The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  On the other hand, that’s where I met Mac. They operated on me as soon as they could, before shipping me into a hospital to recover, basically just pointing me to a bed. I didn’t mind. I’d several years worth of sleep to catch up on, even if I did feel like I’d gone ten rounds with the Corps fighting champion. I climbed into the bed, lay down, and sometime later was awoken by a voice.

  “Jesus Christ,” it said. “They’ve brought us the Doctor!”

  I opened one eye and glared at the speaker. All right, I did look a bit like David Tennant – who had been the Doctor for two years when I was wounded – but there was no call for something like that.

  “And who are you meant to be?” I demanded. Mac - Robert McNab, to give him his full name – was a short ugly sparkplug. I’d call him worse, were it not for the fact that he is proofreading this book. “Mike O’Neal?”

  He laughed and a beautiful friendship was formed. Mac was an Army Ranger who’d just been returned ahead of time from Afghanistan. Like me, he loved science-fiction and military history, while he introduced me to other kinds of fiction, including fantasy and alternate history. We spent many happy hours chatting away while they tried to nurse us back to health and, once we were allowed out of the hospital, we painted the town red together. I’d love to tell you some of the stories, but as I said, Mac’s proofreading this. I’ll leave everything we did to your imagination.

  As it happened, both of us were too badly wounded to return to combat at once, although Mac would and did recover fully. I don’t mean that we were walking around with a broken leg or some other such nonsense, but we were no longer at the peak of physical fitness. That wasn’t actually a problem and so we found ourselves being dragged into advisory roles. We had actually been in combat and had seen the elephant…and we were perfect to tell some civilians just what was wrong with their war-winning gadget. They didn’t have a fucking clue!

  No, I don’t mean that they were bad people; I mean that they didn’t have the slightest idea of what real combat entailed. There was a firm, headed by this really hot babe – and boy, do I mean hot – which had come up with the perfect camouflage suit. It might not have been the Predator’s perfect cloaking device, but a soldier could wear it and he would be invisible. He would also be dead. It worked fine in the lab, but in the field the temperature just kept rising. Back to the drawing board, we said, and we made it stick. I don’t know how we got away with it.

  One thing led to another, again, and we found ourselves working on all kinds of committees. The military has to be a planner. Every so often, the media will ‘discover’ that the military has a plan to invade…well, insert your favourite enemy country here. They missed the point, of course. The Pentagon is supposed to have a plan for anything that they might be called upon to do. There was no sign of hostile intent in coming up with the plans. As you might imagine, they missed that point as well. We worked on nuclear war plans – more on that later – disaster recovery plans and pretty much every kind of contingency that you could imagine. Would you believe, really, that they even had a plan for alien invasion? They did.

  Some of the scenarios were truly depressing. There were some for expected civil wars in 2000, and again in 2008. I hadn’t believed that either would have been likely, although there were moments before both elections when violence loomed its ugly head. I even studied a book covering a civil war against an evil President and found myself wondering, grimly, where I would stand if it really came down to blows. We had all kinds of interesting debates on the subject. I might even have convinced a few civilians that I wasn't an asshole…and nor were the rest of the Corps.

  But I didn’t know what to do with myself. Don’t misunderstand. I was enjoying some of what Mac and I were doing, but it wasn't what I’d signed up to do. What good is a Marine with a punctured lung? The RCT had moved on without me, most of my friends had been promoted or had left the Corps – or had been killed, in a handful of cases – and I had been left behind. I spent a year as an MP in Afghanistan, but that wasn't really me, somehow. It was Mac who suggested the solution, in the end, and who pulled strings on my behalf. The town of Ingalls needed a sheriff and I, a Marine, was an ideal choice. The people in smaller towns tend to be more patriotic – it may be because they know more soldiers, proportionally speaking – and besides, Mac’s family had lived there for generations. I wasn't sure, at first, but hell, it sounded like a change. I moved out, settled in, learned the ropes, met the people and ended up enjoying myself…

  And then came the war.

  Chapter Two

  A nuclear war could ruin your whole day.

  -Anon

  I wasn’t there at the time.

  That should be obvious. I wasn't the President of America, or the President of Russia, or one of the other world leaders during the years before the war. I wasn't making decisions on a strategic level. I might have been working on operational plans, but I never actually had to put one of them into use…and I certainly never ordered that any of them were to be used. I can only tell you what I saw at the time, from the outside, and what was pieced together later, sometimes much later. The general level of devastation caused by the Final War saw to that.

  This is the story as I understand it. There are already people who disagree with my basic outline, but you can look them up on your own. This is the story of the year the world decided to have a damn good try at committing suicide. Even now, years after the fact, I still get angry every time I think about it. Those fucking idiots in the White House, and the Kremlin, and Ten Downing Street, and every other governmental building in what we liked to call the First World, made pretty much every dumb mistake in the book. When nuclear weapons are involved…oh, I could stand them all up against the wall and pull the trigger, were it not that that would be too kind.

  Anyway…

  Let me start by pointing out something that should be obvious, so naturally no politician grasped the point. An American soldier at Point A is not at Point B. That should be fairly understandable. A man cannot be in two places at once. What does that mean, you might ask, for the war? Simple; a Brigade Combat Team – or whatever – that was in Iraq was not in America, or Poland, or Germany, or Japan, or Korea, or wherever else we might want to have a BCT. We actually saw this problem on a smaller scale in Iraq. The country was about the size of Texas and, at first, we just didn’t have the manpower to cover everywhere we needed to cover. It didn’t help that we didn’t realise how many places we had to cover, but I digress. The bottom line was that every American soldier who went to Iraq was an American soldier who could not be used elsewhere.

  Now, the United States, before the Final War, was the most powerful nation in the world. We had the most powerful geopolitical position in history. We had a navy that out-massed every other navy put together. We had an air force that could shoot all of our possible competitors out of the sky without breaking a sweat. We might not have had the largest army in the world – I think that that was the Chinese, although some of the other communist states had much larger percentages of their population in uniform, or in the reserves – but we had the most powerful army in the world. It took us twenty-one days to destroy Saddam’s regime. That is almost unprecedented in the history of modern warfare.

  What we weren't was all-powerful. Remember what I said about that American soldier? Use him in one place, can’t use him elsewhere? That held as true for us as it does for anyone else. We might have been powerful, but our concentration on Iraq meant that other powers could start to get on with their own plans, because they knew that we could do nothing to stop them, but political hot air. NATO was little more than a talking house and had been ever since the end of the Cold War. We had obligations that we couldn’t meet, obligations that we didn’t have the forces to meet, or the position. We were riding for a fall.

  And the Russians gave one to us. They used to rule half of Europe after the Second World War. They were in control of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and a dozen other
countries, some that had once had an independent existence, others formed out of the ruins of the so-called Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It might have been a Union, but it wasn't Soviet, Socialist or remotely Republican. It was a prison camp for half of Europe and a deadly menace to the rest. It fell apart, largely because communists make lousy planners – poor or even falsified feedback – and we declared victory. Why not? We’d won the Cold War without fighting.

  The Russians didn’t see it that way. They hit rock bottom during the Clinton years and started to climb back up again. They pushed through an entire series of reforms that started to rebuild their economy, and then they started to rebuild their military. They were still the only serious threat to America’s existence, but we didn’t take them seriously any longer. They might have produced a few impressive pieces of kit, but most of their technology might as well be used as scrap iron. In 2001, after 9/11, the Russians realised that they were in a stronger position than they had thought. We – the USA – needed them, and they didn’t need us. They grew more confident, started to pull their former satellites back into their orbit, and invaded Georgia. There’s a ton of crap written about that war, most of it completely missing the point, but the writing on the wall was that the Russians were back. They had kicked the shit out of the Georgians…and NATO had done nothing. NATO could do nothing. The Russians were back in Eastern Europe.

  We needed them, desperately, to assist us. Pakistan was falling into chaos. We needed supply lines through Russian-controlled areas to supply our forces in Afghanistan. We needed them to stop fucking about with Iran. The Russians had no problems with either of them – they regarded the Iranians with the same kind of attitude that the KKK has for the NAACP – but nothing comes for nothing in this world. They would give us what we wanted, for a price, and that price was effectively selling out Eastern Europe. Our new and inexperienced President effectively took the deal…and, in the absence of clear support from Washington, Western Europe followed suit.

  Look, I’m not defending them, but I understand their position. During the Cold War, Western Europe was terrified that there would be a nuclear war, fought in Europe. Victory would be meaningless if it meant the complete devastation of Europe, as far as they were concerned, and so they had the twin priorities of defending against the Soviets and restraining us. They couldn’t stand up to the USSR on their own, so they needed us, but they couldn’t survive a nuclear war either. Matters only got worse as Putin started exporting larger amounts of Russian energy to the West. All of a sudden, resistance to the Russians meant European citizens freezing in the cold. How much resistance do you think the Russians faced?

  Anyway…we had effectively won in Iraq, if only for certain values of ‘won’ and were pulling back, when the Russians made their move. They had always hated the presence of American BMD systems on Polish soil. They might not have been a threat to the vast Russian arsenal of ballistic missiles, but they resented them, just as we had back during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Russians had already taken over the Ukraine and Belarus – oh, they’d learned; there was far less direct rule from Moscow, but when Moscow said ‘bend over,’ they bent over and took it – and they had forces right on Poland’s border, glaring towards Warsaw. They told the Poles to evict us, or else. The Poles screamed to Washington, Brussels and the UN.

  The UN did fuck-all, of course. It had no army and, in any case, the Russians had a veto. Brussels dithered. The last thing the morons there wanted was something that would disturb them from leeching as much as they could from the European Union before it collapsed under its own weight. Washington didn’t blink. All of a sudden, the BMD system was a vital American interest again…which kind of makes you wonder why we hadn’t bothered with some other precautions, like stationing a division or two in Poland to protect it. They flew in an Airborne unit and started to deploy more American troops to Europe.

  Now, that was a fuck-up. Don’t get me wrong. The Airborne soldiers are as good as they get, but they don’t have much in the way of heavy equipment. They were a speed-bump, just as they had been a speed-bump in Saudi Arabia in 1991, and if they had been challenged, they would probably have been annihilated. Oh, they’d have taken a bite out of the Russians, but they would have been lost, for nothing. The President was twisting arms and using everything he could to get a large American force into Poland, but the EU was playing games. They thought that the President would posture a bit and then withdraw, or back down, and they didn’t want to be associated with it. Hell, I can’t blame them for that. I thought the same. The idiot in the White House genuinely believed that a small army was a good idea, but how could we carry out his foreign policy ideas without a bigger army? We were in the midst of a build-up when the balloon went up.

  The Russians launched a campaign of maskirovka. This is something the Russians are very good at and we’re very bad at, mainly because of our tradition of a free press. They launched a smear campaign to brand the Poles warmongers and set off a series of ‘incidents’ to convince the world that the Poles had started a war. The fighting got rapidly out of control, just as the Russians had intended, and the Poles were getting the worst of it. God knows what happened to the Airborne soldiers, but I wouldn’t put money on it being anything good. Europe convulsed as Russian commandos started to cause havoc, while anti-war protests appeared everywhere – no one traced all of the funding, but I’d bet good money that it came from Russia – and riots appeared on the streets. They knew that they were under attack, of course, but at the same time, no one was quite sure what was going on.

  Now, I'm going to digress here. We view other countries as being monolithic, governed by a single will, and those countries are either with us or against us. Iran? Bad country, bad people, bad government…enemy. Saudi Arabia? Good country, good government, good people…friend. Boy, did we get that one wrong or what? We’re wrong, of course. The lesson we should have drawn from Iraq regarding Europe was that if supporting the US is a vote-loser, politicians in Europe – or wherever – won’t support the US. Not out of malice, but out of simple political survival. They were politicians. What did you expect, really?

  Anyway, back to the war. Germany and France mobilised and suddenly they couldn’t do enough for us. NATO was starting to look like a working prospect again, with a mass army facing the Russians, who had overrun nearly half of Poland by that time. The two forces met in Western Poland, where Hitler had suffered his greatest defeat, and struggled for days before the Russian offensive was finally blunted. The Russians had played their cards and lost.

  Or so it seemed. It turned out that hardliners in the Russian Government were absolutely determined not to suck up any more humiliation. They’d been marginalized after the Cold War and were determined not to suffer that again. There was a brief gun-battle in the Kremlin and the hardliners were firmly in control. They deployed tactical nukes and, in four explosions, inflicted more damage on us – and the Europeans – than anyone had taken since the Korean War. We struck back, of course, launching our own tactical nukes…and the blasts started to move steadily westwards and eastwards. The Russians, by this point, were getting a little desperate. They’d hoped to force us to back down. We hadn’t blinked. Perhaps, in hindsight, we should have blinked, but we didn’t. They struck and we struck back. They deployed tactical nukes mounted on cruise missiles against our carriers, sinking several. We struck back by destroying their ports. They…

  They fired on Paris. I think they saw the French Government as the weak link in the NATO chain and they might have had a point. The French had too many problems with rioting youths – politically correct codeword for Muslim youths – and really didn’t want the war. The Russians hit Paris with a nuke. The French struck back by targeting Moscow and then…it was Katy bar the door. Everyone was shooting at everyone else. We were going into some of the ‘never even think about using’ war plans and targeting Russian industry, military bases deep within the former USSR and even their population. They were doing
the same to us, and Europe. Oh, and they did the same to China as well. The Russians had always bought into the ‘Yellow Peril’ concept, but more on that later. The President ordered mass retaliation and we launched almost everything we had towards the Russians…

  And we weren't the only ones. Israel had been watching the war closely and they knew that we were going to be down and out for at least a decade. Israel needed us to survive. The core problem of the entire Israeli-Palestinian dispute was that one side’s minimum demands were larger than the other side could reasonably accept. Israel was smaller than just about every US state and they couldn’t think about giving up territory without cast-iron guarantees. The Arabs, for domestic political reasons, couldn’t and wouldn’t give them such guarantees. Israel knew that we were going down and they opened fire. They destroyed almost every Middle Eastern city within range; Tehran, Baghdad, Cairo and others. The mass slaughter lasted barely a day, but by the time it finished, the population was a bare shadow of what it had been.

  And the Chinese were getting into the game. They saw the Russian launch and fired back themselves. That triggered off the Second and Final Korean War. North Korea launched against South Korea, Japan and, for good measure, Guam. The Japanese downed three out of the nine missiles the Koreans launched, but they still lost five cities to nuclear blasts. The sixth missile failed to detonate. Japan launched back as the country convulsed; it turned out that Japan had secretly been stockpiling nukes ever since President Clinton fled Somalia. It was very secret. I don’t recall hearing anything about it until after the war. China panicked – they’d taken hits themselves from the Russians – and fired on Japan and Taiwan. It turned out that the Taiwanese had nukes too…and they shot back. They were also incredibly lucky. There was a pair of Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers in the area and all, but one of the Chinese missiles was downed. (The Chinese had thrown their main force against Russia, which I always thought was a little pointless, but the Chinese hadn’t known that at the time.) North Korea’s mass offensive into the south made incredible headway during the first few days, and then stalled badly as the effect of the nukes started to take its toll. The entire country came apart.