-Philip Bobbitt
Personally, I blame Mac.
Ok, that’s not entirely fair. While I’d been doing exciting things like overseeing the Constitutional Convention – oh joy – and supervising exploration and scavenging missions, Mac had been sitting down with the other military professionals to hammer out the details of the new army. Yes, we had agreed fairly quickly on that the ‘common defence’ was a common concern, which was a surprising development, because politics before the war had rarely focused on internal defence. The generation that survived the war took a far more pragmatic approach to defence.
It helped that most of the Principle Towns had a high percentage of real military veterans. I’m not talking about desktop warriors, or high-grade Rear-Echelon Mother Fuckers who moved from flying a desk into a high-paying ‘consultancy’ for one corporation or another that produces war-related materials, but veterans from every war since Vietnam. Men who have been there and done that, seen the elephant and survived spitting in the bastards eye, real soldiers in every sense of the word. Oh, there were Marines, Navy, Air Force and other units – some of which had been heavily classified before the war – in the area, but most of them had some experience of being on the sharp end. They had experience in real war.
There’s a joke civilians are fond of telling; soldiers – particularly the stereotypical generals – are always preparing to fight the last war. In a sense, they’re entirely correct; where else could they learn from their mistakes, or their successes? Military officers are not blessed with the ability to see the future, although war games do offer a shadowy glance into the possible future of war, but they can learn from past wars. Its not uncommon for the wrong lessons to be drawn – the Gulf War, which drew heavily on Vietnam, was turned into a brief war that didn’t even manage to rebuild the status quo – but again, where else can they learn? The men – and some women – in the Principle Towns had learned from Iraq, Africa and even Central America. They had never expected to be fighting in America itself.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. Most of them, like me, had given some thought to how they would defend their towns if attacked, something that probably played a large role in their survival. It’s normally good to have a contingency plan, even if it doesn’t quite work out in practice. They had saved their towns and, now, were devoting their mental energies to keeping the roads open between the towns. There were bandits in them there hills…
(Actually, I haven’t told you about the Principle Towns yet. The Principle Towns were the largest – population wise – to survive the war and had the greatest chances of survival before we started to make contact with other towns. They were, naturally, very important politically and ended up sending the most representatives to the Convention to discuss the future. They all agreed that we needed an army and that, at least, we could organise without having to wait for the Convention to produce a vote.)
Anyway…what they’d agreed on had been a three-tier system, one that would allow them to split their interests in defending their own towns with working towards building a secure environment. We were, to some extent, involved in a counter-insurgency campaign and they’re never easy, although in this case it was pretty much a matter of simply outlasting the insurgents. The problem with any sort of counter-insurgency campaign is that people are loyal to their own towns, but not always loyal to the whole country. It had been a serious problem in Iraq. We would recruit and train up a group of volunteers and send them to another location, where they would make themselves unpopular, while their hometowns and villages were attacked by insurgents. The solution we found – finally – was to have people defending their own towns and the story of how we did it makes shameful reading. We should have pushed for it at once.
I’d built the barebones of the system in Ingalls and Dutch and the others had had similar ideas. The first-tier would be the regular soldiers, insofar as such a term could be used, volunteers and trained to as high a standard as possible. (There would be no laser tag-like training tools for us, or some of the other really neat toys that we’d used in our own training. We had to be a lot more careful.) They would spend their entire careers as soldiers, defending the entire United States – which was really a third of West Virginia, at least at the time – and be rotated through the different towns and villages. That wasn't just to get them used to the idea of defending the entire state, although that was a factor in our thinking, but also to let them get a feel for the terrain – the new terrain. Places like Clarksburg and, later, Charleston, no longer looked like their maps. Visiting one of those ruined cities was a depressing experience. I had to remove several people from the scavenging teams after they had breakdowns. The soldiers would be the front lines of our defence.
The second-tier would be the militia. They were basically composed of conscripts in the different towns, charged with defending the town against attack, if – when – it was attacked. They were all conscripts – and therefore couldn’t be pushed as hard as the volunteers – but we would train them as hard as possible…and, of course, they would have the advantage of their own ground. It wasn't going to be easy to be them, not when they would be splitting their time between defence duties and everything else – mainly farming – but I had faith in them. And again, they were more expendable than the vets. The vets were everywhere. There were only a handful of them we could take away permanently without something falling to pieces.
And, finally, there was everyone else. Rose had been insisting that the girls learned to fire guns and fight as well, and, of course, the veterans would have to take up arms in their own defence, those who weren't already part of the militia. If the defences were broken, it would be the task of every man – and woman – in the place to fight to the last to defend their town, or face whatever fate the raiders had in mind for them. We had seen enough harrowing examples from various places that hadn’t been so well-defended – everything from rape to cannibalism – that our final defenders were very well motivated indeed. I’ve always said that the best way to discourage a rapist is to ensure that all the women know how to carry and use a concealed weapon. Mr Darwin takes care of the rest.
So, we had the bare bones of a military. What else did we have? We had a small selection of vehicles, the best we could recover, for as long as the gasoline held out. There were plans to build a 1900s era oil refinery and some other possible sources of oil – and we had worked hard to conserve as much as we could – but we couldn’t get dependent on it. We had radios – they worked over short range, those that had survived the EMP – and we had some other equipment, but…well, let’s just say that the men of my old Company would have laughed at us. We weren't that much better equipped than the Iraqi insurgents had been, although we were far better trained and we didn’t face a powerful and well-equipped opposition.
(There were several teams working on trying to obtain an air force, of sorts, but that program hadn’t shown any results yet. I let it continue, just on the off chance they would succeed, even though the EMP had crippled every aircraft we had discovered, those that had survived the war. An air force would be very – very – useful indeed.)
What we faced was almost unprecedented. It had been five months since the war and most of the refugees had died out, or at least died down to a sustainable level. The cannibal gangs had wiped themselves out through disease – a human body is not the healthiest of meat sources – and starvation. The handful of remaining survivors had either found their way to us, or hidden out in the ruins, waiting for a chance to prey on the other survivors. Some of them were really sick people who had long since lost any sense of right or wrong. We found a gang who had kept a girl alive – after eating her limbs – for sexual use. The poor bitch died just after we rescued her. There was nothing we could do for her. Others were just desperate to survive, whatever the cost…
And we had to deal with it. We needed those roads clear and the surrounding area secure. We had to expand our cultivated land as much as possible an
d that meant providing security. It didn’t help that sometimes we lost people and never even realised they were missing until much later, although that was sometimes the only clue about the existence of a cannibal gang. The stupid ones had managed to kill themselves off or get killed quickly. The smart ones remained an ever-present danger.
We had another mission, of course, but I’ll get to that in a second.
Every one of the Principle Towns was obliged to provide a number of soldiers. I had objected to that at the time – conscripts do not, in my view, make good soldiers – but we were lucky enough to have enough volunteers. Ingalls provided two hundred soldiers for the regular army, as everyone was calling it by the end of the day. I wanted Marines, others wanted everything from Rangers to Minutemen, but in the end we compromised on calling it the Regular Army. A good compromise, as they say, leaves everyone mad. I ended up leading one of the units personally while overseeing the training, wearing at least three hats at the same time, but Mac managed to wrangle himself a position where he could take some of the weight off my shoulders. He did offer to do everything, but the commanding officer has to know what is going on…
Hell, in my rather less than humble opinion, there are three types of commanding officers. There are the idiots who want a brigade command so that they can get their ticket punched on their climb to higher officer and pay, there are commanding officers who have risen to levels above their competence – a depressingly regular occurrence – and don’t have the slightest idea of what they are doing, and the ones who just have the knack for being a commanding officer. I wasn't sure that I wasn't one of the second type, but I learned, and I suffered in the field besides them, and…well, no one rolled a grenade into my tent at night. The trick to being a good CO is to delegate as much as possible to the Sergeants so you don’t get overwhelmed by the petty details. It’s not an easy trick, but as I said, I learned. It helped that there were, in some ways, less for me to do. The old Marine Corps, or the Regular Army, no longer existed.
And so we started training.
I got my first surprise when Stalker’s Stalkers assembled in the training area. It had used to be a college or university in Clarksburg, which had been designated neutral ground. (I didn’t pick the name, by the way. That was Mac’s fault. I don’t know if he was teasing me or sucking up, but I suspect the former. All of the designated Companies ended up being named after their Colonels, although I ended up forbidding some of the more outrageous names. Richard’s Dicks was probably a bad idea from the start.) Most of them I recognised, of course, but one of them was a surprise. It had been almost a month since I’d last seen Roshanda and…well, let’s just say that her ordeal had left her sterile.
She’d not had an easy few weeks after we rescued her. No one blamed her for her ordeal, of course, but we couldn’t afford a rape counsellor or any of the support that would normally be offered to a victim after such a horrific experience. Rose had set up a few sessions with some of the other victims, but Roshanda had declined to attend them, although she’d kept the AK-47 we’d recovered and insisted on keeping it with her at all times. People tended to walk nervously around her, suspecting that she was going to blow at any moment, but I hadn’t expected her to join the army. God knows we could use her, if she was back to normal, but…well, none of us knew what normal was for her. She wasn't a breeder, so technically she was expendable, but…
I just don’t like the idea of women in combat, not really.
I pushed the matter aside and addressed the Company. “You have all volunteered to be turned into real soldiers,” I announced, as grandly as I could. I wanted – needed – to impress them. It was a shame that we couldn’t put them through a full Marine Corps-style Boot Camp, but we’d make do with what we had. “This will not be easy. You will end up hating all of us and cursing us until your first time in combat, whereupon you will realise just why we put you through hell. Good luck.”
The Sergeants took control and started to run through everything from basic marching in formation to weapons safety. The earlier training had given them all the basic skills – those who hadn’t already had it – but now we made it more formalised. The fifty men – well, forty-nine men and one women – who made up the Company went through everything willingly, although I heard a few grumbles I wasn't meant to hear. Perversely, I was rather reassured to hear them. We were training real soldiers, not helpless sheep…and hell, they saw us suffering right alongside them. Mac watched me carefully – I think he was worried about my health – but I refused to slow down. I wasn't that old, damn it!
“They’re not a bad bunch,” he muttered, during a break. “The last few months taught them a lot and they don’t have much to unlearn. That girl isn’t doing badly at all.”
I nodded. The problem with women in combat is that most women can’t keep up with the men, as I believe I have mentioned before. I had little objection to having a woman in my forces who could keep up with the men, but I objected strongly to lowering the standards so that women could compete on a ‘fair’ basis. It wasn't good for unit cohesion to have men doing fifty press-ups (or whatever) while the women did forty. Resentment and distrust (not personally, but of their combat abilities) could tear a unit apart, or lead to lower standards for training and experience. I believe – and I could be wrong – that that was exactly what had happened to the 507th Maintenance Company, whose weapons jammed when they were attacked. If Roshanda could keep up with the rest of us, or even outpoint them, well…more power to her.
“Give me a week or so and they’ll be ready for action,” Mac continued. “I believe that you wanted us to start heavy patrolling in the direction of Charleston, right?”
I nodded. I didn’t have anything I could put my finger on, yet, but I was getting an odd vibe from the south. There were just fewer refugees reaching our territory and some of them had hinted at someone else organising the country into something new, rumours repeated – time and time again – as fact. I’d actually prevailed on the Mayor to send a small recon party down to the south, but so far they hadn’t reported back. I didn’t like some of the implications, although anything could have happened to them.
“I think we should start probing there,” I agreed. There were definitely at least two bandit gangs operating in the area and they were potentially a major problem. The survivors were the ones who knew to find the root cellars or the mason jars or other survival stocks. Some of them would quite happily join us. Others would have to be burned out before they came hunting for new sources of food and women. “A week, you said?”
“Yep,” Mac said. “They’re good kids, Ed.”
I didn’t dispute that, but it still bothered me. Marine Basic Training is twelve weeks at Boot Camp. Yeah, we had given the kids training when we’d conscripted them, but it hadn’t been intended to turn them into a real deployable army. One week of training wasn’t really long enough to turn them into real soldiers, was it? They’d be learning on the job and death, as they say, keeps his pupils back.
The week went by slowly. I stayed with the kids as often as I could, going through the same training with them – and getting chewed out by the sergeants – and getting back into shape myself. I hadn’t realised how badly I’d gotten out of shape until going through training again. It might have been easier than my Boot Camp, but it was still a dry reminder that I wasn't as young as I once was. Mac urged me to stay back, but I had to push myself…
And then came the call for war.
As it turned out, it was only a preliminary skirmish.
Chapter Twenty-One
Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war.
-John McCain
There wasn't much to say about St. Marys, West Virginia, except that it should have survived the war intact. It had a starting population of around two thousand people, including a fair number of military veterans, and a position that could be defended reasonably easily. It might not have made Principle Town status, insofar as any such st
atus actually existed, but it should have survived as we had. Instead, it fell into a nightmare.
According to the handful of refugees we discovered trying to find help, St. Marys had been attacked only a day after the Final War by a heavily-armed band. Not, I should add, another group of gang-bangers, or villains. This band was a group of city-dwellers from Parkersburg who wanted – needed – a place to keep their families safe. Parkersburg might not have been hit during the war, but it was in a mess all the same…and those men could read the writing on the wall. They grouped together, took whatever transportation they needed, and drove out to St. Marys, whereupon they occupied the town and took over. The Mayor of St. Marys had been rather ineffectual in the crisis. By the time they realised that they needed defences against refugees, it was too late. The newcomers had invaded and occupied the town.
As I heard later, the newcomers had all belonged to a part-time survival militia organisation. I never took such groups very seriously. They spent time on various shooting ranges, learning how to use weapons for the inevitable war against the Federal Government (or whoever) and generally did nothing else, but talk. They sometimes collected illegal weapons and stroked them as if they were doing something naughty. The war, however, had forced them to react to a crisis for the first time in their lives and…well, they’d felt that they had no choice, but to take over a town and run it for themselves.
The Living Will Envy The Dead Page 19