American Insurgent

by Phil Rabalais

  Mark struggled mightily to wrap his head around everything John had just set at his feet.

  “Mark,” John asked, “what the hell do you have in mind? I’m not arguing this can’t continue, but a lot of good people are going to get hurt if they go off trying to follow the example I just set. I have four lives on my conscience, and I’m trying to get to heaven without any stains I can’t wash off.”

  Mark launched into a diatribe. “John, you came out on top. Maybe luck, maybe skill, maybe our intelligence or all of it together, but if YOU came out on top, others can too. You know, I heard your podcast years ago; I was a quiet little fan of yours.”

  It was John’s turn to be surprised. He had run a podcast years before, mainly preaching Libertarian values, small government, pro–Second Amendment, and preparedness. It had grown a modest audience and had made him some lifelong friends, but when the political winds shifted and social media and tech companies began to blatantly purge any and all content creators they viewed as dangerous, his show was abruptly but quietly shut down. No one would host his bandwidth, and his social media accounts were all deleted. To hear Mark recall all of this sent John’s mind racing. Who was his host, and how deep did this previously unknown connection go?

  “You always said this would happen. Hell, you predicted the Arsenal and Sniper Rifle Laws years before they were proposed. You were yelling at Fudds telling them their bolt guns would be next, like you were Nostradamus and nobody believed you…but I did. I was linked in with most of these guys already. And the more things turned, the more apparent it was we needed to take action. Minutemen isn’t a single organization; we’re modeled after a network of terrorist cells. Every cell is independent, with its own leadership and resources. We know precious little outside of comm frequencies and call signs of the other cells, so if one is infiltrated, they cannot penetrate the entire network. No one person is in overall command. We all pursue a common goal in our own ways, to disrupt the government’s attempt to strip our arms from us. When our intelligence revealed you as the next target, and you made it clear you wanted to fight them, we made the decision to assist you afterwards. I see no reason your actions wouldn’t energize others, either to join our cause or even to operate on their own.

  “John, you were the one who said if a hundred million gun owners stood up and said NO, the state would have to back down. Well, if this continues, we’re going to get weaker every day until our numbers won’t be enough to stop them. If we get those gun owners on their feet, all of them, this will stop. Those four guys thought they were kicking the door on a single family. If they’d rounded the corner and come face-to-face with a couple of dozen armed people, you think they’d push the issue or go home? Your story, your voice, YOU can make these people see that surrender isn’t the only option and unite them. You could help us do that. It’s your decision. I know you don’t want anyone else’s blood on your hands, but how many more people are going to rot in prison if we stand by and don’t do something?”

  That last bit stung John, which Mark did not intend. He did feel like he’d abandoned the fight. He had cowered rather than fought, and the fight came to his door anyway. He had taken men’s lives in self-defense, but now he was being asked to openly advocate insurgency against his own country. He understood innately that an asymmetrical and unconventional war was the only one with any chance of success against a technologically superior foe. They had the home-field advantage, as these agents were inevitably being massed from surrounding locations and couldn’t be familiar with each and every neighborhood they were searching. Mostly, they had the advantage of blending in with noncombatants, a lesson the US military had learned from fighting insurgencies in foreign lands. It is inherently difficult to separate combatants from noncombatants when they all speak the same language and look the same, and the penalty for accosting noncombatants is the delegitimizing of your force and the mission.

  He had indeed uttered those words years prior, that if all the people united, the state had no option but to capitulate to their will. Even the “useful idiots” who voted for an ever more progressive agenda lacked the numbers and the spine to stand up to a majority population of angry citizens intent on having their rights respected. He saw Mark’s point and his vision, and he did not question his motives nor his logic. The feeling nagging at John was actually something more personal to him; he questioned if he was the man to be leading this…insurgency. He questioned if this was what he wanted his life’s legacy to be, the man who tore his own country apart. He had enlisted young because he loved his birthplace and loved what it stood for. And now, his country had followed in the footsteps of every Marxist dictatorship the world had ever seen, jettisoned the natural rights of its citizens, and was currently wiping its bloody boots on every word in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Sure, some part of him wanted to watch that country burn, but it pained him terribly to come to that realization. He didn’t want to see his country torn apart, but perhaps slapped until it was brought back to its senses.

  “Okay, Mark, I’m in pending a discussion with my wife. Let’s sit down and figure out exactly what you have in mind and how we’re both going to keep from getting our heads shot off in the process.”

  Mark smiled. He had hoped for that reaction, though he could visibly see the conflict that boiled inside John. “Any hesitation?” Mark asked.

  “I just hope we don’t go down in history as the two who set a match to what’s left of the United States of America, Mark. I didn’t serve my country to be the one who burned it down.” John sighed.

  Mark gave John a knowing look and nodded as they walked back inside.

  Conflict and Resolution

  “What do you think, honey?” John asked his wife. He had always sought and greatly valued his wife’s counsel in moments like this. John was, by his nature, a very decisive person. He always found the shortest distance between two points, the most direct path to his objective, and then he pounced on it. He was nearly unable to weigh the consequences of the options before him. Once he had decided on a course of action, he would not shy away from any hardship IF he believed the end justified the means. This strength, he would admit, was sometimes his greatest weakness.

  Rachel was very different. No less committed to following through on a decision she had made, she debated the merits of different plans and considered not only the objective but the cost of her potential actions. John making a decision was using a sledgehammer; Rachel used a scalpel. If her only fault was occasional indecisiveness, her strength was the ability to digest extremely complex situations and, given appropriate time, come up with a solution that mutually satisfied all parties involved. She could win a fight without actually fighting, a born negotiator. It was this strength John looked to now.

  “I don’t know, honey. I understand Mark’s point about trying to force a change before it’s too late, and I don’t fault you for the decisions you made that brought us here, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t have some reservations about continuing down this path.” Rachel reached down and gently took her husband’s hand, that same rough and calloused hand that had worked so hard to build a life for her and their daughter. The same hand that had gently and tenderly held her through moments of joy and sadness. The same hand that promised endless tenderness to those he loved, promised incredible violence to those who threatened his family. She had seen very clearly earlier that day the duality that was the man she loved: the husband and father, and the soldier. She had met him two decades earlier while he was in uniform…

  “I’m going to marry this man,” a younger Rachel told her friends and family. He was nothing but a picture she held, hundreds of emails and Yahoo Messenger chats, a soldier pouring his heart out to a woman he was falling for thousands of miles away back home while he was in Iraq.

  John had joined the Army National Guard young, with all the idealism of a young man who wanted to serve and protect his home. When he had made his commitment, the Twin Towers had
not been struck, Iraq and Afghanistan were just countries on a map, and the War on Terror was not yet a phrase coined to describe a decade of fighting half a world away. Yet when his orders came, he went.

  Months later, a friend of his from high school moved into an unassuming apartment complex near a local state college and struck up a friendship with another young woman recently moved down from a more rural town. A picture on her refrigerator, depicting a young man heavily tanned from the desert environment, lean and muscled from his deployment, caught Rachel’s eye immediately. The day he came home and was released from duty, his first stop was home to grab his car. His second stop was to her.

  After the first few years Rachel watched the Army side of her husband fade but never disappear. He had softened, grown more patient, turned into a wonderful husband and a great father, yet she always knew that behind that lopsided grin, beneath those dark eyes, he was still capable of incredible viciousness and violence were he to be cornered or threatened. On an occasion or two, if his family were in some small way threatened, she could see and hear the old him resurface.

  This morning, she had seen it come out, all the way out. She had watched this gentle man morph into a soldier again and ruthlessly kill four men without pause, and then just as quickly turn back into the husband and father trying to shield his family from the ugliness of what he had done. He was not ashamed, for he felt justified; he was just trying to protect his family. Always trying to protect.

  “Rachel, I meant what I said. If you think we should cut bait and take our chances, then let’s cut bait and go. We have our bug-out gear, that’ll cover us for several days. We have plenty of ordnance to protect ourselves, med gear if that becomes necessary, our emergency shelter, and enough fuel to put some miles between our home and ourselves. If you think that’s the smart decision for this family, I need to hear it.”

  Rachel knew John was not saying this to abdicate his responsibility, only that he was deeply conflicted and saw no clear answer to the decisions he faced. It was moments like this, without clear direction, he was at his most vulnerable. He was afraid to make a decision that would later turn out to be ill advised, and hence sought the counsel of the only person in his life he trusted to give him direction.

  “John, I don’t think running is the answer. I think Mark is right, either we fight this fight today while we are strong, or we wait until we are too weak to fight it. People should have been going nuts years ago when you were out campaigning and protesting about these laws, but they all shrugged their shoulders. And they still are, waiting for their turn to get marched off to the next camp for the politically inconvenient. I’m just worried about my family. I’m worried about my husband and my daughter. The rest of the world can figure their own problems out if they would just leave my family alone.”

  And John nodded his head, for similar thoughts had crossed his mind on multiple occasions. It was why he stopped his advocacy, didn’t fight when his podcast and blog were shut down, stopped going to the state capital, stopped writing congressmen. He was not a quitter, but he had hoped that if he stopped proudly wearing his bull’s-eye on his back, the people who came to his door that morning would never come. This was America, after all; things like this weren’t supposed to happen.

  “Well, honey, I’m pretty worried too. The problem is I know history. Every time an insurgency, and that is what we are proposing here, arises, the state will spare no effort or expense attempting to crush it. The insurgents’ only possible way to survive is to call more people to their cause, which spreads out the government’s resources and disrupts their control. If we don’t fight this fight, they will find us and destroy us. If we do fight, we may be destroyed anyway. I see our only path forward is to jump in with both feet and do what Mark is suggesting. He wants to start by using our story like a lighthouse to guide other ships in the storm. We were the first ones to stand up and say NO MORE. If others follow suit, the state may have to reconsider its policies or risk their legitimacy completely crumbling. The more heavy-handed their methods, the more people realize the time to shit or get off the pot is right NOW. If we can keep our butts out of the immediate line of sight, we may pull this off, and the Minutemen have the resources to shield us for the time being. But I can’t do this without you.”

  Rachel gave a long blink and nodded her head. John was such a dichotomy, both hard and soft at the same time. On the outside, he was nearly six feet and two hundred forty pounds of tanned skin, tattoos, and calluses with just a bit of “dad bod” thrown in, but underneath he was an incredibly emotional person. He depended on his wife to calm the storms in his mind and his heart, to help him make sense of the emotional currents that ran through him. It did not take an incredibly perceptive person to look at those deep-set dark eyes to see he was worried about many of the same things that worried her, only he didn’t seem to be able to find the words to make sense of all of them. He just felt worry, and unable to find a course of action that suited him, the worry chewed on him.

  “If you think this will make a difference, let’s do it. I know you won’t do anything to intentionally jeopardize our family. What’s Mark’s plan?” Rachel inquired.

  “Initially, pirate the AM/FM radio frequencies and broadcast. The government has the internet pretty locked down, but he and I think we know some avenues that will be much more difficult for them to control. And once we get the information into the hands of the Minutemen’s other cells, the agency will have its hands full trying to block multiple coordinated attacks. I’m sure they’re already hard at work trying to cover up what happened, wish we had taken pictures and collected some evidence to corroborate our story, but that wasn’t high on the priority list. But their commo guy Kevin caught the whole radio transmission from the scene ’cause the stupid bastards weren’t running secured comms, and that’ll be hard to ignore. It’s going to be an information/disinformation campaign for now, not direct action.”

  “By direct action you mean…”

  “I mean neutralizing enemy forces,” John finished.

  Rachel shuddered, maybe internally, but maybe it showed. She had taken no pleasure in shooting at the men who had come to her home that morning, even though she felt fairly justified defending her husband and her family. What her husband wasn’t saying, and did not have to say, was that “for now” meant it was an option not off the table. If an occasion arose where John felt justified in launching a preemptive strike, or if their location was discovered and they were attacked, then John would cut a bloody path through anyone who got in his way. He didn’t have to say it, it was just a part of who he was. He had promised her years before that he would never let her or their daughter be harmed, and she had seen firsthand the training he subjected himself to for years to carry through on that promise. Firearms training, range days, the expense of ammunition and firearms—John never compromised on taking care of his family’s financial needs, but he saw this as another aspect of taking care of them, and he committed to it fully.

  “What can I do to help?” Rachel asked.

  “You already have, honey,” John replied, squeezing his wife’s hand. Then he hugged her, turned on his heel, and walked back toward the house to find Mark. His demeanor had changed in that instant. Gone was the quiet, brooding, unsure man who looked longingly for his path and his task. In his place was the soldier, a man who believed in the righteousness of what he was about to undertake. A soldier who had been assigned an important mission that he could not fail.

  Mostly, he was a man with the full support of his wife, his other half. He was a man who knew he couldn’t be beaten by anyone.

  “Mark, let’s get started,” John stated matter-of-factly while leading Mark back into the house.

  “You’re sure, John? You two came to a decision that quick?” Mark replied questioningly.

  John nodded his head. “The longer we wait, the colder the trail gets. Let’s hit them right now and get this going. I wish we had some evidence of what happened to corr
oborate that radio transmission your guy Kevin grabbed, but I guess we’ll have to roll with what we have—”

  “Actually, we do have evidence,” Mark replied casually, turning around to the console behind him. Seconds later, John was looking at a bird’s-eye view of his home, and nothing looked out of place. Then an SUV pulled up, blocking their driveway; four men in tactical gear and carrying rifles at low ready approached his front door. One carried a battering ram, which John realized was how they had knocked his door in so quickly. He had hardened that door years prior, using three-inch deck screws to secure the striker plates and hinges, and the door was an old solid wood job that was fairly heavy. One swing with the ram, and the men were stacked up, running in…then falling backwards as fast as they had walked forward. With their black uniforms and the height the video was shot from (a drone most likely) their wounds were not obvious, but the one surviving member of the failed raid was obviously in pain. Then John watched himself walk out the front door, rifle at low ready. He viciously stomped on the man’s hand that still held a rifle, reached down with a knife to slice the sling, then kicked it away. A quick glance at the other three showed no movement. John slung his rifle, drew his sidearm, and shot the man once in the head. He then proceeded back into his home, and the video ended.