The War in 2020

Prologue

In the year of our Lord 2005, the United States made a terrible mistake. In the course of yet another internal crisis in post-Mobutu Zaire, South Africa had seized extensive mineral-laden tracts in Shaba Province. Bound by half forgotten treaties, ignorant of the details of the local situation, and anxious to convince a doubting world of our continued importance as a superpower, we deployed the XVIII Airborne Corps to Kinshasa. The operation proved awkward, and slow. The Army had been gutted during the euphoric reductions of the nineties, when standing ground forces had come to seem as anachronistic as they were extravagant. But we still had faith in ourselves.

The XVIII Airborne Corps limped onto a sick continent. Africa had been largely written off by the solvent nations of the world. Unable to feed its people, unable to pay its bills, and annoyingly incapable of governing itself decently, Africa had nothing more to offer than occasional troughs of minerals and dwindling animal herds that had come to seem far more valuable to the civilized world than the continent's emaciated millions. The continent was dying. First, the AIDS pandemic had taken the joy out of photo safaris, then, shortly after the turn of the century, a new plague had begun to stray out of the African bush.

Such considerations did not bind Americans. We believed we heard the slightly off-key call of duty, and we sent the best we had. Wheezing from the effort, our forces raised the flag in the heat of a country for which they were ill-equipped, ill-trained, and about which they were blithely ill-informed. But none of this seemed to matter. The Americans had landed, and, really, the deployment hardly seemed more than a formality to the men who made the decisions.

No one seriously believed the South Africans would fight.