basic script and some suggestions on the video we'd gotten. Also some stuff on background.

The scripts were usually, but not always, written by a pimply faced private in Mortars. The kid had . . . oh, a flare for storytelling and he was pretty knowledgeable for being all of nineteen. We'd find a particularly horrible shot and he'd back it up.

We were attempting to, and sort of did, undo decades of propaganda. We'd show the picture at the beginning then do a standard voice-over for the scene. That was usually done by a female announcer at Skynet.

"Stones." That's the one with the picture of the young woman who's obviously been beaten to death.

"American forces in the vicinity of the Iraqi town of Al-Kami were accused today of the rape and murder of Shayida al-Farut, daughter of a local tribal leader. According to local sources (young guy screaming and shaking his fist at the camera) she was seen in the company of American soldiers shortly before her death." Cut.

Back up.

Where in the hell is Al-Kami? Why were American forces there? Who was the guy? HOW DID SHE DIE?

(Go see the episode. For those of you who've never watched it, remember that thing about "honor rapes"? We tried to stop it, she chose to go back. For the honor of her family. That's it in a fucked up nutshell.)

The last shot would always be what happened to create the shot that led in. In that case, a beautiful young woman, dead and battered to a pulp on the ground. Back up and you see the heavy stones scattered around her. Back up further you see the men who had done it, in some cases members of her own family, walking away.

"We are . . . The Last Centurions."

In a way, this whole . . . huge fucking time-waster I've been writing is a written version of The Last Centurions.

It was also a living record of our time of suckage.

It spawned a whole fucking industry. Everybody tried to copy us. "Realer reality TV" whatever that means. But a story like the Ten Thousand, or The Last Centurions, is hard to beat. That's why it's been so popular over the centuries in the first place.

And everybody tried to figure out what the picture meant.

Understand, we'd send Skynews the picture and the "false" voice-over as soon as we had the script. And they'd tend to play it over and over. There wasn't much else new in programming at the time. After the first few, it got picked up by Fox News then Fox Network then a couple of minor networks that were holding on and finally it was even on ABC.

And it became, like, the standard water-cooler (actually, food line at the time) conversation.

"I think he was a terrorist . . ."

"I think . . ." "I think . . ."

Every week it was a mystery how we were going to fool people. What the "real" story was.

Oh, there was plenty of human interest. We had interviews and clips of just about everyone in the unit pretty quick and kept them up. There was a hard-hearted reason for that. When it involved the death of one of the troops, having file footage helped.

We could never go back and reshoot. The takes that we had were everything there was. Going back was rarely an option.

Of course, we had cameras in the Strykers and helmet cameras and gun-cameras hooked up to both the commander's sight in the Gun Strykers and to the gunner's sight. And both the regular cameraman (for as long as he lasted) and the SAS guy were running around all the time.

We also had the helmet mikes. Those and the gun cameras all could be fed to the commo trailers and recorded. Even if they weren't switched there. So we just continuously recorded everything.

Which was why so much of it was sucky. Reviewers used the term "edgy." I would have preferred better production values, but it wasn't an option.

Oh, and then there was the intro. The "new" intro that was introduced in episode three, "Stones." (The one described above.) I didn't like it. I didn't like the title of the show. I wanted to just call it "Truths" and I liked the simple intro. Graham talked me into it.

Centurions were the guardians of Rome. At the height of the Roman Republic there were over five thousand qualified Roman Centurions in the Legions. To be a Centurion required that, in a mostly illiterate society, one be able to read and write clearly, to be able to convey and create orders, to be capable of not only performing every skill of a Roman soldier but teach every skill of a Roman soldier. Becoming a Centurion required intense physical ability, courage beyond the norm, years of sacrifice and a total devotion to the philosophy which was Rome.

When Rome fell to barbarian invaders, there were fewer than five hundred qualified Centurions. Not because Rome had fewer people but because it had fewer willing to make the sacrifices. And the last Centurions left their shields in the heather and took a barbarian bride . . .

We are . . . The Last Centurions.

And this Rome SHALL NOT FALL!

Shot of a Stryker crashing through a house, (trying to avoid Javelin fire, by the way) intro of various characters. (Yeah, that's me on the radio with the mortar round exploding in the background. What we left out of the context was the camerman hitting the ground right afterwards. Funny as hell. It wasn't as close as it looked, or I'd have already been down, trust me.) Samad and Fillup and Bouncer (the first sergeant) and whoever was featured in that week's episode.

I didn't like it. I wanted to keep the original intro. Graham talked me around.

I still don't like it. I skip it when I watch the DVDs.

"Lancers," "Stones," "Division" about the battle for Mosul, "Hurrians" about the Kurds, "Loot" about scrounging vs. looting and how we ended up saving centuries' worth of cultural treasures in Turkey and finally, I thought, the three-parter "Caliphate" about taking down Istanbul.

My favorite, hands down, is "CAM(P)ing." Now, at the time I thought I was going to burst a blood vessel and wanted to kill every damned Nepo in the camp. As I watched one of our precious HERCULES burn because that fucking CAMP(P) was being used by the Nepos to cook food . . . And to see Samad walking up with it in his hands right after we'd set off the charges. Oh, GOD was I angry.

But I got over it. It was laugh or cry. And it was a very funny episode. The show needed humor and it was usually something between us and the Nepos that provided it.

"Battery" was probably the most poignant. I'm not sure what it was about the death of a minor shopkeeper in a minor town that was so fucked up. But when the batteries turned out to be dead . . . It was just so stupid and so random and so futile. And, yes, after I saw the episode I released some of our precious store of batteries to Goomber for his fucking iPod. Come on, I've got a heart.

Then came "Elephant."

Okay, "Elephant" was a) the only show we did that was pure "activist journalism" and b) the only one that was driven entirely by me. But go back to my point about media and government. The media exists in a democracy so that people can make informed choices about their representatives.

We were going into the first winter of an ice age and everyone was still talking about global warming!

Picture of a flower with baked mud behind it.

"Despite record cold and snow across the northern climes, global warming continues to be a looming disaster . . ."

By then we had permission to let the Skynet guys do interviews using our commo. And we managed to scrounge up one of the climatologists who had been screaming about the situation, and getting ignored, for months.

Remember, I'd gotten the first word back in January. It was November and people were still talking about "global warming." It was insane. We were trekking through road-wheel deep snow in mountains where it usually started to snow in ernest in late December and people were still beating the "global warming" drum.

And we beat them to death with their own drumstick.

The Brit climatologist was almost pathetically glad someone would listen. And he gave us a list of other experts who were trying to get the word out.

We were the first people to break the news that we were entering an ice age and get world-wide notice. We turned the tide. After that episode, even journalists started asking the right questions.

(By the way, I was the "producer" of most of the interviews. What does a producer do? He or she tells the ventriloquist's dummy what questions to ask. I knew what questions to ask. Graham, who before the episode had no clue, just asked them.)

I'm probably most proud of anything that I've ever done in my life with that episode. Well, that and my kids.

Were there "issues"? Oh my fucking GOD.

The Bitch was not pleased. She wanted us off the TV. And she hated Murdoch and all his networks. But, on the surface, it was all Skynet. Us? We're just trying to survive, what do you want us to do, censor them?

And from the first episode it was taking the networks by storm. Murdoch, who knew good entertainment when he saw it, had "Lancers" playing on four different time slots on Skynet and two on Fox News. By the time the Bitch reacted to it, we had another episode canned and a third in production. She screamed that she wanted it stopped. The Brass got passive aggressive.

We aired "Stones" and we were suddenly on Fox Network and one of the minor ones. (UPN?) After "Division" episode one, ABC bought the rebroadcast rights and did all three shows as a "miniseries" as a lead in. Then came "Division" episode two and all the guys people had grown to know just suddenly gone . . .

"Division" was the one that had everyone talking. There was no stopping us after that. She couldn't shut us down because she'd done too many obvious power-grabs and even her closest supporters were glued to the TV every Sunday night at eight.

And Thursday at seven. And various late-night spots and . . .

Hey, there wasn't much entertainment in those days. We were it.

Oh, people ask me, a lot, about "Centurion."

I did not produce the last show of the series. I didn't even know it was in production. I didn't know much about it until about a week beforehand, when I was kind of busy figuring out how to break the Caliphate. So when I was informed that Graham and Fillup were working on the last show, they had it, it's all good, I just let them do it. I trusted Fillup not to screw it up. Hell, by then I trusted Graham. You have good subordinates and you let them do their job. Like I said, I'm lazy.

Fuckers.

And that scene that everybody talks about where we come under fire and I stop telling a story for a second, snap out a string of orders then go back to telling the story?

Look, it's not that hard, okay? I mean, I don't suggest it for nonprofessionals but I'd been doing the job a long time. It wasn't rocket science whatever the episode made it out to be.

(Wife edit: Now you see what I mean? He drives me nuts sometimes. Watch the episode. Yeah, it's that hard to figure out in your head how to maneuver four different units over several kilometers of terrain while taking artillery fire. And he did it in, what? A half a second? Faster than most people can figure out what coffee to order? Will he ever admit it? Hell, no. Drives me nuts.)

So that's the story of how The Last Centurions came about and how things went from bad to good to very very bad. Because we weren't going to be getting many episodes out unless we made it to the filling station. And there was, in fact, a division in our way.

Chapter Fourteen There Has Been A Good Killing

The Sunni Triangle is a bit of a misnomer. But I'll work with it. The "triangle" is elongated north and comprised of Baghdad and Al Ramadi, which are more or less on the same line in the south, and Tikrit, which is a few hundred miles north of that line.

The whole area is fairly built up. Which meant more potential threats and given the population it was unlikely we were going to be greeted with open arms. Yeah, the population had crashed compared to the last time I was in Iraq, but it was still populated.

We were to the east of the Tigris. Looking at the map of village after village we were going to have to pass through, I was less than thrilled. Any of them could have a Javelin team in it. If I'd been the local Sunni commander, whoever he was, I'd have sent out a couple of Jav teams to every one of those villages. Or, at least, scout teams to figure out our route of advance and Jav teams to respond.

I was not interested in dodging Javelins all the way to Mosul then fighting an armored force.

I looked at our fuel consumption, looked at our available, did some calculations on the back of a napkin then dodged.

Right through the Sunni Triangle.

I didn't want an emperor's throne but I did want to see Blue Earth some day, even if it was going to be freaking cold. And it was going to be quite a few marches until we'd be free to run like the wind.

The thing is, to the east of the Tigris it was little fucking villages almost the whole way to Tikrit. To the west they drop off fast until you hit the Syrian Desert.

I wasn't afraid of desert. I'd have loved a nice open, nobody around, desert. What I didn't like was little fucking villages and farms and water courses and all the rest of that shit. It stopped us continuously making us sitting ducks.

I needed to be west of the Tigris.

Only one problem. There were, like, no fucking bridges across the Tigris. They were only at major cities. Notably, the first one north of Baghdad was at Zaydan where the villages had already fallen off. We were past the ones south of Baghdad. And all of those were in cities that were considered "hostile."

Presumably, Baghdad was where the core of the enemy would be hanging out.

Keep poking slowly north as the enemy closed in? We'd get surrounded and then ground to hamburger. We had to speed up. Speed was life. The quick and the dead.

We hadn't gotten that far north when I ordered an abrupt change in direction.

"Fillup, tell the Scouts to get on the Baghdad road and hammer west."

"West? Are you nuts?"

We were going downtown.

Commander's intent was what is called a "thunder run."

The commanders in Iraq in the "insertion phase" thought they'd invented it. They hadn't. Neither had the Black Horse in Vietnam which used it in Cambodia during our brief "intervention." Probably the first was performed by a Wehrmacht Panzer unit in Russia. Hell, the very first was probably by the Sarmatians.

Simply put, you put your pedal to the metal, you go balls to the wall and you fire at everything that even vaguely looks like a target. You don't stop for anything you don't absolutely have to.

It required some rearranging. And I did not want anyone running out of gas or ammo on the drive. We did a log on the way in. Then the Scouts went back out and we thundered.

A thunder run is significantly improved with tanks. Tanks have a psychological effect it's hard to describe. Especially at short range, and urban fighting tends to be very short range, they just look unstoppable. We didn't have tanks. We were going to have to hope that the gun Strykers were good enough.

We were saved by serendipity. (Which is a term meaning "I fucked up but things came out better than if I hadn't.") Okay, and active stupidness on the part of the local commander.

The local commander had gotten the word that we were out there and it was obvious we were heading for a link-up with the Kurds. He, therefore, did much what I thought he might. He sent out small units to "attrit" us while he gathered his main force to hunt us down.

All smart. Problem being that I "got inside his decision making cycle." What that means is, I wasn't doing what he thought was the obvious thing to do, keep pressing north, and I was reacting faster than he and his forces could react.

We were almost due east of Baghdad, a bit south of the line near Ajrab, when I made the decision.

The first "reaction" force had been sent out pell-mell to attack the drop area. That's the one that got the scout Stryker with the Jav. He was being smart, though, and putting most of his "light" force that he could scramble quick, fedayeen militia some of them organized into Javelin teams, up in the curve of villages I really didn't want to work my way through.

So about half his local supply of Javelins went to the wrong area.

Then he did what any good Middle Eastern commander does. He gathered his regular forces for a harangue. Had them line up with their tanks and trucks and AFVs and told them that they outnumbered the small American unit and that it would be easy to stop. That he knew right where it was going and by the time they caught the "thieves and butchers" that most of us would be smoking wrecks from the Javelins of the fedayeen militia. That there was nothing to worry about.

Scout Team Two-Five had a very specific mission. Barrel down the north side of the Baghdad highway to screen our advance. Don't stop for anything.

Why in the hell they went onto a fucking Iraqi military base I have no fucking clue. They said they got turned around and thought it was a parallel road to the Baghdad Highway.

Two-Five consisted of a regular Scout Stryker and the one commanded by the Scout Platoon leader. I happen to know that Boner could read a map better than that. Otherwise, he wouldn't be the Scout Platoon leader. They had fucking GPS and a clear route. How in the hell did they take a wrong turn?

What I got at the time went like this.

"Fillup, Fillup, Boner. Have encountered a small checkpoint. Area cleared."

"Roger. Fillup out."

"Fillup, Fillup, Two-Five. We are stuck in some sort of army base. Am encountering scattered resistance. Getting a little turned around."

"Roger, Two-Five. Blow through. Only base in the area is Damran Base. Be aware, that is part of the LOG we left behind. Expect resistance by U.S. military grade hardware. Boner, get the hell out of there."

Ten minutes later.

"Command, Two-Five! We are in encounter with large force . . . !"

The call cuts off.

"Two-five! Two-Five!"

All the BFT indicators are up on Two-Five. Our little boxes are talking to their little boxes and their little boxes are talking back which means the vehicles are not a pillar of smoke. Still not a pillar of smoke. Not responding to radio calls, but not a pillar of smoke. Still not a pillar of smoke . . .

"Fillup, Fillup, Two-Five. Happy to report have captured Damran Base and large store of military equipment including approximate equipment for an armored regiment. There has been a good killing."

There has been a good killing.

Picture this.

You're an Iraqi general. You have carefully gathered your armored regiment. The Abrams, Bradleys, Strykers, Paladins and such are lined up in serried rows at the rear. They are an amazing sight, all that armor just waiting to be let free to bring death and destruction to the enemies of Allah.

In front are the users of those vehicles. The drivers, gunners, infantry, techs and their officers. They are in dressed ranks standing at attention listening to you talk. And talk. And talk. Some five thousand men.

You have just told your armored regiment, equipped with the latest U.S. military equipment and capable of taking on any force in the Middle East, that you know where the enemy is going and that they will mostly be destroyed before they are ever encountered. Soon they will engage the small remnant of the enemy in an unstoppable wave which is right and just because Allah is on their side.

As you are delivering your harangue to your freezing troops (it was cold that day), there is distant firing. You ignore it. There is often firing. The Shia continue to resist, militias settle quarrels. People fire off every sort of gun in "happy fire" all the time. When one gets going, others follow. And, anyway, it cuts off abruptly.

As you continue your long-winded speech, there is a bit more firing. It's closer. So what? More people doing "happy fire" for the heck of it.

You may even recognize it as Bushmaster and M240 fire. Again, so what? Your forces are equipped with both.

You might pause as you notice smoke beginning to billow up. But you're well into your speech and others are responsible for fire-fighting. Besides . . . things blow up and burn. Your guys are not exactly experts with their equipment.

Then you see two Strykers enter the (extremely large) parking stand. You have Strykers but they are all supposed to be parked with their crews listening to your harangue. Perhaps they are from another unit, but all the rest of the units are up north fighting the Kurds. Your unit has just been "stood up" on the American equipment that was left and is preparing to head up there and break the Kurds for once and for all.

Perhaps it is from one of those units?

Then you notice the American flag on the lead Stryker's aerial.

By then it is too late.

Picture if you will . . .

Armored vehicles cannot express "body language." Or can they?

The sudden braking as the Scout Strykers, which had been doing a good 40 miles an hour, skid to a stop on the extremely large concrete pad. The concrete pad filled with more armored equipment and enemy troops than they'd ever wanted to see in their lives. The main guns shifting left and right as if wondering just what in the hell they're going to do. Perhaps they begin to back up . . .

So what does our intrepid Iraqi general do?

He shouts into his squealing microphone: "IT IS THE AMERICANS! ATTACK!"

Picture if you will, the troops starting to scatter as the general and his staff and commanders try to run. Picture both tracks opening fire.

The nearest cover for the assembled troops are the armored vehicles. The Scout track commanders are not stupid. (Okay, they were stupid, but also very lucky.) They lay down the majority of their fire in that direction. They know if the crews get those vehicles up and running they're toast.

The next cover is on the other side of the reviewing stand in a set of buildings.

All the way down the five-hundred-meter pad are more buildings associated with a motor pool.

The other direction are the Strykers and nobody is running that way.

25mm Bushmaster. Coaxial 7.62. Track commander with .50 caliber.

Two sets.

They ran out of 25mm ammo. They ran out of .50 caliber ammo. The track carries thirty-five thousand rounds of 7.62.

They ran out of most of that, too.

This I had to see.

It was ugly. You might have seen the shots but it doesn't really convey the ugliness of it. The guys had been fallen out without their personal weapons (probably because the "general" was afraid of getting shot). Not that that would have done much good against Strykers. They definitely didn't have anti-armor weapons. They had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

I had seen the word "windrows" in military histories before. "Windrows of bodies." I'd never actually seen what they were talking about but I recognized it immediately. Those guys writing histories back in the Civil War were familiar with agriculture. It wasn't like today when everybody thought their food came from the stores.

When a big wind hits a field of wheat, it lays down the wheat in sort of waves. It forms rows of beaten down wheat that hump up almost as if they'd been plowed by the wind. Neat, regular, long lines of destroyed wheat.

The Iraqis were the wheat.

Massacre? Yes. "Evil!," "illegal!" No. They were enemy combatants. A few might have tried to surrender. See the whole thing on taking prisoners. Besides, in the gun-camera footage I didn't see many trying until the end and by that time Boner was taking prisoners.

All that beautiful beautiful equipment and, at first, I could not think of a damned thing to do with it but blow it the fuck up.

Even with all the equipment and bodies there was still room to park Farmer's Freaks. (We didn't call ourselves The Centurions. Ever. In reunions we still don't except the techs when they're drunk. We were Farmer's Freaks.)

I climbed out of the commo van, up on the front slope and just sat there looking at what Boner had wrought. I tuned the bodies out pretty quick. I was looking at the vehicles. There were more HERCULES and Hemmitts and Bradleys and Strykers and Paladins. Fuck, there was everything. Even Avenger anti-aircraft systems.

Boner came over wagging his tail like a Lab that had just brought back a bird. I let him babble for a bit and then nodded.

"Not bad, Boner, not bad."

He looked like he'd just been handed the Holy Grail with a Medal of Honor in it.

There's a point to only praising to the most limited degree.

(Doesn't work with all personality types but the types that it doesn't shouldn't be on a battlefield. They have important things to do in civilian society but if you need people blowing smoke up your ass all the time, don't join the military. I don't work well with that personality type but I tell them I don't and why.)

"I would go so far as saying that I agree this was a good killing."

I thought he would stroke.

All that time I was looking at that gear and wondering what the hell I was going to do with it. Nice to not have it as a threat anymore. But . . . damn . . .

Okay, we didn't need any Strykers. Stryke those. I was not going to fuck around with Paladins. I'd loved to have been able to, but I wasn't gonna. Scratch all the Brads, too.

What I wanted was a way to get it all up to the Kurds. No way in hell. Why?

I was looking at over four hundred vehicles. Okay, say that we just took the Abrams. There were nearly a hundred of those. I had about a hundred and seventy effectives. But an Abrams requires a crew of four, commander, gunner, loader and driver.

And none of my guys knew diddly about them. A tank doesn't just run itself. Sure, the Abrams as a sweet vehicle and very easy to use. But maintaining it? Hell, even boresighting the gun we didn't know how to do.

I didn't even want to take the time to fuck everything up, but I knew I had to do it. I couldn't leave this shit in my rear. Somebody was bound to butt-fuck me with it.

But the Nepos were just sitting there . . .

We took twenty Abrams and forty Bradleys.

How? Wait, didn't you just say . . . ?

Ten of the Abrams were fully crewed by guys drawn from the infantry. That left me with very few ground shooters. I'd live.

The other fifty were driven, and driven only, by Nepos, some infantry, the news guys and techs. Why?

Abrams are very hard to destroy. Even with a Javelin if one got hit it was unlikely to hit the driver's compartment. Which was the only way the driver would get killed.

I wasn't taking them to use them, I was taking them to keep them from the enemy. And, hopefully, get them to the Kurds.

They're also very easy to drive.

All of them were fully armed and fueled. We took two trucks of Abrams ammo, a bunch of 25mm and four of parts. They weren't all parts for Abrams and Brads but what the hell.

Then we used five Abrams to shoot up all the rest. Last but not least, we shot those five. They'd fired so many rounds, their barrels were "depleted" and why used "depleted" barrels when you have brand new ones?

I had sort of enjoyed blowing up the LOG base in Iran. I nearly cried at this one. This shit could have really helped out the Kurds. I cursed the bastard that left it here.

I also took two Avenger anti-air systems, fully crewed. They were Stryker Avengers, which I'd left in Iran not thinking I'd need them. And we grabbed four more fuel trucks. We had, essentially, nobody riding in the Strykers.

If I'd known about CAM(P)ing I would have taken a HERCULES. I wanted to take everything. We just didn't have the manpower.

Oh, by the way. Fully armed Abrams with their ammunition doors opened? They blow up really nice. It was heartening. Sort of. We were now in them.

We rolled out after a bare two hours and continued our thunder run.

Going through Baghdad was . . . unpleasant. There were quite a few fedayeen with RPGs. They got one of the Strykers near the bridge and I think another on the west side. Also one of the fuel trucks. There were, I think, some Javelins. But Baghdad is pretty built up, and I kept as much as possible to the built up areas. The reason I think we took some Javelin fire is that a couple of times buildings had explosions we weren't causing.

We were causing a lot of explosions, though, so I'll take that as a "possible."

A Thunder Run everybody looks out and keeps an eye out for targets. The track commanders were the most exposed and we lost one of them to effects of an RPG. But, mostly, we were laying down so much fire, not much was coming back. We were burning through ammo, but the most important thing was to get to the other side of Baghdad.

We had to slow down, though, for the vehicles that got hit. All the guys weren't dead. We had wounded, now. Lots of wounded. Since we didn't have a doctor or any way to evac them, that was going to suck.

We went Abrams (fully crewed) to the front, then a group of gun Strykers, then some trucks, then more gun Strykers, then the rest of the trucks, then all the rest of the shit (nearly empty infantry carriers, mortars, Avengers and the line of uncrewed Abrams and Brads), then some more gun Strykers. The HERCULES were near the rear in case we needed to tow anyone. I wasn't planning on stopping to tow if I could avoid it.

The satellite intel said the bridge was up and engineering intel said it could take all our vehicles.

It was up and it did.

It was also defended by a cluster of fedayeen with RPGs. Which was where we lost one of the gun Strykers. It had an explosion go off on the overhead which I think was a Jav. On the far side we lost a Stryker, again. One of the nearly unmanned infantry carriers. At first I thought it was an RPG. I'm still not sure if it was RPG or Javelin.

Three wounded in the first, one dead one wounded in the second. All my critical infantry troops. Pissed me off.

I do not know, nor do I care, how many we killed on the run. I do know that at one point there was a sort of human wave charge of a few hundred.

What's that line from Patton? We used them to grease our treads.

Did we kill civilians? Possibly. Probably. When an Abrams TC spots a guy with an RPG in a window and orders "fire" and the gunner replies with main cannon . . . Anything in or around the guy with the RPG gets killed. And we weren't just firing at RPG holders. You don't have enough time in combat to say "is that an RPG or a guy with a pipe on his shoulder? Is that person leaning out for a good look or to fire something?" You see anything that looks like a target and you fire.

Getting out of Baghdad actually scared me more than going through. We were back in open country and anyone with a Jav could have lit us up. But we didn't take any.

Oh, prisoners.

While we were "reconfiguring" at the pad and such, I had Hollywood and a couple of other guys who had gotten some "bedroom" instruction in Arabic interrogate the survivors. Which is where I got the narrative about the Iraqi general. Also about him sending most of the Jav teams up and to the east to stop us.

Last bit. We found the main cache of what had been left behind as well. It was in a base on the west side of the Tigris. "Lightly defended." Also had been mostly emptied out. We took some more shit from there (including refueling our fuel trucks and vehicles and ammoing up) and then blew up anything that resembled military hardware.

Take that, State Department.

Chapter Fifteen It's a Good Place to Hallucinate

So where were we going?

Nowhere. We were going nowhere.

As in "Bumfuckistan," "East Bumfuck," "middle of nothing," "beyond the Pale."

We stayed north of the Euphrates out in the salt wastes. There was, operationally, a choke point near Ramadi between it and the Thartar which is a big shallow salt lake kind of like . . . well, Salt Lake. Our dust could easily be seen from Ramadi.

But there wasn't any reaction. It looked as if we were headed for Syria. Our basic path, except for avoiding roads, was the one I'd taken when I did my deployment as Scout Platoon leader. This was the path that the Sunnis had smuggled fighters in throughout the whole Resistance in Iraq, from all over the world to Syria and then down the Al-Ramadi trail.

But there was fuck all in most of that area. If you didn't stay down by the Euphrates there weren't any towns and hardly any roads. It was a big fucking open desert.

We lost some vehicles. I don't know how a group of reasonably intelligent Arabs could fuck up Abrams and Bradleys as fast as they did, but fuck them up they did.

We dropped four Abrams and two Bradleys on the first part of the run. And we were running. There was no ability to switch drivers. We logged and we ran, logged and ran, logged and ran until the guys were obviously becoming too punch drunk to log in movement.

It took us two days to get to the "oasis" of Abu Samak. Part of the time we spent on a road that had been laid down, way back when, for the Iraqi military. They used to perform training operations, when they trained at all, out in this area.

Problem was, the area was crossed by wadis. Wadis are gulleys formed in desert terrain by the occasional rainshowers it gets. They flood to their banks at the slightest rain then go down to dry. Arroyos is the term used in the Southwest.

Wadis can really ruin a tank or Stryker's day when they don't notice them. Oh, there were always places to cross. But when you're tired as hell and crusing along at forty knots in the middle of the night, you don't always notice an arroyo. Then you drop four feet through the air and generally slam into the far wall. Even if you climb it, you've just shaken your crew around like peas and somebody is probably injured. Especially the guys in "white daze" or dead asleep.

Taking the road kept us out of wadis. It was a chance and I took it and it never bit me in the ass but I didn't like it.

At Abu Samak we did a full stop.

Abu Samak is where the story "Stones" came from. When we left the guys wanted to just waste the place and be done. But we left it standing.

It had been a fair sized village before the Plague. Did an op there when I was Scout Platoon leader. (Not the one where I got the scars.) Recovery had been centered around three families from two different clans. Only about sixty people left. Which was why killing one of their breeders was stupid. Besides the whole thing being stupid.

But it was their culture and her choice. As long as they don't try to shove that culture down my throat, let them have it. Try to do it in my country and . . . Well the muj in Detroit found out exactly how forgiving Bandit Six is about that sort of thing.

(By the way, was she old enough to "consent" to that sort of thing in the U.S., if it had been legal at all? No. But it's their culture . . . In that culture, she was. Fundamentalist Islam is a very fucked up culture IMO, but I couldn't save the world.)

Getting away from "Stones," we did a full stop. We set up jamming, cut the phone lines, told the locals if they tried to leave they'd be shot without mercy, put out security (who tried like hell to stay awake) and got some rest. We stopped for ten hours, rotating so everyone could get some rest other than in a moving vehicle.

Then we fueled, packed and rolled. Leaving the town standing against our better judgement.

We rolled out to the west-northwest until we were way out of sight of anyone and then turned due north. We went nowhere near a town for days.

We rolled, hard, dropping vehicles along the way as they just fucking died, for three more days. Days of fighting dust and fatigue that was so bad you shook in pain. Grit in your eyes, grit in your mouth, grit in your clothes. I'd spread the formation so that nobody was in anyone's dust. Didn't matter. It got everywhere.

Two of the wounded died. The rest pulled through. They were as comfortable as we could make them in the supply trucks. The two medics we had worked like hell to keep them alive.

Short of evac, there was nothing else we could do for them.

There were more wadis up north. All over the fucking place. I put the Scouts out front and we lost one of the Scout Strykers to a totally destroyed undercarriage when it hit a fucking wadi doing well over what I told them to do speed-wise. I wasn't going to chew the driver out. He had a broken arm. And, no, we didn't know how to set it.

We rolled deep into the desert wastes. It is said that Saddam had sent one of his sons up here, just before we'd entered, with a cache of not only most of his sarin and VX gas but also cash in tractor-trailer load quantities.

If so, nobody has ever found it. We didn't, and trust me I looked. Less for the cash than the poison gas which I was perfectly willing to use.

There were wadis. There were dunes. Not like the Rub Ak Kali or the mojave, but pretty big. There were weird things like this big sort of quicksand area. It was wet. How in the hell the sand/mud/shit that it was in stayed wet I don't know. But we lost a Stryker and an Abrams to it. The Abrams dropped fast. So fast the Nepo driver barely got out.

There were "roads" out there. They were graded desert, mostly, with posts saying "Here's a road. Don't get lost or you'll be absolutely fucked!" Some of them were paved. We ignored them. There was nobody using them. You could see for miles and miles out there, most of the time. Most of what is called "The Syrian Desert" is gobi desert. That's a technical term meaning a desert of flat ground, usually clay, covered in small rocks.

Out in the big desert is a very disorienting experience, even for a guy from the prairie. You keep looking for something to get perspective on and it's never there. We were a line of boats on a flat, hard, dirt ocean. There were mirages.

You rarely see something like an oasis or a harem girl or whatever from a mirage. They're just layers of differential heat that reflect stuff. Like mountains that are hundreds of miles away.

But when you're a bit shy on water and hallucinating from fatigue, you can make up just about anything. Saw a giant rabbit that was running away from silver spears falling out of the sky. And mountains covered in cellophane.

You get the reason that most of the great world religions have been formed in desert when you're out there for a few days. It's a very good place to hallucinate. Peyote cults make sense, too. Everything makes sense in this big cosmic "Dude, I am soooo stoned . . ." way.

During the day it was hot. The sun just beat down despite a constant thin overcast we were getting used to. At night it was motherfucking cold.

We dropped the spare vehicles. Where? I'd have to give you the grid coordinates which are still classified. But we dropped them. We had to, we needed the gas. Those Abrams and Brads were gas hogs.

Day four we stopped. We put out minimum security and we racked out.

Where?

Middle of the fucking desert, that's where. But I knew that we were going to have to do the same sort of thing, under worse conditions, soon.

When we got up, we sent out "Stones" and did a regular "what's happ'nin'?" broadcast indicating we were going to try to head out through Syria.

We were less than six hour's hard drive from Mosul.

Chapter Sixteen I Had Them Right Where I Wanted Them

Mosul was a stalemate.

The Iraqi forces had the outskirts, the refineries and the tank farms. The Kurds held most of the rest of the city. But they were also surrounded. Eventually, they'd be starved out.

There were Kurdish forces trying to break through from the mountains to relieve them. Sort of. The Kurds are fierce fighters but see the thing about "raid" vs. "shock" infantry. They were not shock infantry. They were trying in their own way, though, and might have succeeded in time.

Iraqi forces were holding the side towards the mountains, the north and northeast, from bunkers and defense lines. Ditto the northwest and due east. The main push was coming from south and southwest. That was where the bulk of their armor was placed. Every now and again they'd push into the city and try to kill the Kurds. The Kurds had barricaded a lot of the roads, tough enough obstacles that the tanks couldn't just bull through. The tankers and infantry would drive around for a while getting lit up by RPGs and Carl Gustavs (a man portable anti-tank rocket), lose some infantry and maybe a track or two and then pull out.

Stalemate.

We were a short drive southwest of Mosul.

Two problems.

Problem one: There were a bunch of little towns southwest of Mosul. I wasn't worried about them being heavily defended or even a bunch of Javelins. I was worried about them telling the Iraqis we were coming. And there was fuck all I could do about it.

Problem Two: There was at least another full brigade of armor pushing in on Mosul. They weren't great, but it was a brigade of armor. We had, at max, the makings of a company with the Abrams I'd kept. Think outnumbered ten to one.

The Kurds weren't going to be much help. They were raid fighters. Hit hard and run. In fact, the Parthians (Persians) were the guys who gave us the term "Parthian Shot." That is, hit somebody, run away and keep shooting at them as you run away. (Very difficult to do with a bow over your shoulder on a running horse by the way.) Getting the last word in as you leave the room is a Parthian Shot not a Parting Shot. (Yeah, I know, how many pet peeves . . . )

Anyway, the idea being to get them to chase you. Then you flank them and roll them up.

Hmmm . . .

They're going to get word we're coming . . .

People, it is not the "Centurion Maneuver." It's not even a "Parthian" maneuver. They got it from the Ugyar (Mongols) and it was probably used way back when by the Scythians. It's been used by every mobile force in history at one time or another. It was used by Native Americans and Colonial forces. (Battle of Yorktown.) It's not new.

Doesn't mean I'm not proud of how we used it.

The road southwest out of Mosul crosses a tributary of the Tigris near the town of Khuwaitla. Northeast of Khuwaitla, between it and Mosul, is a low ridge.

The tributary was crossable with our bridging equipment, which was still hanging in there.

It started with a thunder run. We got on that road and barreled ass for Mosul. There were some checkpoints set up to control people in the area and some "tax collectors." We fired them up. But I ordered no main guns to be used. I wanted survivors.

Most of us barreled ass down the road. My ten remaining Abrams and four Stryker gun vehicles carrying Javelin teams swung north towards Tall Zallat. They killed anything they saw and drove over the few phone poles to make sure commo was as down as they could make it.

Another Stryker force went south avoiding most of the villages. That was a good share of my available U.S. infantry and, notably, my bridger.

The group on the main road took its time. We even took a couple of breaks away from the villages. The Nepos got out and set up fires. We were in no hurry.

In Khuwaitla we stopped, again. This time we did a full commo shut-down. And I dropped Jav teams in houses along the northeast side. Those were all Nepos. We'd given them the best training we could on the Javs. Javs are not that hard to use and they took to it like ducks to water. They could see all the way to the ridge and could engage at least half that distance. They had lots of Javs, too. I also left my LOG trail.

After Khuwaitla we sped up. Sort of. I got the Scouts well out in advance and we rolled in stately procession down the road.

I had no intel on what was up ahead or what was going to happen until the Kurds called me and said they'd heard from the guys in Mosul that a big tank force was moving out. I wasn't in direct commo with the Mosul guys. I couldn't ask for details even if they could give them. All I got was "many tanks."

Now, I've got about half my Strykers (fully loaded with infantry again) and my bridging equipment to the south. I've got my tanks to the north. It's a fraction of the total unit, mostly Strykers crewed by Nepos and with barely crews for that, rolling down the road. Exept for about half the Scouts who are barrel assing for the ridge.

They get to the ridge. Every fucking tank on the planet is headed their way. The road from Mosul is "packed with armored vehicles as well as a long column of trucks."

They back up and unass some of their dismounts. With Javelins. They fire up the approaching tanks.

Now, a Javelin has a long damned range for an infantry anti-tank rocket. Two klicks by the book, two and a half in normal conditions and sometimes something like three or so. (There's a trick to that.)

An Abrams, which we'd given these fuckers, has four klicks of range. And it can fire while in movement.

Which the Iraqis did. Badly. They fired at our Scout vehicles and missed. They fired at the Jav teams, who were up in a pass and moving after each shot, and missed.

But as they got closer, the gunnery improved. The Scout vehicles went behind the pass. The Jav teams continued to fire them up.

We counted four trucks, two Bradleys and nine Abrams burning on the road to Mosul east of Centurion Ridge. They did a damned good job, all things considered.

One thing they did was piss them off. The Abrams and Brads could outrun just about anything else. They sped up on the road, getting strung out in a long line. (I found out later that was against orders. Good thing the commander, who was a pretty good guy, didn't have really effective control.)

When they got to within a kilometer, the Scouts pulled out. That was the sucky time.

We were cruising along halfway between Khuwaitla and the ridge when the Scouts pulled out and ran. Right after them came first one Abrams then two then nine then . . .

In all, there were forty Abrams tanks, nine Paladins and sixty-three Bradleys. There was also a convoy of trucks filled with a shit-pot of infantry, many carrying Javelins.

My "main" force was caught on a flat open plain with the enemy on a ridge overlooking us and with superior firepower and range.

I had them right where I wanted them.

I put out dismounts and had them open up with Javelins as the Strykers spread out and opened fire. It was a pointless exercise. Except for keeping the Strykers moving. The enemy wasn't unloading to use Javs. And tank rounds do not track. They fired at the Strykers, the Strykers ran around in circles. We lost one Stryker to tank fire. We should have lost them all. To an American unit we would have lost them all.

The tanks and whatnot were slowing down as they came across the ridge. That was backing them up. I couldn't have that. If I'd had decent artillery, sure. They'd have been dead-meat. But I needed them to attack.

We turned back around and picked up the infantry dismounts. They'd shot out their Javs anyway. More smoking vehicles.

We ran like hell as the Scouts finally passed us. We'd dropped the dismounts down the road and now weaved to pick them up. They were continuing to take the enemy under fire the whole way.

We ran into Khuwaitla. We ran through Khuwaitla. Then we turned back around and drove into buildings, only the 25mm cannons of the Strykers sticking out.

Khuwaitla had a mosque. Just about every little town did. This one had minarets, those towers where the muzzarein call the faithful to prayer.

They make dandy viewing points.

Javelins have huge range but almost no backblast. They are, therefore, one of the very few anti-tank weapons you can fire from inside an enclosed space. Oh, it can't be real enclosed or even their minor blast will hurt like hell or kill. But if you blow out most of the back wall of a hovel, you can fire from a window with a bit of maneuvering.

There was a stand of trees, poplars, running along the northeast edge of Khuwaitla. Also common in the wetter areas. People use them for firewood. The leaves had been stripped by the autumn winds and branches were gray fingers reaching to the sky as if in supplication that spring would someday return.

They affected neither the view nor the angle of fire of the ten Javelin teams, each with eight Javelins, waiting on the outskirts of Khuwaitla.

Most of them were Nepos with a scatter of infantry to lend technical advice. More had emplaced in defense points in case it got down to infanty-infantry fighting. I didn't want it to.

The "Parthian Shot" is only part of the tactic favored by the Ugyars. Everyone thinks of the Mongols as vast hordes, men on light horses that used speed and their incredible numbers to overrun half the known world.

Most of the time, the Mongols were outnumbered. And they weren't just fast little devils, they were very good strategists and tacticians. They also weren't all "little guys on tiny ponies."

Their favorite tactic went like this.

Charge an enemy with "little guys on tiny ponies." Run away shooting.

Behind some sort of visual screen would wait much heavier guys, lancers, (note the name, people) on much bigger horses and wearing much heavier armor.

When the enemy charged the "fleeing" guys on ponies, they'd run into the guys with lances and be stopped.

In the meantime the little guys were swinging around and hitting the enemy in the flank and rear. If there were enough big lancers, they'd hit on the other flank. It was a "one, two, three" punch combination that, especially with an enemy unfamiliar with it, was lethal.

The enemy Abrams and Brads rolled down the road, pedal to the metal.

When the lead Abrams reached a klick, I gave the order to open fire.

Fucking Abrams are motherfucking tough.

When that SF unit that first proved the worth of Javelins was under attack, they faced four T-55 tanks. Now, T-55s are old stuff. They're, basically, upgraded WWII tech. Just steel armor and very little internal compartmentalization or blow-out doors. But they're tough.

A hit from a Jav took one out every time.

A hit from a Jav took out a Stryker like a tincan. Really fucked up a Bradley.

Fucking Abrams are motherfucking tough. On average it took two Javelins to get the motherfuckers to stop firing at our ass. Sometimes it was three. Hit the driver's compartment and they stopped but kept firing. Ditto the engine. Hit the ammo storage (side of the turret) and it blew up spectacularly and they were out of main gun ammo but still kept firing machine guns!

Best hit was on the turrets. Generally the tank would just turn around and run away very fast. All the guys who were shooting were dead.

Best best turned out to be "hit the turret with the ammo storage compartment open." On Abrams you're supposed to open it, pull a round, close it, load the round.

I don't know for regular tankers but we tended to lock it open in combat. So did the Iraqis. So it wasn't protected when the Jav hit the turret.

We called it "pop-top." Lots and lots of power in those Abrams rounds. When the main ammo storage went off, and the door was open, there'd be an explosion so big and fast you couldn't figure what was happening. Then you'd catch something flying through the air. The turret. Furthest one landed, I shit you not, nearly a hundred yards away from the tank. A football field. Fuckers weighed more than a big bulldozer. The explosion was enough to throw a bulldozer far enough to make a goal from the other endzone.

That's how much power.

And when the door was closed?

Fucker would still keep running.

And they weren't just sitting there to be shot. Oh, no. They were firing back. So were the Bradleys which were getting smoked at a very high rate. Rounds were crashing into and through the whole fucking village.

But Javs have very low signature. Remember, looking at the guys from a klick away, when they were just hiding in a ditch, our Scouts, who were professionals, couldn't spot the Javs firing.

The Abrams and Brads were lighting up the village but they couldn't see, well, where the fire was coming from.

They also had no clue what they were doing.

Tanks are shock weapons. You run them into an enemy, hard. They're the lance cavalry of the modern battlefield. Sure, they've got great range. But the main thing is that they've got shock weight.

The Iraqis were mostly not under effective control. Not surprising given that the group had to have organized since the Plague. And Iraqis are not, by and large, shock infantry guys. They are, mentally, raid attackers just like the Kurds.

They had been barrel assing down the road in more or less a scattered-out line when the lead tanks took fire. They spread out into the fields to fire at the village. More or less randomly. This is the tanks and the Brads which were mixed up together in no formation I could figure out.

Then, instead of just pushing forward and crashing into the damned village, they milled around on the fields firing at medium ranges.

If they'd backed way off and fired, that would have been one thing. But the stupid fuckers stayed in our engagement basket the whole time and fired from ranges where their accuracy wasn't that great.

Nelson: "Never interrupt an enemy in the process of making a grievous error."

I actually told my Abrams to back off.

But they clearly got some sort of order and started to roll towards the village. They weren't rolling fast, which was stupid, but they were rolling.

Then I told my Abrams to come in.

It was Second Platoon and a scattering of Nepos, mostly driving. The guys who had picked up enough English to be able to take commands. They'd never done real tank gunnery before. Oh, we'd fired some rounds at the vehicles in the desert, including while in movement, but they'd never engaged moving targets while moving themselves. And the Nepos? Well, they'd just recently learned to drive trucks. Now they were driving seventy-three-ton tanks and taking orders from TCs in English which they sort of understood.

To the north of Khuwaitla, at about six klicks, was the town of Tal Zallat. The road they'd taken to the north went up through Tal Zallat in a bend.

There wasn't much to Tal Zallat. Just some houses and a mosque like Khuwaitla. But the houses were big enough to drive Abrams into and disappear.

Hopefully the people got out, first.

As soon as I saw the Iraqi units starting to "consolidate" and get under some control I called the Abrams.

Down from the village they came like . . . Boy, I want to get poetic. "Like an avenging north wind" was what I was going to say. Actually, it was more like ten bouncers jumping into a big riot in a bar.

They opened fire at max range and mostly missed. But they just kept coming in a spread-out line, cannons booming from time to time and kicking up a big pall of dust.

The Iraqis were just getting the idea to drive into Khuwaitla. They couldn't drive around it because of the watercourse. But they could drive into it. They started rolling forward and all of a sudden they're getting hit from the flank.

A Bradley on the flank was the first vehicle to get hit by one of the tanks. It was the tank of the platoon leader. You could see the "silver bullet" track right in on that fucker on the playback of the gun camera. And it went through the turret and out the other side. Set off all the main gun ammo on the Bradley and apparently killed all the crew and scared the driver enough he bailed out.

By then our Abrams were down to under two klicks and starting to score. The Iraqis suddenly decided that the Javelins in Khuwaitla were less important than the tanks on their flanks and tried to turn to face our Abrams.

And then the Strykers hit from the south.

They'd bridged the watercourse well to the south and moved up through a screen of trees a couple of klicks down. This was my last platoon of U.S. infantry, First Platoon, and they had a dual mission.

As they moved up, they dropped Jav crews into depressions and those guys started lighting up the armored vehicles. But the main purpose of the Strykers was the line of trucks, filled with infantry, which were following the tanks.

The trucks were mostly still on the road and pretty spread out. U.S. ten tons. (Thanks, State Department!) And a bunch of them had .50 calibers in ring mounts, which can do a number on a Stryker.

If there was any effective fire from those trucks, it wasn't evident. The Strykers spread out and took them all under heavy fire with main guns and the TC's gun. They took out one of the lead trucks, first, which backed up all the others. The others tried to escape onto the fields. Some of them bogged down. None of them were as fast as the Strykers off-road.

The Iraqi commander wasn't done, though. He still had about fifteen Bradleys and ten Abrams and he finally got his artillery firing into Khuwaitla. It was random and mostly fell on the back side of the village but it was a nuisance and we took some casualties. Including one of the Strykers in the village when a 155 round fell right on it.

Out in the fields, it was mano y mano as the Abrams and Bradleys charged each other. I couldn't have that.

"Scouts. Roll out and take the Brads in the ass."

Strykers are not supposed to engage Bradleys. Bradleys are much tougher and even have TOW missiles on them.

But when four Strykers are attacking from the rear while ten Abrams are attacking from the front, thirteen Bradleys are in a bit of a pickle.

There were still the remaining Abrams, though. The enemy's that is. One of ours had been taken out and more were about to be charging right at each other. And with them heading north, most of the Jav teams couldn't get an angle of fire.

"Samad. Get the remaining Jav teams out of the houses. Have them engage only the enemy tanks."

Time of flight became an issue. The two groups closed fast. But Javs started launching up. Not as many as I'd hoped. Clearly we'd lost some of the Nepos. But they were outbound.

The two groups closed to within less than a klick when the Javs started falling on the enemy Abrams. Coming down from the rear, they had a choice (based on their targeting software) of engine, turret or gun.

Most chose engine. Nice big heat source.

It got very fast and furious for a moment. Then six Abrams charged out of the smoke and dust. They ran actually through the formation of Strykers, turned around and charged back in.

"All Javelins, cease fire."

I hoped I'd been in time.

Javelins are very smart rounds. And, somehow, the Nepos managed to sort our Abrams from their Abrams. I couldn't.

Out at the trucks, our infantry was accepting the surrender of the surprisingly large number of survivors.

Battle of Khuwaitla bottomline:

Enemy losses.

Destroyed vehicles:

Forty-three Abrams Main Battle Tanks.

Fifty-three Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicles.

One hundred and four trucks.

KIA: 3800 (approx).

WIA: 2500 (approx).

Prisoner: 1586 (exact).

Captured equipment:

Six damaged Abrams MBT.

Twelve damaged Bradley AFV.

Seventeen Ten-Ton Trucks.

Nine Paladin Mobile Artillery Systems.

Friendly losses:

Four Abrams Main Battle Tanks. (Two recoverable.)

Three Stryker Infantry Carriers. (One recoverable.)

Two Stryker Scout Vehicles. (One recoverable.)

One Hemmitt. (Supply truck. No, the wounded weren't on it.)

Nepalese Auxiliary Infantry: Sixteen WIA, four KIA.

U.S. Army Personnel: Seven WIA, nine KIA.

Twenty-three and Thirteen to Twenty-five hundred and Thirty-eight hundred.

That's balling the ace.

Chapter Seventeen Honorable Bastard

We weren't done but we mostly were done.

Wellington had a great quote for the moment the last enemy vehicle was stopped:

"I have never lost a battle. But I cannot but think that the only thing worse than a battle won must be a battle lost."

The fields between the village and the ridge were covered with burning vehicles. Guys were wandering out there chaotically. There were still some shots, especially .50 caliber. A defeated enemy that don't want to be killed had better surrender on a battlefield. Running is the same as fighting under the laws of war.

A lot of my boys, American and Nepalese, were dead. More were injured and that was in a way worse. We didn't have any doctors or medevac.

And we still hadn't taken Mosul or Irbil or the fuel we needed.

I ordered my guys to take prisoners and sort them out. And to use the "special protocols."

Normally, say back in WWII, the way that you take prisoners is this.

You round them up. Any who "show fight" are taken under fire but otherwise you just round them up.

You separate them into three groups: Officers, NCOs, enlisted.

You keep the groups separate.

You ensure the security of the prisoners at all times. Once you capture an enemy fighter, his security is higher than your own security or those of your fellow soldiers.

That's if you're fighting the Germans. Which we don't do anymore.

With Middle Eastern forces, especially any that included or could include "hardcores," that is guys who were fundamentalist nutballs, you used the "special protocols."

There were still three groups: Officers, enlisted and "hardcores."

How to define "hardcores"? It's an art. First, you look for any guy who's got a beard. Military units, even most Middle Eastern units, are down on beards. I'm not talking about stubble, I'm talking about a full-up soup catcher. Fundamentalist Islamics are big on soup-catchers. (Says you're supposed to have one in the Koran. Surah something. Look it up.)

Closer up, you look for the guys who are glaring at you. Look, these guys just took a pasting. Ever been in a fight you lost? I mean, just got the shit kicked out of you? Do you glare at the guy who just kicked your ass? No.

Not unless you firmly believe that Allah or whoever is on your side. Then you keep glaring while he kicks your ass again and again.

Got a beard and glaring? Definite hardcore. Beard and not glaring? Possible. Glaring? Probable. We tended to be conservative. Possibles went into the "hardcore" file.

And you didn't just round guys up. You had them strip down, first. Why? Because hardcores hid grenades and shit in their clothes and would use them on you. And you couldn't be sure you got all the hardcores. Although if a guy had a grenade in his pocket you could figure he was a hardcore. So everybody, from generals to privates, stripped down to underwear. Then the guys searched their clothes. Then a rank tab or other sign of rank, if any, was ripped off the uniform. They were told to hold that in their hand and keep it where it could be seen. Then they were separated.

I hadn't brought anywhere near enough fast-ties. Those are basically big cable ties that are used for temporary handcuffs. I hadn't planned on fighting a large force much less capturing a good bit of it.

So we had to go to "special special" protocols.

The enlisted non-hardcore were the most numerous. They always are. They're cattle. Middle Eastern units, by and large, are conscription units with low-morale conscriptees. They don't give their captors trouble. We put them out in one field with a couple of Strykers on guard and told them to get their clothes back on. They were given shovels and told to dig latrines and given some rations and water. They were told to stay in a bunch, don't try to wander off and they'd be fine. Best we could do for them at the time.

(Oh, explaining the latrines is always fun with guys like that. They think they're digging their graves. It gets explained.)

The officers, about twenty, were marched down to Khuwaitla. They were run into a barn and told to hold there. Guards were posted including a Stryker. They were given food and water. One tried to escape. He got shot. Must have missed a hardcore.

The hardcores, a fair number (about a hundred including some "officers" and such-like), were marched into a field. They were spread out. They were told to put their clothes on and sit. Do not stand. Do not talk. If you do either, you will be killed.

Some of them didn't believe us. One stood up.

Had Nepos watching them. Why? Nepos are very interesting when it comes to human life. They take it as a dishonor (they got this from Samad and Ghurka stuff) to kill a true noncombatant. That is, a woman or a kid or an old guy. Even an unarmed male who is not a combatant.

They also don't torture. Don't believe in it. Consider it dishonor. Don't rape.

Combatants? You'd better do what they say or you're fucking dead. And they sort of enjoy it.

Guy stood up. Two .50 calibers opened up. He was hit. Guys on either side were hit. Guys behind him were hit. Some just wounded.

They screamed and bled out. The Nepos giggled.

U.S. troops might have hesitated. Should have, probably would have, gotten eaten up by it. Sure, they're hardcores, they're the core of the terrorist motherfuckers we've been fighting since the taking of the U.S. embassy in Iran. They're the guys that flew into the Twin Towers. But they're humans.

Nepos don't think that way. There are targets and non-targets and they don't care what happens to a target.

We get along great but we're not exactly alike.

That wasn't all that was going on.

There were still forces in Mosul. I punched the remaining tanks and Scouts up to the pass. They found the Paladins that were still intermittently firing. Captured them. (A Paladin has a .50 caliber on it and their guns can be lowered to direct fire. They're there if a group of infantry hit your unit. If you're a smart Paladin commander, however, when a Main Battle Tank comes calling you surrender. Quick.) More prisoners. Dispatched a couple of trucks with Nepo guards and some guys to drive the Paladins back.

We "consolidated" on Khuwaitla in the meantime. Gathered wounded, redistributed ammo, reammoed. Ran a supply truck up to the guys on the Pass. No movement in the direction of Mosul they could see.

We did what we could for the wounded. I'd brought a plentiful supply of medical stuff with us and picked up more in Baghdad. Most of what was wrong, though, the medics could barely touch. Horrible burns on a couple of guys. One amputation from a tank round. Shrapnel. One of the Nepos, who had been hit on the head so hard a chunk of skull was missing, wanted to go back on duty. We sedated him.

The Kurds in Mosul had a doctor. He was short on medicines. I had lots of medicines. As soon as things were stabilized it was time to link-up.

So I had somebody go get the commander of this ratfuck.

Yes, he'd survived. Got picked up from the "truck" group. Was in a wheeled mobile command post which had stopped and everybody bailed when the Strykers hit. Smartest thing they could do.

He was alive. He'd gotten his clothes back on. He was turning the rank tab over and over in his hands when I walked in.

Decent looking guy. Clean shaven, good haircut. Uniform wasn't tarted up with medals. Smart eyes. Not glaring, just smart.

"Captain Bandit Six," he said very dryly in really clear English. "What a surprise to see you up here."

We talked. He didn't do the usual Arab thing of beating around the bush. I got out a bottle of hooch from the Iran LOG base. He didn't turn down a belt or two.

Turns out he was a "real" colonel. Sunni but American trained and hadn't been part of the Resistance. (Not all the Sunnis were.) Survived the Plague. Kept some people together. Family, some guys from his unit.

Bigger fish took over in most of Baghdad. Not military, a Sunni mujaheddin type. Not even from Iraq, an Egyptian. Grabbed the LOG base. Colonel joined forces with the bigger commander. Fighting would have been stupid.

He was pretty good. Experienced. School trained. (Command and General Staff among others. Guy was better trained than me.) Things were quiet in the south. He was dispatched with most of the combat forces around to go up and take the oil fields from the Kurds. Well, beating up on Kurds was just patriotic duty to any Iraqi. Kurds were mountain raiders, ground-mount Vikings, barbarians. Well-known fact. Been that way since time immemorial. The guys on the plains get raided by the Kurds . . . Go back to that bit and read it. Then take it from the POV of the guys in the "empires." "Fucking Kurds."

Couldn't hold fighting the Kurds against him except they were my allies. The Kurds were bastards to the Iraqis and vice versa.

"By the way, wiped out the other armored force down in Baghdad."

"Yes, I was told." Very dry again. "Actually, I found out through sources. What I was told was somewhat different. I was also told you were on your way to Syria. That I shouldn't worry about you."

"I tried very hard to give that impression," I admitted. "So what do I do with you? You know all the laws and such. And, trust me, I'm down to basic law not regs put on top. Not even basic law to tell truth."

What I was saying was, I no longer felt constrained by the Geneva Convention. Easiest thing was to shoot everybody out of hand.

"Believe it or not, I actually have Kurdish POWs," he replied. "I am keeping them as well as I can."

What he was saying was he felt constrained by the Geneva convention. Fucker.

On the other hand, if he was willing to play by the rules . . .

"Parole?"

Parole, in military terms, means that the officer and his unit agree to no longer engage in combat against a particular enemy. So he couldn't be used to beat up on the Kurds or us. But he could be sent down to watch the Shias or whatever and free up forces from down there. I'd take that.

"If I give my parole Mullah Hamadi will have me killed," he replied, smiling. "And find an officer who is willing to lead this shattered force. I will give it, but you might as well shoot me."

Fuck.

"I don't suppose you can get the forces besieging Mosul to surrender?"

"Probably not and if I could I would not give the order."

Honorable bastard.

"What if you agree to remain under parole here," I asked. "Until the local issues are decided?"

"I would go for that. But there are elements of my force which will not."

"The hardcores. What to do with them?"

"Give them to the Kurds for all I care."

Honorable and knew who to be honorable about. I was starting to like this guy.

And so it was done.

I called the Kurds. I told them to tell the guys in Mosul that when the tanks came back they were ours. Don't shoot.

I left most of the prisoners in Khuwaitla with a group of Nepos and, notably, our LOG and wounded. The enlisted prisoners were moved into the shattered houses and given food. They didn't cause problems. The officers did a couple of times. The colonel settled that out. The Nepos were just there to make sure nobody got really stupid. There were a couple of hardcores in the enlisteds. They got stupid. The rest got the hint.

We waited until the next morning then rolled to Mosul.

Don't get me wrong, nobody got any sleep that night. There were hardcores to handle, which is never easy even with blood-thirsty Nepos. Shit had gotten fucked up. It had to be unfucked. I had to spread out units as observation posts and hope they didn't get overrun. There were still some guys moving around that had avoided the sweep. We had to round them up. All the vehicles had to be logged, which since we were spread to fuck and gone took time. I put in a quick call to home. More on that later. There was a probe up towards the pass. It got turned back.

Some of the troops got some sleep, I got none at all and neither did the other officers or most of the NCOs. I'd talk about how tired I was but unless you've been there you just can't know. And if you have, I don't have to explain. But by dawn we were ready to roll.

Creating any sort of "combined action" was impossible. First of all, the Perg Mersha for all their valor were never particularly disciplined. They're great fighters, don't get me wrong, but so were Vikings. Getting them to do anything, though, is like herding cats.

The way to herd cats is to toss treats. The treats were running Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi logistics units that were suddenly unguarded.

Basically, we did what JEB Stuart did at Gettysburg instead of his job. We rolled all the way around the battle. Everywhere we went, the suddenly surrounded Iraqis broke and ran. The guys in the trenches were the least hardcore of any of the units. Getting rolled over by Abrams scared the shit out of them.

As a unit broke, the local Kurds, who kept a close eye on such things and had gotten the rumor that we were in the area, would break out and attack. Raid if you will but when an enemy is running raiders will run just as fast or faster.

Took all day but by the time the sun set the Siege of Mosul was lifted. Link-up was effected with the guys coming down from the mountains. All quiet on the Mosul front.

One tank farm went up. Probably a hardcore. There was still plenty of diesel and gas. Hell, there was enough for us in the trucks supporting the Iraqi forces.

The Kurds did a pretty good job in the aftermath. They'd been civilized, a bit, by dealing with us. They rounded up the Iraqis instead of putting them on stakes or whatever. They used the "special" protocols but that was just sense. They also separated for hardcores. We gave them ours. They still didn't put them on stakes.

We got our wounded under care and the Kurdish doctor (doctors, actually) got medicines from our stores and the Iraqis'. (Which were U.S. medicines, anyway.)

I got with the local Perg Mersha commander. Here's how the Perg Mersha work. They're tribal based. That is, a company, battalion, whatever, will all come from one tribe. When they gather in big groups, one guy is put in charge. There's a lot of arguing about orders at that level. But they all sort of agree as long as the target is clear. Think barbarian hordes. Or, hell, the Confederate Army.

The local guy was the brother-in-law of the president of Kurdistan. (They'd tried a couple of different organizations, politically, and gone with one that is remarkably close to ours. Works for tribes which is what the thirteen colonies really were. And, hell, still are.) Also one of their brighter military lights, by useful coincidence. I looked up his data on the DODnet and DOD agreed. Smart guy, good natural tactician, school trained in the U.S. Fuck, what was it with these guys getting CGSC and I couldn't get a damned slot?

The Kurds got under control fast. They rounded up prisoners. They secured equipment and critical installations. They started counting the loot. All under this Kurd guy.

He had things well in hand. Well, fuck me. I'm supposed to have to do everything!

We parked in downtown Mosul and just fucking crashed while the Kurds had a party.

Chapter Eighteen Yeah, Son, We Really Kicked Ass

The next morning I got on the horn. I'd sent in a sort of incoherent report the night before but it was late and I was just fucking shot.

We'd been in EMCON, electromagnetic something something, basically not using any of our electronics, for most of the run. All the way since Abu Samak. We'd told home we were going EMCON and approximately when we should come back up. But there was still some "trepidation" on the other end.

Overnight my "staff," Fillup and his XO basically, had done some work. Fine boys. We had a list of the captured stuff from the first battle and it turned out the Kurds had a better one. I called home. BC, being prompted I was going to call, came on. I opened my mouth:

"Have the honor to report have captured Mosul along with over seventy enemy cannon . . ."

Had it all written out and the words just flowed "Nepalese auxiliaries charged forward with great gallantry . . ." "must highly commend Lieutenant Mongo on his fearless assault into the flank of the enemy force . . ."

Look, U.S. After Action Reports are as dry as a fucking bone. If you read the fucking battle of Thermopylae as a U.S. After Actions report you'd be snoozing halfway through. They could suck the life out of the battle of the Alamo.

In the old days these sorts of things were written by quill, put into a multi-layer waxed-linen envelope and sent over seas by way of fighting ships. Who just might have to fight through enemies to bring them home. They were dry and terse but they had a terrible beauty about them. Often they were reprinted, verbatim, in newspapers.

They did not use the term "synergy" anywhere in the report. And they gave fucking credit where credit was due.

The new BC was clearly a history buff. He was grinning after the first sentence and just nodded all the way through. Apparently, despite the wording, he was getting every bit.

"That was a thing of beauty there, Bandit Six."

"Thank you, sir. I practiced."

"I take it you have it written out?"

"Yes, sir. With appendixes."

"Fast work. Send it on. I was copying your verbal. I'm going to send that on as well."

"Yes, sir." (Gulp. Let's hope most of the chain of command had a sense of humor.) "Sir, Mosul and Irbil have airports. Rupert Murdoch got a plane in here, for God's sake."

"Ready to come home?"

"You're kidding, right, sir?"

"Let me get back to you on that," he said. I could see there was something going on but I couldn't know what.

Lord God I wished I'd known. I would have gone and taken a barbarian bride.

But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

The Kurdish general still had things in hand. My guys had been moved up overnight. The wounded were under care and it was pretty good. I checked up on them and the facilities they were in were at least Vietnam era. Compared to everything we'd seen up to that time, it was like science fiction. Hell, they had a functioning MRI! They'd needed medicines but we'd carried in a lot of those.

The POWs were a handful, there was now a fuckload of them, but there were a lot of Kurds to take care of that. They had pretty much the same approach as the Nepos. Be nice boys and you live. We'll even feed you.

Food turned out to be an issue in the whole region. The harvests were screwed by the weather. Right then I decided if this Last Centurions thing worked out I was going to discuss the weather.

But there were lots of fields around Mosul. Most of them were fucked up from the weather and plague but some had standing wheat and barley. With the fighting under control the next major operation was to get them harvested. The Kurds really wanted enough food to make it through the winter and next spring.

So I got together with the Kurdish commander and the Iraqi commander and a bottle of hooch.

Thing was, most of the Iraqi commander's troops were Shia not Sunni. Sunni had gotten down to less then ten percent of the Iraqi population by the time the Plague hit and they didn't fare any better than the Shia. Having a Sunni in control in Baghdad was just silly. It was purely a function of State leaving our gear where they did. Oh, and the fact that most of the Sunni left in Iraq were, ahem, "immoderates." (Read "hardcores.") Quite a few of them weren't even Iraqi; they were transplants who had come in for the "great jihad" against the U.S. Most of the long-term Iraqi families left in Iraq were those who just refused to leave and were going to fight the Shia tooth and nail until they were "ethnically cleansed." There were some good guys. The commander of the Mosul brigade was pretty decent as such guys go.

But most weren't.

What now? Lotsoprisoners you can't feed.

Truce with Baghdad. Prisoners. Better operational forces. Your equipment and support . . .

Yeah, on that. Don't bet. Stuff back home.

Still have equipment.

Yeah, on that . . .

Truce with Baghdad.

Mad Mullah.

()

Need a different government in Baghdad.

(Slight wry grin.) Culloden Field.

Now that was a reference I was surprised to hear. Go look it up. But clearly this guy realized that taking the Kurds all the way to Baghdad wasn't an option. In which he was smarter than Bonnie Prince Charlie.

I looked over at the Iraqi commander who was quietly sipping my booze and wondering why he was in a high level meeting with two of his enemies.

Need a different government in Baghdad.

There were . . . issues. There always are. And when people started to piece together what I'd done, let's just say that my career got rocky. But that was later.

Here were the issues.

The Iraqis, the non-hardcores, were going to be willing to follow the colonel. He was a pretty good guy all things considered. But they'd just gotten their asses kicked and a shattered unit is rarely cohesive in battle.

But even if the returning "army of conquest" could beat the hardcores working for Mullah Hamadi, and that was an "if," that would leave the colonel in a bit of a pickle. He'd be a Sunni trying to lead a bunch of Shia with absolutely no support from the Sunni around him.

Which had me making calls.

Turned out the mullah I'd left in charge at the LOG base had gotten pretty good relations going with the Shia over in southern Iraq. Basically, the border was a memory. They were getting into good cooperative agreement now that a couple of "issues" had been settled in the area. (HAMB on the Iranian side and the rest of the Mahdi Army over in Iraq.) The "moderates" were in a position that being "moderate" was no longer a survival trait so they'd gotten "immoderate" with the "immoderates" and since the "immoderate moderates" outnumbered the "immoderate immoderates" they'd kicked their ass.

If that makes any sense at all.

There had always been a lot of Iraqis who supported "moderation." Look at their fucking elections for God's sake. But the problem had been large numbers of fuckheads, the Sunni jihadis who were being funneled in and Ba'athist Sunnis who wanted back in power and the Shia who were puppets to the Iranians whether they knew it or not. And their various tribes. And criminals and whatnot.

The "immoderates."

With the Plague the "moderates" had realized that it was fight or die time. And they'd always outnumbered the "immoderates."

This pattern, too, was consistent in Islam. There'd been periods of "moderation" and then periods of "fucking nutballs in charge." Causality was pushing in the direction of "moderation."

Didn't mean I would want to be a Sunni in Iraq.

The point being, there was a group in south Iraq which was already looking at taking Baghdad and tossing the fuckheads out. Freedom and Democracy? Maybe. In time. But they were primarily secularist politically (even the "mullah" I'd left in charge in the LOG base) and that would have to do.

Their problem was, they had pretty good intel on what Mullah Hamadi had in Baghdad. It was way less, now, but it was still a tough nut.

We got everybody in a consult. Hey, I wasn't sure why I'd left the commo vans in the LOG base but I figured they might come in handy. Think the Palantir in the Lord of the Rings. (Yes, I've read it. School paper. God that's a fucking snoozer.)

The end point.

Combined assault on Baghdad from the north and south. The colonel would lead his primarily Shia unit on an "invasion of liberation from Sunni oppression." (Yes, he was a Sunni. People could and did ignore that.) They'd have some Kurds to lend esprit de corps and for whatever loot they could get from Baghdad. Forces from the south would come up in support. Food, which was more available in the south, would be sent to the Kurds for their help. Oh, and the Kurds get Mosul, Irbil and all the oil and other stuff up here to the line of . . . figure it out.

Shia?

Yeah, we can go for that. As long as we don't have those fucking Sunni in power anymore.

Guarantees? There's no such thing in the Middle East.

However, that left the colonel in a bit of a pickle. He hadn't been the most popular guy in the world in Iraq before the Plague. After it, he was less popular except among the Mullah Hamadi crowd who saw a school-trained Sunni. And he was willing to talk a good line to stay alive.

After they took Baghdad, Sunni were not going to be popular people.

Sigh. Couldn't have the savior of the country strung up. Which would have happened eventually. Life is like that. Or shot by the Shia as a Sunni or the Sunni as a traitor.

He had family in the Sunni Triangle. Hell, bit of the remains of a clan.

"Well, Moses, you know what's got to happen."

"Take my people out of Egypt?"

"Okay, maybe Abraham. Out of Babylon for sure."

So I put in a call to Jordan.

School-trained colonel. Sunni but secular. Nice guy. Probably bringing some weapons, personnel and equipment with him. Got a few things to do first.

Sure, Hussein Jr. would love to have somebody like that. Come on down! We'll bring the couscous.

Did I have authority to do any of that shit? Oh, hell no. And when State got wind of it they damned near wet their short trousers. Especially "justifying" the borders of Kurdistan. Who the hell did I think I was? Churchill?

Let me give a little history lesson.

Most of this stuff, prior to WWI, had been owned by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans made the mistake of backing the Great Powers, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, etc, against the Allies, France, U.S., Britain, etc.

The Ottomans had been pretty broken up over the whole thing. Seriously broken up.

So at the end of the War, the Allies broke up the Ottomans. Totally. And created a bunch of "countries" what were just fucking lines on paper. And most of those lines were drawn by none other than Winston Churchill, who was the British Foreign Secretary at the time.

There's a bit of an otherwise straight border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq which dips upwards, giving a bit more completely empty desert to Saudi Arabia and a bit less to Iraq. (At the time, the oil issue was little known.) No fucking reason in the world for it. People call this "Churchill's Burp" because they say he drew the line in after lunch and burped while he was drawing the line.

Most of the lines make no sense. They had nothing to do with terrain and nothing to do with indigenous inhabitants. It's one of the reasons that the MidEast has been a continuous battle zone ever since. That and the fact that it's been a battle zone for its entire history. Which is just about all there is of history.

Take the Kurds. ("Please!" Just joking.) Here's a pretty homogenous group that has fairly defined borders if you ask them. Nobody asked them. They got broken up into three different countries. None of which liked Kurds. And they'd been battling for survival ever since.

Iran and Iraq are, basically, Persia. There's some counter arguments but they're weak. At the very least, if you're going to make an "Iraq" it should go all the way to the Zagros Mountains. But, really, Iran and Iraq could be one really mongo country. (As they are today.) Breaking them up was basically so that a particular Arab clan which had helped out the Brits could have "Babylonia." (Churchill was a romantic. Romantic Babylon and all that. I've been all across Iraq. Ain't romantic.) And to cut down on the power of the Persians.

In time it led to the Iran-Iraq War which left over a million dead on one of Churchill's little lines.

The First Gulf War happened on another.

Most of northern Saudi Arabia was inhabited by Shia. Who were under Sunni control and never really liked it.

And the family that Churchill liked so much?

The only one left in power of the Hashemites was Hussein, Jr. Who was barely holding on. The Sauds had killed the last Hashemite in Saudi Arabia and Saddam's predecessor killed the one in Iraq.

All I was suggesting was that we get the lines to look a bit more like the people involved.

Hey, they'd lasted a hundred years. That's a long time for a border to last in the Middle East.

Assuming everyone won their battles, we ended up hashing out some new lines. Until something could be worked out with the various "Fars" city states (the guys running bits and pieces of Iran), the line of demarcation for "Babylonia" would be to the Zagros. Both sides of the Shat Al Arab. Border with Jordan stayed more or less the same. In the north, the Kurds got all of their previous Iraqi territory. They were in de facto control of all their "Turkish" territory and "Iranian" territory anyway. They even were in control of a good bit of "Syrian" territory.

Assuming Mullah Hamadi and his goons could be kicked out of power, most of the Sunni who were willing to leave would go to Jordan along with not only everything they could carry but a bit of a goodwill offering. And some who weren't willing to leave.

There were three or four guys in charge in Syria. None of them were fucking with Iraq at the moment and most were Shia. (One was a Ba'athist Alawite fuck, which was the group in power before the Plague.) That area of "diplomacy" would have to wait.

This sort of negotiation should have taken months. How long did it take?

Three hours. And that was with a break for lunch.

(The mullah at the LOG base actually could answer a direct question when four angry people were staring at him over satellite video. He's actually a great guy and much better at MidEast normal negotiations than I could ever be. Hell, he's got a fucking Nobel Prize. I don't.)

It wouldn't be fast. Things were going to have to be "consolidated." Both the Iraqi colonel and the Kurd guy realized there was going to need to be an OpPlan.

I left them to it. They were using one of my commo vans. The other was in use cutting "Divisions" and keeping an ear out for The World. Nothing on redeployment or even evac. I went and checked on the wounded. They were way more upbeat than they should have been. There was the Nepo missing a chunk of his skull. He'd held out to be operated on. He thought it was great. The Kurd surgeons had put in a chunk of metal so "Now my head is even harder, sahib!"

Burns, shrapnel. Most of the guys who weren't sedated were in great spirits. "We really kicked ass, didn't we, sir!" This from a guy waving the stump of an arm.

There were a couple that just weren't going to make it. They were out in a bliss of morphine. One of them was less out, sort of one long quiet moan. Unconscious and still moaning.

Yeah, son, we really kicked ass.

Centurions one and all.

Chapter Nineteen There Was an Issue

The guys were resting up after their travails. I was getting some rest, starting to pine for Shadi and considering the beauty of Kurdish women, but mostly waiting for the other shoe to drop.

We could get out via the local airports. It would be "logistically difficult" given that most of the airbases that the U.S. depended upon for "global dominance" weren't available. But you can refuel a C-17 in-flight. Hell, there were planes that could fly in non-stop from Britain, which had some functioning airports. There was fuel here. Irbil was well on the way to becoming the best place to land between Britain and India.

The other shoe dropped.

I got called to come over to the commo van. Everybody was "taking a break" from cutting the next episode. They'd been tossed out. The BC was on the video conferenced in with the brigade commander and a couple of other people I didn't know. One of them was a suit. Another was a lieutenant general, Air Force no less.

Uh, oh.

The good news.

C-17s configured for medical evac were on the way. Ask the Kurds if they have any casualties that would respond better to top-flight treatment. Everybody's coming to Walter Reed.

Thank fucking God. I'll get right on that, sir. What about . . . ?

There was an issue.

We'd finally picked sides in Turkey. The side we'd picked had, according to them, most of the territory that used to be Turkey. And it was kinda, sorta, stabilized. (Yeah. Right. More on that later.) They had Ankara, the Turkish capital. They had most of the Anatolian Plain. (Arguable as we'll see.) They were leaving the Kurds alone. The Kurds had their area stabilized and that was good enough for now. (And they're going to keep it, suckers.)

They were mostly Turkish military which meant secular. They wanted to restore freedom and democracy and all good things to Turkey.

But there was an "issue."

A fundamentalist group had some territory. Notably, they had most of the territory around Istanbul and the Bosporus. The big problem being Istanbul.

History again.

Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. Hell, I think there's a name before Byzantium.

The Bosporus is actually a big fucking river if you think of the Black Sea as being a big fucking lake. It consists of the Bosporus which is a narrow bit exiting from the Black Sea that Istanbul straddles, the Mamara Denizi which is a big lake, then the Dardanelles, which is another narrow bit by the Med (okay, Aegean, same diff). Rivers from Eastern Europe to the Stans dump to the Black Sea and the water, in turn, dumps through the Bosporus (I use it as a general name for the whole thing) into the Mediterranean. (In fact, there's a continuous outward current. It really is a river.)

Rivers have always meant trade. So the choke point, from back before there was history, for all that trade is the Bosporus. And people have been plying their trade on the Bosporus since they were moving better flints down from the Volga region. (Seriously. They've found sunken boats that had cargoes of flints. Like for making chipped stone knives and stuff. Way before history.)

Remember Troy? Forget all that shit about it being about Helen. Troy was one of the first major cities to control Bosporus trade. It got really rich on it, and the Hellenes decided they wanted the money. Simple as that. It's over at the entrance to the Dardanelles on the Aegean/Med side. Guy named Schliemann found it in the late 1800s using mostly The Illiad as a guide. Well, he found one of the cities that was, sort of, Troy. There were layers and layers he never got to.

Anyway, The Big City for controlling Bosporus trade pretty much since history had been written was Istanbul. And it had a special significance to the Turks.

The faction that had taken most of Turkey was never going to be able to really control things until they controlled Istanbul.

And whether they had the forces to take Istanbul or not, they didn't have the moxie. They needed stiffening up. They needed a little Viagra in the old pencil.

We were the Viagra.

The Air Force general burbled. Airbase in Incirlik was available as soon as they took Istanbul. How the two were linked I had no idea; they were about seven hundred miles apart.

The State Department guy babbled. Improved relations with the Turkish government. Stabilization of the whole region. Opening trade through the Bosporus links.

Nobody was doing much "trade" back then. Most shipping lines weren't operative. An opening up the Bosporus was no big deal. If we really wanted to help this guy, we could send a MEU over and take Istanbul. Trust me, we wouldn't make the mistakes that the Brits made at Gallipoli.

But for some reason it had to be "Farmer's Freaks." They wanted me to cross the Tauric range, in what was starting up to be a fucking iceage of a winter, and on the far side link up with notionally friendly forces and take a city that was a fucking fortress?

I let them burble. The brigade commander and my BC watched me nod in agreement.

When the two idiots wound down I nodded again.

"No," I said and cut the connection.

I walked out of the commo vehicle and looked at the on-duty RTO, who was looking worried for good reason.

"When they call back, tell them I'm unavailable."

And I made myself unavailable.

The Kurds had some running Humvees we'd left behind. About the only thing we'd left them. I found a Kurd who knew who I was, and wanted to know if I was married because he had a cute female cousin . . . and he was talking marriage mind you . . . and rode out of town.

I drove up to Centurion Ridge. I parked where from the marks a Javelin had been fired. I looked down at those pretty good fields covered in the wrecked trucks, tanks, Bradleys, in all the mess we'd made.

They were pretty good fields. Not as good as Minnesota. But with the right equipment and knowledge, they could be made to really produce. And, hell, just because all that shit was fucked up now, didn't mean it had to stay fucked up. Some of the engines down there were in pretty good shape. Find a busted up tractor, put one of those truck engines in it and you'd be stylin'. Pimp my tractor, baby. Hell, I could put a fucking Abrams engine in it. Burn up the wheat as I was harvesting but, hell, that would keep down all but the grassy weeds . . .

Might be some unexploded ordnance. French farmers dealt with that all the time.

I wonder how cute that cousin is? And it wasn't the first such offer I'd gotten. The Kurd general, who was related to the Kurdish president, had mentioned introducing me to his sister . . .

What was there for me in the States? What was there for most of my boys in the States? Families were dead. The government was screwed to the max. The cities were a nightmare and the Army wasn't being allowed to do anything about it.

Things would get pretty peaceful in this region pretty soon. Especially if we helped out in Baghdad. The Kurds were mostly Hurrians but they had all sorts of tribes in truth. Maybe it was time for a tribe of Americans.

They'd called me pretty late in their day. It was noon local when I said no. I sat there all afternoon. Watched the sun set. Watched the fields turn to silver as it got really fucking cold. I pulled out my poncho liner and wrapped up. I watched the fields get more silver as a thin moon rose over my shoulder. I slept. I dreamed and they were ragged dreams. Dreams of empire. Hell, the whole Middle East was ripe for the taking for somebody who had the right force and mentality. I saw myself on a throne. And I saw disaster and Mom calling me in from the fields and Dad's big hands working on a tractor. I dreamed of battles I'd been in and battles I'd never seen. I'd never held a shield or sword in my life and I saw those as well as if I'd lived it. I saw cohorts and just big groups of guys with bows and ragged cavalry charges. And I woke to the birds singing outside the room of my house and knowing I was late for school. That there was something I had to do and it was nagging at me.

They were the wrong birds. Magpies squawking in the pass. Ravens croaking their harsh cries.

Could those green hills of Kurdistan have ever been home? I don't know. Maybe. If they pushed me, they were going to be.

There was a radio in the Humvee. I'd had it turned off. I turned it back on, punched in the right frequency and called the commo van. I was coming back. Call the BC. I'll call back when I was ready, give me an hour or so.

I had a leisurely breakfast. I'd taken some pogie bait with me, every soldier carries some food with him, but not much else. I was going to need the blood sugar.

I tossed everybody out of the van again. I called back. I got put on hold, which I'd expected.

Took about fifteen minutes for the conference to come back up. Different group. Still the BC and the Brigade. And the Army Chief of Staff. And the Air Force Chief of Staff. And a different State weanie. This one looked less Weanieish. Sharper.

Chief of Staff, Army, opened.

"Bandit," and he called me Bandit, "we know what we're asking. We know. We can send replacements for your casualties. We can send you gear if necessary. Supplies. Whatever. But we need this done. And you're the guy who can do it."

"I was laying odds you were going to take a barbarian bride," the BC said. There were glares all around. Water. Duck.

"I get that, sir. The you-want-this-done part. Note, that you want it done, not you need it done. Turkey means exactly dick to the U.S. strategically right now. The Middle East means dick right now. In five years, ten years, maybe. Right now? Diddly. So you want it done not need it done."

"That is actually a fair assessment," the State guy said. "But there's a high probability that the Anatolian League can help with stabilization. There's an oil shortage building in the U.S. Less use but we're heading into a cold winter and we're going to need oil. We're mostly looking for the oil platform in the Black Sea. If the Kurds can get their act together and the Anatolian League can get their act together we could be shipping by January. And we're going to need it in January."

"Uh, huh. I've done some stuff . . . Well, I've done quite a lot of stuff to stabilize the situation down in the Northern Gulf. Shia will sell you oil."

"Bandits in the Straits of Hormuz," the Air Force Chief of Staff said, shrugging. "Maybe we could escort with Navy ships but we're still pretty tasked out. The Med is clear. Italians are sort of back up, ditto the Greeks. And the Brits took back Gibraltar so the Spanish don't matter. They're not back up."

"The Kurds are becoming a linchpin," the State Department guy said. "They are stable. Especially after your actions at Mosul. Mullah Hamadi cannot, in the near future, take back northern Iraq. And the pipeline to the Black Sea is up. Venezuela and Brazil aren't pumping. Gulf of Mexico isn't entirely back up but it's keeping us alive. By January we're really going to need oil. So are the Europeans. So we need the Bosporus."

"Uh, huh. MEU?"

"That's not the only thing we're working on," ACOS said. "Screwed up as we are, we're still the World's Policeman. The Marines are way overtasked with that. This is part of being the World's Policeman. If you want a traffic whistle I'll send you one."

"Oh, I do," I said. "To be precise, I'm going to give you my needs, wants and desires. The needs are nonnegotiable. If I don't get them, we're going to become Kurds and I wish you luck in you Bosporus adventures. The boys are getting pretty tired of being handed the shit end of the stick."

"People?" the Chief of Staff asked.

"No," I replied. Although, truthfully, I should have gotten more troops. But I trusted the guys I had. New troops would be an unknown quantity. And I was seeing glimmerings of ideas. "Maybe some . . ."

See, here's the fucked up thing. Give me a problem, one that's damned near insoluble, and I start solving it. I hate that trait. Especially since the ideas are never straightforward and always have a huge number of consequences. They solve the problem but they make more problems. And then there's the whole "the reward for a job well done is a harder job."

And you know, no matter what you do in the Army, you get paid exactly the same as some same-rank Pentagon weanie who takes a two-hour lunch?

There's a list of staff officer sayings. One of them came to mind at that moment:

"The secret to this shop is to find the one or two guys who are not complete incompetents and work them to death."

Military leadership in a nutshell.

"First, I'm going to need something like a designation as ambassador plenipotentiary to these Turkish guys."

What the fuck does that mean?

Back in the days when communication to a foreign country took forever, see the thing about waxed linen envelopes, the ambassador to a foreign country would be "plenipotentiary." That is, he (and it was always a he) spoke with "full power" (plenipotentiary) of the government he represented.

All ambassadors these days are, technically, plenipotentiary. The reality is, State does whatever it damned well pleases with or without the ambassador's say-so. Probably a better system, but I wasn't having it.

"If I'm going to do this, I'm going to need concessions and support from a lot of local groups. I have to be able to negotiate with full powers to get it. And I'm going to be negotiating with the Turkish guys, not some State suit. State doesn't joggle my elbow. State doesn't back-channel. State doesn't back stab. State stays the fuck out of the way and you get what you get when I'm done. The same goes for anyone above State."

The only person above State is the President.

"I am notionally accepting of you being an ambassador," the State guy said. "Although that is rarely a military post it has precedents. I cannot guarantee it being done. I also cannot guarantee lack of any interference. But if you detect interference from State we should be able to work that pretty hard. We also should be able to . . . handle interference above State. May I ask, in general, what you are going to be negotiating?"

"No."

"What else do you require?" the ACOS asked.

"Really, that's it, General," I replied, shrugging. "I would like a bunch of other stuff. But that's the only requirement. Fly my wounded out. Be ready to do that again when it becomes necessary. I'd like air support. I don't see why we can't get a wing of something over to Irbil and have them work out of there. We've got plenty of fuel here. Might have some parts needs, but last time I checked we're good on that. But I need serious room to negotiate and I don't know for what. I won't put the U.S. in any binding treaties and you can be sure I won't promise anything I can't deliver myself. Given that I've gotten nothing delivered to me this whole time, like, you know, redeployment to the States or some fucking air support, promising anything to the Turks would be silly. Although the way that things have been going, why would it surprise me if they got more support than we have."

"Major," the ACOS said, sternly, "I have been, I think, very accepting of your attitude in this discussion. But I will remind you that things are tough all over."

I looked at the cut-off button for ten seconds then looked back up, right at the Chief of Staff of the Army.

"You want 'tough,' General? General, I'm sure that you still have access to satellite imagery. I invite you to task one of those satellites on the fields outside of Khuwaitla. General, a company of Stryker infantry, some of them in tanks that State O so kindly gave to the enemies of the United States and that we took away from those enemies and that they had never before driven or fired along with a group of Nepalese tribesman who had not worn shoes a year ago and were asked to use practically every weapon in the U.S. infantry inventory took on an armored brigade in more U.S. inventory that State gave to our enemies and crushed them."

I grabbed my somewhat too long hair and screamed.

"I KNOW THE PENALTY FOR A JOB WELL DONE IS A TOUGHER JOB BUT THAT WAS A PRETTY FUCKING TOUGH, GENERAL!"

Short answer? I got what I wanted. Every bit. Surprised the hell out of me.

Oh, I asked for and received other stuff. I got a C-17 loaded with Javelins and another with ammo. I didn't, then, ask for food. I knew it was in short supply in the U.S. But I told them I was going to need quite a bit at some point. At least a freighter's worth of grains and suchlike. They sent me some MREs which was nice of them.

I said I might need heavy duty air support at some point. I'd give them time, but there might be a point where B-52s would be a good thing. The Air Force COS said he'd get working on it.

And one of the C-17s that got blocked for us carried a courier with a piece of paper signed by The Bitch calling me "envoy" and giving me "all the authorities of ambassador plenipotentiary of and for the United States to the nation of Turkey and the Anatolian League."

When I had that in hand and the sat-phone number to the military leader of "The Anatolian League" I got on the phone and started negotiating.

The problem was somewhat similar to Iraq. The mullahs in Istanbul had grabbed a bunch of hardware. And there were some Turkish officers who were less secular than the Turkish military liked. And some of them had survived the Plague and now worked for the mullahs.

The Anatolian League, according to this Turk, controlled the Anatolian Plains and the high ground over the Bosporus Plains. But their lines stopped at Adapazari and it was another stalemate. The Islamic Caliphate held the whole narrow tongue all the way over chunks of what had been Greece and Bulgaria. The Greeks were still consolidating and not willing to get in a row with the Islamics as long as they didn't try moving more in that direction.

The problem was, Istanbul. The city frankly sprawled. I mean, it was continuous city from the "Europe" side of the Bosporus most of the way to Izmit. Then there were high ridges, Izmit (a port city on the Marmar or whatever), then more ridges then Adapazari where the main bulk of the Anatolian range reared up.

There was a big reservoir called the Sapanca Golu which anchored the corner of the Islamic League lines then it ran along the river from there to the Black Sea. Going back towards Istanbul and Izmit it followed high ridges.

The Islamic League, clearly, had quite a few troops. And breaking something like that was going to require lots of street fighting. I didn't see where one unit of Strykers was going to be more than spit in a bucket.

One unit of Strykers wouldn't be more than spit in a bucket. But I wasn't planning on just bringing Strykers. And I wasn't planning on fighting them head on.

It would all depend on the Turks. Our Turks that is.

Turkish troops could be very very good. Oh, not as good as American troops, not in that day and age. But very good. Disciplined, certainly. It was rumored pre-Plague that a Turkish officer didn't have to file paperwork if he only shot one soldier, below the rank of sergeant, a year. I saw one beat the shit out of a private one time.

Didn't mean the officers were good. They were a mixed lot. Some of them were excellent, some got off on the power and not enough on the suffering if you know what I mean.

But, generally, Turkish troops were good.

What I didn't know was how good they were now and how good the Islamics were. They were Turkish troops, too, and presumably had a pretty serious hardcore element.

A lot was going to depend on this Turkish general. I'd have to play it by ear when I got there. So far, though, things seemed on the up and up.

A couple of things were bothering me, though. I was getting some strange vibes from the States. Oh, not, "as soon as you come back you're going to be hung" vibes. Once I made it clear I'd do my best to complete the mission everything was smiles and roses and "what little temper tantrum?" And the smiles and roses weren't "the long kiss goodnight." I was getting what I needed in the way of equipment and supplies. (And personnel. Get to that in a minute.)

It was little things like the State guy saying "We also should be able to . . . handle interference above State." And who was the State guy? He was never introduced. And why did he say that he notionally could consider me for ambassador. He wasn't the Secretary of State or the President. I looked around and couldn't find him as even a deputy secretary of State. Yet, here I had the document in my hand.

Very odd.

And here was the answer. It wasn't "a military coup" as later historians have suggested. It was more "a coup of the adults."

It was sort of like what the oil companies did. (And more on them later.) The Bitch was being . . . innnsuuulated. Yeah, that's a nice term. Insulated. She was under a lot of pressure. Everyone knew it. It was obvious every day. She didn't need a lot of shocks. We're . . . helping her.

By basically telling her what she wanted to hear and doing whatever the fuck adults saw needed doing.

It had started with the military units, ordered to deliver food to areas that were completely out of civil control but also ordered to not fire even if under attack, "using initiative in the field to complete the commander's mission concept." IOW, since they were getting arrested for defending themselves they started "breaking down" in areas where they didn't have to defend themselves. And delivering the relief supplies there.

As time went on and the Bitch's orders got weirder and randomer higher and higher authorities started ignoring them and implementing real-world solutions. In the meantime, they were simply lying to higher about what was happening.

Occasionally this became evident on what news the Bitch was watching. Sometimes she freaked out and called for heads. (Apparently at one point she was actually screaming "cut off their heads." I knew she was the Queen of the Reds but I never realized that meant The Red Queen.) Other times she apparently was able to rest in a comfortable state of denial.

Why was she still in office? It was a clear-cut case where a President needed to be impeached for her own good if nothing else.

Democrat Congress, Democrat Senate. After she started the Big Grab several impeachment bills were started up and all of them were killed. None even got to the floor. All on party line votes in committee.

I'm not going to flay the Democrats entirely. There were Democrats amongst the "adults" who were performing a de facto if not de jure coup. But what should have been done was impeach her and get someone in office who could handle the, crushing, pressure. I don't think her running mate would have been a good choice, either. But, Jesus, somebody who wasn't going totally fruitloop.

Instead they let her fiddle while America . . . well . . . froze.

She was even running for reelection.

It was the adults who saw we needed oil, desperately. And if they could free up Istanbul (actually, we just needed Ismali but the Turks were bargaining for the whole shooting match or at least the south side of the Bosporus) we could start getting tankers moving with Kurd sweet-light crude. Pumped over the Anatolian plain to Ismali then on to the good Ole USA.

What we were going to pay for it was an interesting question. But the Kurds knew we were good for it and we still had stuff to offer. Like, well . . .

I was a bargaining chip. Hell, soldiers often were. I could live with that.

On actual "stuff" I asked for there were two notes.

I'd said I didn't need troops. That wasn't quite true. With this op in the works, I started backpedaling and negotiating all over again. What I needed was tanks. And tankers.

My guys were having a lot of fun driving those Abrams. But they really didn't know what they were doing. I was going to need at least the six I had left, preferably ten or more, to do this op. I had a notion what I was going to do and I was going to need tanks. And guys who actually knew how to shoot, drive and fix them.

So that was one thing I got. What I asked for was:

"I need a tanker unit. Enough for ten tanks and all the support they're going to need to keep them running in the field under awful conditions. And I need guys who can, no shit, no question, no ifs ands or buts, go wherever I tell them to go however I tell them to and can fight like motherfuckers when they get there. I need the best tank platoon in the Army and a couple of extras for spice."

I don't know if the Mongrels was the best tank platoon in the Army. I do know they were very good.

Second Platoon had liked their tanks and didn't like giving them up. They felt they'd proven their worth.

I had the Mongrels take them out and show them something about the systems they'd been using.

Technically, an M-1 has 4000 meters of range.

One of the Mongrel crews went over the pass and, with intent, went off a small cliff on the south side. Fired in air, gun pointed sideways. Hit one of the, admittedly stationary, Abrams that was out on the plain from nearly 5000 meters.

Before it hit the ground. Then it fired four more shots in about ten seconds as it headed down the, very bumpy, ridge. Three of the four hit other targets. Most at very near max range.

Second Platoon stopped bitching and went back to their Strykers.

The Mongrels were a "reinforced" platoon under a first lieutenant. He quickly learned about "coffee."

Chapter Twenty Adana, Van, Christ It Sounds the Same with a Turkish Accent

Meanwhile I was shucking and jiving.

I offered all the Brads and the Abrams I'd left in the desert to the Kurds. Almost all. I needed to rebuild my losses. I also needed other things.

Most of the Kurds in the Mosul area came from that general area of Kurdistan. The tribes in the immediate "Iraqi" area.

I asked for, and got, Perg Mersha to "assist me in actions in the Anatolian region." But.

This is where I needed negotiation room.

I pointed out to the Turkish general that I was going to need some things if I was going to do this op. And he'd been informed that if I didn't get what I wanted, I had the final say-so on conducting my operation. Basically, he'd better geek or I'd pack up and go home.

Which is why the Kurdish areas of what was once Turkey are now "Kurdistan." (The Iranian areas came later.)

Also why Istanbul is named, again, Byzantium. (I wanted to go for Constantinople but my own guys talked me out of that one.) That one was kind of silly, but it had bugged me for years.

I didn't ask for the statue. I didn't know about the statue until it was practically done. That Turk general had my number. If he'd asked me I'd have screamed blue blazes. Fucking thing is a nightmare. Every damned ship, including cruise ships, that goes through the Bosporus can see the damned thing. I mean you can't fucking miss it. As an engineering work, it's pretty fucking impressive. Pissed me off, though.

I also didn't ask for the sword. Still got it over the mantelpiece, though. Heirloom and all that.

And I'm actually sort of surprised at the statue. When we left, the Turks were a little pissed at us.

But that's for later.

The Kurds were, basically, attacking in two directions with damned little in the way of logistics. Very Kurdish in that.

It took two weeks to get everything in place. Including plane loads of gear. I'd said I didn't need it then got pack-rattish. But, fuck, I needed it.

Then we set off to waves and yells from the Kurds. Somewhere they'd found flowers and all that stuff. The troops were getting kissed by girls and it was a grand send off.

It was snowing like a bitch. Nice of them to turn out in all that snow.

It snowed harder. And more and snowed and fucking snowed.

The first part was easy-peasy. The Kurds controlled all the territory up the Tigris well into what used to be Turkey. And the Tigris went way into Turkey. Since it cut through the mountains down that way, the roads and railroads kinda followed the same line.

Yeah, there was a railroad. I'd thought about loading the Abrams on it but things were kinda messed up and I was only a company. I couldn't get a railroad running. So we drove.

We'd gotten tank-carriers, though, for the Abrams. The Iraqis had them. We had to unload sometimes when shit got bad. The Abrams made dandy snow plows.

The shit got very bad. The Taurus mountains are not exactly Alpine but they are very rugged. And they're very volcanically active. We ran across the hot-spring we based "Elephants" around up in the Taurus and decided it was a good place to lay up for a couple of days. The guys camped (not CAM(P)ed, that was later) and warmed up in the water. "Battery" was later, too. But that was in Turkey. When it got worse.

There was actually a border post when we passed out of the Kurdish region. By then we not only had the "task force" of Bravo and the Mongrels and the Nepalese, we'd picked up a fair trail of Kurds. About a battalion of infantry under a tough old guy from the Turkish regions. The Turks really didn't like it when we turned up with him. Turns out he was wanted as a terrorist. Looked like one. But we were all friends now. I invited him to "coffee" and he brought a couple of lieutenants and the commo trailer was getting really overloaded. Since we were having to stop to log these days, we just scheduled a log-stop for "coffee" time and did it then. I missed the old "Bravo Company . . . arriving" thing but if they ever build a commo van large enough to hold an officers' call for a short brigade I don't want to be in it.

Once we passed out of the Kurdish region, though, things got tougher. The Kurds had been keeping some of the roads open. None of these were. And although the Turks said that this region was "under their control" there were, to say the least, areas where control was spotty. We got ambushed about every other day. Mostly it was the equivalent of bandits, guys trying to steal our shit. But getting hit by bandits isn't much different than getting hit by muj. And quite often you can't tell the difference in places like that.

Hell, there was a reason to hit us. We had food. Most of the region was starving already. What they were going to do in the spring and summer I had no idea. Assuming there was a spring and summer.

There was a main road running from Van to Ankara, where the Turk general's capital was. I thought he said they had it all under control and that it was open. Problem was, there was no good way to get to it.

Last Kurd control was the edge of Diyarbakar province. We were on little fucking hairpin roads trying to get to Mus, where the "highway" was. Passed the Kurd outpost in the pass above Mus. Fucking bunker with a stove going for all it was worth and the pass was already under six feet of snow. The Abrams were off their carriers and towing them.

Then they were trying to keep them from sliding off the mountain on the other side. I'd thought we'd hit some mountains in the Kurd region, got a new appreciation for the term in the fucking Taurus.

The Nepos, of course, loved it. Oh, they called them "hills" and said they weren't "real" mountains. But they were running around at every stop, and there were a lot of them, like little kids. We hit places where you had to sort of gasp for air. They said it was still too thick but getting better.

Runty Himalayan fuckers.

We finally made it to Mus. Not much to see. It was just another Plague-ridden city with a crashed population and, at that point, a serious weather problem. And, as it turned out, a group of hardcores that were more of a gang than anything. See "Battery."

We rolled out of Mus with less of a security problem and food eating problem, for them, than when we arrived. There is little good that soldiers can do but we can, occasionally, reduce the bad.

So much for the Turks having "control" of the whole road. Also so much for the road being open. It was just as choked as the little ass ones we'd crossed. Just a bit wider which was nice.

We still lost two Abrams and a carrier trying to get to Ankara. And the HERCULES of course, but that wasn't really anyone's fault but the Nepos.

I forgave them two days later.

We were just out of Erzincan near the town of Goyne. This, by the way, was, like, the headwaters of the Euphrates. There had been a route up that but it looked worse. Probably was.

Anyway, lots of little valleys and pretty major rivers. All frozen solid. Ish. The road we were on had good bridges, thank God. Turned out the Turkish military had a big mountain-training base not too far away, pre-Plague.

And apparently a depot or something in the area. Because as we came up to the pass, lo and behold it was defended.

Our first inkling of this was the Scouts yelling like hell and backing up. And then, over the yells, we heard the echo of a big gun firing.

Up in the pass were a couple of tanks. Dug in. Getting up to it was a long damned switchback. They had it covered.

We tried Javelins. They couldn't get a lock. The tanks were in revetments looking down at us. The Javs needed more of a view.

The Abrams guys looked at the situation and shook their heads. They'd go. But they figured they were going to get whacked and whacked hard. Most of the way to where they could get a good firing position they'd be driving with their flank to the enemy. And if those were Turkish tanks, which was the only thing that made sense, they were Leopards. And Leopards are just about as good as Abrams. (Just about. Not as good. I don't care what the Krauts say.)

Get some infantry up on the pass? Brother, those mountains were steep! And high. It would take a couple of days. And my guys weren't trained mountain troops they were . . .

Wait.

It took me, seriously, about ten minutes to slap my forehead. Sometimes, most of the times, a solution that easy comes to me fast. Then other times I'm pretty damned dense.

"Samad!"

Assault the pass? Tanks? Possible infantry? Carry Javelins up there where eagles dare? Of course, Sahib. I will arrange.

Ever seen a goat trail? I mean one in a mountain?

They're switchbacks, too. And about two inches wide. Back and forth, back and forth, occasionally punctuated by spots that the goats jump lightly from the path to a small rock and then on to the path again. There being no other way to make their way across a sheer cliff.

Ever seen guys trot up a goat path. For hours? Carrying, like, more than their body weight of gear? I mean, the Nepos were carrying not only personal weapons but Javelins, which are heavy motherfuckers, and medium machine guns and ammo and even some light mortars. It was a motherfucker of a load.

I began to understand Sherpas. Even the Kurds, who looked a bit pissed at first to be left out, were getting impressed quick. They were "mountain" fighters, they thought. The Nepos were still referring to these as "hills."

There was an area to the north that it looked like the guys up on the pass couldn't observe. Goat path up to the ridge. Ridge up to the cliff overlooking the path. Presumably Javelin into the pass. Trot, trot, trot . . . Who is that I hear trotting on my ridge?

Wait, hope they're not Turkish military. That would be embarassing.

I called ahead.

No, they are not ours.

I thought you said this road was a) clear. Which it is not. And b) under control. Which it is not.

I thought you were going up the Adana road. Why are you in Erzincan province? We haven't even tried to get control in that area. All the roads are blocked by the snows!

Mus looked closer and I thought you said the Van road was open and . . .

Fuck me.

We're going to be a while.

Did I fuck up? I don't know. I do know that there wasn't Kurd control over to Adana and from what I gleaned later the "control" of the Adana road was spotty. But . . .

And I swear he'd said the Van road. I didn't keep a copy of the conversation, though, so it's his word against mine.

Clearing the pass.

We parleyed while the Nepos climbed.

The Avesi Alliance now owned this patch of ground. You will pay a toll of all your vehicles, those are nice tanks by the way, and equipment. We'll let you leave with a couple of trucks and fuel and enough food to get you back to those heathen Kurds. Oh, you have some heathen Kurds with you? Well, take them back where they came from. These are our lands!

I appreciate your sentiment. However, my orders are to proceed through this region on the way to complete a mission of some importance. Move or I'll move you.

How?

I have great and wonderful powers you cannot begin to understand. And if worse comes to worse I can get airstrikes. Move.

Fuck off and die.

Okay, Burger King, you can have it your way.

The Avesi are not really the most violent people in the world. Most encyclopedias talk primarily about their contribution to Turkish music. (By the way, that sort of makes them violent in my opinion. I'm not a fan of Turkish music.) They're a branch of Shia that are related to Sufiism and . . .

Ah, Christ. Go look it up.

"After Action Analysis" indicated that a former infantry captain (hey, look at me!) took the name as a way to build local support. He'd established a little feudalism in Sivas province. I don't think he was actually doing bad things, unlike some of the bandits and others we cleared out. At the time I didn't really care. And the Turks did reestablish order in the region after we passed through. Having someone clear out all your troublemakers makes that easy. When we got done the Van Road was pacified with a capital P.

The Nepos got up on the ridge about nightfall. They made it to a good firing point around 2100. Yes, they had night vision gear.

I called up the local commander.

Yo, dude. You've got two Leopard tanks and three trucks up there.

Wait, how did you know about the trucks?

I have mysteeerious powers. Look, surrender, now, and I'll leave you the use of your legs.

Hah, hah, you are very funny . . .

Then one of the trucks blew the fuck up.

What have you done?

Blew up one of your trucks. Don't try to move the rest of the shit. Just lay down your guns and surrender. I have wondrous and mysterious powers. Don't make me kill you all.

So they pointed the tank guns to the rear and we drove up and accepted their surrender.

We left some Kurds to guard them and the pass while we sorted things out. They promised not to kill and eat anyone. We picked up the Nepos down the road so they never knew what my "mysterious powers" were. (Javelins. Low signature.) It was less of a walk for the Nepos. But that's where Samad slipped on his way down, something of the ultimate insult to a Nepo along the lines of drowning in his fucking bathtub to a SEAL, and turned into a human snowball. Very scary at the time, very funny in retrospect. Made for great cinema.

"Sorting things out" took a couple of days and one or two skirmishes. We also had to leave a bunch of Kurds behind. And they didn't interact great with the locals but we pointed out that they were just there to guard the prisoners and we'd get Turks over to straighten things out shortly.

Bandits by day, sneak thieves by night, occasional feudal lords. Some we could negotiate with, they were trying to decide which way to hop on the whole "who's in charge" thing. Some we had to fight. They lost. We took almost no casualties because a) I never fight fair and b) when the Nepos couldn't flank someone the Kurds could. In retrospect, it was good training for what was to come.

Turned out we didn't hit the first outpost of "order" until we got to Kirkkale. Actually west of Kirkkale. Ankara was near the back side of what the Turkish general controlled.

But I rolled in with seven more Leopards than I'd had at the beginning. Also down two Abrams, a HERCULES and a carrier. Five WIA, two KIA. Two cases of frostbite. One guy lost toes.

Maybe I should have taken the Adana Road. But I swear he said Van.

Chapter Twenty-One Of Course We Fucking Looted

So there we were ready to perform our heroic . . . What do you mean you can't fight in this weather?

Okay, the weather was rather bad. We'd explained that to the world. Well, not all of it. We only had an hour.

Go back to the Global Warming thing. One of the things that was raised about why Global Warming was going to Destroy Civilization was that Storms Got Stronger.

Uh, huh.

Maybe, maybe an argument for hurricanes. (I can argue ag'in it. And so would most paleoclimatologists and even hurricane experts.) But hurricanes don't affect most regions of the world. Very few, actually. Oh, they're big news in the U.S., but they don't hit most parts of the world, period.

Cold fronts do, though. And warm fronts. And they can be pretty fucking powerful. See "Storm of the Century." Well, it might have been for the 20th Century, but in the 21st we've learned a whole new definition.

Why?

Meteorology 101. "Storms are governed by differences in temperature between the polar regions and the tropics."

Global Warming would have meant warmer temperatures in the polar regions and pretty much the same in tropical regions.

Global Cooling meant much colder temperatures in the polar regions and pretty much the same in the tropical regions.

Oops.

And, yes, that meant the weather was a bitch. Especially since weather is always worse when there's a big change going on. All those thunderstorms you get with a cold front are because the air temperature is suddenly changing. It gets colder, air condenses, storms build up, ice movement makes static electric-icity, water falls, lightning strikes.

The air temperature all over the world was suddenly changing. We'd gone through some motherfuckers of thunder snow storms in the Taurus. Those are not regular occurences. I'd run across, maybe, two the whole time I lived in Minnesota.

The weather was a bitch.

And bitchy weather favors defenders. And for the plan I had in mind to work, it was going to take our friendly Anatolian Alliance fighters climbing out of their trenches and bunkers and assaulting.

Which was going to suck. No question.

It also was the only way to get the oil flowing by the end of December. Which was the "drop dead" date for the U.S. Somewhat literally.

Things had never gotten anywhere near pre-Plague normal in the U.S. and now we were going into "the Mother of All Winters." It had taken a fucking Brit news crew and a bunch of infantry stuck in the middle of nowhere to get people to stand up and notice but it was finally happening. And now everyone was going ape-shit because they realized we didn't have the fuel or food to carry us through.

We eventually realized that was bunk, but in November of 2019 it really looked like total Disaster. This is the Big One. End of Civilzation As We Know It. Here come the glacial sheets! Fuck you, buddy, I'm heading for the hills!

(It did suck if you lived in Canada. But, hey, Canoeheads are tough. They tell us that all the time.)

I hadn't traveled all this way through those fucking mountains, okay, okay, maybe you did say the Adan road, just to sit on my ass and let my country freeze to death. We were here to open up the spigots. And we can't do it on our own. Get off your ass or I'm going over to the Dardanelles and catching a ship for Greece. And, no, I won't be leaving useable equipment. I'll send it back with the Kurds. Don't try to stop them.

I didn't need a full-court press. All I needed was for the Caliphate to be using a lot of supplies and concentrated on Adapazari.

The E80, in that area a full-up interstate, ran from Istanbul through Izmit and to Adapazari where the bulk of the fighting was centered. The main log base for the fighting, though, was at Izmit.

On the south it was well protected by a range of high ridges that were strongly held by Caliphate forces. South of those ridges was Alliance territory.

What I proposed was to take Izmit. If we could cut the E80, Adapazari would become untenable to hold. The Caliphate forces would have to fall back and either retake Izmit or, if it worked properly, be forced back beyond.

The general pointed out that trying to take the ridges would signal the Caliphate that I was coming and then we'd have to fight heavy forces all the way.

I pointed out that a B-52 strike would clear the way long enough for us to dart down to Izmit. All he had to do was reinforce us. Fast. Please. Don't dawdle.

It was a Japanese technique called the roadblock. It wasn't the cavalry raid of old. The idea was to get a force across your enemy's resupply and hold there. Don't let anyone past. There were ways for the Caliphate to resupply around Izmit. But the intel said the bulk of their military stores were in Izmit. And getting around it was difficult. Think "Ruffles have ridges." And all that snow.

Just east of Izmit the E80 and the E100 crossed. Between them was the Izmit airport which was where the main log depot for the Caliphate forces had been established.

That was our target. We were going to blow a hole through the Caliphate forces on the ridges, dash down to the Izmit depot and take and hold it against all comers.

Sounds easy, right?

God, it fucking sucked.

It took a week to arrange. B-52s had to be flown back to England; closest bases that could take them. The Alliance had to get their guys ready to charge. Build up artillery supplies.

The good news was that the bases the B-52s were returning to were the same ones they'd used pre-Plague. And the Brits never really lost control of them. So there was plenty of ordnance on site. If we'd had to move ordnance it would have been impossible.

I also arranged for resupply drops. We were going to be using a lot of ammo. We might be able to use some of the shit in the depot but I wasn't going to count on that. We hoped we wouldn't have to blow it all up again. The Alliance could use it.

So we got into position and we struck. Easy, right?

Fucking ridges south of Izmit are motherfuckers. I mean motherfuckers. We could barely get the Abrams up them.

And the Caliphate was dug in hard. We hit them with an arclight strike that should have blasted them to the stone age. They were still fighting.

What saved us was the Nepos, the Kurds and the Mongrels. The Caliphate, thank God, did not have good anti-tank weapons. And the Nepos had worked with tanks quite a bit at this point. And, okay, I threw in something I'd learned in a book.

If you're very careful, you can fire an anti-tank round right past infantry. It's not as easy with these new tanks; silver bullets have a tremendous sonic backlash. But you can fire close. The Caliphate was dug in, deep, in bunkers with interlocking fire. They were Turks and the Turks know how to fight.

The way to take out bunkers with interlocking fires is to have your troops get as close as they can get without getting killed then hit the bunkers with tank fire. The tanks have to fire right past the infantry but they can suppress a bunker like nobody's business.

We had to get up the ridges fast. We started off fast, with the Scout Strykers tearing up the hairpin roads.

They got hammered halfway up the ridge. Most of the crews bailed out before they brewed up, but they got hammered.

In go the Nepos. They're going up sheer cliffs, it looked to me, like it's a walk in the park. They're still taking fire, though. The Caliphate was dug in hard all along the ridges.

Enter the Mongrels. They rolled up the road in the teeth of the Caliphate fire. By then there was artillery but they're still not letting go. And as the Nepos started pointing out bunkers, they'd take them under direct fire with anti-tank rounds.

A bunker may be strong. But a sabot from a 120mm Rheinmetal tank gun will ruin everyone's day inside.

We started from the Alliance held town of Turgutlu. And up we went. It took time. It took more time than I thought we could possibly have. It took three days to fight our way down onto the plains south of Izmit.

I don't know why the Caliphate didn't reinforce. Possibly they thought it was a feint. And the local forces did close the road behind us, for a time. Maybe they thought they could cut us off to die on the vine.

Maybe they thought the tank battalion that was camped south of Izmit as a strategic reserve would stop us.

Oops.

The battle of Rahmiye is . . . Well, let's just say when I did finally get to CGSC it was fucking humorous to have two battles I, ahem, had "participated" in be ones that were refought in class. Rahmiye, though, wasn't really special. We just let them come into an ambush and lit 'em up. Okay, so I got a little deceptive on them again. In the Koran it says that it's completely okay, indeed a good thing, to lie to an unbeliever. If so, the reverse is obviously true, right?

And, yeah, Rahmiye is the place where they got that shot of me snapping orders then going right back to what I was saying. Like I said, it wasn't really hard. You know? I mean it was like muscle memory at that point.

We took casualties, though. Both going over the mountains and at Rahmiye. Lost six Strykers and two Abrams. The Abrams really hurt but, hell, that was for nearly sixteen Leopards and a bunch of AFVs. Captured more and dragged them along with us. Then we got to the base. That was easy-peasy. Sure, it had defenses but nothing to stop us or even slow us down.

I expected the Caliphate to put in a heavy assault. And they did.

That. Sucked.

The Caliphate and the Alliance had been trading blows for nearly four months solid. They'd gotten over the Plague pretty quick to do that but they'd been steadily building up on both sides. Originally there'd been several other factions on the Alliance side. Therefore "Alliance." The Caliphate was about three which had united under Caliph Omar something something something. (Look it up.)

But the point was, they'd gotten okay at what they did by then. And what they did was WWI style assaults. Okay, maybe even WWII. It went like this.

Shell the hell out of you for hours. Just rain down metal. Then send in a line of infantry and tanks, generally behind a curtain barrage. Sometimes they used AFVs to carry the infantry.

They had some planes. They'd bomb and strafe.

We dug in. Then we dug in deeper. We lost Strykers, quite a few, to the artillery. We lost an Abrams to artillery. We lost guys to artillery.

We held the position.

They tried to filter supplies past us. They were in range of our Abrams, which would shoot the trucks carrying the supplies. Eventually they took the long roads.

What saves us was a few things.

We got more B-52 strikes. We could generally tell when they were getting ready for a big push. We were getting intel from the Alliance among other things and occasionally Predators and Global Hawks. We'd call the B-52 and ask them to stop by around when we thought we'd be getting assaulted.

Sometimes we timed it right. Other times we didn't. Then they'd fly over the main area of the Caliphate and just sort of bomb at will. But when we did it would really fuck the Caliphate forces up big-time.

We hadn't thought about defending the B-52s. Fortunately, the AF chief was no idiot. There was no way, at the ranges they were flying, to establish "air superiority." But they could send F-15s and F-22s as escorts. It was real old-fashioned stuff. But they could generally slam the Caliphate fighters long before they could threaten the Buffs.

There were anti-aircraft missiles. There were anti-aircraft missile site anti-missiles.

I think we lost two Buffs. I'm sorry as hell for their crews but they did a hell of a job.

The second thing that saved us was the airdrops. We had brought in a lot of supplies. We shot through much of it in the first couple of days. C-17s and C-130s dropped supplies. Again, they had to be escorted and were more vulnerable to anti-aircraft. But they managed to drop the supplies without being shot down. By the end of the battle, they were landing on the airstrip, dropping the shit fast then taking back off. Very ballsy.

The third was that the Caliphate commander was an idiot. He should have massed a force and overrun us. Instead we'd get hit by whatever he gathered at any particular time.

So we'd get hit by three Leopards, some IFVs and a bunch of infantry on foot. We'd wax the Leopards and IFVs with Javelins then the infantry with machine-gun fire.

Then we'd get hit by a shit-pot of infantry. Machine-gun fire.

Then a bunch of tanks, no infantry. Javelins.

Then some IFVs. Javelins.

We got hit from the east and west. But we never got hit from the east and west at the same time.

The artillery sucked. Other than that, "they came at us in the same old way and we beat them in the same old way."

Casualties? Nasty. And at first no way to evac. Then a C-130 landed and picked them all up, American, Nepo and Kurd. Thank you, Air Force. I take back every evil thing I've said about you.

Meantime, the Alliance was trying to cross the damned Sapanca River and failing miserably. That is until one of their battalion commanders, and the guy deserved and got a medal, noticed that his section had frozen solid. He wrapped a bunch of his guys up in bedsheets of all things for camouflage and infiltrated them across.

Turks are bastards with bayonets, I'll give them that.

The Alliance got a foothold on the far bank and held on for dear life. Then they expanded it. Then they got a bridge. It was blown, but they could repair it.

It took them five days to really get serious forces across the river but at that point it was Katy Bar the Door.

The Caliphate forces broke and ran. They had to go around us. Roads got choked. Control disintegrated.

We got relieved on day six of taking the base. A bunch of stuff on the base was fucked up. But we had an airstrip and logistic materials for the Alliance forces.

Then we moved out. We'd barely gotten over getting hammered and we moved.

Straight to Istanbul, right?

Give me credit for sense. The Caliphate was hurt, its main force was retreating, but it wasn't licked. And it had most of its functional forces defending the E80 and E100 to Istanbul.

We went for the side roads.

The Alliance forces ground forward towards Istanbul. The main line of resistance was on the hills near Hereke with the main supply and control base at Gebze.

Guess what we went for?

Up through more fucking mountains. And they were defended. A lot of the Caliphate forces were in full-out retreat but there were enough hardcores, and hardcore formations, to make our life miserable. And the weather still sucked.

On the other hand, we were in mountains and we had Nepos and Kurds.

Hit a defense point in a pass. Lay in intermittent fire. Send the Nepos up the hills on one side and the Kurds on the other. Tell them whoever got the pass cleared got priority on the trucks to ride. The other formation got to walk.

They'd race each other to clear the pass.

Move on.

It was at one of those passes that we had "coffee" while under artillery fire. Was dick all we could do about it. The Nepos and the Kurds were flanking and our job was to be targets and smile. "Would you care for a (FUCKING WHAM! as an artillery round landed) finger cake?" Veddy British.

We took Gebze. Bit of a battle with some remaining Leopards near Pelitli. But the Mongrels, those who were left, were very much their betters. Like "Who's your Daddy?" their betters. Which is what the Mongrels painted on their tanks after Pelitli.

This time we didn't hold it. We hit the Caliphate defenders in Hereke from behind. Lots of surrenders.

By then we were getting into serious urbanization but we kept doing the same thing. Hit a defense point? Swing short, swing long, whatever. Hit them from behind or in the flank. Move on. Alliance forces pushed straight in since they had a harder time with command and control. We'd swing wide and low sweet chariot.

Push 'em back, push 'em back, waaaay BACK.

There was a whole nother Caliphate "Army," more like about a division, up by the Black Sea. They got cornered and surrounded by Alliance forces at Bali Bey and surrendered en masse.

We hooked and we flanked and they fell back. They were dealing with desertion en masse and we occasionally routed forces and "had a good killing."

The Caliph blew the Abdullah Aga bridge leaving a shitload of forces on the "Asia" side of the Bosporus. They surrendered. We hooked up to the E80 bridge and, lo and behold, it was still up.

Hooked back down.

We were outrunning most of the Alliance forces at this point. Okay, I was going a bit hog-wild. But, hell, how often do you get a chance to take a major historical city?

Fuckers tried to blow up the Hagia Sophia. Man, that pissed me off. I sent in the Nepos with orders to prevent it with extreme prejudice. There went a bunch of their remaining hardcores.

The Caliph made his final stand, with a core of about a battalion of hardcore Sunni fundamentalist motherfuckers, in the Topkapi Palace. It was mostly a museum before the Plague but it had been the palace of the Ottoman emperors for four hundred years.

The motherfucker was big. And there were about a billion fucking rooms. Turned out the Caliph had turned the harem back into a harem. That was really damned interesting when we hit it but we were just passing through, alas.

(Me? Running around in the Topkapi? When I should have been carefully controlling my elements? They all knew what to do and I had a good commo guy. Used to work for a satellite company.)

Found the Caliph, finally, in a throne room. Called the Hunkar Sofasi, which apparently means "Throne Room." I'm afraid to say that it took a certain amount of damage. That's what plaster masons are for. And, okay, you're going to need some lapis lazuli to patch the murals. Sue me.

It took most of the night to run down the last holdouts. Most of them weren't asking for quarter and we weren't giving it.

Okay, let me say a little something on the subject of "looting." Yes, there did seem to be some trinkets missing from the Palace when the Turks, finally, showed up the next day. I performed a very thorough shake-down of my Nepo, U.S. and Kurdish troops. None of those trinkets were found. Given that the Caliph had the palace for months, I suggest you ask him. Except you can't, he's dead.

As to the various shopkeepers along the way that accused my Kurds and Nepos of looting, fuck 'em. We hadn't been paid in months. And I never saw looted item one. I've so stated in various reports on my honor as a U.S. Army officer.

WE TOOK ISTANBUL YOU IDIOTS.

OF COURSE WE FUCKING LOOTED.

Jesus.

Chapter Twenty-Two Been Down So Long Looks Like Up to Me

Can we go home now?

The Turks couldn't get rid of us fast enough.

Here's a very nice gold-encrusted sword that was carried by Pasha (I'd have to look it up) in his great battles against the (I'd have to look it up, it was Europeans is all I remember; I think there was a subtle insult there) to go along with all the other shit that's missing now get the hell out.

The Air Force, again, came in and picked up all the Kurds. Food was going to be delivered as soon as a couple of passes got cleared. There was already a ship in the harbor. They dropped off technical specialists in oil pumping to help get the pipelines back up. They took the Kurds home. Wounded were flown to England for treatment then U.S. and Nepos went to the States. (Oh, clearance for the Nepos to immigrate had been granted. Thank you INS or whatever. The acronyms keep changing.)

Incirlik was back up. It started getting more back up.

There was a very nice ceremony where they gave me the sword. All the other officers got similar stuff except Samad who they barely deigned to recognize. It was okay. I believe he'd picked up a couple of souvenirs. Sentimental value only, of course.

The ceremony was somewhat marred by the fact that the Mongrels, who had somewhere found some huge fucking concert speakers, were playing Manowar so loud you could, literally, hear it on the other side of the fucking Bosporus. The tanks were lagered about a klick away but it didn't matter. I rather liked their taste in music but "Swords in the Wind" clashes, badly, with the Turkish national anthem.

However, I do think just about everyone in the formation got tears in their eyes when they started playing "The Fight for Freedom" over and over. The Turkish general trying to be heard seemed somewhat pissed. Especially when we started singing along to the chorus.

God knows we'd been from the mountains to the sea. More like from sea to sea and over the mountains and . . . Just work with me here. We were very happy to be going home.

The day the C-17s landed to fly us home, I really had a hard time believing it. I mean, sure, I'd worked on cutting the orders, had done the arrangements, had "integrated" with the Air Force. But "The World"? Going Home?

Well, it wasn't the home we'd left. But, yeah. We were going home.

We landed at a base outside of London. They drove us by bus to Heathrow. There were food lines. It was snowing. I mean like a bitch. London's weather was never great but it ran to rain, not snow. Not in early December, 2019. Still doesn't run to rain. Might not for a couple of centuries. But before the chill, the Brits were famous for umbrellas not those fur hats they all wear now.

The Skynet guys were already home. They promised that they'd get the last episode of Centurions right. Actually, there were two last episodes. "Crusade" about taking Istanbul and "Centurion" about me. Murdoch, I found out later, told his senior producers that he would "break their fingers" if they thought about touching the "creative control" of the guys who had been producing Centurions all along. The same kid from Bravo had written both scripts. He's now working for ABC. And they don't get why he wears a Sith t-shirt all the time.

There was a ceremony at Heathrow. People turned out, despite the depression and despite the fucking snow. They cheered. It was weird. I hoped it was over after that. We got on a 747 where we rattled around like peas. The stewardesses (sorry, flight attendants) treated us like they wanted to have our fucking babies. I think a couple of the guys got "relieved" on the flight home. It was weird.

There was a ticker-tape parade in New York. Okay, from what we were getting from the Skynews guys we intellectually understood that we were celebrities. Emotionally, it took a while to kick in. We were a group of worn-out grunts who were just looking forward to a real fucking barracks and quarters. Someplace with working heat and a mess hall. Maybe some chow that resembled real food and not MREs or goat fucking stew. For those of us who still had family and someplace to go, maybe a little leave. We knew that even those of us who were "over time" were going to be staying in. We were in "for the duration" according to our current orders.

We were just grunts.

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

A fucking ticker-tape parade. In what amounted to a blizzard. You could barely sort out the confetti and shit from the snow. We had to march. It was worse than the fucking Taurus. And people were lining the God damned street in that fucking blizzard cheering us.

We were hooked up with "Public Information Officers." I now know where they put the guys who cannot survive in Protocol Office which is where they send the guys who are fuck-ups in line units. There is no greater Fobbit than a PIO asshole.

I had essentially been overseeing a damned docu-drama every week, more or less, and now I had some shit for brains telling me how we were going to "present the Army in the best possible light."

Eat. Me.

Things were more or less under control from NYC to DC. They put us on a train that stopped at every stop along the way. We had to make speeches. The troops were paraded in the fucking snow. Guys gave interviews. There were contests to meet people's "favorite Centurion."

It had not been my intention. I swear to fucking God. I wish I'd never thought of that stupid fucking idea.

I got put on talk shows. I tried to stay terse. I'm Minnesotan. It's our job. I got angry at some of the lame-brain questions though and ate a few assholes.

People fucking Ate It Up with a spoon.

People called me Centurion.

Look, my name is Bandit Six. You can call me Bandit if you really outrank me or I really like you. Otherwise it's Bandit Six. Whatever my rank Bandit Six if we're being formal. Mr. Bandit Six when I finally took off the uniform.

Do. Not. Call. Me. Centurion.

And I don't like Cincinnatus much, either.

It went on and on and fucking on. They put us on tour. We had to kiss babies.

I couldn't tell if we were rock-stars or politicians or fucking what.

All we wanted to do was grab a fucking snack and get back to fucking work. Maybe some leave for fuck's sake.

But the worst part was, we were back in commo.

Hell, I could have picked up the phone any time and called Bob. But if I did it, then the troops should get to do it. Before I did. Rank has certain privileges but it doesn't work that way. And there was only so much commo. So we were sort of in information black-out from home.

So I didn't find out until I borrowed the PIO asshole's cell phone that I didn't really have a home to go to.

The farms, all of them, had been "nationalized."

Bob was still, sort of, running two. He had some dipshit in DC telling him what he was supposed to do. The guy was an "agronomy expert" from the USDA. Actually, he was an "environmental agronomy" expert from the USDA.

The guy was in DC trying to tell a farmer in Minnesota, who has twenty times his experience and a hundred times his savvy, what to do in the middle of the worst natural disaster in history. Especially for farmers.

Like a lot of people, Bob was tuning as much as he could out. But he had to go through that guy to get supplies. Seeds, basically, since, you know, herbicides and pesticides and all those other 'cides were icky.

And plowing has to be this way and planting has to be that way and none of it was anything resembling what was actually going on. The guy was getting his "forecasts" from hand-picked "climatologists" in the department of the USGS that was the leading study farm for "global warming" and they were still using the same fucking models.

Bob was only directly running two of the farms. The other seven had been turned over to "hand-picked" experts in "environmental agronomy." Tofu-eaters. They gave my farms to tofu-eaters. It was Lamoille County all over again. It was the Zimbabwe Plan, the Cambodia Option. It was nationwide famine in the making.

It was going to make 2020 and 2021 suck like a gigantic vacuum. Even without an ice age.

I went back to shucking and jiving.

I was an officer of the United States Military. Legally and ethically I could not say anything contrary to the policies, military or domestic, of the Commander in Bitch. Said so right on the package. I know that there have been officers and enlisted who have ignored this doctrine. The officers should be stripped of rank and thrown out. The enlisted should be made privates and sent to somewhere like, oh, Minot. Or Iran.

I slipped up one time. I'd just gotten some particularly bad news from Bob about the state of one of my farms. (The Hanska property, as it happens, where the dipshits had let the fucking well-pump not only freeze but just about self-destruct. And then called Bob to come over and "get their water running.")

So right after that I'm talking to some reporters about stories I've already had to tell a dozen times and clearly not as "up" as Bandit Six normally is and one of them asks me why and I lay out something like "bad news at home."

Well, by then my bio was so public record it practically was platinum. They all knew Dad was dead. So what's the bad news? So some reporter started sniffing around.

Before I knew it, I was only being asked what I thought of the Bitch's farm policies!

Oh, Christ. I didn't like any of her policies. Taking my farms was just icing on the cake. (And, yes, they were my farms. Dad was dead. I was his legal heir. My. Farms.)

That was into late December of 2019. Much had already been made of the fact that "Centurion" and his forces had been the ones responsible for opening up the Kurdish oil fields to start supplying Western Europe and the U.S. Quite a bit had been made, now that reporters could get in and interview others in the area, of that fact that Bandit Six had:

1. Established a new nation called Kurdistan with which the U.S. now had formal relations and which hadn't existed prior to the plague and only existed (so the story went) because of the Centurions and especially The "Centurion."

2. Had participated in diplomacy to essentially rewrite a good bit of the Middle East and had groups talking together and working together amicably who had been enemies for thousands of years.

3. Was held up as the major reason that there was a new republic forming around Iraq and the area that was very friendly with the U.S. It was expanding slowly but might soon have all of Iran and Iraq back to some semblance of civilization. And The Centurion was the primary cause.

Look, all I did was talk on the phone. It was the rest of those guys who were doing the hard work. But it's very hard to stop a meme once it gets started. I Was The Shit.

Because:

Heating oil, which was at a premium and rationed anyway, was only available because of "the heroic actions of these Last Centurions" who had somehow saved the world while doing nothing but running out of the Middle East with our tails between our legs. (Okay, not quite, but there were nights when that was what was going through my head.)

Ditto gasoline, natural gas, etc.

And politicians were already "declaring" their run for president.

And suddenly the fact that "The Centurion" had had his farms seized (months ago) by the U.S. government was a political hot potato. People were trotting out, I shit you not, that old story about Maximus that Russell Crowe did a pretty good job with in The Gladiator.

I was off the news so fast it was incredible.

I was "unavailable for comment." I was "on operations." I was "working hard for the nation."

I was in the fucking Pentagon.