The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “In Vietnam, in Iraq, in Iran and Afghanistan, ZOG had every gadget and deadly toy human ingenuity could devise, computerized and covered with bright shiny lights. But they never found a way to beat the little barefoot brown man, dressed in rags and armed with an AK-47 and a couple of magazines of ammo, and a heart that would never surrender. The human heart and the human spirit can beat their machines, gentlemen. The human heart and the human spirit can beat their money. The human heart can beat their lying media. Our heart and our spirit can defeat their cruelty and their treachery and their lies, but only if we are fortified with strength and pride and faith in the justice of our cause. Our Volunteers must be like the soldiers of Oliver Cromwell, who said he wanted simple men of labor and the land, who know why they fight, and love what they know. ZOG could never beat the barefoot brown man with his AK-47. Neither will they be able to beat the white man of the Northwest in his pickup truck, his blue jeans and his baseball cap, with a pistol stuck in his belt and a backpack full of Semtex, on the rainy streets of Seattle or out in the backwoods of Idaho.”

  “That’s if we can find the kind of political soldiers necessary for that kind of warfare,” Hatfield reminded them. “The guys with the cool head and the iron nerve and the ice water in their veins, who can pull a trigger or thumb a radio detonator and not worry about it afterwards. The guys who can go the distance and do this for year after long bloody year. The guys with a bottomless reserve of sheer guts.”

  “You got it,” agreed Morehouse with a nod. “I can outline for you a structure for a revolutionary armed force that will work a treat against the enemy we will be facing. I can give you a strategy that will win us our own nation, and I can describe to you the tactics that will keep us alive and free and fighting while putting the enemy and his minions six feet under every time. But what I cannot do is to make you brave. I cannot turn mere white males into white men once again, men that our ancestors would have recognized. That we must somehow do for ourselves, by finding within ourselves that last dying spark of pride and honor and courage that has always distinguished us for thousands of years. It’s still there, comrades, and every man and woman of us who wants to change the world must search for it in their hearts and their souls. They must find it and feed it, blow on it, nurture it until it bursts into flame again.”

  “You think these bastards will give in no matter how many people we kill?” asked Washburn. “Iraq and Afghanistan are very far away, something people read about over their morning coffee or watch on CNN. We will be striking at the very core of their power, right here on what they consider their home turf. Can they psychologically bring themselves to admit defeat even if we beat them?”

  “This is another reason why we are not being so foolish as to try this in all 50 states. What we’re going to be doing, Charlie, is we’re going to be fighting a classical colonial war,” Morehouse told him. “There are rules for fighting a successful colonial war, and they have come into play dozens of times over the last century, from Ireland to Africa. We’re not trying to take their whole loaf from ZOG. Of course, they’d resist that to the death. Such a guerrilla war across all of America would last for generations, and anything we could salvage after such a conflict probably wouldn’t be worth living in anyway. Nor could we win it. For one thing, we’d have to slaughter over one hundred million non-whites, or drive them back south of the Rio Grande in the most massive refugee wave ever seen, and that simply isn’t feasible with what we have or what we are likely to get. If the only alternative to ongoing insurgency is the complete destruction of their own empire, ZOG will simply absorb whatever we dish out and hang on to the wreckage like drowning rats. A country as huge as the whole United States of America could absorb such a bloodletting as I have described, as traumatic as it would be, if it was scattered all over from Florida to Maine to San Francisco and everywhere in between. After all, more people than that are killed every day in traffic accidents. The ruling élite would never agree to hand over power to us on a nationwide basis and thus commit personal and political suicide. That’s just not going to happen. The patient isn’t going to disembowel himself to cure a bellyache, or even to remove a tumor. But, if what we do is to gangrene only one leg below the knee, so to speak, and if the patient knows he can amputate that part of the diseased limb and still walk on crutches and function—well, once it gets to hurting enough, he might be persuaded to amputate.

  “With our thousand or so people—and by the way, there will almost certainly be more than that as our insurgency grows—anyway, what we can do is to make these three states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho and maybe parts of Montana and northern California completely ungovernable. We can stop the United States from reaping any profit or income from this territory, and we can turn it into one gigantic black hole sucking in men, resources, time, effort, and above all money. Gentlemen, there is a truth to fighting and winning a colonial war that I want all of you to burn into your brains, because it is the key to our victory. In a colonial war, the generals never surrender! The accountants surrender! What we have to do is to confront the United States with a situation where as bad and as humiliating as it will be to let the Northwest go and let white people have their own country, the continuation of the guerrilla war is no longer an option for them. We can win this, comrades,” concluded Morehouse decisively. “We can beat the God Almighty United States of America, kick their stinking rotten asses right out of here, and take this land for ourselves and our children. But only if we have the stomach for it.”

  There was a long moment of silence. “Let’s get started, then,” said Hatfield.

  “Right,” said Morehouse, filling his pipe again. “Okay, you’ve already got the basics here. You’ve got three men. I always say men out of force of habit, but bear in mind that the right woman can do any of these jobs I’m going to describe to you just as well. In this room you’ve already got your first Trouble Trio.”

  “Say what?” asked Charlie.

  “The basic building block of the NVA company,” said Morehouse. “A three-man team. When we were planning all this out, studying and analyzing how previous successful revolutionary movements worked in Western political and social environments similar to ours, we came up with a kind of hybrid anatomy combining the IRA and the Cosa Nostra, two highly successful subversive outfits who to this day have never been completely repressed by their governments, despite over a century of trying. It’s simple, flexible, and workable. Even if the cell never grows beyond the first three guys, you’ve still got a small team who can do damage out of all proportion to their numbers, presuming they’ve got some stiffening in their spines. You’d be amazed how much hell three men can raise in a society this complex, this racially volatile and unstable. For a while some of us called this three-man building block a troika, but that sounds a bit foreign, so we ended up christening this formation unit a Trouble Trio. I’ll go ahead and give you the theory now, but I should mention that already some mutations in actual practice are starting to appear as we are forced to work out the kinks under fire, quite literally in some cases.”

  “Go ahead,” Hatfield urged him.

  Morehouse lit his pipe again. “You start with three people as I said, all of whom must have the requisite qualities of courage, resourcefulness, loyalty, and fanatic dedication. That’s the hard part, finding the right men and women for this. Each of these threes will be the nucleus of a company. I know it sounds ridiculous to call three people a company, but there will be more of you, and what we want is a structure that we can maintain right up until the end, when we will make the transformation from a guerrilla insurgency to become a proper national army. During our initial underground phase, the NVA is not an ordinary army where units are supposed to have some kind of set strength or function. We are as fluid as a lava lamp, always changing shape and bobbing around. Each company needs to be free floating, capable of conducting operations indefinitely on its own, even if it is totally cut off from the rest of the movement, and eventua
lly regenerating itself and growing, adding more cells, like an amoeba.

  “Each company will be part of a larger unit called a brigade,” Mr. Chips continued. “The next unit up from a company in most armies is actually the battalion, but we’re not going to create any of those until necessary and until we’ve got the bodies. The brigade will be the main operational combat unit of the Northwest Volunteer Army, responsible for taking on ZOG within a roughly defined operational area, and it will be made up of as many companies as needed. We diddled with the idea of creating separate commands for each state, Washington and Oregon, Idaho and Montana, but we decided to keep it simple. We need an army of fighting political soldiers, not layers of paramilitary bureaucrats. Each brigade will report to and be directed by the Army Council in the person of one or more political officers.”

  “So the political officer actually commands the brigade?” asked Charlie.

  “No. He’s strictly a liaison who acts as a communications conduit between the brigade commander and the central organization, although there may be situations where he has to use his interpretation of Army Council policy and strategy and pull a kind of rank on a brigade commander. That situation hasn’t arisen yet, and I hope it seldom does. That’s still kind of a gray area. The brigade is actually commanded by a brigade commandant, but don’t worry about that now. What concerns you is the company, the basic fighting unit. The company itself will eventually be subdivided into flexible squads, or teams, or crews of three to six men each, as needed. An NVA combat team with their weapons should always be able to fit into one vehicle at a pinch, although we’re finding that it’s a damned good idea to always take two cars on an operation. Getting back to the Trouble Trio, one of them will become the company commander. He’s responsible for everything that goes on in the company, and he leads his men in battle. He handles target selection, he initiates combat operations, and he keeps the company functioning and fighting. The company commander needs to be the most experienced and basically the most badass dude in the outfit, but he also needs to have demonstrated leadership capacity. In your case, I would suggest Zack Hatfield for this position.”

  “So would I,” said Ekstrom.

  “Absolutely,” said Charlie.

  “Congratulations, Lieutenant Hatfield,” said Morehouse.

  “Boy, that was quick,” said Zack. “It took me three years in the American army just to make E-5.”

  “Yeah, well, we don’t have affirmative action in the NVA,” said Morehouse with a grin. “White boys are encouraged to apply. By the by, sorry to tell you two guys that at the moment only a company commander holds an actual NVA rank. We don’t have any sergeants or warrant officers or field marshals as yet. Later on when there are more Indians, maybe we can have a few more chiefs, but for the time being there’s only one big fish in each of our tiny little ponds. That’s all you need right now. This is a real war we’re fighting, not an Italian opera.”

  “Mmm, more democratic like that anyway,” said Charlie. “Good psychology. That way you don’t have guys getting jealous cause I’m a sergeant major and they’re only lance corporals, or whatever.”

  “That, too,” agreed Morehouse. “The first NVA companies will only be a small handful of men anyway, maybe a dozen at most, and you only really need one recognized honcho. But Zack, you need to set up a chain of command and appoint one of these guys to deputize for you in your absence, and to take over if you buy the farm. Let us know which one. You’ll also need to select men as team leaders, as your company expands.”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” said Hatfield.

  “Fine,” said Morehouse amicably. “Anyway, a second member of each Trouble Trio must become company quartermaster. This is a vital job. The quartermaster is responsible for the acquisition, maintenance, and security of all physical plant, including weapons and ammunition, explosives if any, every kind of supplies from food to medical, as great a number of motor vehicles of all kinds as you can get access to, safe premises for housing and training, and generally everything material. He also holds the company’s bankroll of cash, since money is just as much a war material as ammunition.”

  “Len, you already run a hardware store,” said Zack. “You’re used to keeping track of inventory and dealing with a cash flow, and you know guns better than any man in the county. I’d like you to take quartermaster.”

  “Fine,” said Ekstrom with a nod.

  “That leaves me,” said Charlie Washburn.

  “Looks like you’re executive officer, by default,” Morehouse told him. “The XO has two primary duties, intelligence and planning. Intelligence is vital. Good intelligence keeps you alive and makes the enemy dead. Bad intelligence does the opposite. Planning means scouting out ambush sites, figuring out what manpower and equipment and vehicles you’ll need, anticipating contingencies, setting up operations from beginning to end. Zack can teach you a lot of what you need to know based on his military experience.”

  “Got it,” said Charlie. “I’m a state forestry employee and I have an official truck and uniform and ID, so I can be seen pretty much anywhere and have a good reason for being there that won’t cause comment.”

  “That’s ideal,” said Morehouse with a nod. “Now, one of the first things you will need to do is recruit more Volunteers. Each one of you should be working prospects, assessing their character and their ability, trying to figure out first off if they can do what must be done, and secondly if they will do it. This will be the most potentially dangerous of all the things you do. Make a mistake and try to bring in the wrong man, and you’ve compromised the whole company. Make a bigger mistake and actually bring the wrong man in, and you will either die or spend the rest of your lives being sodomized by niggers in the prison shower. There is no worse error a revolutionary organization can make than to bring the wrong individual or the wrong kind of individual on board. This is a whole separate topic we will have to get into later in some detail, and we are starting to establish the necessary procedures to screen people, so you won’t be flying totally blind, but I can’t overemphasize the seriousness of recruiting. We have to have more Volunteers, but they must have the right stuff right from the start. It’s going to be a bitch. By the way,” he added casually, “Do any of you drink? Never mind. From now on, you don’t. We have something called General Order Number Ten that forbids any Northwest Volunteer from consuming alcoholic beverages or using drugs of any kind. Period. End of story. Do I need to explain to you why this must be?”

  “I think it’s obvious that you can’t stage a revolution with drunks,” said Ekstrom.

  “Hell, I’m too damned overweight anyway,” said Charlie. “Yeah, I suppose like a lot of white men, I’ve crawled into a beer can sometimes to try and kill the pain. Can’t you tell by looking at me? But now I know there’s hope, I’d have to be a real creep to choose my six-pack over the future of my race. I guess I just won’t stop off at the mini-mart on the way home tonight. Or any other night, until this is over. It’s a small price to pay for being a part of history.”

  “I saw too many things go bad in Iraq because of drunks and dopers, of all ranks and races,” said Hatfield. “I don’t want to be out on some rainy street at night, and the man I’m depending on for my life and the success of the mission shows up staggering drunk or he’s not where he’s supposed to be because he snuck off to some damned bar. Not to mention the fact that booze loosens lips and sinks ships.”

  “Good,” said Morehouse with an approving nod.

  “Okay, so once we get a few more guys in, assuming one of them doesn’t rat us out and we don’t all end up in prison before we fire a shot, what then?” asked Hatfield.

  “The Holy Grail you seek, gentlemen, is what’s called OR. Operational readiness,” said Morehouse. “That means you’ve gotten all your ducks in a row, acquired enough guns and recruited men willing to pull triggers, gotten a small fleet of vehicles and safe houses and supplies and some money together, and you’re ready to start s
hooting. But then you don’t just go out on the street and start blasting at every passing black or Mexican face you see.”

  “Darn!” said Washburn.

  “You have to condition yourselves always to keep your eyes on the prize,” Morehouse urged them. “Remember that you are part of an army that is fighting a colonial war for independence. You are trying to achieve a political objective, not just rack up a black and beaner body count. Any damned thug can shoot people. We are trying to free people, ours. Eventually the Army Council will appoint political officers to the smaller NVA active service units whose function will be to make sure that every action a unit takes in some way serves the larger purpose and fits into the big picture.”

  “I assume there will be other NVA companies around,” said Hatfield.

  “Yes,” replied Morehouse with a nod. “Once you guys are OR, by the way, you will officially come on strength as D Company of the First Portland Brigade, Northwest Volunteer Army. We’re shaping up two brigades in every major urban area, Seattle and Portland and Spokane and Boise. Two completely separate structures acting independently, suspenders and belt, so if the feds break one and roll it up, then the other one can keep on fighting. Eventually there may be more than two. We’ll have to see how all this plays out. Your brigade commandant is Tommy Coyle. I can go ahead and mention his name since he’s already on the Ten Most Wanted List after Coeur d’Alene. I’ll be in touch with you in a few days, Zack, and we’ll set up a meeting. I think you two will be simpatico. Tommy did a couple of tours in Iraq like you, with the Rangers. Each of you will need to appoint one man from your group to act as liaison with the other, so that if either you or Tommy go down, we won’t lose contact. If that ever should happen, by the by, you also know Shane and Rooney, and if either of them can find you, you can take anything they say as coming from me. Communications is a whole ’nother bag we’ll have to sort out, since we’ll be using everything from the internet to cell phones to coded personal ads in supermarket tabloids. Make no mistake—this is going to be a complex gig and you’re going to have to be able to keep all sorts of names and numbers and information in your head without writing anything down.”