299 Days: The 43 Colonels

by Glen Tate

  “We want the history books to tell the story of how we did this by telling the stories of a few remarkable people.”

  Ben motioned for the soldier to stand. The gentleman was in his dress Army uniform, which closely resembled the FUSA Army’s uniform. A careful observer, however, would notice that this soldier had the new “Washington State Guard” patch. His lapel insignia was not the old “U.S.” pin, but the new state’s symbol, an evergreen tree with the Don’t Tread on Me snake around it.

  “Staff Sergeant—sorry, Colonel—Chester Volz, please rise,” Ben said in his commander-in-chief voice, which he had been perfecting slowly. The soldier crisply stood at attention.

  “Please proceed to the rostrum, Colonel.” He had decided to treat the currently serving honorees in the military with all the military trappings, and to treat the civilian honorees as civilians. As the Governor, he was both a civilian leader and a military commander. He needed to reflect both sides of his role in the way he treated the honorees.

  “One of our contacts who was formerly deep in the Lima government told me an interesting story,” Ben said. “She was in the Camp Murray command center in the early days of the Collapse. She said that they received a report that a squad, about ten or so soldiers, of the National Guard was missing in Lewis County. She said the military officer providing the briefing said that the squad was thought to be ‘prisoners of war.’ The people at Camp Murray became deeply concerned, not so much that ten soldiers were missing but because their own solders were thought to be ‘prisoners of war.’ This made it clear for the first time to them that a war was, indeed, taking place. Never before had American soldiers on American soil been ‘prisoners of war’. Well, not since the Civil War. ‘Civil War’: that’s the designation that caused them so much concern.”

  Ben looked out at the audience to see how they were reacting. They were spellbound so he continued, once again without notes. He had stopped using them long ago, now going on memory and passion.

  “Well, it turns out that squad in Lewis County weren’t prisoners of war,” Ben explained. “And the best person to explain what happened next is none other than Col. Volz.” Ben motioned for the soldier to come up to the rostrum. Chester strode up to the rostrum with purpose. He had been dying to tell this story and was very grateful to be honored with a colonelship.

  After the standing ovation died down, Chester started to speak. Earlier, he had asked the Governor’s advisor if he could just tell his story; the advisor encouraged him to do so.

  “My name is Chester Volz and I’m from Chehalis down in Lewis County. I managed an auto glass shop before the Collapse.” He didn’t say it, but he was divorced with no children, which was why he could leave the city and do what he did. He continued, “I was also in the National Guard, serving as a squad leader in the 2nd Battalion, 146 Field Artillery, 81st Heavy Brigade Combat Team of the former Washington National Guard.”

  He looked right into the crowd and said, “I joined the Guard to help people. That’s how I’m wired: I’m a sheepdog.” He continued, “I had several good years in the National Guard. I worked with mostly wonderful people and we helped in floods and forest fires. This seemed like the perfect role for us; we helped people.”

  Chester’s tone changed. “But a few years ago, the mission and culture of the Guard changed. We were increasingly told that ‘domestic terrorists’ were running around all around us. They told us veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were plotting to overthrow the government, which seemed odd given that most of us in the unit were veterans. We looked around and no one we knew wanted to overthrow anything. Most of us really didn’t like the direction the country was going, but we took care of that at the ballot box. Well, we tried to; we dealt with political things the political way: by voting. We kept wondering who these ‘domestic terrorists’ were; we couldn’t see any.”

  “But we figured it was just politics,” Chester continued. “It seemed like the ladder-climbers, the mid-level officers mostly, were the ones pushing this ‘domestic terrorism’ nonsense. But it didn’t matter much because it wasn’t like we were rounding up American citizens. At first.”

  “Then it was,” Chester said dramatically. “At our drill weekend in April last year, a few days before the Collapse on May 1st, our commanding officer addressed us. He said he’d received word from his higher ups that something big was coming. All he would say was that massive civil unrest was coming. Rioting, looting, and ‘insurrection.’ We all knew the economy was in the tank—my shop had closed a few weeks before—so looting seemed possible. But, ‘insurrection’?”

  “Sure enough,” Chester continued, “the Collapse hit a few days later. It almost felt like it was scripted. We assembled at our local armory, well, most of us. Quite a few guys were staying with their families, but when we mustered at the armory, there were no supplies from Battalion, the HQ armory in Olympia, which was about twenty miles north of us. The plan was for them to bring down vehicles and weapons, and food and water. We waited and waited. Nothing. Most of the guys went back home.”

  “We had no official communications with Battalion or anyone else. We tried using cell phones, but the voice network was down from too much traffic. We texted our friends at Battalion, but they didn’t know anything. Pretty soon, the texts weren’t going through either. The radios we were issued at our small local armory had dead batteries and no one knew where the chargers were. We were cut off from our command.”

  “While we were in the local armory, several local police came by and asked where the Guard was and when we’d be out helping them. At first, I told them we’d be up and running soon. I actually believed that.”

  “At the end of the first day, it was obvious that help was not coming. The police stopped coming by and asking when we’d be helping them. They were too busy literally putting out fires and fighting looters.”

  “Finally, thirty-six hours into it, one Humvee from Olympia pulled in. Traffic down I-5 was terrible and apparently most of the Olympia guys were staying home, too. Battalion in Olympia sent down exactly five M-4s, eight magazines and one case of 5.56 ammunition. There were a couple cases of MREs in there, too.”

  “Oh,” Chester said with a smile, “they also sent a hundred little bottles of insect repellent, which is weird because we don’t have any bugs here, especially in April.”

  “I asked the corporal who drove down from Olympia what my orders were. He was a young kid who joined the Guard to pay for college and he was exhausted and stressed. He shrugged and said, ‘Hell if I know, Sergeant.’”

  “Five M-4s and eight magazines didn’t exactly make us a vigorous fighting force,” Chester said with another smile. “So I did something that isn’t exactly standard military protocol: I told guys to go home and get their personal weapons. Especially their ARs and magazines. We were citizen soldiers, so if the official soldier headquarters couldn’t arm us for our job, we’d plus up on the armament from our own citizen supplies. We were all ‘gun guys’ and most were returning veterans so we were actually the ‘domestic terrorists’ we were supposed to be on the lookout for,” Chester said with a chuckle.

  “There were eighteen guys still with me at this point,” Chester continued. “I knew that once I sent them home to get personal weapons, quite a few wouldn’t come back. Sure enough: only nine came back.” Chester shrugged.

  “But the guys who came back were solid. They all had personal ARs and magazines, and personal side arms, so they came back with more than enough weapons for us. These were my core guys, the ones I knew I could count on. The exception was the young corporal from Olympia, who I didn’t know.”

  “When I had all the men and weapons assembled, I realized that we still didn’t have any orders. I asked my guys to try to text Battalion one more time and see what we were supposed to do. The corporal was unloading the insect repellent and found an envelope taped to it, which he brought over to me.”

  “‘Oh, Sergeant, here’s something for you from
Battalion,’ he said. I tore it open. It was on official Battalion letterhead and was handwritten. It said our orders were to secure the overpass, including the on and off ramps, on Exit 79. ‘No civilians are to enter I-5. They must exit at Exit 79 and not re-enter the interstate. Only military, law enforcement, fire and medical, and those with official credentials from governmental agencies may use I-5.’”

  “That was it,” Chester said with a shrug. “There was no explanation of the legal authority to do this, let alone how a squad was supposed to control four points of entry and exit to the main interstate highway on the West Coast.”

  “This order was disturbing because it was consistent with the official plan we’d been briefed on a few days earlier at our April drill. ‘Containment’ was the term for the plan. We were supposed to contain civilians in the cities so we could ‘control’ them. That was the word they used in the briefings: ‘control.’ We were to use force if necessary. I had decided, in advance, that I would not follow this order. This was precisely the kind of order Oath Keepers told me might come, so I was mentally ready for it, which was key. Thank goodness I wasn’t trying to process all of these extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime events on the spot. From the Oath Keepers’ heads’ up, I had time in advance to think them through.”

  “After deciding I wouldn’t follow this order, the squad leader in me took over and I wanted to know about the logistics of everything. I asked the corporal where the rest of the vehicles, men, equipment, and supplies were and he said, ‘Chaos. Everything is chaos.’ He started walking away from me, like he was in a daze. Finally, after collecting his thoughts, he turned around and said Olympia was getting pounded by looting and rioting and some violent demonstrations at the capitol. He said he didn’t have any family to protect and asked if he could stay with us.”

  “Now that we had enough weapons and my men knew I had orders, although I hadn’t yet told them what they were, they were excited to finally get on with their mission. Waiting around for a day and a half while their town was starting to tear itself apart was hard on them, and me. These were my guys, and I hated to disappoint them, but I had to. I called a hasty squad meeting on the steps of the armory.”

  “‘Guys,’ I told them as I held up the piece of paper from Battalion, ‘we have orders, but I’m not following them.’ I explained to them why the orders were unconstitutional and that it would be unlawful for us to follow them. A couple of them were shocked that we weren’t going to go out and try to secure the overpass, but most of them had come to realize over the past few hours that they had been abandoned by Battalion and were on their own. They were only sticking with the unit because they had strength in numbers—11 soldiers with M-4s and a Humvee beat several carloads of looters—and they were all single, so they had no families to go home to.” Chester thought about how family obligations were the one thing the military planners failed to fully take into account. Almost everyone who stayed with their military and first responder jobs were single.

  “I told them they were free to go and could take an M-4 and a hundred rounds of ammo for personal defense. I told them that I was going back to my place in the country and we’d set up a base there and would do what we could to help people, but that our primary objective was to survive the next few days and then regroup with the police and citizen self-defense forces if that was possible.”

  “We headed back to my place, which was in the foothills of the Cascades and very defensible. I was a ‘prepper’ before the Collapse—another indicator that I was a ‘domestic terrorist’—so I had enough supplies for my guys, at least for a while. I posted guards and told everyone to sleep in rotations.”

  “My town, Chehalis, and nearby Centralia, was really hit hard by the looting. We listened to reports on the local radio station until it went off the air. I realized there was nothing we could do in town, but my guys really wanted to help. So I agreed that we’d run one 'presence patrol' in town, to show the bad guys that the National Guard was out.”

  “We mounted up, had enough fuel, and went into town.” Chester paused and said with a near quivering lip, “What we saw was unimaginable. Fires, bodies, people hauling off stolen merchandise. They were stealing the most absurd things,” he said, “like big screen TVs. Who needs that? Especially when it’s obvious the power will be on and off soon, and might go off forever.”

  “There were two reactions as we came on the outskirts of the city,” Chester said. “The decent people ran up to us and asked when the rest of us would be there and where the food and water was. The looters got away from us as fast as they could.”

  “Every single one of my men, even the gung-ho ones who wanted to go into town and help, realized that we should go back to my secure location and try to make it there for a while. If we wanted to be heroes, we’d have to do it later.”

  “By now, which was day three of the Collapse, my neighbors started to come to my place. They wanted protection, because the rumors were that looters were done with Centralia and Chehalis and were making their way outward into the country. I wanted supplies for my men and my neighbors, who were generally well prepared because they lived out in the country, fed us and gave us precious fuel. They started calling me ‘Sergeant Mayor,’ a play on the military rank of Sergeant Major, because I was organizing the area like a mayor would.”

  “Over the next few days, we got organized and started to take in volunteers. I sent some scouts out to watch the overpass. Military units—I’m not sure from where—started to accumulate on I-5. As far as we could tell, the only law enforcement presence was patrol cars with flashing lights, but few, if any, officers or deputies. Something told me to have scouts keep a watch on the overpass.”

  “I realized that we had National Guard uniforms, weapons, and a Humvee. We could blend in down at the overpass and find out what was going on. So I went there one night with five of my men. We rolled right to the overpass and were waved into the circle of military and law enforcement vehicles encircling the overpass area. We didn’t say much and just observed.”

  “What we saw was disturbing. Homeland Security brought in some TSA ‘agents’ to man the overpass and check the papers of vehicle occupants. These people were the bottom of the barrel. TSA was hiring anyone who could breathe, and since jobs were very scarce, they had plenty of applicants. They put them in those silly blue jumpsuits and gave them a sidearm. Now they had the power of life and death over everyone on the freeways.”

  “We saw about a dozen TSA agents standing around while one of them beat a man right in front of his wife. One of the regular military officers was arguing with the DHS boss of the operation, but the DHS guy wouldn’t stop it.”

  Chester looked down at the floor and then decided to discuss a sensitive topic in front of this dignified audience. He looked back up at the crowd and said, “I told my men that if the TSA guys touched that woman, we’d kill every single one of them.”

  He regained his composure and said, “That’s when I realized we needed to get out of there and try to solve the problems on the overpass from a longer distance.” He described how they left the security perimeter around the overpass and headed home with a new mission mind.

  “I realized that me and my squad, and all the new volunteers who were streaming into my house, were in a perfect position to help the good guys on the overpass. I got my scouts together and we came up with a plan.”

  “There was an abandoned house on the hillside about 600 yards from the overpass. We set up a sniper over-watch. We didn’t have any trained military snipers, but there were plenty of elk hunters with their favorite rifles. They could hit things at that distance with little difficulty.”

  Chester put his hand up for emphasis. “But I was torn. There was a legitimate reason for the military and law enforcement to control the interstate. Vital supplies had to get through and, from what we could see, there were gangs running up and down the freeway, killing and stealing. From the house overlooking the overpass, we could see that the
military was generally being professional, but those TSA agents were a bunch of thugs. They were getting more and more brazen. The DHS boss of the operation was letting it happen. Even through a riflescope at 600 yards, you could see the frustration on the military officers’ faces. But we could also see that the military was following orders and that the DHS boss had been put in charge of that location, so the military was just doing as they were told.”

  “One morning, we watched from the house as a TSA agent shot an old lady. That was it. We could allow no more. We decided to hit the TSA agents, taking care of them with the hunting rifles from the house. We wanted to send men in close to the security perimeter and simultaneously hit them there, but we could see that the military had a few NODs, night optical devices, so we knew we couldn’t move at night.”

  “Four hunters watched for the next few hours and picked out who the DHS boss was and who the TSA leaders were. When one of the hunters had a good shot at the DHS guy, he let the first shot fly. Follow-up shots went out in quick succession. It took several shots to put them down because 600 yards is a long shot.”

  “The sniper shots caused mayhem at the overpass. The military started shooting in all directions. They spent the next few hours paralyzed, afraid to move without cover.”

  “Then I realized I had just picked a fight with a large and well-armed unit,” Chester said, shrugging. “Oh well. I couldn’t let thugs, whether they were in blue jumpsuits or gang colors, kill innocent people. A sheepdog can’t watch that happen.”

  “That night, I took some volunteers out to test the security at the overpass. We stayed behind solid cover, like vehicles, and, sure enough as we got about 400 yards from the outer perimeter, they started shooting at us. Wild shots, not even close, but still not something you want to keep heading toward.”