The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

  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 the
m 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.