What is it about Mondays?
Okay, so you had a good weekend and maybe you had a bit too much to drink. You don't want to go back to work. Mondays suck.
But that wasn't the case with Iran. We were working every day, more or less. Oh, there was a rotating "down-time" schedule but with increasing probes the guys weren't getting much rest.
So what is it with Mondays?
Guess you figured it was a Monday when the shit started to hit the fan.
Actually, we got some wind of it early. Scatter of more refugees. Then the food detail got told there was a new problem.
Remember the Shia Liberation Front? Seems they'd maintained communication with fellow travellers. Said fellow travellers, the "Husayn Ali Martyrdom Brigade" (HAMB) had managed to avoid enough martyrdom to consolidate their hold in Awhaz and were now looking to establish "true shariah" in a wider region. Which really threw a monkey wrench into the whole Abadan area.
Okay, background:
Who or what the fuck is "Husayn Ali"?
Husayn ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib was a grandson of Mohammed by one of his numerous wives. (Mohammed's wives that is.) Husayn is one of the guys who's a founder of Shia. Remember the whole thing about Shia and Sunni? Most Moslems are Sunni. Iranians and a cluster in southern Iraq and down into Saudi Arabia are Shia. I won't get into details about the Umaayids and shit. He revolted in favor of "true Islam" and got his head cut off. Just know he's one of the Shia's big "martyrs." Got killed near Al-Najaf where there's a big temple in his honor and, I shit you not, every year guys gather there and whip themselves with flails. I've seen weirder shit, but not much.
But the Husayn Ali Martyrdom Brigade wasn't just religious wackoes. It had been formed around the family of an Iranian colonel up around Ahwaz. Was he a religious wacko? Sort of.
Okay, one of the "lessons" we learned in Iraq was "don't completely dismantle the standing government and military." We shut down the Iraqi Army in Iraq and then tried to rebuild it "right." The problem being, that when soldiers are out of work they'll work for anybody. And a lot of the guys we were fighting, at first, were former soldiers all the way up to senior officers.
So when we went into Iran, we kept the Army together as much as possible. Oh, some of the units like the Revolutionary Guard and stuff were stood down and mostly rounded up for questioning, etc. But we didn't stand down the whole Army.
Well, the mullahs had wanted to keep the Army under their thumb as much as possible. So a bunch of senior commands were held by "fellow travellers," guys who thought the way the Mad Mullahs in charge thought or were family. (Which amounted to the same thing.)
Farid Jahari was one of the guys who wasn't rounded up for questioning. Oh, later, I found out he had been tagged as hard-core Islamic, but he was making all the right noises and following the New Way so nobody fucked with him. Despite "credible" reports that he had maintained contact with the RIFs and might be supporting them.
Whether he'd been playing both sides against the middle or what, when the shit went down, he managed to hold together a "coalition" in Ahwaz. It had taken him several months to consolidate his power and get things functioning. Now it was time for the next step.
Shooters he now had aplenty. What he didn't have was equipment.
And guess where the biggest store of equipment around was?
The "probe" with the truck was probably his idea. And they'd apparently been watching how we were guarding things.
The first inkling we had that things were going to be going astray was increased traffic on the Ahwaz Road. (Highway 9 for people who care.) Vehicles were headed into Abadan. And then the flow of refugees picked up as street fighting broke out.
The good colonel had the cachet of being military. The Warriors and the SLF, now a branch of HAMB, called a truce. Together with some "special warriors" from HAMB they took down the Mahdi Army in about two days' fighting.
Didn't hurt that they took out the command structure, first. They called for peace talks to "begin the reunification of our peoples." Not all the senior people from the Mahdi Army turned up, but enough that it mattered. They weren't trusting, mind you, but they also weren't expecting a big truck bomb.
We heard that on Monday. Big ass explosion down in Abadan kind of near the docks as far as we could tell.
Took the Warriors, SLF and HAMB about three days to clear out the Mahdis. Some of the refugees we got were "dependents" of the Mahdis. That's where we got the story. (Also a couple more workers. The Mahdis had clearly been picking and choosing carefully. Woof!)
(Wife Edit: It's amazing what you've left out over the years. I thought I knew all your stories.)
Fuck.
Anyway, we really knew shit was bad mid-week when two T-62s and some trucks came rolling down from the direction of Ahwaz.
Found out, later, that was the sign Herr Colonel had come down to show the flag. Until Abadan was "secured" he'd stayed up in Ahwaz. Now it was time to spread the joy.
So we got another delegation.
This time it was a civilian truck but the guy who got out of it was in uniform. Pretty correct. Unlike the first joker he seemed to fit it and it wasn't exactly loaded with medals.
I got called out.
"General Farid Jahari, Commander of the Faithful, Sword of The Prophet, Warrior of Islam . . ." etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, "sends you his greetings. In his beneficience and munificence, his overriding goodness that extends beyond the ability of mortal men . . ."
We had three days to pull out. We could take anything we could carry. We had to leave all the rest and open the gates.
Took, like, fifteen minutes for the guy to get to the point. I said: "Ain't happenin'."
"Captain, you cannot understand. The armies of the Prophet cover the ground like the sands of the desert . . . !"
We know your strength to the last Nepo. You're badly outnumbered and we're going to kick your ass.
All I could do was fall back on something I'd heard back in ROTC and many times since over the years.
"Convey my message to your commander exactly. This is the message. Nuts."
Okay, so it was an airborne unit. Big fucking deal. It was a good line.
What wasn't good was what we didn't know. The Commander of the Faithful was not an idiot. We had a fairly good feel for the numbers in Abadan at that point. The Warriors, if they hadn't taken a bunch of casualties, could field maybe six, seven hundred troops. The SLF had been about a hundred. From the count of vehicles going to Abadan, we were looking at, at most, another hundred or so.
Okay, say a thousand against our one company. Two tanks. I knew how we were going to deal with them. Adverse correlation of forces, but we had pretty good positions and good vehicles. And we had them in view the whole approach. They were going to get slaughtered.
Well, I thought they were going to get slaughtered. But I hadn't figured on the Commander of the Faithful being smart.
Ahwaz wasn't on the Shat, but it wasn't all that far, either. You had to cross into Iraq to get to the river (the Tigris, actually) but nobody gave a shit about borders. Turns out he'd sent a bunch more fighters down on barges. And we didn't know about them. The refugees had cut off to nothing. No satellite intel . . .
Okay, I had a couple of UAVs in the place. I'd even gotten a couple up and ready to go. But they weren't Predators, they were short range and duration. Even if I had gotten them out and done some surveys, I wasn't going to get any more intel.
Now, a thousand vs. a little short of two hundred with the Nepos might have been enough to change a guy's mind. Maybe should have been. But American forces had faced odds like that before and won.
Problem being we were going to take casualties. And there wasn't a doctor nor any evac.
That was going to purely suck.
So I called home. I didn't bother with calling the BC.
"Brigade S-3. Assistant S-3 speaking. How can I help you sir or ma'am?"
"Tell me to cut and run."
"What's up?"
"Security is no longer nominal."
Thousand of them. Two hundred, sort of, of us. Three days.
"What did you tell them?"
"Nuts."
"That's what the 101st said!"
"I couldn't think of better line. Go fuck a camel just wasn't as succinct." (Heh. I used a big word.)
Chain of command.
Duck's bottom.
Call you back.
Ring, Ring!
"Fort Lonesome. We've got the ammo if you've got the money. If not: Go fuck yourself."
Call your boss. Brigade Commander said "Nuts" though and he couldn't think of a better line, either.
Yo, BC, security situation no longer nominal.
You're a bad boy! You should have negotiated! Bad boy! Bad boy! No biscuit! Take off your skin so I can use it as a shawl!
Gotcha. Give 'em the stuff.
Calling higher.
"Fort Lonesome! Security situation is in degradation mode and headed for sucky!"
Brigade Commander said "Nuts."
The 101st said that. Couldn't he think of a better line? Medevac?
Nope.
Reinforcements? Fighting soldiers from the sky?
Nope. Get fucked. Bad things here. And where's that human skin I ordered?
Blow it and run?
Maintain and secure.
So then things went from weird to weirder.
Friday, I think, evening, anyway, I was "pondering the security situation" when I got a call at the office.
"Bandit, sir, there's a reporter on the video link. She wants to talk to you."
Now, this is a secure military video link system. How the fuck a reporter could have gotten onto it was beyond me.
I never considered the incredible boneheadedness of my boss.
So some reporter from CNN is chatting him up as he is delivering "aid and comfort" to the voodoo doctors in Savannah. (There's another essay there, but it's not mine. Things got very weird in Savannah at one point.) Good people doing good work for good people who are all good and it's all good and we all love each other.
(The battalion took more casualties in Savannah than we did during most of this mission. Khuwaitla, Instanbul and all.)
And somehow the point that he's only got two companies helping comes up. And, wow, there's a company in Iran? Really? Could I talk to the commander?
I don't know how she sweet-talked the BC into that. Bandit Six was the last guy he'd ever want to give air-time. That would take it away from him. And I don't know what strings he pulled to get her on our vid-link. Maybe CNN did it.
Fuck.
I got out of bed with Shadi, checked to see I was shaved, put on my battlerattle and went over.
"Captain Bandit Six. What's it like in Iran?"
"Our mission plan is to maintain and secure."
"Have you had any problems?"
"We have rectified all our action issues with transformational deconfliction."
(That one I remember. What a classic. I saw it one time on a poster and nearly shit myself.)
Refugees?
Adjusted with transformational synergy. (I think. Something like that.)
The last fucking thing I wanted to do was tell a reporter:
"Well, we're outnumbered something like five to one, and some of our 'one' are Nepalese tribesmen that just learned to turn on a light-switch and you got me out of bed when I was 'aiding and comforting' a refugee. And if we get hit we're going to blow this pizza joint sky high."
I doubt she understood word one of any of my replies. I don't think I understood most of them and I'm pretty good at buzz-word bingo. I do know that the troops were laughing next door so hard I could faintly hear it through the extremely soundproofed walls of the commo van.
We were deconflicting and transforming faster than a battle-bot. We were synergizing and action iteming like a couple of water beetles in mating season. We were defenestrating obstructors at one point, I think.
Went on for about fifteen minutes of me just a shuckin' and jivin' as fast as I could.
There's a point to the media in a democracy. It's there to make sure that people have the information they need to make rational decisions about their actions. Especially their actions in regards to who is going to be elected King or Queen or Duke or whatever.
I won't go into media bias. There's reams and reams of papers on it at this point. And it's still biased. It's going to stay biased for another fifteen years or so until the people who have lived through the Time end up as bosses in the media and start choosing different producers and editors. Hopefully, they'll choose wisely.
But at that point, the media was the military's worst enemy. They were the enemy, no more and no less. They never reported anything straight and always took the side of whoever was shooting at us.
They weren't fucking murdering terrorists who killed their own people faster than they killed us. They were "freedom fighters" or "irregulars." We weren't the freedom fighters, oh no! How could we be? It was rare that they called us what they really thought of us, but every now and then one would slip. Mercenaries. Murderers. Continue in M and go back and forth for every evil word for people you can dredge up.
When one of our number, usually a grade A asshole to start with, would fuck up, it was "all soldiers are like that! They're all evil murdering lying scum!" When one of their number fucked up, if you learned about it, they were "confused" or "overwrought" or there was nothing fucking wrong with them at all. Circle the wagons. We'd sit there and prove that some story about atrocities was bogus and the fucking media would sail on as if nothing had happened. Anything bad about soldiers or the very hard job we did was major news. Anything good we did wasn't covered.
Don't think that the Plague had changed anything. Every fucking screamer with some sob story, no matter how wrong, was instant headline news. The 4th ID got reamed when some woman got a reporter on ABC to put her on telling about how a whole bunch of those poor fucking grasshoppers had been "gang raped" by a bunch of soldiers.
Was there ever any proof? Not a fucking shred. As far as anyone can tell she made it up.
Back in the Iraq Campaign there was some fucking Air Force sergeant who got some reporter to repeat her sob story about "thousands of women raped" and how she had been.
Were female military members raped in Iraq? Yep. And any time we could track down the bastards that did it we'd put them on trial and sentence them to max punishment. But when you have males and females together, you get rape. It's like sunshine and flowers and April showers. Fucking happens. Pardon the pun.
Were "thousands" raped? No. Despite there being nearly a million females rotating through the AOR over time. The rape rate was way lower than on a college campus despite pussy being rare as hell.
And the Air Force sergeant in question?
Not only was she not one of the "thousands," at least she'd never reported it at the time or since, she was never in fucking Iraq! She'd made it all up. And the news media fucking ran with the story anyway!
Any lie by anyone who hated the military was repeated endlessly. Any truth was ignored.
I did not and do not like reporters. Is that clear? Even after the whole Centurions thing I maintain my opinion.
Sherman said it well:
"If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world but I am sure we would be getting reports from hell before breakfast."
Oh, and about democracy.
The purpose of a free press, in which I believe believe it or not, is so that people can make rational decisions in a democracy. They'd already perverted the process so bad that was hard, but the point is valid.
So why give her the runaround? Why not answer the questions straight?
There was still Plague running around. Most of the cities were (or should have been) free-fire zones. People were starving to death. And there was an impending climate catastrophe they were completely ignoring.
What the fuck did a company stuck in Iran have anything to do with making rational decisions about how to survive in the current conditions?
Nada. Dick. Nothing. The closest you can get is deciding whether Warrick was a fucking idiot and the reality was all around you. It didn't take a rocket scientist. Not that the media was going to admit their annointed was a fucking fruitcake.
She was going for a "human interest" story, that most idiotic of media exercises.
Well. Fuck. Her. Try making a robot interesting.
The company dayroom was right by the commo van. When I stumbled out, unbuckling my helmet and swearing under my breath, the troops had lined up to give me an ovation.
"God damn, sir, you sounded like a Pentagon spokesman!"
"They're going to put you up for Chief of Staff!"
"Defense Secretary!"
"Fuck you all. I'm clearly not working you hard enough."
In truth, I wasn't. I wasn't working them hard, I wasn't working me hard, I wasn't working Fillup hard. Why? Because I knew we were all going to be working our asses off soon.
Bill Slim was an interesting guy. British General in WWII. Probably the best Brit general of his generation and certainly the best one that got anything done. (Way better than Monty.) Wrote a hell of an autobiography. One of the things he said stuck with me. (Well, a lot did, but I'll just get into this one.)
"A General should take as much rest as he can in peace because when battle rages he will get none."
Paraphrase but that's the general idea. I knew the shit was about to hit the fan. So I and everyone else was getting as much rest, food and water as possible.
Good thing I did.