There were a few details to work out. I paid my second in-person visit to the refugees.
The "mullah" who had taken over was a guy in his forties. He had, somewhere, scrounged up traditional Islamic dress and never actively carried a gun.
Let me explain the quotes. A mullah is, technically, nothing more than a teacher. That's actually the translation of the word: Scholar. He's not a priest specially annointed by God through a chain from some distant past. The Islamics simply don't have that. They have some people, like Hussein Jr. in Jordan, who are descendants of the Prophet and therefore specially important. But they are not necessarily or even commonly mullahs. A mullah is more like a rabbi, but even rabbis tend to go through an elaborate preparation for their posts. The only fixed requirements for a mullah is that he has completed the Haj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, and that he reads Arabic so he can translate and "explain" the Koran, which is a fairly baroque and in place opaque document.
(These "explanations," by the way, are called "fatwahs." A fatwah is not always a license to kill although it often seemed that way to Westerners since those were the only fatwahs we ever heard about. A fatwah can be something as simple as whether you can talk on your cell phone while doing your morning ritual washing. No, by the way. And, yes, there's a morning ritual wash. Why do Islamics often smell like the backside of a camel? Because it's based on people washing in the DESERT. Water is not required. Trust me, as OCD as Mohammed was (and he was very OCD) if he'd been around for modern conveniences he'd have added "And use water you morons! And soap! And maybe some fucking deodorant! You all smell like camels' butts!")
Down south and to a certain extent anywhere in the Bible belt you'll find small churches all over that are set up by a "preacher" who then brings his personal version of the Word of God to people every Sunday. Such preachers range from guys with multiple degrees in divinity (one of the schools Al Bore failed, by the way) or theology to some guy who can barely read the Bible.
Now you know what mullahs are. They're guys who a) went on the Haj, b) can or fake that they can read the Koran and c) convince people to give them money to preach.
And among the Shia they occasionally act as pimps. It's a funny old world.
This mullah seemed a decent enough guy. Whether for propaganda reasons or faith he seemed, also, to be trying to live the life that Shia mullahs had tended to live prior to the Mad Mullahs taking over Iran. That is, he advised and suggested how things should run, but didn't actually run them. Not under "shariah law." It's kind of like, a guy may be one of those small town preachers. He can still run for office. But if he's smart he doesn't bring God into every discussion of a bill. By the same token, his advice and suggestions were taken. Look, I wasn't going to tell them how to run their little society as long as it ran.
They'd gotten the gist that we were pulling out. And, of course, they'd been around for the earth shattering kabooms. The fight, fortunately, hadn't spilled their way but with no defenses and no chance of decent survival if we lost they couldn't have been real happy. And they weren't real happy we were leaving.
People were trying to kiss my hand. I hate that. But they apparently hadn't cared much for HAMB, either.
"We're pulling out. We have a way we can get home."
Hollywood duly translated.
Mullah: That sucks. (This, of course, took about ten minutes.)
Yeah. Well, things suck all over. We're not leaving you in the lurch. You've done good by these people and I hope things go okay for you when we leave. To help with that, we've left all the noncombatant stuff in the base intact. Food, water, a water plant and of course the defenses. Even some AK ammo for your boys.
You rock. (Another ten minutes.) Guy was crying. Yeah, I probably would have cried too.
They were figuring we were pulling out and destroying all the food and shit. I'm a farmer. Food is my religion. Well, and killing all enemies of the Constitution "foreign and domestic."
Bandit: Got a problem, Mullah. The girls. Our "temporary wives."
We'd explained to the girls what the plan was. Then we had to explain again, in more detail.
Look, most of the girls were from pretty reclusive families and they might have been taught their ABCs but that pretty much covered it. Girls only had to know three things in Islamic society: How to cook, how to clean and how to obey men. They mostly figured out having babies on their own.
The world had already gotten to be a very big and unpleasant place with the Plague. Trying to explain to them what was about to happen was hard. Think cheerleaders but with even less knowledge of the world. Not bright, ignorant and with a very short attention span.
When it was finally explained to them so that they understood, and I could see it sinking into their tiny little brains, I explained that it would probably be better for them to stay. We weren't sure we were getting through and if they got captured when we lost, it would be bad for them.
Problem being, it was going to be bad for them anywhere.
Islam was really strict about the whole "premarital sex" thing. The penalty for being raped, not for the rapist but for the girl who was raped, was stoning. Generally the family of the rapist paid a nominal fee and it was all good. Rape was, in fact, a way of exacting punishment on someone in (really backward) Islamic societies. Say a guy was caught stealing. Technically, the punishment was losing his hand. But say that he was the sort of lout who comes from a good family that's politically connected. Just one of those fuck-ups you get when power is in the wrong hands.
Say he has a sister. The penalty for him and for his family was often for the sister to be raped. Not because they cared about the sister as a human being, not because he loved his sister (they never did), but because it was dishonor to the family.
Then to purge the "dishonor" the sister would be stoned to death and everyone was happy.
I am totally not shitting you. There is some shit you just can't make up. We saw it, later. Another story I'll get to. The basis of "Stones."
Technically, if we left the girls behind they'd all be stoned to death. More likely, they'd end up as concubines doing scut work for the rest of their lives.
(Yes, they'd been concubines doing scut work for us. But we treated them with respect. The same would not be the case in most Islamic households. Mohammed the OCD also included precise instructions for how wives and daughters, any women, were to be "instructed" using a cane "no more than the width of a man's thumb." At the time and society, this was actually enlightened like a lot of Islamic law. Problem being, times had changed.)
I told them I'd do what I could to make sure they were better off than that. And this was me trying.
Mullah: This is a problem. I'll do what I can. (Ten minutes.)
Bandit: Yeah. I'm sure that will work. You're a good Islamic preacher, right?
Mullah: Yes. (Maybe three minutes.)
Bandit: Women can inherit under Islamic law, right?
Mullah: True. But a man must manage it.
Bandit, pulling out a bunch of paper: This is the printed out inventory of what's left in the camp as far as I can figure it. I, a male, am gifting to them, for their extraordinary service to the United States Army in times of peril above and beyond the call of duty, all the materials in the camp. Actually, I'm gifting it to their "temporary husbands" who in turn are willing to turn it over to new husbands. Each of them has some of the materials, basically broken up by areas and what I figured you guys would value. Guys who marry these girls, under all official Islamic law and the blessing of Allah the Beneficent and the Merciful, get the goods. As long as they remain their husbands. By the way, the prettiest one was my temporary wife under Shia law. And she got quite a bit of shit. More than the rest is all I'll say including all the ammo and the water supply. How many wives do you have?
Look, I said I didn't like Islamic law, never said I wasn't good at it.
We stuck around long enough for the weddings. All the girls decided they were staying. I had a talk with a couple of the grooms on the subject of how we really liked our former "wives" and that some day I was going to be back and they'd better be just as happy and smiling.
(By the way, they were never in any way officially or unofficially, Shia or American or Chinese law, our wives. I lied. He knew I was lying. He also saw it as an excellent out. Good guy, like I said.)
Did I miss Shadi?
Pussy like Shadi's is very nice. Do not get me wrong. But I like someone I can talk to. And even after Shadi got a few words of English, we really didn't communicate very well. I'd gotten her started on reading before we left but it was at C-A-T equals Cat and then explain what a Cat is.
(She also got me learning Farsi and Arabic. It's called a sleeping dictionary. Most military guys learn the local language that way. For that matter, it's how English came about. No shit. There are benefits to "fraternization" I don't think the brass ever consider.)
I'd done the best thing I could for her. I'd married her to the local strong man who also seemed to be a pretty decent and wise guy. Right age difference according to Islam, etc. We were going where angels feared to tread. Leaving her in the care of a good man was the best I could do for her. But I was going to miss her.
Pax Americana: Like a gnat in a blast furnace in the Mideast.
(Sort of. The mullah? Thaaat would be Mullah Rousham Faravashi. Yeah. That Mullah Rousham Faravashi, former Ambassador to the U.S. and current president of the Persian Union.
(You know his really hot oldest wife? The serious "Islamic women's libber" who goes around unveiled and is on all the talk shows? "Gorgeous eyes?" Also a former ambassador? But more importantly the current head of the PU Secret Service and touted as the next president?
(Shadi is going to fucking kill me. She's got lots of assassins on her payroll. I'm going to fucking die.)
(Wife Edit: So that's why we get that big box of almonds every year. I'm not eating any when this comes out. You can have them all.)
So we rolled.
I'm not going to do an Anabasis and give a blow by blow account of the whole trip. Basically, it sucked. Not quite as much as it sucked for the Ten Thousand, but it sucked.
Oh, hell. Okay. I'll do the whole fucking Anabasis . . . Even if most people have seen it in reruns.
We were starting off, by then, in late September of 2019. We left on September 25th.
Now, in late September in Minnesota, back then you could get some frosts.
Abadan is on the same latitude as Jacksonville, Florida. And for some pretty straightforward meteorological reasons, it has a hotter climate. Way hotter in the summer, rarely as cool in the winter.
The day we had the wedding it snowed. Let's just say that it didn't used to snow much in Jacksonville anytime and it hadn't snowed in Abadan in recent memory even in the dead of winter.
Snow in September.
Yep, classic Big Chill weather. We all know that. Intellectually, I knew that. Problem being, we were headed north.
So that's the climatological issue covered for the nonce.
Second "issue."
We didn't want to go over by Ahwaz. There were still probably remnants of the HAMB over that way. My plan was, as much as possible, to get through all areas with as little incident as I could manage. I knew that there were going to be incidents.
("Incidents." Hah-hah-hah-hah! This is me madly chuckling. "Incidents." Bwah.)
I took a look at a lot of maps and had traced out a route I figured was going to keep us away from the majority of problems. We weren't going near any big cities and were going to skirt towns as much as possible. Unfortunately, for some really simple terrain reasons, we were going to have to get closer to Baghdad than I liked. And because we were moving to the east of the Tigris, which was the wetter side, there were going to be a lot of water crossings. That was going to totally suck.
Might as well talk about equipment, which has to cover personnel as well.
We'd dumped the girls. So there were three groups under my command and control: The infantry company under Fillup, the Nepos, and the technicians under their NCOIC.
One thing I'd done, coldheartedly, was to figure out which were the most important to the mission of getting home and the order was: The technicians, the U.S. infantry, and the Nepos.
Why?
I only had a few technicians. (The satellite/internet/electronics geek from Fillup's company was now in that crowd.) We were rolling with a lot of wheeled and some tracked vehicles. Wheeled and tracked vehicles break. They need maintenance that goes beyond "filler up and check the oil." Commo breaks. Weapons break.
We were going to need to have most of this stuff most of the way through the mission. I needed those techs to keep it running. Lose one grunt or Nepo and I was out a shooter. I had lots of shooters. Lose one tech and I was probably fucked.
So the technicians were going to need careful handling and feeding. They were all, basically, Fobbits anyway. Oh, they could handle themselves in an ambush if they were firing from a vehicle but I wasn't going to be using them for any assaults even if they weren't as valuable as gold.
So the techs had to be protected.
Fortunately, there was a way to kill two birds with one stone.
Military equipment is very heavy. It's got lots of metal parts and then, of course, all that armor. With a few exceptions (and we weren't taking any Humvees at all) you can't tow it with your neighbor's car. You need big fucking metal to tow a Stryker very far.
Thus you have the armored vehicle recovery vehicle. (Heavy Equipment Recovery Combat Utilty Lift and Evacuation System: HERCULES.) Hercules looks sort of like a big fucking tank without a gun. And it's got more power than God. It can tow, I shit you now, two Abrams tanks at the same time. (The suckers weigh in at 73 TONS apiece to give you an idea what I mean by "more power than God.") It's not real fast, unfortunately, but it could keep up with us. We weren't going to be going fast.
There were over a dozen of them in the base. I'd pulled out four before rigging. We ended up taking two. Why two? Redundancy. More on that later.
Now, this was a big motherfucker. And it was designed to carry a "recovery team" of three guys. In other words, I could fit six techs in those.
Then there was another necessity. We were going to be crossing a lot of watercourses. Some of them we could ford. Some of them there were bridges strong enough to take even the recovery vehicles. Others we were going to have to bridge.
Big bridges were out of the question. They take, like, a fucking engineering battalion to put up. But the Army also has a cute little "fast bridging" armored system based on an Abrams chassis. It was the only Abrams chassis we were taking. I do love those big motherfuckers, even if they are hard to destroy. But they just sucked so much gas and were so hard to move through certain areas I had to leave my last two. (And I didn't destroy them. I left them for the mullah. Seemed like the Christian thing to do. And they had ammo.)
Point was, it could span a thirty-foot watercourse. Crew of three. More techs. They could learn as they drove. Driving an Abrams is not hard.
So I had lots of heavy metal wrapped around my techs. It gave me warm fuzzies.
We took two of the big rolling command post/commo vans. They were Strykers with a big ass box on the back and could keep up satellite commo and local radio even on the move. Lots of electronics I rarely fiddled with. They were supposed to be for battalions and above. What the fuck, I was a reinforced company. Close enough. Later I got closer. I'll get to it.
Then there were the Strykers. We had enough for all the guys and most of the Nepos. We could have had them for all the rest of the Nepos but I had another use for them.
Now, Napoleon said "An army travels on its stomach." Since I wasn't planning on walking to the Bosporus, much less low-crawling, this army traveled on more than its stomach. All those vehicles took fuel. Lots of it. Military vehicles are graded in gallons per mile not the reverse. (Strykers are a bit better, but not much.) We were going to need a lot of fuel.
Since I wasn't planning on looting local villages for olives and shit (see Anabasis) we were going to need food. That was mostly going to be MREs and BritRats. The latter were for the Nepos. And they'd brought some of their own food that they might get a chance to cook.
We were going to need water, both for the vehicles from time to time and for our own consumption. Most of the vehicles were towing a trailer. Some of them were water buffalos. We also had a portable ROWPU we could figure out how to use. Had an onboard generator. Quit working? Why do you think I brought the techs?
We needed ammo. We might need lots of ammo. There's never such a thing as too much ammo. There's only too much ammo to carry.
Sideline: A lot of people over the years have dissed the M-16 series of weapons that we were still using in the form of the M-8. It wasn't all that different from the M-4, just a slightly longer barrel and it could be "modulated" for different weaponry and stuff you could hang on it. It fired a dinky little 5.56mm diameter round. That translates as .221 caliber, same as a .22, basically. Big diff.
The difference matters, though. Because it went very fast. And, honestly, with good shot placement was very lethal.
The Army had used .30-06 rounds in WWII. Those were big honking man-killers. Then they'd gone to the .308 which was still pretty hefty. It was what we used in our medium machine guns.
Why go to the 5.56?
Took up less room. More rounds for less weight.
Lots of arguments both ways, but when I was figuring cubic space to carry all this shit, I was glad I could pack 30% more 5.56 into the space the .308 took up. And it took up less than .30-06. And waaay less than .50 caliber. All of them took up less than mortar rounds.
Yes, we brought two mortar Strykers with us. Indirect fire is a good thing. I'd have taken more but I was getting pack-rattish and I knew it. It wasn't the vehicles, it was the ammo. And the fuel to haul the ammo.
Most of this shit was going to have to go on trucks. Several trucks. The trucks were going to be our most vulnerable targets. Therefore the Nepos drove the trucks. They were the least vital group.
Why were the Nepos our least vital group?
It wasn't because they weren't Americans. I'd grown to love the little bastards like they were my own boys back when I had B company. But they simply were not as important as the U.S. infantry. Why?
The Nepos were shaping up to be good irregulars. Given enough time and opportunity and some more trainers I probably could have gotten them up to the point they were just as good as the U.S. infantry guys.
But they weren't. They were good cooks, some were sort of mechanics and they were decent irregulars. They wouldn't run from a fight and they could sort of shoot. Quality on that was coming up and would come up more.
But they were semiskilled. The U.S. infantry were highly skilled technicians on the subject of war. Let me try to explain.
The Nepos could fire their individual weapons pretty well, clean and strip them and put them together. The ones that had been trained on machine guns could fire those machine guns, clean and strip and clear basic jams. They could slap a compress on somebody who had been shot.
The riflemen in the Stryker unit could: Fire their individual weapons, clean, strip, detail clean and in many cases do minor repairs. They could do the same on a pistol, squad automatic weapon (SAW), a medium machine gun or a heavy. Didn't matter if that was their primary job. The Javelin gunners could do the same and most of the guys could work a Javelin about as well as the gunners. They could do close quarters battle, movement to contact on foot or in vehicle, set up an ambush, react to an ambush, perform battlefield first responder actions up to and including inserting an IV and in many cases stitching a minor wound. They could lay in claymores and in many cases more advanced demolitions. They could call for fire from the mortars. They could land navigate using GPS and/or map. They could perform fire and maneuver. They were trained in night movement either in march or combat.
They could all work a radio.
The Nepos, mostly because we simply had not had the time to train them with everything else going on, couldn't do most of that. And most of them, still, didn't speak English. So whether they could work a radio or not was sort of moot.
I didn't want to lose the Nepos. But if it came down to losing them or the guys who were highly trained specialists at survival, I'd take the highly trained specialists over the semiskilled any day.
So the Nepos drove the vulnerable but incredibly important trucks.
The problem being, most of them didn't know how to drive a car.
Foreseeing this as an issue as time had passed, I'd taken some of their training time to ensure they could all drive military trucks.
Driving military trucks is not like driving a car. The ones we were using were HEMTTs (Heavy Extended Mobility Tactical Trucks.) Think a four-wheel drive tractor trailer. Bit smaller than a tractor trailer but not much. They are big, boxy trucks designed to go anywhere tanks or Strykers can go.
Teaching the Nepos to use them was . . . interesting. Among other things, the Nepos turned out to have a repressed size inferiority streak. Putting them in big-assed trucks with cabs six feet off the ground suddenly put them in charge of their destiny.
It's very hard to roll a Hemitt on flat ground. They managed it. Fortunately, they had very hard heads and we had lots of Hemitts. (It's how it's pronounced.)
They eventually got the picture and got over their tendency to race each other.
Strykers:
We had a lot of Strykers. We had more Strykers than we needed. Why? Since they all used fuel?
Look, I'm a big fan of the Stryker. But the things just break a lot. All military equipment breaks. It's a function of how it's used in part. (I won't get into deep conspiracies about companies that then get to provide parts.) And who uses it. Soldiers are specialists in breaking things, not keeping them going. And they're complicated compared to the average car.
But Strykers break a lot. They were, in fact, overengineered. They had way too many moving parts. Frankly, much as I liked Strykers I wished they'd have gone with something like the LAV. Not as complicated and broke less. "Keep it simple, stupid" is a military acronym that weapons designers and generals often forget.
I had lots of Strykers because I figured by the time we got to the Dardanelles at least half of them were going to be scattered on the road behind us. I was planning on fixing any that we could. Barring that, they were going to be left behind.
We had three types. The mortar carriers. These were the latest and greatest things and actually were pretty cool. They were 120mm automortars with automated tracking and guidance. That is, instead of manually moving them around, when you got a call for fire a computer figured all the corrections and they automatically fired. Assuming everything worked. If everything didn't work, there were manual overrides including a way to work them around by hand.
But if we got in the real busy, they might come in handy. Two of them, again. For one thing, the more mortars the better. For another, redundancy. I was hoping that those wouldn't be the Strykers that broke.
Then we had Assault Gun Systems. These had, originally, been the "Mobile Gun System" with this weird-assed 105mm "semi-recoiless" cannon. That had lasted, from what I heard, five years after deployment. Then they all got converted to "Assault Gun Systems." Difference? The well-tested 25mm Bushmaster from the Bradley replaced the 105. The 105 was supposed to be an "anti-tank" gun system. It couldn't stop most modern tanks straight on. Neither could a 25mm but it could from the side. Just like the 105. And it didn't break as much and you got more shots.
Besides, we had Javelins for tanks.
Most of them were "Infantry Carrier Vehicles." Just big rolling boxes filled with shooters and a commander's cupola with a .50 cal. Some of the commander's cupolas had Mk-19 40mm grenade launchers.
Oh, and six recon vehicles. Those were, basically, AGS with more ammo and less room for shooters. Also better commo including a satellite and meteoric bounce system if they got too far away for radio.
All the vehicles had "Block Five" Blue Force Trackers. That is, they would continuously tell me and Fillup where they were and more or less what their status was. There was an automated ammo counter we'd long before learned to distrust.
With all the vehicles, most of the team was driving Strykers at first. Or commanding them or gunning. I figured that would "consolidate" over time. And the Nepos were cross-training on Stryker driving.
I wasn't planning on stopping for much if I could avoid it. I figured that RIFs along the way, if they heard we were coming through, were likely to pile on just to take out an American unit. Not to mention the loot. Oh, speaking of which.
We had ten trucks, two supply, two food, three ammo and three fuel. One Nepo driver and an AD in each. AD manned the .50 caliber. In the case of the supply and food trucks we'd also mounted them up on the back with two more .50s in ring turrets and welded armor.
We did not have enough fuel to make it to the Bosporus. I was hoping for some Islamic charity along the way.
The basic plan was to stay off road as much as possible. The Strykers would stay in a ring around the trucks. Scouts out.
The Scouts were most of Third Platoon. Why Third? I drew it out of a hat. They loved the fuck out of it. Third Herd usually has a touch more esprit than the other two platoons in any company. Why? Well, they're the only one with a cool name, I guess.
They each carried a crew of three and two "dismounts." The dismounts carried rifles and there were some Javs in the vehicle in case it got real busy. Javs were good against not only tanks but anything else that was big as previously proven.
Spare weapons for when one got totally fucked up, spare batteries, spare clothing, parts, tools . . . I created one list that had us with eighteen trucks. Wasn't going to happen. I winnowed it down. Forgot stuff we'd really need. Went back up.
It was the best list I could create is all I can say.
So we rolled. And then we stopped. Did I say something about watercourses?
Iraq, which we entered almost at once, is part of the Fertile Crescent. If you didn't get the Fertile Crescent in school I'm not going to be explaining. See there are these two rivers that run through it, the Euphrates on the west and the Tigris on the east.
We were running along the east bank of the Tigris. The Tigris is the big river in Iraq. It's not huge by American standards, not a patch on the Mississippi, but it's pretty big.
And my God is it farmed. It's been farmed since time immemorial. This is ancient Babylon, Sumeria, Ur, cradle of civilization, blah, blah . . .
So there are, like, four hundred and twenty-nine billion damned irrigation canals running off of it. Especially to the east.
We spent the first week working our way through that fucking maze. Setting up the temporary bridge was fairly quick. Taking it back up not so quick. And when you're looking across one irrigation ditch, which is just too deep and steep for your vehicles to negotiate, at another five hundred meters to the north, well, you tend to see if there's a bridge you can use. Only problem being, most of the damned bridges were designed for farm trucks. So the answer, especially in the case of the HERCULES was: No.
Bridge. Roll. Stop. Bridge. Roll. Stop. Bridge.
It was during this period that we developed the habit, that we kept even during minor skirmishes, of "afternoon coffee."
Yeah, we had coffee. I know there are people who lived through the times that are gritting their teeth. We drew on a big fucking LOG base and I made sure we carried plenty of coffee. An Army runs on coffee. We had coffee.
Specifically we had it every afternoon at 1630. (That's 4:30PM for all you non-mil types.) And we did it right.
All the officers had somehow ended up with Nepo "orderlies." I swear to God it was never ordered. I think Samad did it. But we all had "orderlies" whether we wanted it or not.
Things had gotten pretty weird, obviously. Back in the LOG base we'd had our "temporary wives" and, well, we were stuck in the fucking Middle East with no clear route home. Things had gotten weird.
I remember the day I decided it was a good time to do "coffee." We were rolling out on the second day and I wanted to sort of "brainstorm" what some of our potential threats and weaknesses might be. How to do it? With Samad? He hadn't a real clue. He was coming along in the "anticipate and intelligently expand orders" area, but he wasn't really any sort of military expert. Surprising inputs from time to time . . .
So I decided to do an "officers' call" and "council of war." Those were the technical American Army terms for it. We did "coffee." I called for all officers to come to the commo van at 1630 to "talk shop." Told Samad he was included and suggested we might have some coffee and maybe some MRE crackers or something.
Should have known better than to get Samad involved. Remember, he was trained by the fucking Brits. And he'd participated in packing the supply truck.
So at 1600 my orderly comes into the commo van carrying a fresh uniform. We hadn't stopped. He just opens up the back and pops through, fresh ACU over his arm.
(Despite my repeated discussions of "safety" the Nepos considered the exterior of moving Strykers, at almost any speed, to be quite convenient ways to get around. I swear they were half monkey. But I digress.)
Sahib will be pleased to change before his conference?
Huh? How the fuck did you get here? Why would I change? Sure, I've had the uniform on for a couple of days but, hell, it's good for . . .
Sahib will be pleased to change before his conference.
So I changed.
1615 the orderly opens up the door to the commo van. A thing drops down.
Ever moved yourself with a U-Haul? They've got this sort of ramp thing that you extend and stuff.
Call it a gangplank in this case.
The vehicles have all slowed as if for a LOG, which wasn't scheduled.
There is now this gangplank sort of thing hanging off the back of the commo van. Fillup, in a fresh uniform, looking a little confused, walks down. It's got a railing. It's riding on the front slope of his Stryker. All he had to do was crawl out the TC hatch, grab on and walk down. Simple. Scary, bad safety, but in a way very fucking cool.
One of the Nepos who had sort of taken the position of senior sergeant is standing by the door, on the outside, holding on.
"Bravo Company . . . arriving!"
One by one, all the officers show up. In fresh uniforms. In order of seniority.
"Number Two (XO) . . . arriving." "Weapons (mortar platoon leader) . . . arriving." "Scouts . . . arriving." "Second Platoon . . . arriving." "First Platoon . . . arriving." "Auxiliary Force . . . arriving." (That would be Samad.)
From somewhere, a silver tea service has been obtained. (See, honey, I didn't grab it!) Coffee is served by the orderlies. There are little baked things. There are finger crackers. There are linen napkins and a tablecloth. (Laid over the map table. It is, by the way, a very crowded commo vehicle at this point.)
Sure, all that stuff had been in the LOG inventory. I hadn't brought it.
I think Samad had just been pining for some good old Brit pomp and circumstance.
And here it was.
But we also had a good conversation. The . . . formality of the thing caught us by surprise at first. But after we got over that, it worked out well. There was a point to the way that the Brits did some things. When "it's just you" surrounded by howling savages, remembering you're a civilized being is sometimes a good thing. Yeah, they could take it overboard but . . . Remembering you're civilized is a good thing. Take it from this borderline barbarian.
So that's the story of "afternoon coffee." Just in case you were wondering. And, yeah, we once had it while a murthering great battle was raging but there wasn't much we could do about it at that point so we had "coffee."
Back to the run.
The good news was, there were no major threats. I sweated blood at first figuring we were going to get hit by RIFs from every side. Shouldn't have bothered. The area was more agricultural than the Midwest. And while it was more densely populated, it was spread out.
See, they didn't do the whole "industrial farming" thing with giant combines. That area, you were lucky to have a tractor. Bunch of it was done by ox plow. Good in one way; they had less to fall from the Plague and shit. But not particularly efficient. See "Organic."
So you'd have a farmhouse surrounded by a few trees and some fields. Farming less than a hundred acres cause that's about what you can do with oxen and shit. Then another down the road not too far.
And the area had been hit hard by the Plague. No medical facilities to speak of, not many cities and few towns. Just fucking farms and irrigation ditches.
Most of the farms were fallow and I could tell the irrigation system was breaking down. Places where the water had spread out over fields and was still there. Places where ditches were dry.
We didn't see many people. There must have been a shitload before the Plague but I figure they took at least 80% casualties between the Plague and secondaries.
Up side was that there was probably enough food stored.
But harvests had gotten fucked up by the Plague and the weather. That area normally had at least two harvests a year, three if you did it right. Most of the wheat, millet, peas and what-not was still standing. Most of it was all fucked up for that matter.
There were some fields active. I taught the Scouts to recognize those and we avoided them as much as possible. These people were going to need the food. We could go through the fallow fields.
Not that they were probably going to be allowed to keep it. Places like this never did. Somebody more powerful came along and took it away to feed an army.
We ran into that around Al Amarah. Actually, near a village called Al Halfayah. Group of thugs in a truck rounding up food from one of the functioning farms.
I wasn't going to get into it. Pax Americana. See also: Gnat/blast furnace.
Problem was, one of the thugs spotted our Scout vehicle and took it under fire with an RPG.
Which was really really stupid. The max range on an RPG is about 300 meters against a moving target, which the Scout was. And they were almost a klick back.
The 25mm, especially with stabilization systems, has a max effective range of 2000 meters.
So they lit up the thugs' truck.
We carefully maneuvered around the farm but I sent the gun Stryker with Hollywood on it over to parley and gain intel.
The "tax collectors" had been from a group called the Al Sulemani Warriors' Brigade. They were the big local group based in and around Al Amarah. The farmer didn't know much about them except that they were taking his food and telling him he was now under their rule.
There was a lot of that as we headed north. Every little city had its rulers and was, in effect, a city-state. Al this and Ibn that and . . . They sort of blended.
Mostly we tried to avoid them. When it did come down to getting busy, it was usually against a small detachment like the "tax collectors" that got stupid. Sometimes we saw guys who were less stupid who just let us pass through.
More or less stayed the same until we got up around Baghdad. At which point three things happened in pretty rapid succession, Bad, Good, Really bad. (Or at least I thought so at the time.)
I'll take the "good" first since it leads to the "bad" and the "really bad" is pretty unconnected.
The good was that we finally got ahold of the Kurds.
I've spoken about the Kurds a little but I figure I'll add some detail.
The Kurds are a mountain people found in the mountainous triangle of what used to be Iraq, Turkey and Iran and is now Kurdistan good and proper.
They're pretty much descended from the Hurrians (look it up) and have been in those mountains for fucking ever. Like the Nepos there's some basic similarities between all Kurds:
They're generally fairly tall for the region, not giants just a bit above average.
They're very straightforward compared to anybody else in the whole fucking area, even to an extent the Greeks. You don't spend ten minutes exchanging polite inquiries about their family with the Kurds; you get to the point.
They love Americans despite the fact that we've regularly fucked them over. (Ditto British.)
They treat their women just about as badly as any other group in the Middle East. Perhaps a touch worse. By the same token, they're pretty okay with women in positions of soft power like doctors.
They are hard-core, in-your-face, one-of-us-is-going-to-get-fucked-up-and-it's-you fighters.
Since back in the Bronze age they've gone through periods of conquering the lowlands around them, getting pushed back by a big "settled" empire, raiding said empire until it takes them over, fighting against the conquerors until nearly wiped out, becoming the best fucking fighters the empire has after it tacitly lets them run things in their own area, waiting until the empire falls and repeat.
Suleiman, one of the most famous warriors of Islam and the guy who kicked the fuck out of one Richard the Lion Hearted? Kurd.
That's the Kurds in a nutshell.
So we finally got ahold of the Kurds when we were southeast of Baghdad and trying to screen past.
To our east were the Zagros Mountains. As a foretaste of what was to come they were covered in fucking snow about two thirds of the way down. They also had a bunch of bad-boy Iranians in them and we'd picked up indicators of some organization, a couple more city-state groups, around Ilam and Khorambad. They were reputed to be remnant Revolutionary Guard back in command and had some fair forces. We did not want to tangle with them in mountains. Especially mountains covered in snow.
So we were keeping to the lowlands, hoping to slip through between Baghdad and the mountains and avoid major conflict.
My initial goal was the Kurdish region. Why besides the above?
During the latter reign of Saddam Hussein the U.S. had established a "no-fly" zone over the northern part of Iraq. (And the south but it was different there.) They also sent in SF teams to work with the Kurds.
With no more than "keep the helos and planes off of us" and some spare equipment the Kurds kicked the shit out of everything Saddam sent at them on the ground and established their own local democracy. Saddam purely hated the Kurds; he'd used poison gas on them in his time. He wanted to be one of the guys that conquered them. Good luck, the Kurdish Perg Mersha were not going to be beaten by a bunch of lowland driven wheat-farmers.
But they really appreciated the help, little as it was. And when we went in and hung Saddam, the "Kurdish Provinces" were the only areas we didn't get fucked in.
There were, basically, four cities in the "Kurdish Provinces." Two of them were pure Kurdish; the other two had been "disputed."
The pure Kurdish were As Sulymaniyah—and, yeah, that's "Suleiman"—and Kirkuk. The two "disputed" were Mosul and Irbil.
See, Mosul and Irbil, pre-Saddam and during the first part of his reign, had been pretty mixed cities. They were about 70% Kurdish with the rest being Assyrian Christians, Turkics and a smattering of Islamic Arabs. More or less in that order.
There was just one problem. Oil was discovered in the Mosul Province. And a refinery got built. And what with ongoing resistance from the Kurds, Saddam couldn't trust them around oil.
So he purged a lot of the Kurds (and Assyrian Christians and such) out of Mosul and Irbil and settled "safe" Sunni Arabs in the area.
(See above about the history of the Kurds.)
When the U.S. came in, the Kurds got a partial beny on resettlement. A lot of the Sunnis hadn't wanted to be up there, anyway. As they left the Kurds moved back in.
But a lot of the Sunnis, who made up the most hardcore faction of the Resistance, fought back. So Mosul and Irbil remained war zones until the Sunni were more or less wiped or driven out. (The reason the Iraq campaign really started winding down.)
Even before then, the Kurds had established a "no travel" zone in their core areas including Kirkuk and Sulamaniyah. That is, they'd take in anybody but an Islamic Arab. Turkic? Come on in. Assyrian Christian? Love you guys. Fucking Sunni or Shia Arab from down on the south plains? Fuck off.
Which is why when U.S. units crossed the borders into what everybody called Kurdistan, you could take off your body armor and relax. You could walk around in a market with no more bother than kids pestering you for treats. People fucking handed you stuff like fruit. They loved American troops.
But the battles around Mosul and Irbil never really stopped. The Sunnis always got weapons, money and people funneled into Iraq right up to the time of the Plague. See, Saddam had been a Sunni. Most of the surrounding countries, especially Syria, Jordan and Saudi, were either controlled by or predominately Sunni countries. They did not want the Shia in control in Iraq. That would create the possibility of a Shia Union with Iran.
(Which is more or less what the Persian Union is, except it's secular. Well, as much as the U.S. is.)
And the Sunni didn't just try to take back their "core" areas around Baghdad (what used to be called the Sunni Triangle and through which we were about to pass) they wanted the fucking oil around Mosul and Irbil.
So we get to the good and the bad.
We'd kept in contact with the Kurds. They'd gotten hit, hard, by the Plague. Not as hard as some areas, though. One; we'd made sure they had vaccine through the military. Two: they distributed it pretty effectively. (More in their core areas than around Mosul and such, obviously.) Three: They had, as a culture, high-trust and a huge degree of cohesion.
So they'd lost a lot of people. And they had then reacted, adapted and overcome. Bury the dead, sow and reap.
Oh, things weren't great. But they were hanging in there.
Which, when I found the right guy at the Pentagon to tell me that and give me some phone numbers, was great news. I was going to need a fill-up and some friendly faces would be nice to see. They had fuel and friendly faces, just like Sunoco or whatever.
Which brings us to the bad.
Unlike Iran, which was not yet up to the level of "pacified" whatever policy maker thought was good enough, Iraq was not considered a "threat country." They were an "associated country" with "good relations" with the U.S. Not quite an ally, but on the way.
(I would have begged to differ, but we're talking about policy makers. State was involved.)
So they could be left with all the gear we were leaving behind under the assumption it would be put to good works.
Now, having just described what great fucking people the Kurds are, where do you think we parked all that fucking equipment?
The Shia were marginal allies of the U.S. They hated the Sunni and Saddam and we'd kicked Saddam out and given them a chance to get out from under five hundred fucking years of domination by a Sunni minority. They were, of course, like any fucking Arab or Persian in that you couldn't trust them as far as you could throw the Great Pyramid. And they had lots of guys who wanted to team up with the Mad Mullahs and kick our ass. But, overall, they were nominally on our side.
The Kurds were just our fucking right damned arm. They thought we rocked, most of the guys who worked with them thought they rocked. They could be trusted like the armor on an Abrams.
The main problem, beginning, middle and right up to the end in Iraq, were the fucking Sunnis. Whether the RIFs that trickled in from other Sunni countries around the world with the intent of blowing up an American for Allah or the Ba'athist party thugs who wanted back into power so they could go back to dominating the Shia like a good Sunni should. They were the motherfuckers we were constantly fighting.
And they were concentrated, to the very end, around Baghdad, up to Tikrit and over to the Syrian border.
So where did we park our equipment?
That's right, right in the middle of the fucking Sunni Triangle.
What. The. Fuck?
We get back to the tofu-eaters. Sort of. Actually we get back to State.
State had a long-term suck affair with the Sunni.
Part of that was just numbers. There were way more Sunni countries than Shia. The only major Shia country, Iran, we didn't have diplomatic relations with until we invaded. (If you can call that diplomatic. Most did not.) So there were just more slots for State pussies to suck Sunni dictator dick than Shia dictator dick. So they learned to suck Sunni dick. They "spoke the language" in diplo-speak. "Would you like it slow or hard?" in Arabic appropriate to the local grammar and norms.
The other part was, frankly, money. Filthy lucre. Graft.
The Sunni countries, many of them, had shitloads of oil money. And they tended to throw it around. The UAE, a tropical desert country, built a giant fucking tube of steel to use as a snow skiing slope. I shit you not. Huge motherfucker.
They gifted "chairs" at prestigious universities. They funded think tanks.
Eventually, every government service worker, including soldiers, wants to get out and do something else. For some of us it's buying or returning to the farm. For others it's getting a good academic position or a think-tank position or a spokesperson's position or a lobbyist's or . . . You get the picture.
Pre-Plague the average salary for an ambassador to a "top-flight" nation was $175,000, most of it untaxable, and quite a few perks. Nothing to sneeze at.
A retiring ambassador to Saudi Arabia left government service and was hired into a "think-tank" that "considered Middle Eastern relations with the Western World" for two million and change.
Guess where the money came from? Bunch of small scale middle-class American contributors?
Don't think so. Whole think-tank, all American citizens and mostly former State employees, was funded by the Saudi Arabian government. The former ambassador had been handed his watch by the U.S. government and a Rolex factory by the Saudis.
So where do you think his real interests lay? Including while he was ambassador.
Oh, of course it was never money! Heaven forbid. The Sunni were our closest allies in the region. Sure, just ask the Sunni guys flying the planes into the World Trade Center. Most of them Saudi citizens because a Saudi citizen could get a visa, from State, without any review whatsoever.
State considered Shia to be unwashed monkeys. What they thought of the Kurds, those violent inbred rednecks of the Zagros and Tauric mountains, you don't want to know.
(The Shia, by the way, were mostly Persian or Persian oriented, even the Arab ones. They'd had a burgeoning civilization when the ancestors of the Sunni were still trying to learn how to herd goats and our ancestors in Europe weren't even doing that. Which was why the Shia, and especially the Iranians, called them goat-herds. Or, more often, goat fuckers. And the Iranians didn't think much of us, either. Discussed that.)
So, and yes it was under "advisement" of the State Department, the DOD was told to park all its shit under guard of the guys we'd been fighting for damned near twenty years and fly home.
Did the Sunni bastards grab all our gear? No, but they grabbed enough before the Plague hit to start a decent little, and entirely unreported, civil war to retake the Sunni Triangle. Then the Plague hit. They got hit at about 60% rate. Things fell apart but they fell apart for everybody.
The Sunni, though, had managed to spring back. Now, there was another park of gear down in the south, very dominated by Shia, area. The Sunni had more and better tanks. But the Shia were still more numerous and even if they were a bunch of groups, the Sunni weren't entirely cohesive.
There was an uneasy truce between the Sunni and Shia. Problem being, while central Iraq had all the government buildings and monuments and museums and even some factories, it had dick all for oil. And eventually the tanks had to be filled on those tanks.
But the Kurds had oil.
And the Kurds didn't have tanks. Or even much in the way of APCs. We hadn't left them much at all, in fact. Just some ammo dumps with light to medium weapons.
Think that the Sunnis, once they got reconsolidated over the summer, immediately kicked the Kurds out of Mosul and Irbil and took over the oil fields?
Think again, brother. They were up against Kurds. Who at least had some shit to fight with this time.
Did I find this all out at once? Nope. But I found out a bunch of it pretty fast.
I finally got the phone number, sat phone, for one of the big Perg Mersha commanders.
Oh, the Perg Mersha. It means "fighters to the death" or some such and was sort of a National Guard. More like the original U.S. and Swiss militia. The guys were farmers or factory workers or whatever. Every now and again, on a rota, they'd get called up and either train in peace or raid in war. Every male Kurd had a weapon of some sort ranging from a rifle to heavy machine guns. They'd come in with their weapons and some ammo, get more ammo then gather under a tribal boss soldier and go fight like fucking demons.
Don't get me wrong. They were not shock infantry. Shock infantry goes back to the Greeks again and their hoplites. Every other fighter in the world, back then, were essentially "raid" infantry or cavalry or whatever. They'd charge and poke then run away. Charge, poke, run away. Do that until one side backs up from too many (low) casualties.
It's very conservative of losses. Also a good way to lose a battle if you're up against the alternative.
The alternative is "we're going to keep rolling forward until you're either dust or we are."
Think the difference between soccer and American football. One of them is all about swift moves and GOOOOOOAAALLL! The other is about slamming bodies together until you've forced the ball up the field. Oh, maybe a bit of throwing and such. But without the slamming bodies, the quarterback's toast.
Think of Three Hundred Spartans facing two hundred thousand Persians and allies. And kicking their ass. Marathon: Ten thousand Greeks (Athenians mostly) vs. about two hundred grand, again, this time on a flat fucking plain. And they smashed the Persians.
Put the Kurds on the plains against us or even the Iraqis, who sort of had the concept of shock infantry, and they were going to have a hard time. But the shock infantry people were never going to have a bit of rest. And in any sort of terrain, including urban areas, raid can counteract shock if shock's not done right. (Which nobody did except us in those days.)
So I called this Perg Mersha commander.
Bandit: O Great One, commander of the faithful, a descendent of Suleiman . . . (Three minutes.)
Kurd: American! Dude! Amigo! Great to see you! (Pretty much that.)
Bandit: Sorry, man. I've been dealing with fucking Iranians for so fucking long . . .
Kurd: American! Dude! Amigo! No problemo!
Bandit: Uno problemo. Need a fill up. Willing to trade some gear and shit.
Kurd: Dude. Bummer. Got a problem.
They didn't hold the oil refinery. Or the tank farms. Or any significant stock. And to get to them I'd have to hit the Iranian Sunni force anyway. Maybe they could sneak us up through the mountains. But then we'd be bingo on fuel.
Motherfucker.
This was getting to be too much like the Ten Thousand.
(By the way. If you ever read the Anabasis or one of the really good historical fiction accounts, the guys who really fucked up the Greeks in the mountains? Kurds.)
Okay, well if that was how it had to be.
They don't call us Strykers for nothing.