The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

  "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.