I know I'm sort of jumping around but we were getting into late August at this point. There'd been a couple more probes. No more negotiations. One what looked like an attack on the refugee camp. Convoy of vehicles, some of them with weapons on the back (called "technicals" for some reason.) Gate Stryker drove it off by taking them under long-range fire. Might have been an attack on us. Don't know. Wasn't getting close.
But sooner or later a big force would get in motion. Refugees were still coming in and they all said that everyone knew how much booty was in our walls. And people wanted it. Most of them to just fill their couscous bowl but the gangs wanted the weapons, ammo and equipment.
I'd set things up so that we could roll out at any time. There were enough Strykers, trucks, fuel trucks and all the rest, including one hell of a lot of parts, lube, ammo, food, water and most especially batteries, that we could roll to Israel if it came down to it.
That was my plan. If everything exploded we were going to roll out and head to Israel. Israel had held on, more or less. The Plague had hit their enemies worse than them. Maybe they put lamb's blood over their doors, I dunno. But they'd taken about 20% casualties and were still hanging in there.
Oh, that's something I mentioned a while back. All the models said at the point that a society took 20% casualties from a disaster, especially a plague, it broke down.
The H5N1 Plague disproved that. What it proved was that certain types of societies broke down at that point. The models and historical records had never accounted for modern, technological, democratic, high-trust societies. All the previous societies hit with that sort of plague had been preindustrial, nondemocratic or functionally nondemocratic, low-trust societies.
Every society like that on Earth that got hit with H5N1 had broken. Iran and Iraq might have been notionally democratic societies, ditto Turkey, but they were not resilient enough to withstand their casualty rates (which, anyway, ran into the 50–60% range).
The "good" societies held together. Hell, Thailand held together. And they had 60% mortality.
Nobody knows, to this day, what it takes to destroy a society like the U.S. or any of the other Anglosphere countries. Or Japan. Or Thailand or Singapore or (South) Korea. What we know is, it takes more than the Time of Suckage.
But getting back to the point, at some point I figured we were going to pull out. That we'd either be extracted or, it was looking increasingly like, have to self extract. Getting to the U.S. was going to be . . . interesting. Among other things there was an ocean in the way. Flying back was optimal, but we needed to have an airport to do that.
And when we pulled out, whether I tried to pass it off as an "accident" or just bit the fucking bullet, I wasn't going to leave this shit for the enemy.
Got any idea what it takes to really destroy an Abrams tank? I mean, so it's not even vaguely useable as a tank ever again?
Yeah, neither did I.
Or a Paladin. Or a Bradley (we had a lot of those). Or a Stryker.
Trucks and such were pretty easy. Oh, it was time intensive and manpower intensive but the Nepos were just sitting there.
Take one 155mm round. Place it on the engine block. Place another in the cargo compartment. Daisy chain them together with det cord and a small "initiator" package of a half a block of C-4 per round.
All that could be left to the Nepos. At this point you have two explosive rounds that aren't going to go off short of blasting caps (which weren't installed) and maybe not even then tied together with some funny looking cord.
In the meantime, the boys of Company B were getting an intensive course in demolitions safety. This was not "do I put the blasting cap under the sandbag before installing the claymore?" demolitions safety. This was "if you don't do it in these precise steps, everybody is going to blow the fuck up including you."
You see, none of that stuff was going to blow up short of blasting caps. Military explosives are very resilient. They have to be; they're handled by soldiers. Soldiers can break just about anything.
Stuff like 155 rounds were designed to survive handling by soldiers. They were tough as hell.
But put blasting caps in the mix and you are dealing with a different situation.
Frankly, I would have preferred that all the blasting caps be put in place and wired by myself or Fillup. But that simply wasn't possible. He had good sergeants, though, and we were very careful.
Wiring the whole damned camp, though, took a long time.
Oh, we didn't wire everything. I mean, I figured leaving all the food and shit was fine. But just wiring the vehicles and ammo was interesting.
How do you bust an Abrams tank so nobody was ever going to be able to use any part of it again?
It's not fucking easy. There are five separate sealed compartments on an Abrams. Each of them is, more or less, capable of withstanding any reasonable explosion in the other. Driver, control area (turret and crew compartment), engine and chassis. That's four, right? The gun is such a tough motherfucker it's going to resist most explosions. And it's the part that, in the end, counts so I wasn't going to leave any functional if I had my way.
The tanks were not loaded with their rounds. All of the vehicles had been stripped of ammunition before parking. (Ammo specialists had destroyed most of the onboard munitions; they weren't considered safe enough to store.)
Well, the ammo was just sitting there.
Five 155 rounds in the central compartment. Another in the driver's compartment. Another in the engine. Anti-tank mines under the chassis. A tank round up the breach preceded by a charge of C-4. Partially close the breach. When the round detonated something was going to happen to the fucking gun. Didn't know if I could destroy the fucker, but I wouldn't want to ever use it again.
Daisy chain. That is, hook them all together so they'll go off at once.
The problem being, I'm doing all this without orders. I'm getting prepared to destroy a whole bunch of billions of dollars worth of Uncle Sam's equipment (nineteen billion and change) and nobody in my chain of command has suggested that is a good idea.
It was early September when we started. Compared to some deployments we hadn't actually been left in place all that long. Three and a half months since we'd been left.
But this wasn't a normal deployment. Look, we had one guy get sick. Doc didn't know what was wrong with him. Thought it was appendicitis. (Turned out it was food poisoning. His honey had fixed him some "special" food and hadn't been quite as sanitary as she should have been.)
I got on the horn to the States. Got a soldier with possible case of appendicitis. Request evac.
Nada.
Fucking NADA.
The U.S. mililtary does not leave you to die. They've killed crews trying to save civilians. What they do for their own sick and wounded is astonishing.
There was no way to get us. No. Fucking. Way.
The only possible choice was to move a whole fucking Marine Amphib unit into the Gulf and fly helos up to us. Maybe just a frigate.
Only problem was, all the ships were back in the U.S. zone.
The nearest "stable" zone, barely, was Israel. And there wasn't a helo on earth that could make the run. Oh, there was a way to do it with tankers and special helos. But the Israelis didn't have the capacity, even if they were willing, and our tankers and helos were in the States saving lives.
We didn't have a doctor. We didn't have a hospital. (Well, we had one but no clue how to use it.) We were on our fucking own.
The point being, this was not a normal deployment. Hell, women cooking and washing and providing "aid and comfort" weren't a normal deployment. I cannot for the life of me recall where I heard the line. Something about "and the last centurion took a barbarian wife . . ."
That was us as far as we could tell.
I didn't want to start up a local dynasty. But if I did start one, I wasn't going to let all this ammo and gear fall into the hands of my enemies. And it was way more than I could ever use.
And if we did what I figured was most likely, the bug-out boogie to Israel, I wasn't going to leave it to the RIFs. Surely there was an adult in my chain of command who could get that logic.
The problem being, the next guy in my chain of command was the battalion commander.
Chain of command is holy writ in the Army. You do not violate the chain of command.
But I was getting dick all from the BC. I violated the chain of command.
We had commo information for higher command levels. Hell, this thing had a commo link to the National Military Command Center but I wasn't going to call NMCC. I called the Brigade S-3.
Yo, Bandit, wassup? (He'd been a company commander in a sister battalion when I was a lieutenant. He could call me Bandit, too.)
What the fuck? No medevac. No deadline for "replacement"? What the fuck?
No medevac?
Appendicitis, we thought. Got over it. No evac.
Fuck. Bad shit here.
Bad shit everywhere. Refugees. Attacks. Replacement?
No fucking idea.
Plan if we get hit bad? Bombers? Nukes?
No fucking idea. Battalion?
()
Okay, point. Plan?
Blow and run.
()
Go-To-Hell-Plan. Replacement. Reinforcement. Redeployment. What The Fuck Ever. None? Blow and run.
Battalion? Told?
(Video link. Stand up and wave hands around ass.)
Okay, point. Send memo. Chain of command.
(Stand up . . . )
Situation? Seriously.
Official or unofficial.
Official then unofficial.
Official: Nominal. Security Threats. Action plan. Insufficient force. Unofficial: If we knew when we were going home and weren't worrying about getting overrun, not bad. Nepos and local civilian personnel left behind. Gets weird.
Try Savannah. Voodoo doctors. Send memo. Stay frosty.
Fuck you.
Sent the memo. I attached my full "action plan" in the event of "action by superior enemy force." Which amounted to "kill as many as we can, blow the place the fuck up and run like hell."
Rigging the place had required a detailed destruction plan. I attached it.
Got a call two weeks later from the brigade commander.
"Bandit, Colonel Collins."
"Yes, sir."
Shit bad here. Unofficial: You're fucked.
How fucked?
"There are no forces capable of evacuating your unit closer than Japan. And they're not going to be redeployed to pick up a straggler company of infantry. The shit everywhere is just too screwed up. There's a MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit: Brigade of marines and ships) in the Med but they're tasked out. The official line continues to be that all stored material is to be "maintained and secured." Think you're bad off? We left a damned unit of SF in Colombia. They've dropped completely off the net; no clue what happened to them. Unofficially, and I'm told from a very high level, in the event you are hit by forces you cannot resist, blow it the fuck up and run. But you'd better be able to justify it pretty well. And even then, I can't guarantee that you won't end up in Leavenworth even if you do make it back to the States."
"Yes, sir. Can I get an official order to implement my action plan in the event this unit is faced by an overwhelming force?"
Long silence. Much forehead rubbing.
"Send your action plan to your battalion commander." Hand goes up to forestall protest. I wasn't planning on making one except in my head but he must have seen my face. Of course, he also had to deal with my BC on a daily basis. "Send it to your battalion commander. It will be approved."
"Thank you, sir."
"What, you think I like one of my fucking companies being left out to rot? But shit's bad everywhere. If you lose commo for any reason, all I can say is good luck and good hunting."
So I sent the action plan to the battalion commander.
What the fuck? No fucking way! Are you crazy? If you were here you'd be relieved and I'd make sure you spent the rest of the emergency as a private, you complete dickhead moron, who the hell could think you had the authority to blow up nineteen billion dollars worth of . . .
A week later I got the action plan back. Redlined. That is, he was telling me all the things wrong with it and wanted me to do "corrections" of all the items.
Which was weird because that meant it was conditionally approved.
Of course, it was also fucked up because he'd left out blowing up half the shit and most of the changes meant nothing would get blowed up. Most of it had to do with "demilitarization" of material. Yeah. Like we had a few thousand people available to do that.
(Demilitarization: Drill holes in the guns. Drilling holes in an Abrams gun requires very serious drills which we didn't have. Thermite barely scratches the motherfuckers. I know. I experimented.)
And we'd already done most of it my way. Sure as shit wasn't going to do it his way.
I sent the redlined plan off to the Brigade S-3. Then I wrote it up his way. Hell, he wasn't going to know if I did it that way or not. I was seven thousand miles away and it wasn't like the fucking IG was going to drop by.
Two days later I got an action plan from the BC. Less redlining. Still stupid.
Off to Brigade S-3.
Got back the original plan. Approved. By the Brigade commander.
Good thing, too, because we were about done.
Talked to the S-3 later. Apparently it had gone like this.
Battalion commander gets the plan. Throws a shit fit. Chews me out. Starts charges.
Brigade commander, a few days later, calls him up and asks what's happening with Bravo Company.
Battalion commander sucks ass. All good. No issues.
No issues? Evac?
Minor issue.
Security situation?
No problems.
Any Go-To-Hell-Plan?
No need. "Secure and maintain."
Get Go-To-Hell-Plan. SF battalion. Bad shit. My boys. Send me copy. Out.
I get GTH redlined. Send back corrected plan. Copy to Brigade. BC sends to Brigade.
Brigade commander. Don't like. (He'd seen my original and the redlined one.) Like it this (my) way.
Battalion commander sends up next plan.
What is it about "do it this way" you cannot understand? Original plan approved.
I now had legal authority to blow the place the fuck up if I had to.
Which was good. Because we had to implement our "Go-To-Hell-Plan" sooner than I'd thought.