So there I was, no shit . . .
January we got our warning on H5N1. February, late, we got our innoculations. By then there were more reports around and Patient Zero in Chicago. March was when the Plague hit in earnest in the States.
We were sitting in Fars Province as things went from bad to worse in Iran. It didn't take the Plague hitting (it hadn't, really, yet) to screw things up in Iran. All it took was Iranians.
Look, Iranians are, by and large, good people. I'm not talking about the jihadi assholes, obviously. I'm talking about your regular low to middle class Iranian. They like to talk, they like to share green tea. They're even reasonably hard workers (unlike the fucking Arabs).
But they're also massively screwed up. There's a bunch of reasons, but I can easily detail two.
One: They're arrogant as fuck. Look, ever seen a movie from pre-Plague called The 300? Bunch of stupid Greeks hold a pass against the whole Persian army. (That would be Iranian, by the way.) Three hundred (actually, more like a thousand with battle squires and allies) against two hundred thousand. Go with the thousand number; they're still outnumbered two hundred to one.
Worse, back then Persia (Iran) was The big superpower. Persian emperors spotted a place they liked, invaded and took it over. They were too large and powerful not to be able to take anything they wanted.
Back then, Persia was The Thing.
(Of course, not too long later historically they were subjects of the Greeks, but I'm not writing a book about the ascent of democracy and why shock infantry always wins over alternatives.)
Iran, even in pre-Plague days, was a third class power.
First Class powers were ones that if they got really busy were going to trash the shit out of any non-First Class opponents. Basically, just pre-Plague, that came down to the U.S. and China. The U.S. because we had, hands down, the best military in the world and we were "the world's economic turbine." China because it was just so fucking big and so was its army. They might not have been able to trash us, (see Greeks vs. Persians; size does not always matter) but if they got it into their heads to invade, say, Cambodia, Cambodia might as well roll. And they were pretty powerful economically as well.
Second class were places like Japan and Western Europe. They had large economies, they were world players and they had small but functional militaries. (Some very good. Australia comes to mind. Then there's the French. It varied.) Throw "academia" and "artists" into this if you wish. Military and economic were usually followed by more or less equal values of the other.
Third class were countries that had some economic power (mostly oil), some semblance of a real economy and were regional powerhouses. They were often big frogs in very little ponds. Brazil, South Africa and Iran all come to mind. Russia might have been second class, might have been third. Not worth debate.
The problem is, Iranians just could not get over the fact that they used to be the big frog in any pond. They still thought they were. And because of that, they thought they knew everything. How could some upstart from a country only two hundred years old know how to do something better than they did?
Well, maybe because the world's changed and we're not still doing it the way that Xerxes wanted it done.
The second problem with Iranians might be an effect of Islam (it's certainly consistent in most Islamic countries) or it might have been something that was a long-term meme. Don't know. Read well researched arguments for both. Anyway, the second problem was they were fatalists.
Look, anybody who has ever been in heavy fire and survived mentally is somewhat fatalistic. "I'm alive so far but if there's a bullet with my name on it, oh, well . . ."
But Persians raise this to high art. The term is "In'sh'allah." "It is as Allah wills."
Bus about to fall off a road in the mountains? "It is as Allah Wills." Circuit board not precisely put in place. "It will work if Allah wills." Foundation for a building made out of quicksand? "It will stay up if Allah wills." In'sh'Allah.
Need a group of workers at a certain place at a certain time? "They will be here if Allah Wills."
For a Midwestern farm boy and military officer, dealing with In'sh'Allah was less than pleasant.
Kipling wrote about it once, talking about people who are not like that:
They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not preach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they damn-well choose.
Ayrabs and Iranians are not the sons of Martha.
But the point is, when the first news of the Plague hit, the entire country went into a spasm. Trust? Familial trust society. If you're not family, you're nobody. You'd better have a hard power control to get anything done.
Familial groups started shifting and contacts started dropping off the screen. Getting anything done quickly became flat impossible. Except getting shot at and bombed which continued right up to the point of Plague hitting Iran in earnest and then just got more random.
Meantime, things were going to hell in a handbasket back home and we were stuck in the ass end of nowhere attempting "reconstruction duties" while the world was deconstructing around us.
March 5th I got the e-mail I'd been dreading. It was from Bob Bates, Dad's senior manager and vice president of the corporation. Dad had contracted H5N1.
Mom died of ovarian cancer when I was ten. I didn't have any brothers or sisters. (Turns out Mom's uterus was pretty screwed up to start with.) Dad was all I had left.
Growing up with Dad had never been real easy. Don't get me wrong, if he backhanded me or gave me a spanking I deserved it. But while "negative conditioning" was high on his list, "positive conditioning" was less so. The flip side is, when he gave praise it was because you deserved it. That made the slightest hint that you'd sort of maybe not screwed up entirely worth gold. I learned a lot about leadership from my dad.
But Midwestern farmers, despite this little missive which is much bigger than I'd intended, don't talk a lot. They spend so much time in their own company, they just learn to absorb the silence. Slowly over the years they tend to become more and more like a Minnesota winter, cold, silent and powerful.
That left me wondering what to say to a man with whom I'd exchanged barely ten words in the same number of years and yet whom I loved beyond measure.
"Get well soon. I love you."?
Oh, GOD no.
"I need you in my life so you'd better pull through."?
If he did live he'd kick my ass! (And despite being in his fifties he could probably do it.)
"Dear Bob:
"Tell Dad that if he doesn't pull through he's a wuss."
Yep, those were the last words from me my dad ever got.
I'm morally certain he understood the love buried deep within them.
The rest of the e-mail from Bob, and it was long, was about the farming situation. Distribution was getting bad. They had laid in rye for the planting season but he wasn't sure when they could get it in the ground. Even rye needs a certain amount of soil temp to sprout and soil temperatures weren't even beginning to flicker upwards. By early March you usually saw some thawing and it just wasn't happening. He also wasn't sure about getting a herbicide and fertilizer delivery. They might have to do some "organic" stuff but that required hands. Which were not available.
They'd also gotten word that the big combines might not be available for harvest. They could till with the cultivators on the farms if they could get the bodies but those were scarce. They'd had to close one of the milk farms because they didn't have the four guys to run the milking machine.
Hell in a handbasket.
March 21st was the day I got word my father was gone. The Iranian New Year. Normally a time of high holiday in Iran with lots of celebrations going back before Persia tried to knock off Greece. Not much celebrating going on in 2019, though. The Plague was starting to spread and people were dying like flies.
Also the spring solstice. There wasn't much spring in the air in Fars province. It was a high plateau more or less surrounded by mountains, and the major farming area of Iran. It generally had the weather of Virginia in terms of temperatures.
This year it was more like Minnesota in the spring. A normal spring.
The funny thing was, I knew there was a "cooling trend" going on. The Army knew there was a cooling trend going on.
Couldn't tell it by the news. We were still getting CNN and between the reporting on the Plague they had occasional weather reports. I stopped counting the number of references to "global warming" I got after fifteen in two days. I just quit listening after the damned meteorologist said:
"We're having a cold and wet spring on top of everything else that's going on due to global warming affecting world-wide ocean currents."
Ocean currents.
Ocean currents have a lag that runs from five hundred to ten thousand years. Anything that ocean currents were doing, now, was because of something that happened a long time ago.
And there was no "global warming" anymore. Yeah, there had been a slow warming trend going back to a mini-iceage back in the Middle Ages. But we'd stopped warming. Given that it was Old Sol driving it, we might go back to warming soon. From the solar physicist's predictions, though, it wasn't going to be any time soon. Not the rest of 2019 for sure and probably not 2020.
We were cooling off. Fast. And people were still beating the drum of "global warming."
Here's how it really works. And it's more complicated than "CO2 makes the temperature rise! Reuse, reduce, recycle! SUV owners are global terrorists!"
But not a lot.
Cosmic rays are produced from big stars exploding a long way away. They're all over the place in any galaxy and Earth is constantly bombarded by them.
Cosmic rays hitting water droplets in the upper atmosphere form clouds. Those clouds cool the Earth.
Cosmic ray impact is controlled by solar winds. What are solar winds?
The sun is a big ball of fusing hydrogen that pumps out an enormous amount of power every second. It not only emits heat and light but particles that fly out headed for deep space. Solar wind. When there's a lot of solar wind, it "blows back" the cosmic rays so less get to Earth.
Less cosmic rays, less clouds. Things warm up. More cosmic rays, more clouds, things cool down.
Decreased solar activity equals decreased solar wind. Decreased solar wind equals more cosmic rays impacting the Earth. More cosmic rays impacting the Earth equals more clouds. More clouds equal cooler temperatures.
QE fucking D.
That can be reduced to: Less solar output equals cooler temperatures.
But not by direct effect.
This had been studied repeatedly, proven rigorously and was the reason for Earth's long-term heating and cooling trends. Or, hell, short term.
"But CO2 tracks with temperature!"
Sort of. CO2 increases lag behind temperature increases. CO2 increases in the atmosphere are a result of temperature increases not the cause of temperature increases. They track eight hundred years later. Something that changes eight hundred years later cannot be a cause. It's an effect.
Why? Boyle's Law. Go see "oceans as CO2 repositories." It's okay. I'll wait.
Back? Okay.
Less solar output equals colder temperatures. (Also, in eight hundred years, less CO2. In the meantime, it's going to keep increasing.)
Sunspots had been tracked for centuries. And sunspot activity had been found to be a, pardon the pun, stellar indicator of solar activity.
The sunspots on the sun were going away, one by one. They had their own lag. But the layer of the sun that caused them had gone into "recessive condition." That is, it wasn't working.
Bottomline, the sun was cooling off. Big time. And so was the Earth. Because less solar wind equalled . . .
And all the fucking weathermen could talk about was "global warming."
AND PEOPLE WERE STILL BUYING IT.
Christ. I lose hope for humanity sometimes.
The same lack of sunspots had last been observed in that mini-iceage back in Medieval days I mentioned. Reporting on its effects when it first kicked in was spotty. But archaeological evidence showed that it kicked in fast. Bogs have been found that had frozen practically overnight and then been covered by glaciers. Things got cold, they got cold fast and they stayed cold for a long time.
It looked as if that was what was happening. And the people responsible for reporting the weather were still talking about global warming.
(Yeah, kids, I know. What the Fuck? I mean, you all know that they were fucking idiots as you wrap up in your coats and blankets. But back then, Global Warming was going to end civilization as we knew it. And it was all Man's fault. If we only cut back on CO2 emissions we could all sing kumbaya. I know, it's hard to believe. But go look up things like "The Dutch Tulip Frenzy" and "The Internet Bubble." Humans are pack animals and when the pack stampedes they tend to follow.)
Don't get me wrong. There were people out there saying the opposite. Climatologists were screaming about it. But the ones who were doing the screaming were "global warming deniers" and had been put in the same category as Holocaust deniers (not going to explain that one, go look it up later) and thus were tuned out by the "balanced" news media. They were getting no airtime. "Too busy reporting on the H5N1 catastrophe and how our Glorious Leader . . .sorry, our First Female President is gloriously responding! All is well except for that continued pesky global warming and, you know, this Plague thing."
Lose. Hope.
Anyway, it was getting cooler, H5N1 was running rampant and the world, warming, cooling, whatever, was indeed approaching the end of civilization as we knew it.
The support contractors were already pulling out. International air travel had been suspended but they could still get charter flights under local government (where they were landing that is) rules. There was fucking nothing we could do positive in Iran and we sat there all through March, watching the reports from the U.S., getting hit by the occasional attack, people starting to line up outside the FOBs looking for safety, food, shelter, anything to survive.
April 1 we got our warning orders for movement. The U.S. military was pulling out. Everywhere. We had too many problems at home to try to deal with the rest of the world's problems.
But.
This was only a temporary emergency. Warrick had stated that we were going to maintain our international obligations. And since we were coming back, any day now, well . . .
Okay, we couldn't move all the fucking equipment we had in the Middle East. Just wasn't feasible. Moving it over there had taken years. Minimum redeployment time, under optimal conditions, was considered to be six months. A. We needed to get home, now. B. These were not optimal conditions. Most of the ships we would have used to get us home were either sailing in circles trying to avoid the Plague or tied up alongside piers with mostly dead crews or crews long disappeared.
This didn't even cover the stuff we had in Europe, Korea, Japan . . .
But the troops were going home. We mostly had unit "sets" (all the equipment a unit needs) Stateside as well. So the troops were pulling out.
What to do with the equipment? We're talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of inventory. One report I saw said that the pre-Plague value of the total mobile overseas inventory of the U.S. was at least one Trillion in old Dollars.
Well, in countries that were allies instead of totally fucked like Iran, we could just leave it. The units pulled their equipment and supplies, all of it, into holding areas and from there it was up to the local government to secure.
In countries which weren't allies and in which we had "security concerns"?
We were leaving it. With guards to "maintain and secure" it "until relieved."
Each area was different. I can only speak for Iran. (MY can I.) We had six brigades and all their supports in Iran. We had four separate major logistics bases and I don't know how many FOBs and COBs.
The Big LOG base, though, was in Abadan. Abadan is a city that sits on the Shat Al Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, and is right on the border with Iraq. For a lot of reasons, (security) we used Abadan rather than Bandar Shapur or Bandar Abbas for our prime logistics base. And it was a monster. Keeping six brigades fed and watered, not to mention the units that fed and watered them fed and watered, was a major undertaking.
People just don't understand the enormous mass of materials that modern units require to keep doing their jobs. I'll put it this way. Think of a really big football stadium. Now, imagine filling it to the rim with . . . stuff. You don't want to break stuff so you put tanks at the bottom. Put armored personnel carriers on top. Keep stacking. Fill it from side to side and all the way to the top. Ammunition, parts, rations, tents, snivel gear, weapons, batteries. (My God do we use a lot of batteries. Remember, I was responsible for making sure the guys in my battalion had all this shit. I know whereof I speak.)
That's the logistics we had in Iran for ONE brigade. A full stadium of . . . stuff.
One.
We had six in country. And all the supplies for the camp followers. (Support and supply.)
Over the course of April and into May we moved it all back to Abadan.
Well, okay, some of it we left. We left a lot of rations in place. Units that were in the last detachments to pull out said that there were riots as people flooded in to strip the camps. We left most of the tents and shit that couldn't be used directly as weapons.
We pulled out everything else (and most of the rations) and moved it to Abadan. And piled and piled and stacked and parked and stacked on top of parked and parked on top of stacked.
An ammo dump is a very scary place under any circumstances. Good ammo dumps have massive internal berms (big dirt walls) or big really tough bunkers to prevent one set of ammo going boom and making all the others go boom. And only ammo that is pretty much assured not to go boom should go in an ammo dump. And only so much in each sector.
We had to build another ammo dump for all the ammo that was brought in. And we were still stacking it to the top of hundred-foot berms. It was very spectacular when it finally got blown up.
Rations?
The Army does not run just on MREs. Most "long storage" rations are in large cans (called Number 10 for really obscure historical reasons.) Unless you've got really huge hands, you can't get two around them.
We had forty-two ACRES of "long storage" rations. Boxes of Number 10 cans stacked two stories high. We had another fourteen acres of MREs.
When you're discussing MREs in terms of acres you know something has gotten truly screwed up.
The total coverage area of all the mass of material that was to be "left in place" and "secured" was right at two thousand acres.
Unless you live in someplace like Kansas or Nebraska, you've probably never seen two thousand acres. That's three square miles. Think a box a mile and three quarters across and wide covered in . . . stuff. Tanks, trucks, water blivets, stacked tents, weapons, internal bermed areas for ammunition dumps. Concertina wire, thank God.
It was amazing to look at. And very very scary. Especially when there was just one.
As units finished their "phased redeployment" (euphemism for "run away, run away!") they were flown out. Yeah, international air travel was suspended. Which just meant there were a lot of planes sitting around. And pilots could be scrounged up. We had 747 after 747 roaring out of Abadan airport (which we secured) morning, noon and night.
And then there was one.
Somebody was supposed to stay behind "until relieved" and "ensure inventory, maintenance and security" of the enormous mass of material.
Units were needed in the States. Things were going to hell and the Army had a job seeing that things didn't come apart entirely. Every body that could be spared was going home.
I don't know what fucking lottery led to our battalion being tasked with leaving ONE COMPANY to do the job of a fucking BRIGADE but we got handed the shit end of the stick.
Remember me mentioning the Bravo Company commander? One of my former JO's and not the battalion commander's fair-haired boy?
You guessed it. The battalion was tasked with leaving "one company of infantry and minimal necessary supports" as security for an area you couldn't walk around in an hour.
And "a logistics officer" to maintain inventory of the "stored equipment."
Gulp.