"Rubble" was our first episode.
We moved out from our assembly areas at dawn. It had been determined that for reasons of "reduction of collateral damage" we should do most of our fighting during the day. Also, because that way we were able to "craft the image."
There were reporters on scene by the time we hit the edge of Detroit. They'd been told we were coming and punched out crews immediately. The command track I was using had, besides all the usual shit, four TVs in it tuned to every major network. We had the "regular" networks split and one for Fox and one for CNN. Graham had done one bit for us then faded out. He was actually on the "other side" of this war.
There were actually reporters "embedded" with the Caliphate forces to show the "truth" of this "unconscionable use of force" against "peaceful Muslims" who were being "oppressed" for "voluntarily choosing" an "alternative lifestyle" to the "Fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy." Graham wasn't with those idiots, but he was still on the other side of the propaganda war.
I didn't spot the shot. But one of our "savvy eyes" did. CNN had broadcast a touching piece while we were still on the outskirts of Detroit about the "horrific collateral damage" of our "military assault." As far as I knew, nobody had fired a shot, yet, and there was a female CNN reporter standing in front of a pile of rubble we had presumably made.
And right behind it came the "alternative view" from an Army videography team. The guys on the team had the right idea. They stayed on the reporter though most of her bit then zoomed in, so you could still see the reporter's shoulder out of focus, on some rebar sticking out of this rubble we had, presumably, made that day. It was rusted.
"Get me all the information we can about that building," I snapped. "I need to know when it fell down and why."
Sure enough, it was a lead-in shot for most of the evening news shows. And they were all over us like stink. We were barely fighting and they already wanted us to surrender.
Hell, no. I haven't yet begun to fight. Either war.
"Rubble" talked about how "Caliph Ali" had been tearing down buildings to build a mosque. The "Martyrs of the Great Jihad of September 11th Mosque." We had overhead of "people" still working on it (more on that later) even as we did our approach. Also dated satellite imagery showing that particular building standing, then being pulled down. Nearly a year before.
We discussed the basis of Islam and, notably, the way that the Koran talked about slaves. Because we already knew where we were going with the overall story.
We took the outskirts of the area "Caliph Ali" held with fairly light fighting and about no casualties. We put out sniper teams to counter their sniper teams. And we bunked down for the night.
Normally, the U.S. Army fights at night. We've learned to own it. But we wanted the news media to get good video. So we could hammer them with it.
Two-front war. The main front was taking down Ali. The second front was showing the media we could fight that war, too. I'm not even sure they shouldn't be reversed.
Second day was "Collateral."
The main shot for that was a shot of one of the Mongrels' Abrams taking out a building. And the line of dead bodies, females and kids, that were outside the building. Clearly dead because of those evil U.S. Forces since nobody else was shooting, right?
Another shot from CNN, broadcast all over the place as we expected. It was the most newsworthy shot of the day and we were pretty good at figuring out which would be the lead-in story for the news at that point.
We showed the heavy weapons emplacement in the building. And had Predator video of the women and children being shot, by Caliphate forces, as they tried to get out of the way of the battle.
The Caliphate was using human shields all over the place. We showed just how very hard it was to avoid collateral damage. We had video of soldiers taking fire and casualties and not returning it until they could target the actual fighters. Also of kids being used as spotters.
Body slammed them again.
The third was "Tangled."
The shot for that day was an Abrams with a plow ripping down a building. Urban renewal indeed.
The Caliphate had laced their penultimate defenses with IEDs. Most of them anti-personnel.
We had one, unfortunate, shot of a civilian trying to escape who ran into one and got blown to rags. Sniper overwatch and we were gathering everything in realtime.
We had graphics of how they were laid out and how we took them out, mostly by going through buildings.
Of course, we were also showing the Caliphate how we were coming, but I didn't really care.
We were picking up lots of video of some horrific stuff that we weren't showing. That was for the last segment.
The last day we did start out before dawn. I took the Bandits, the Scouts and the Mongrels on a sweep to the east.
While the main force of the battalion, and most of the media, were concentrating on the main fighting, we swept around in our standard flanking maneuver. There were defenders in that area but they weren't numerous. Also IEDs but we had those licked.
We breached their final defenses and shoved, hard, for the central command post.
Why?
Hostages.
The "Caliph" had gathered many of the "dhimi" (cover that in a bit) as well as all of his slaves around him. Well, most of them were packed into the roads that the battalion was slowly and with much noise and commotion grinding forward on.
They were forced to stay in place with chains on their legs as well as guards behind them with machine guns.
We swept in behind them. And we got the guys with machine guns, mostly, before they could open fire. At which point I told the battalion to speed the fuck up and watch out for civilians. And handle casualties.
The "Caliph" had taken refuge in a former library that was, for the time being, the most palacious building he could find. It was, he considered, heavily defended. And he, again, had hostages.
I had the Mongrels take out the forward defenses and then the Bandits unloaded and started raising all kinds of hell.
Our intel was that his "throne room" was in an upper lobby. I had Third Herd assault the front while the rest of us went around the side and up the fire stairs.
The "Caliph" was on his "throne" (a canopy bed) surrounded by his harem, not one of which was over sixteen. He had his "martyr guards" oriented to take Third under fire.
When we came out of the stacks, everybody was looking towards the main stairs.
Second Platoon lit them up. They want their 72 virgins, we'll make that easy for them.
Which left the caliph surrounded by terrified teenage girls and holding a naked ten-year-old up as a human shield.
I was a commander. I didn't shoot people if I could avoid it. That's what snipers are for.
I had Second's sniper shoot him in the elbow. It was nice and exposed.
Then I shot him.
And, yes, he appeared unarmed. But I couldn't be sure. He was still moving and thus "a potential threat to myself and noncombatants."
So I shot him several times. Some of the shots at point blank range.
Sue me.
That night we broadcast "Chains."
Two hours, by previous negotiation, it laid out what had really been happening in the "kindly" Islamic Caliphate of the 9/11 Martyrs.
Mullah Ali had established true Shariah. There were three classes of people. The Muslims, "dhimi" and slaves. Dhimi were any people who refused to renounce Christianity or Judaism but were able to successfully contribute to the Caliphate's brutal "tax regime."
If you could not contribute, you were made into a slave. Sometimes. Actually, what usually happened was that you sold a member of your family. Usually a pretty daughter; they brought the most money. Or you'd lose your business and eventually become a slave.
It was, in fact, very much on the normal lines of a caliphate.
The only added fillip is that each week every dhimi household was paraded before the "faithful" and forced to undergo a ritual auto de fe in which they were at first threatened with death and then "reprieved" if they paid their taxes.
Dhimi females were, by law, not to be veiled. They had to wear the "hijab," the headscarf, which is a sign of ownership by the way, but they could not wear veils.
At the weekly auto de fe, females ranging as young as ten were pulled out of the dhimi households and "used" for the pleasure of the caliph and his "generals."
Sometimes they were used publicly while the parents and husbands were forced to watch.
Rape is a method of control. It is an exercise in naked power. It was used as such to ensure that things in the Caliphate were "peaceful" and "ordered."
Then there were the slaves. The slaves were dhimi who could not pay their taxes. They did the majority of the labor on building the mosque, as well as the combat emplacements. Chained in long lines, the shackles on their legs were muffler clamps mostly, they were as ragged and emaciated as death camp survivors.
Given all that, you'd think that anyone would want to become a Muslim, right?
Only "persons of color" were permitted to "submit to Allah."
Like I said, he'd have made MLK a racist.
The news media, by the day of the final assault, was trying to change its tune. Why?
People had stopped watching anything but The New Centurions. They knew they would get their news as facts, not spin. Not a picture of something and a whining bitch talking about how soldiers, who were incredibly well regarded by then, had been killing innocent women and children but what was actually happening.
There's no point in watching a 24-hour news cycle if all the "news" is wrong.
People were turning off TVs until Centurions came on.
By day four, the news media was getting the hint. It was taking a clue-bat, but they knew that whatever they showed that night, we were going to deconstruct and destroy them with.
"Chains," we actually had a hard time. But CNN could be counted on to toe the party line and they had a shot of dead women and children lying in a roadway.
They'd been chained up to stop our advance. They couldn't run and they couldn't hide. They were shot in the back by "soldiers" of the Caliphate when Farmer's Freaks breached the perimeter. And the "soldiers" died seconds later, courtesy of two fast acting TCs and the World War One era Ma Deuce, thereby saving hundreds of lives.
CNN showed the bodies, from the hips up.
They didn't show the chains.
They didn't show the sobbing men, women and children being released from them by soldiers of the United States Army.
They didn't show the women screaming at us, "WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?"
(Actually, they showed the angry mob, they just did a voice-over that cut out what they were angry about. We deconstructed that one, too.)
We deconstructed piece after piece that showed the Army and the Carson administration in the worst possible light. We talked about what the Koran really said, how it could be interpreted and how the "Caliph" had perverted even that perverse document. (Don't like my take? Go read Surahs Eight and Nine. Skip One. It's superceded by Mohammed's own directives in Surah Six.)
We found "moderate" Islamics, real ones that were immigrants and had been good Islamics their whole lives, and got interviews about their anger at what had been done. The one imam from Iraq who was crying and apologizing over and over again was particularly good, I thought.
By the next day, the news media was effectively broken. They were interviewing survivors and even CBS and CNN reporters were getting a bit testy at what had been allowed to happen.
"That this travesty could be permitted in America at even the worst of times says something about the previous administration. And the news media has to share a portion of the blame."
CBS evening news, President of CBS News, Day Five.
By then, units were going into all the "contested" cities and finding similar horror stories. None as bad as the "Caliphate" that had been held up as "enlightened" but very fucking bad in their own way.
Then came "Trust."
That was all me. I'd actually built most of it from footage going back to the very beginning of the Plague. It was, in parts, very dry. It's not anyone's favorite and perhaps I should have quit on a high note. But I wanted my swan-song to be my song.
I talked about trust. I talked about societal trust, when it worked and when it didn't. I talked about assimiliation, the "melting pot" concept vs. "multiculturalism," the "salad" concept. I talked about studies of societal trust. I pulled in shots from The Gangs of New York, talking about how "multicultural" it had once been when Italians and Irish and "American" Americans couldn't talk to each other and didn't trust each other and therefore killed each other in such droves that the Army had, way back then, had to do a "Detroit" on New York City itself. And now one group had great food and the other great beer and it was otherwise hard to tell them apart.
I talked about how Swedes and Norwegians, two cultures as white-bread as you can find, had once battled even here in the U.S. over differences brought to our shores.
"If we sunder ourselves internally, if we accept the false divisions, then we bring with those false divisions all their ills, all their blood of centuries. Where then, can we find trust? If we cannot see the difference between the evil that stands here before us with blood-soaked hands and what we are told is the evil we do in bringing peace and plenty to foreign shores, where then is the trust? If we cannot remember who we are, if we cannot comprehend what it means to be this shining light on the hill, this country of wonder and riches, this . . . America, then we shall surely slip into the long dark night that the enemies of our freedoms so richly desire.
"We are told, always, that there is no black and white. That there are only shades of gray. This is a picture that is held up to us. But it is only a picture and it is false. Each day, each of us makes countless choices, and each of these choices is black and white. If we choose, over and over again, as we have for so long, to choose the black choices because they are easier, to choose 'me' over 'us,' to choose division and strife over assimilation and trust, then we slowly slip into that black night.
"I do not so choose. I am your Centurion. This America Shall Not Fall!"