299 Days: The 43 Colonels

by Glen Tate

  “A day or two later, the military commander announced that the plant was now owned by the federal government. I thought he was kidding. I checked with my corporate office and sure enough, the Spud King plant was now owned by DHS. I just shrugged. It didn’t matter to me who owned the company and I was helping to get food to hungry people.”

  “The military started to build a tent city in the parking lot of the plant. I asked why. They said it would house my employees. I laughed. I said that my employees live in their own houses. ‘Not anymore,’ the military commander said. The National Guard started to string barbed wire all around the plant. Quite a few of the employees who went home before the barbed wire went up stayed at home. Some came back to work because they had no other job. But about a third of my employees just seemed to disappear.”

  The military people told me we had to have three shifts producing 24/7. I wondered where we’d get all those potatoes. The military people, and increasingly FCorps people, told me that other processing plants were off-line and Spud King would be picking up the slack.”

  “Buses started arriving from other parts of the state, primarily Seattle, with new employees. They were almost all recent Mexican refugees. That wasn’t a problem; many of my pre-Collapse employees were Hispanic.”

  “The federals started treating the new employees, and my long-time employees, like dirt. They insisted on 12-hour shifts with no days off. They told employees they couldn’t leave the plant, and they had barbed wire and guards to prevent anyone from leaving.”

  “The federal officials were under incredible stress to produce a zillion pounds of potato products immediately. Every hiccup in the process—like the lack of fuel for trucks to get potatoes to the plant or broken parts in the processing machines that couldn’t be replaced quickly—caused the feds to scream and threaten anyone they thought were responsible. The country was destroying itself but they thought that if they yelled loud enough and threatened enough people with jail, that all the complicated things necessary to turn a potato in a field into a bag of mashed potato mix in a grocery store would just work out.”

  “The feds started blaming everything going wrong on ‘sabotage.’ At first, I thought they were just stressed out and looking for a scapegoat. But the more I was around them, the more I realized that the feds actually thought ‘teabaggers’ were responsible for all the government’s failures.”

  “They responded to these imaginary ‘threats’ by strengthening the security around the plant and inside it. They put up a second ring of barbed wire around the perimeter. FCorps inspectors constantly walked around to keep an eye on employees, all of whom were so exhausted from working almost around the clock that they could care less about politics. The employees were too tired to sabotage anything.”

  “It was still May at this point so the weather was pleasant enough to make living in a tent in the parking lot bearable. But the warmer weather of summer was coming and the tent city in the parking lot wasn’t sustainable. Some DHS troopers came to our little town and started ordering families to take in plant employees. Then the feds realized that they couldn’t trust the employees to be outside the perimeter of the plant, so they insisted that the workers continue to live in the tents in the parking lot. DHS used the homes off-site to house themselves.”

  “About three weeks into the Collapse, the federals were treating my employees like slaves. Most people have no concept of what real slavery is because we’ve never seen it in America in our lifetimes. But there it was: slavery. The workers were locked up behind barbed wire and machine guns, forced to live in awful conditions, and required to work at least twelve hours a day, seven days a week.”

  “The FCorps at my plant were racists. They treated the Mexicans like sub-humans. Mexicans and whites in eastern Washington have been living together for generations. My wife is Mexican! So neither the Mexicans nor most of the whites appreciated how the feds were treating the employees.”

  “But what could I do?” Dirk asked the audience. “I couldn’t reason with the feds and I couldn’t tell them to leave. I had to watch them enslave my friends and community.”

  “Or did I?” Dirk asked rhetorically. “I realized that the feds were taking these harsh measures because they were desperate and force was the only option they had. I kept thinking about how much the feds needed those semis of mashed potato mix to keep leaving the loading dock and heading to Seattle.”

  “The last straw for me was when an FCorp thug killed a worker. She fell asleep on the processing line and the FCorp guy beat her to death right there in front of everyone. No one tried to stop him. The workers were almost catatonically exhausted and, where they came from, people in authority just did those sorts of things. I decided that I would never let that happen again.”

  “I knew I couldn’t fight the feds by myself. I needed a plan and, given how strong the feds were early in the Collapse, I needed to wait until things changed.”

  “Unfortunately, it took several months for things to change. But by early fall, the feds were running on fumes. The Patriots controlled most of eastern Washington. The Limas were left with fortified processing plants, giant fields under heavy guard, and transportation routes in between the two, also under heavy guard.”

  “I talked daily with farmers. They told me how DHS troopers were now blatantly stealing their crops. The feds didn’t even go through the motions of pretending to pay the farmers; they just showed up armed and drove off with what they wanted. Many farmers confided in me that they felt like me: powerless to stop this, but knowing that it needed to stop.”

  “As the plant manager, I got special privileges. This wasn’t because the feds were nice to me; it was because I was the key to that plant operating successfully. I knew everything about the machines and facilities. I also knew most of the long-time employees and I knew the farmers bringing their potatoes in.”

  “I had a special DHS pass that let me leave the plant. I could sleep at home most nights. I could talk to people in town.”

  “I knew Lima agents were keeping tabs on me in town so I was very careful to only give out the official line about conditions at the plant. ‘Production is humming along smoothly’ and ‘the employees are really grateful to have jobs’ is what I told everyone I talked with.”

  “I grew up in this town and had known some of these people my entire life. I could trust them. So I asked my best friend to try to get me in touch with the Patriots. He did, but that took a while. Finally, one night in September, I met with my Patriot contact and told him everything that was going on. I asked him how I could help, and how we could take back the plant.”

  “I asked him if I should start sabotaging production; I knew some ways to do it. He said no and suggested getting the confidence of the feds and lulling them into a false sense of security. ‘Make them bored,’ he said. ‘So they get lax. It works every time.’”

  “I resisted my urge to sabotage the plant and my contact told me they were working on a plan, and he shared the details of it with me a week or so later. The Patriots would have one of their irregular units launch a diversionary attack nearby and draw the Limas’ attention away. Then another Patriot irregular unit would attack the guards at the plant. They would overwhelm the guards and open the gates so the slaves could leave. They wouldn’t destroy the plant because the Patriots needed that mashed potato mix for themselves.”

  “This is exactly what they did, and it worked beautifully, primarily because the feds were so weak by then.”

  “Knowing that this attack was coming, I arranged to be absent that night and got my family out of town to a nearby Patriot safe house. When the Limas who were reacting to the diversionary attack came back to the plant, it was empty. No workers and no managers.”

  “From my safe house, I started to work with the farmers and other plant managers to do the same thing for them that we did at my plant. I kind of became the focal point for these raids. I knew the other plant managers and farmers, and the Patriot soldi
ers and operatives. I knew people in all the surrounding communities. I also knew how food processing plants work, which is the most helpful thing I did.”

  “After we liberated a food processing facility, we had to get it back up and running to make food for the Patriots. I would help the liberated plant employees get their facility operational again.”

  “My code name,” Dirk said with a smile, “was the Spud King.”

  “Now that we’ve kicked the Limas out of the entire eastern half of the state,” he continued, “I’m working there to coordinate even more food production. How are we doing it?” he asked. “You got a preview of how from Col. Stachyra from Poland: employee ownership in many cases. In other cases, investors came in and got things going.”

  “It was funny,” Dirk said, “the former corporate owners, the few of them who didn’t flee to Seattle, thanked us for getting ‘their’ plants back. I told them that ‘their’ plants had been taken over by the Lima government, with the old owners’ approval. So the plants and farms and food were no longer ‘theirs;’ they belonged to the successor government, which is, of course, New Washington. With Col. Stachyra’s help, our new state decided to give the plants to the employees or sell them to investors who had a solid plan. When a farm could be returned to its rightful owners, like a farm family, we did that. But the corporate collaborators didn’t get anything. They picked sides—the wrong side, as it turned out.”

  Chapter 370

  Col. Lee Webb

  (“Just” a Personnel Clerk)

  “We go from the Spud King to a personnel clerk,” Ben said, enjoying how different the colonels were. “Our next honoree fled Seattle where he performed an amazing service for us and put himself in extreme danger. He was ‘just’ a personnel clerk for the old State of Washington. How could one personnel clerk have such a huge impact for us? Please listen to Col. Webb as he answers this question.”

  The audience applauded as a man in his fifties, who seemed mild-mannered and thoughtful, went up to the rostrum.

  “Hello,” he said to the large room full of people. “I’m not used to speaking to large numbers of people,” he said, “so please excuse me if I mess up.”

  “I was a personnel clerk for the old state, as the Governor said,” he began. “I had a pretty normal life. I got up in the morning, went to work, came home, fixed dinner, and watched some T.V. On the weekends, I ran errands. Nothing exciting. I was fine with that.”

  “I guess I’m good at what I do,” he said. “I am very organized. I worked as part of a small team of people at the Department of Personnel on a new computerized employee database. We pretty much invented it. It worked really well. Other states essentially adopted it. I was proud.”

  “Our database kept track of all of our employees. We had all kinds of information on them. Not in a nosy, spying way; we just had things we needed like their contact information, dependents, past work history, medical and financial information. That kind of thing.”

  “Years before the Collapse came, when we were developing the database, I kept hearing a voice that said I needed to do something that would be dangerous, but very helpful to the good people. It wasn’t a voice, exactly, it was an outside thought. It was like Col. Kate Benton described earlier: a thought from someone else, giving me guidance. It was calming. The thoughts were coming from someone very good, who was in control of things.”

  “The outside thought told me that it would be important in the future if I secretly made a copy of the employee database. That seemed completely crazy at the time. But I had the computer programmers put in a backdoor way for me to get the database. They didn’t even ask me why I wanted to have that feature; they just did it. I remember feeling silly for doing it.”

  “Years later, when the Collapse hit, I realized why the outside thought told me to do that. Now I could make a copy of the database and no one would know I had. I knew how important it was to the employees for their information to stay confidential. Then I realized how helpful this information would be for the people who were trying to stop all the bad things that the government was doing.”

  “I made contact with the Patriots in my area, which was surprisingly easy because I had the database and filtered it for people who were suspected of being Oath Keepers. I knew one of them; he was my cousin’s neighbor I met at a barbeque at her house. The outside thought told me to be brave and do it. I did.”

  “It was easy to get the database. I was concerned that the Patriots would use it to go and hunt down government employees. They said they wouldn’t, but I couldn’t leave that to chance. The first version of the database I gave them was filtered to only show the information on one kind of employee: those who were suspected of being ‘terrorists,’ which essentially meant they were suspected of being Oath Keepers.”

  “I put it on a thumb drive and got it to the Oath Keeper and then he got it to his higher ups.”

  “Apparently, the information was very important to the Patriots. It told them, among other things, who the state thought was an Oath Keeper. I made a second subset of the database which also had information on false identities issued to various state law enforcement officers and others whose agencies were unidentified.”

  “Finally, after the Patriots had earned my trust, I gave them the whole database. Now they knew who all the state employees were, which included the National Guard since they were technically employees of the state.”

  “The Patriots used the information mostly to remind state employees that they couldn’t live in anonymity. The Patriots made the point that after they won the war, they would know who was a state employee. There would be no blending back into society and avoiding accountability. They assured me that they weren’t going to kill all state employees, and they have honored this.”

  “I understand that the Patriots were able to persuade several key state employees to work for them because of the information they had on them from the database. I guess this was pretty helpful,” he said, unaware of what an understatement it was.

  “The Patriots got me out of Seattle just before New Year’s. One of them died while getting me to safety, and for that I am forever thankful.”

  “I am proud,” he said in conclusion, “of the code name they gave me. ‘Just.’ It was because I always said I was ‘just’ a personnel clerk.”

  Chapter 371

  Col. Ryan Russell

  (The Canadian)

  “I’ve found,” Ben said as the applause was dying down for Col. Webb, “that the most formidable person is the one who says they’re ‘just’ something. ‘I’m just a mom’ or ‘I’m just a country boy’ means that person has a lot more talent or experience than you initially would think. To the Limas, Lee Webb was ‘just’ a personnel clerk. To us, he is Col. Lee Webb. Respecting the ‘justs’ is one of the reasons we won.”

  “Our next colonel is Canadian. He has been granted New Washington citizenship and now lives here. Earlier, Col. Aylesworth described how New Washington’s relationship with Canada was so important and how Canada eventually became a Switzerland, a neutral country that traded with all sides. Col. Russell’s story illustrates this well and shows why Mao thought that a foreign country near an insurgency was so vital for supply and harboring fighters. Please welcome Col. Ryan Russell.”

  A man in his thirties stood up. He was thin and looked like he enjoyed the outdoors. He came to the rostrum and shook Ben’s hand.

  “Thank you,” he said with his mild Canadian accent. “It’s a pleasure to be honored by my new country.”

  “I’ll get right to it. I grew up and lived most of my life in Grand Forks, British Columbia, which is a few miles north of the U.S.—well—FUSA, I guess—border in Okanagon County, in eastern Washington right near where Col. Heintz operates. I had a furniture store there, the only one in my little town. I have to say that business was good. In the years leading up to the Collapse, Canada was doing just fine. This surprises a lot of people because Canada was always a socialist country.
We had nationalized health care before you did. We heavily restricted the ownership of guns. We had crushingly high taxes. We were ‘ahead’ of the U.S. with all of these,” he corrected himself, “Well, ahead of the FUSA in all of these.”

  “But Canadians are a practical people. We saw, years before the FUSA, that socialism wasn’t working. We chose a different way out of it, though. We started to loosen our laws on businesses. We cut our government spending and we actually had a balanced budget. In contrast, the FUSA doubled down on the spending and debt. I guess you could do that when you had the world's reserve currency. We didn’t have that luxury. Other countries didn’t buy Canadian dollars to settle international trades so the demand for our dollar wasn’t artificially high like it was with the U.S. dollar. We had to maintain our country’s balance sheet so our currency would be worth something. We had to think about this many years before the FUSA. So, in many ways, we were ahead of the FUSA on this topic, too.”

  “Another thing Canada did in the years leading up the Collapse was develop our natural resources. We were one of the world’s leading producers of oil and natural gas. We produced more oil near the Collapse than Saudi Arabia, given all the problems they had. And it was cheaper to ship it to the U.S. from right up north than to bring it half way across the earth. We had enormous amounts of timber and we developed our gold mines, too.”

  “We always scratched our heads up in Canada. Why was the U.S., with roughly the same natural resources as us, shutting down production of its natural resources with environmental regulations? Why was the U.S. importing so much oil when you could drill it yourselves, and keep the money? I came up with two answers, neither of which makes sense to me. I guess the votes of ‘green’ soccer moms were more important to your politicians than having a stable and inexpensive source of energy. And I also guess that when you can print the world’s reserve currency and constantly go into debt that it makes sense, in a way, to just print U.S. dollars and send them up to Canada for oil.”