299 Days: The Change of Seasons

by Glen Tate

  The unit patch aided in further bonding. It showed the “irregular” troops that they were in a “real” military unit, just as Boston Harbor had intended. They weren’t a gang; they were soldiers. Instilling this was exactly what the patch was meant to do, and it did it very well.

  A final memento was used to bring people together. It was the little beads Grant got before the Collapse. They were in Gadsden yellow, the same color as the in Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. They had a hole in the middle so they could be put on a neck chain or around a Para cord bracelet. A whole strand of two hundred beads cost about $5.00 before the Collapse. Grant got the strand in his preparations before the Collapse because he realized that he might need to identify friendly people in a way that was easy to conceal. A little bead in a distinctive color was perfect. And cheap.

  One Sunday dinner, Grant made a speech and handed out a Gadsden bead, as they became known in the unit, to each man and woman. Troops started wearing them as a necklace with some high-strength fishing line they had. The unit’s Gadsden bead became like a dog tag. It was a source of pride and a way to identify each other as part of a unit. It was amazing what impact little things, like a bead, a patch, a hand sign, and a pocket notebook could have.

  Chapter 247

  Physical and Social Sanitation

  (December 15)

  Marion Farm wasn’t paradise, though. Morale was high, but it was no summer camp. The troops were glad to have it better than most, but this was still a secret military camp with semi-primitive conditions.

  Sanitation was a constant concern. There were over one hundred people living in close quarters without all the modern conveniences. The farm had electricity and running water, but there were only two toilets and one shower. And, to make matters worse, they were on a septic tank. It was only designed for about six people, not 104. The septic system also meant that only organic matter could go down the drain or toilet. This was a new limitation for many of the troops who were accustomed to municipal sewer systems that could handle anything that could physically fit down the toilet or sink. They had to supplement the sanitation system.

  Don, the Air Force RED HORSE guy, was an expert in field sanitation. His old unit would set up makeshift air fields in primitive conditions, sometimes near or behind enemy lines. Sanitation was part of the necessary facilities. Don, and a detail of men, dug some trenches and made crude outhouses far away from the living quarters. They even set up a crude shower. Cold water only, though, which was a new experience for most people. But, for morale, everyone got a hot shower in the farmhouse … once a month, with a five-minute limit. This was about all the septic system could handle without almost immediately needing a good pumping.

  But, then again, Marion Farm was essentially disposable. Once they left on their mission, they would hopefully never need the farm again. They would be occupying recently taken cities, not falling back to the farm. They wanted to preserve Marion Farm as much as possible, though, so it could house another unit or some homeless civilians. Overusing the septic system wouldn’t render the place uninhabitable, but they still wanted to be as low-impact on the facilities as possible.

  Don would give quick classes on sanitation and made sure everyone knew how important it was. “You’re no damned good to this unit—and are actually a liability—if you’re pukin’ and crappin’,” he would say. The military people who had lived out in the field—primarily the infantrymen and the few Marines—understood this. The rest of the unit who hadn’t lived in the field thought the sanitation regulations—like washing their hands several times a day, the constant cleaning of everything, and taking their boots off in the sleeping quarters—were weird. But they complied.

  A key component of the sanitation plan was in the kitchen. Franny was an expert at sanitation. Food-borne illness could cripple the whole unit, at least for a few days. That was very serious business. Franny had a small thermometer in a narrow little pocket on the arm of his cooking jacket. He would test the temperature of the water used to wash dishes, pots, and pans. He also measured the temperature of foods to make sure they were either hot enough or cold enough to be safe for eating. People could laugh all they wanted about the cook in a military unit, but they all had to eat and not be doubled up puking for days. The cook was the key to both of these vital things.

  The sanitation regulations touched on medical issues. Coughing meant using hand sanitizer. If someone got sick, they were essentially quarantined in the infirmary, which was an RV Rich had brought in as a gift from a generous Pierce Point donor who was told he would be helping the “rental team.” RV trailers were valuable commodities after the Collapse. RVs with an engine were less so because they required gas or diesel to be moved, but they were still valuable mobile bug out locations, or mobile quarantine quarters.

  Every cut that drew blood—every single one—had to be sanitized and bandaged. Some guys thought it was a sign of toughness to work with open cuts. Ted would go bonkers when he found out about someone with an untreated open cut. He had seen simple cuts turn into major infections, which could take a soldier out of the fight, might kill them, and could tax the unit’s resources to treat him or her. “There’s no damned medevac here,” he would yell at anyone who decided to be a badass and not get a cut properly treated.

  One of the hygiene issues Grant harped on was brushing their teeth. The last thing he wanted was a soldier to be taken out of action by a totally preventable toothache. “If you don’t brush your damned teeth and get a cavity or whatever,” Grant would tell the troops, “it’s not just your damned problem. It’s the unit’s problem because we just lost a fighter that we need. Don’t be that guy.”

  Nick was pressed into service as a makeshift dentist. One soldier came into the unit with a rotten tooth. After Nick had to yank it out without anesthesia, the unit took preventative dental care much more seriously. The screams from that soldier could have woken the dead, which convinced a lot of people to take care of their teeth.

  Nick was tasked with medical spying on the troops. He would constantly observe them and check for any potential medical conditions they might have—from cuts, to coughs, to hypothermia, to whatever. He would give an exam to each soldier about once a month. The troops thought this was overkill, but Nick was catching little things that could become big things. One of the civilians was mildly diabetic (non-insulin dependent) and wasn’t doing so well with all the carbohydrates they were eating out there, like cornbread and pancakes. Nick got him on a different diet and he was fine. They needed every single solider to perform at full capacity.

  Nick was it out there as far as medical help went. In an emergency, like with Tony Atkins, they would take soldiers to the makeshift medical clinic at Pierce Point. Luckily, Nick could handle almost everything that would come up at Marion Farm on his own.

  Nick actually did very little first aid work. Most of his day was taken up by observing the troops, doing the monthly exams, and giving first aid classes. But these were very valuable things. The battlefield medic work would come later. Unfortunately.

  While medical sanitation sought to eliminate physical threats, like illness, there were also efforts at social sanitation, which was eliminating threats to the good order of the troops. Jealousy and pride were the main culprits, with lust coming in a close second. People—over one hundred people with wildly different backgrounds, thrown together and cooped up in a secret camp—were bound to have some conflicts, despite all the morale boosting Grant and Ted were doing.

  Despite the vetting, with over one hundred people, there were bound to be a few assholes. And people who weren’t assholes under normal circumstances can easily turn into assholes under stress.

  Sure enough, the 17th had a couple of assholes. Ted and Sap picked them out early on and had the squad leaders watching for problems from them. The assholes—Perkins, Roth, Timerzick, and sometimes Patterson—complained about everything. The food wasn’t good enough, they wanted to sleep more, they didn’t wa
nt to do guard duty or KP, etc. They would find minor inequalities and try to set people against each other. Two of them were military and two were civilians. They would try to claim the other group wasn’t doing enough or got better treatment. Their squad leaders tried to manage them, but as time went on, the “four assholes” as they became known, were getting mouthier and mouthier. They were given extra guard duty and KP as punishment but that just made them complain more.

  “Can we shoot them?” Grant asked Ted one day. He was kidding … for the most part.

  Ted laughed, “I wish. I think that’s kinda a ‘war crime.’”

  “Oh,” Grant said, remembering George Washington’s writings about the absolute imperative of military discipline, especially for outnumbered and outgunned rebel forces. “We can throw them in jail, though, right?”

  “You’re the lawyer, what do you think?” Ted asked. He already knew the answer, but wanted to see how Grant would approach this problem.

  “Unit discipline is totally within the discretion of the commanding officer,” Grant said. “And that’s me.”

  “Yep,” Ted said. Of course, if the commanding officer wanted to shoot someone for a minor infraction, that was not okay. Grant knew that there was always a political element to military discipline: go overboard on it and your troops will no longer respect you. Go too light on discipline and they won’t respect you, either. It was like being a parent.

  “What would you like to do with the ‘four assholes’?” Ted asked. Once again, he knew the correct answer, but was testing Grant.

  “I will firmly decide to… ask for the suggestion of my senior NCO,” Grant said. Which was the right answer.

  “Progressive discipline, like more guard duty hasn’t worked, so throw them in the stockade for a few days,” Ted said. The “stockade” was the mini military jail they had out there. They didn’t have a separate building for it, but they made plans for one in the small equipment shed. Might as well make the discipline problems suffer out there. It wasn’t supposed to be fun.

  “Excellent suggestion, Sergeant,” Grant said. “Two days sound good?”

  “Sure, that’s usually how long it takes them to shut up,” Ted said. “We’ll have to watch them after they get out. They’ll hold a grudge against you, me, their squad leaders, everyone. They might try to frag us.” “Frag” was military slang for killing a superior. The term came from Vietnam where a superior might be killed by an “accidental” blast of a fragmentation grenade.

  After two days in the stockade, Timerzick and Patterson mellowed out. The stockade had the opposite effect on Perkins and Roth; they got even mouthier. It was pretty clear the two didn’t want to be soldiers.

  “Too damned bad,” Grant told them when they asked to be discharged. “Are you two out of your fucking minds?” Grant yelled in the commander’s office (a bedroom of the farmhouse) with Ted standing there.

  “What?” Grant yelled, “Do you think we’ll just let you walk out of here and tell whoever will listen about the 17th Irregulars, our plans, our strengths, and our weaknesses? How stupid do I look?”

  They were stunned. They had seen Grant lead, and be tough, but not in such an in-your-face manner. They were deflated. They had honestly thought that they could just say they quit and then get released.

  “Nope,” Grant said, “you two assholes are staying in the stockade until you decide to honor the commitment you made to your fellow troops, to be soldiers and not be pussies.”

  Perkins and Roth realized they were basically in jail until they changed their attitudes. This was not how they planned for things to turn out.

  Grant continued, “Or, if you continue to be assholes after the unit ships out—at which point Pierce Point will already know what we were doing out here—we’ll transfer you to the Pierce Point jail and let them hold you until regular Washington State Guard MPs come in and take you away for your sentences.”

  Perkins and Roth looked at each other and finally started rethinking things. Grant could tell they were looking for a way out. Perkins and Roth needed to save face.

  “Here’s the deal, gentlemen,” Grant said. “You fucked up. Okay? Everyone makes mistakes. You can come back into the unit if you quit being assholes, act like soldiers, and do your jobs. The unit should be disbanded in a few months, anyway. Then you get on with your lives once we win the war. Okay?”

  That sounded pretty reasonable to them. Slowly, Perkins and Roth lost their bad attitudes and were re-integrated into the unit. Grant, Ted, and Sap made sure that the unit wouldn’t hold Perkins’ and Roth’s past behavior against them. The guys in the unit weren’t happy about the “forgive and forget” policy as they realized that this unit needed to work together and not have personal disputes getting in the way.

  Eventually, Perkins and Roth were functioning members of the unit again. They kept to themselves and bitched about everything—but in private, to each other, not to the whole unit, which was fine. People can hate me, Grant thought, and they can hate being a soldier, but they can’t hurt the unit.

  Ted, impressed that Grant handled the situation so well without military experience, asked him how he knew what to do with Patterson and Roth.

  “I’m a parent,” Grant said. “It’s a lot like that.” Grant thought some and then added, “Except my kids won’t frag me.”

  There were other squabbles in the 17th that didn’t involve the “four assholes.” The women were the source of some problems. It wasn’t their fault. Horny guys are horny guys and will fight over women. They just do. But the squad leaders were on top of that and stopped it before things came to actual fighting.

  Then one day, the jealous guys stopped bickering. Right after Ted had a talk with them in private, of course. Later, Ted confided to Grant that he had threatened to cut off the parts of their bodies that were causing the jealousy. That was effective.

  Two other social issues sprang up at Marion Farm. The first was the fact that—surprise, surprise—a few of the Team Chicks were pregnant. After all, contraceptives were hard to come by.

  In contrast to the soldiers at the Marion Farm, the Team, including Grant, had it made in the sex department. They could come and go from the farm and spend the night in their own cabins in Pierce Point. This meant sex, hot showers, and booze (and, one time for Wes, all three at once).

  Grant congratulated his guys on their impending fatherhoods. He suggested that they “marry” their girlfriends. By “marry,” he didn’t mean a legal marriage; there were no more of those, at least out in rural areas. There was no more government to administer legal marriages.

  By “marriage,” Grant meant one of the “wartime marriages” where people pledged to be with each other. Grant wasn’t a prude, but he thought it was important for the Team—who many Pierce Point residents looked up to—to set a good example. They all agreed. The Team Chicks, even the ones who weren’t pregnant, enthusiastically agreed. They wanted to be married, even it was only a wartime marriage.

  It wasn’t just that the Team Chicks wanted to be married for the sake of being married. They weren’t exactly Bible thumpers. Instead, they wanted to be married because even just a wartime marriage meant two things to them. First, they would have a permanent link to their boyfriend on the Team. Actually, for the pregnant ones, they would have the most permanent link possible. But they wanted to have an additional connection with their man. He was so much more than a boyfriend. He was their everything in these bleak Collapse times.

  Second, being married was “normal.” They still craved a semblance of “normal.” It was ironic, though. “Normal” in the days leading up the Collapse was people shacking up without getting married, or at least not getting married until their later twenties or early thirties. It was not “normal” for girls in their late teens and very early twenties to get married.

  But the “normal” they sought now was the “normal” from a few generations ago, back when getting married that early was just what young people did. It beat spe
nding your late teens, all of your twenties, and into your early thirties partying, which was fine when things were free and easy like before the Collapse. But now, with everything scarce and the constant threat of danger, partying for ten or fifteen years sounded odd and frivolous. Like a bizarre luxury. Oh, sure, occasional parties were still welcomed. Very welcomed, but it just wasn’t the focus.

  The Team Chicks—and the Team—grew up in a hurry that summer and fall. They went from a big party at the beginning of the Collapse to being serious soldiers, Army wives, and expectant parents. And, despite the world coming down around them, they were very happy about all of this.

  Chapter 248

  Warrior Song

  (December 16)

  With all the excitement out at Marion Farm for the upcoming deployment, Grant had almost forgotten about Pierce Point. He was going to Marion Farm every day and frequently spending the nights there. Lisa wondered why he needed to do so much “training” with the Team, but she wanted to believe that he was really at Pierce Point with them, instead of at that rumored Green Beret farm. Every time she thought he might be doing Army stuff, she told herself how crazy that was. She kept telling herself that.

  He used the absence from his family to get himself mentally prepared for the second half of his life, which would be without his family once he shipped out with the unit because Lisa would leave him. Or he would die. Either way, within the next few weeks, he didn’t expect to be with his family ever again. War was full of shitty situations. He was doing the best he could to get his head in the right place for when it happened.

  Given how much time he was spending at Marion Farm, he couldn’t devote much of himself to Pierce Point. Luckily, Pierce Point needed very little of his attention. The place was humming along nicely.