by J. F. Krause
The American-Oceania division has troops in both North and South America as well as Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean. Again, depending on where they are trained, they may be called Marines, Rangers, Commandos or another designation. The Army may be smaller than the militias, but it is very highly trained and constantly getting better. Of course the Navy and the Air Force have highly trained men and women as well. Finally, not everyone who joins the professional Army, Navy, and Air Force decides to stay in the branch of their enlistment. Depending on their training, some of them transfer to other branches or even into the civilian wings of their services.
October 28
La Unueco and La Gloro were the transport ships to Tristan da Cunha. In addition to their transportees, they delivered a lot of supplies. Because so many of our Coalition citizens participate in local militias and the militias support the local police in most communities, we really have very little crime. The only crimes that warrant banishment to Tristan are very serious, and since we don’t have many crimes anyway, we aren’t likely to be sending too many people to Tristan in the future. But we will be sending supplies and that always requires two ships. I think we’d have sent two ships regardless. Two of the prisoners will fit right in having been convicted of sexual slavery. The orderly may be in demand since he knows something about medicine. Unfortunately, he also has a predilection for poisoning his patients. The other one, the serial torturer/murderer comes with some baggage, too. Baggage or not, he’s a dental hygienist and surely the exiles want to keep their teeth in good repair, so he may be fine in the long run. The bad guys on Tristan have always been racially mixed so I don’t think the African marauders will suffer too much because of racism among the population. No one’s done a study on how they’ve organized themselves, but anecdotally, it seems there was just as much diversity remaining on our last trip as was there before. I don’t see us having any interest in rehabilitation so we may not know for a long time what’s really going on down there. If they want supplies, they have to line up so we can count them. If they don’t line up, or we think they’re doing anything suspicious, we’ll just put the new exiles in a couple of small, leaky, plastic dinghies that can’t be used to get off the island. They’ll be put off the ship a short distance from the pier, and they can row themselves ashore. We don’t expect any trouble, but we have no doubt that the island inhabitants have crafted themselves primitive, but deadly weapons. I’m not embarrassed to say this, and I probably should be, but I am sort of sorry we didn’t hang them all when we caught them. Before The Sickness, I didn’t believe in capital punishment, but strangely, now that I’ve been meeting some of the victims, I’ve changed my mind. I figure more mature heads than mine are dealing with this so I just keep my mouth closed and let someone else decide. Regardless, it would break my heart if even one of our people is hurt delivering these monsters to Tristan to what could be a pretty nice life, if they don’t screw it up, of course.
As for Kevin, he comes home on the train from Stanford every Thursday evening. The kids are all over him when he gets off the short train. Dinah is especially happy to see him. She’s only three but she talks in complete sentences, now. She’s a bit smarter than most three year olds I remember. We think she was about twelve or thirteen months when Kevin found her. She was still in the crawling/walking stage at the time so we arbitrarily gave her a birthday a week after The Sickness. Dinah’s birthday and Jerry’s birthday both make our personal world a little better. They both follow the big date by a few days, and we always feel better celebrating life and the year ahead.
December 1
We celebrated Thanksgiving this year as we did last year, but unlike last year, it really was a fairly festive holiday. We were joined by Jovantha, Cynthia, and Todd who are in varying stages of their gap years, and Enrique who is on duty now in Tunis. Lydia and Marco were here along with Lupe and Rosie. Lydia is pregnant. Dr. Mary and Avery were here with little Taylor. Dr. Mary’s pregnant with their first child together, and her first child ever. Then there were Irma, Carl, Eric, and their new baby Rachel. Irma’s pregnant again. LaWanda and Max came. They announced they were engaged, and that they’re going to have a Baptist-Jewish wedding. That should be interesting. And LaWanda is not pregnant. Yet. Jane, Kyle, and Julie are living with us now. At least they are until Kevin finishes his Nurse Practioner course. And April and Elaine were here for Thanksgiving, too. They each brought a special friend as well. And to top it off, I managed to get Anna and Zach a short leave from the Air Force Academy. I can pretty much get what I want I’ve discovered. I have to remember to do that as little as possible, but sometimes the temptation is just too much. Janet and Rusty Holloway arrived last with baby Hiram and her two little sibling wards from Ventura County. She’s pregnant again, with a little girl, who will be called Rebecca after Rusty’s mother. Janet says they’ll stop after baby number four, maybe. She loves kids and he does, too, evidently. Anyway, he clearly loves her and that is all that matters. The children’s care system makes raising kids as easy as it’s ever been. Remarkably, she’s still teaching!
We had a Chinese/American Thanksgiving all made possible by the culinary skills of Jason and Mia Kryschtoff-Lin. They run our family’s favorite restaurant in town so when Jason offered to cater our Thanksgiving meal one night when Kevin, the kids, and I were all there, I didn’t even get to answer before the kids overwhelmed us all with their enthusiastic acceptance of his generosity. Knowing we were going to have a feast, and with Jason and Mia’s permission, we invited our new extended family. Since Mia is pregnant again, we all insisted that we help out, something the kids loved, and now I have a family full of future chefs. That is except for Chad. He’s really almost obsessed with piano. If I let him, I think he would rather play the piano instead of doing anything else. I’d think that the better he got, the less he’d want to practice, but that’s not how it works.
Everyone arrived about thirty minutes before dinner and we had a great chance to catch up just a bit before we sat down for dinner. Because I don’t like the idea of anyone being treated as a servant just because they know how to cook better than most of us, the kids and I had already set the table and got the house ready, at least the part that we were showing to guests. Kevin, Jane, Julie and Kyle took over from Jason as soon as he and Mia arrived with the bulk of the food. Just to make everything a little more authentically family style, everyone brought something of their own to share as well, just not the main dishes. I love pecan pie so the kids and I had baked two of them the day before. Even Chad tore himself away from the piano long enough to help. Jane and Kevin baked a couple of apple pies and Julie and Kyle put a huge salad together, with some supervision from Jane, but not as much as I would have expected. Jane believes in self-sufficiency, and it really shows in Julie and Kyle.
Dinner went off without a hitch in the great formal dining room. I tried to avoid it, but I was at one end of the table with my little family unit, and Lydia was at the other. Lydia is radiant and, somehow Marco was caught in the glow and seemed more relaxed than at any time since I met him almost two years ago.
Even though I was at the head of the table, no one trusts me with a knife so Kevin and Jason managed to get the Peking turkey carved up. (That’s what we called it so that’s what it was!) Jerry and Chanelle passed the plates around for the turkey; then Chad, Charlie, and LaWanda’s ward, Jason, were up and about for the first few minutes taking care of drinks and anything else needed by the guests; and finally, Julie, Kyle, and Eric took over from them as needed. After that Kevin and I sorted out the desserts. Our pies weren’t the only desserts, by the way. Finally, Chad, Jason, and Charlie served up the coffee, tea, and whatever else people wanted while the oldest five bussed plates and whatever to our rather large kitchen. We just left the table as it was when we were finished with dessert, and all of us went into the formal drawing room and sat down to exchange family news, one family at a time. I never thought I would hear mys
elf talking about family news again after all we’ve gone through. We have a lot to be thankful for while never forgetting what we’ve all lost to get here.
Several of our group have been away for quite some time, and we needed to catch up so I asked Lydia and Marco to start the conversation by catching us all up on the Coletti-Bacas.
Lydia started off with a big list of accomplishments and projects here in San Luis Obispo. I knew all of this stuff because of the monthly reports and because I have lunch with Lydia and Marco pretty frequently. I also sit in on occasional SLO City Council meetings. Lydia is a good leader for SLO and I’m so thankful I don’t have to do any of those things. I like to tell myself I’m a big picture type of person and that I don’t sweat the details, but it’s really true. Local community leadership is all about the details, and SLO is pretty lucky they were able to pawn me off on the Coalition since I’m sure they felt they owed me something, and they’d have kept electing me to be the SLO leader even though I wouldn’t have been the best person for the job. That isn’t to say I’m the best person for any job, but being the Coalition Executive Director makes it harder for me to screw up on a local level. As the Executive Director, the less I do the better, but that doesn’t work for a growing community like SLO.
And SLO is growing. As the really small communities close down, their people don’t necessarily go to the nearest bigger town. A number of them have headed to SLO as well as larger communities like Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, LA, NYC, and others, too. SLO is no longer the largest city in North America, but we’ve grown quite a bit. Now there are over 4,300 of us, not counting the newborns. Lydia has been instrumental in getting transportation links going to all the cities and towns around us. Thanks to this, most of the smaller towns in California have been able to maintain and even grow while many of the smaller communities around the country have been consolidating. Morro Bay, for instance, is only about half an hour’s drive from SLO, and they’ve been thriving thanks to the multiple daily bus trips to and from MB. For that matter, Kevin is able to take his nurse practitioner courses because of the train that runs up to Stanford twice a day. Of course, he stays up there during the week, but he could come home in a pinch, and that was the deal-maker for us.
As Lydia talked about her life being a leader, a wife, a mother, and an expectant mother I could hear her emotions almost careen from the extreme changes that have taken place in her life. We never replace our lost loved ones; we do, however, move forward. As she talked about her life, I found myself remembering my own ups and down. Would I go back? Absolutely. I would never choose to pay for this life I have now with the lives of all we lost, but am I happy with what I have now in life? Absolutely. Life is a Gordian knot, and sometimes the only solution is to cut through it and move on. The bell rang; the game’s over; start a new one. For most of us there is no connection to the old life we lived before, just this new one we have been given in its place.
Lydia regularly, at least every couple of months, meets with the leaders of the other North American communities. At first local communities tried to meet just with each other, but that didn’t solve problems very efficiently because a lot of problems need more resources to solve, so community leaders now meet continent-wide. They have gathered together as far north as Anchorage and as far south as Panama City. Also, twice a year, all the larger or more prominent communities have a global powwow. I have to go to all the different meetings, but not much happens most of the time. It’s just a big conference and everyone gets chummy, but, more importantly, we all get to see, personally, that there’s a big world out there that didn’t just roll over and die. We need to have relationships with each other, and the only way to do that is to get together. Fortunately, we have almost endless resources that need to be used in order to keep them going. Use it or lose it.
And Marco, who manages the ongoing training of our local militia has been very busy, too. Proportionately, our local SLO militia is really huge compared to reserve forces before The Sickness. Indianapolis scared us more than any of us let on. So, because we have time and also because money isn’t a consideration anymore, we can devote a lot of our community’s resources to our militia. Almost every healthy adult between the ages of our Gap returnees and our active seniors voluntarily participate in training sessions, which means we have almost three thousand militia members. Aside from providing for the protection of SLO, there is a long list of benefits attached to our weekly workouts. We all have close friends we’ve made from our time together, and we’re all healthier, most of us much healthier, than ever before. LaWanda may be responsible for our healthy diets, but we are all also much healthier from all the exercise we get. I’ve never been much of an athlete, but I’m much stronger than at any point in my life because of the militia. Of course, I don’t belong to any unit, but I’m a regular participant in Kevin’s unit. One of these days, I won’t be the Executive Director for the Coalition, and I’ll be just another citizen participating in my local militia. I should mention that we don’t spend nearly as much time watching television and playing video games as before. We still have them as options, but after losing so many of our loved ones, most of us, even the introverts like me, find a lot of comfort and satisfaction from interacting with friends and our newly acquired families.
All but one of our current local militia officers were originally trained by the US military before The Sickness. The one exception is from Mexico and was trained there. Of course, now all new officers are being trained in special military academies run by the Coalition. Militia participation with the American-Oceania Military contingent is totally under the control of the local communities who grant permission for their local militias to participate in any joint activities or missions. No one can deny an individual militia member the right to volunteer for any military project, and no one can compel a militia member to participate against their will. We have a standard rule in SLO that we will answer the call of the Military with volunteers whenever the request is made. The principal word is volunteer. After all, we couldn’t stop them from volunteering anyway, so why not accept the reality of our new circumstances. Not all the communities have the same attitude. All I can think is ‘good luck with that’. It’s surprising how many people still think we can just pass a law and people will fall in line as if they didn’t have a choice.
But back to Marco: He’s just as busy as Lydia. Every time Lydia has to go away for a meeting, so does Marco. The local militia commanders typically meet at the same times and places as their local leaders. Since I have to attend most of these meetings, too, and also similar ones for other regions of the world, lately, I’m gone for several days every month. Thank goodness for Jane and Irma. Jane looks after Kevin’s and my kids, and Irma looks after Lupe and Rosie for Lydia and Marco.
Marco has been a major force in getting and keeping SLO organized. He has several full time helpers who are responsible mostly for the ongoing training of our militia. Some of his full time helpers coordinate with the local police and fire departments and, of course, a few of them are assigned to look after me. Now that Jovantha and Enrique are off on their own adventures, Hector Corea is my primary bodyguard, along with some of his assistants. He’s been with me all along, but after I got shot it was decided that there would be a permanent presence in my vicinity. Now that I have to travel so much, he or someone from his crew is always nearby. They’re so low key, I don’t notice them anymore. Other people do, though, so I’m happy to have Hector’s team around.
It was fun hearing Lydia and Marco talk about the last year and we all listened to them closely. Several of our Thanksgiving family have been away almost the whole year and needed to catch up a bit.
Enrique is on leave from his current assignment with the European-African professional army. He’s really handsome in his dress uniform and I’m not the only one to notice. I can’t really go up to him and say ‘Hey, Enrique, aren’t you taller and even more handsome in that new uniform?’ I probably could, but I proba
bly shouldn’t. Regardless, something about Enrique has changed since he left for training with the French Legionnaires.
After he finished his Gap Year, Enrique got a transfer into the French Legionnaires and finished his initial training with them on Corsica. He anticipates spending a few more months in North Africa before seeking a transfer back to North America. He’s also taking coursework for his college degree. As usual, Enrique was modest and taciturn. That was all the group could get out of him. Because of my position, I know more. For instance, I know he was asked by the French movie people about a small part in a film, and he turned them down. I also know that he’s applied for Seal training when he finishes his stint in the Legionnaires. I’m pretty sure he’s got a plan, but only Enrique knows what it is.
Jovantha is completing her Gap Year soon and will be enrolling at Pasadena. The legendary Dr. Bernard Whitworth survived and somehow managed to round up a handful of surviving alumni to lay the groundwork for the revival of this awesome research and educational institution. Jovantha is brilliant, but because of the financial circumstances of her youth, she would most certainly not have been a candidate for admission to the old Cal Tech simply because, even though she was exceptionally smart, her opportunities to be exposed to a truly rich and deep field of study during high school just didn’t exist. One of the things that seems to be happening during the Gap Year is that participants are introduced to a wide variety of opportunities and encouraged to explore personal possibilities. While Pasadena didn’t know about Jovantha, Jovantha most certainly knew about them, and when she got the chance to actually meet Dr. Whitworth, she impressed him just as she had impressed everyone else. I think in that brief meeting, Jovantha changed all her plans and focused on her heart. In January, Jovantha will be one of the newest students entering Pasadena’s reconstituted Cal Tech.