Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  “Well, they both run into the Mississippi. The Wolf runs along the north side of Memphis, and the Nonconnah along the south side. Most of Memphis lies between those two rivers, and of course the Mississippi River is on the west. Memphis was practically an island once those bridges went down. All of Western Tennessee was basically an island when the big river bridges went down, so that made Memphis an island on an island. The only way out of Memphis across dry land was straight to the east between the Wolf and the Nonconnah, through suburban towns like Germantown and Collierville. Our mission was to open a supply route from Memphis straight south into the state of Mississippi. Getting a bridge over the Mississippi River was out of the question, that’d take years. The Ohio and Tennessee rivers weren’t much better, those bridges were down too. Interstate 55 was going to be our main supply route from Mississippi into Western Tennessee. The highway runs straight south from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, and then New Orleans. Our mission was to bridge the Wolf and then the Nonconnah, to open up the route down into Mississippi.”

  “I thought General Mirabeau sealed the state border.”

  “He did, to refugees coming out of Memphis. We were opening up a route to bring in relief supplies. I have no idea what kind of coordination happened between Mirabeau and Washington, or what kind of deals were made. At the time, we were just operating under our original orders: put temporary bridges over the Wolf River and Nonconnah Creek, and open up I-55 from Memphis down into Mississippi.”

  Doug sipped his water and continued. “The Memphis airport is south of the Nonconnah too, near I-55. Between Nonconnah Creek and the Mississippi state line. Once they got the runways fixed, they were bringing transport planes with relief supplies into the airport, but they could only get it from there into Memphis by helicopter. It was the mother of all bottlenecks. Once we fixed the bridges, FEMA and the military could bring the stuff into Memphis on the roads. As it was, thousands and thousands of refugees were crossing the Nonconnah in little boats, or even swimming. Pedestrians could get across some of the wrecked bridges. All of these people were swamping the airport, turning it into a giant refugee camp, and that made the bottleneck situation there even worse. Without a working road from the airport into Memphis, all they could do was helicopter airdrops, and that wasn’t enough. FEMA was stuck way behind the curve. The situation in Memphis was getting worse by the day, not better. But first we had to bridge the Wolf River, north of Memphis.”

  “How did that go?”

  “We set up a series of assault bridges. We had the Wolverine bridge system at Fort Leonard Wood; it can extend out across an eighty-foot gap. The Wolf River averaged about two hundred feet wide—over the water, I mean. The bridge was much wider, to get the roadway up onto high ground. Sections of the old bridge were still usable. We got a lane open with our Wolverines, plus what we could pick up out of the river with cranes. We broke every safety regulation there ever was putting old bridge sections back up, but our mission came first: open a lane over those two rivers ASAP, no matter what! Our welders and riggers really kicked ass, they were just amazing. The work they did! We had our own operating engineers, so when we needed bigger equipment than what we brought, we just commandeered what we could scrounge up and we got to work. Big road cranes, mostly, plus ‘dozers and backhoes.”

  Carson asked, “What do you mean, commandeered?”

  “We just took what we needed. Emergency law, it was all under emergency law. We could take the crane operators and mechanics too, when we could find them. Sometimes they helped us willingly. I mean, it’s their city, and they wanted to fix things even more than we did. Plus, they’d rather run their own equipment than see it driven off by strangers and maybe get ruined. We usually got help with the heavy equipment, one way or the other. We had our own fuel tankers, and we were armed, right? We had plenty of qualified equipment operators in our battalion. We could run any machines we could find. Well, it took us three days to get a single lane open across the Wolf. We left a reinforced company for security, and the battalion pushed on south to Nonconnah Creek with the rest of our equipment.

  “It took them two days to make it ten miles as the crow flies. Whoever decided our battalion should cross the Mississippi River above Memphis should be shot. We should have come across the Mississippi further south, into the state of Mississippi, and then gone up into Memphis. Instead, we did it ass backwards. Typical Army planning—go the shortest way, not the best or the easiest. I think they did it because the Mississippi River was blocked by the fallen bridges: they had to use the barges and tugs where they were, north of Memphis. Anyway, we ended up driving clear around the city in a big zigzag circle, trying to get to the Nonconnah. We couldn’t use the highways, I-40 or 240—that’s the beltway around Memphis. Too many overpasses came down in the quake, so we had to use the surface streets. It took us two days of moving telephone poles and pushing through rubble and fending off refugees. It was a nightmare. We were supposed to put up bridges to bring in relief supplies and allow refugees out. In the end, it was us who needed to be rescued, along with everybody else.

  “We had to use live ammo—fire warning shots, then shoot to kill, the whole nine yards. Our mission was considered that important. We lost a third of our convoy along the way: ambushed, split off, looted or burned. Our battalion CO had orders to press straight on to the Nonconnah, but she kept detaching elements to rescue people. It was a horror show. It was hard to drive on by when you saw little kids begging for help, drinking ditch water…starving and freezing. We had our own rations, but it was tough keeping our minds on our mission. You just wanted to stop and help people everywhere, but you couldn’t. We had to get the highway down into Mississippi open. We had to open the way to the airport. By then we had some big road cranes that we’d picked up along the way. Anything we could use, we took it if we could. Just took it, under emergency law. Finally, on January 7, we opened up the bridge over the Nonconnah. The interstate highway down to Mississippi was open, and that meant the Memphis airport was open too. Only one lane, but it was open. Technically open, anyway. Then my company was sent back north, to bring down more supplies from the barge crossing point north of Memphis.”

  Carson asked, “The state of Mississippi was already a disaster area from the hurricanes, wasn’t it? Did they really expect Mississippi to come and rescue Memphis?”

  “That kind of decision was way above my pay grade. I was just there to help open the highway down into Mississippi. But it didn’t matter in the end—it was a moot point. On January 9, the second big quake hit. Nobody expected it! At first, we thought it was just another aftershock. Our temporary bridges fell into the rivers. Our best cranes went over too, both our own and the big civilian cranes that we’d commandeered. It was the best heavy equipment we could find around Memphis, and down it went. When a crane goes over, you need another crane to lift it back up…but there were no more cranes. And their booms and lifting cables were totally fubared. You don’t just go down to Home Depot and get more of them. They don’t stock cantilevered booms for hundred-ton cranes, or spools of one-inch rigging wire. Not to mention that all of the Home Depots were looted anyway. So all that work we did to get heavy equipment to the rivers was wasted. After the January quake, all of that equipment wound up getting stuck. Stuck, trapped or ruined, and the bridges were back down in the river. And here we were, an active duty Army battalion, and we basically needed to be rescued. Our rations ran out. We didn’t bring any heavy weapons, just our rifles and a basic load of ammo. That was almost all expended just getting through Memphis.”

  “Didn’t the Army use choppers to fly food and ammo in to you?”

  “Some, but hardly enough. Remember, there were millions of people in a bad, bad way, from Nashville to Little Rock. We were just a battalion of soldiers, so I guess they expected us to be able to take care of ourselves. We were a low priority, just one of probably hundreds of military units stranded all over the place.”

  “How big was the second qu
ake?”

  “I’ve heard all kinds of numbers. At least an eight on the Richter scale, about as strong as the first one. I don’t truthfully know. It was big. The second earthquake hit after dark, seven thirty at night. There was a curfew. No more vehicle traffic at night except for the military—not that anybody obeyed the curfew. It was a madhouse, nobody was in charge, there were no police. We had camps on both sides of the Wolf River, guarding the bridge, manning refugee checkpoints. There were refugee squatter camps on both sides of the river, trying to get protection and begging for some of our rations, our MREs, and our clean water.

  “Anyway, I was walking across the bridge with a couple of my squad buddies when it started moving, slow at first, then bucking real hard. I tried to run for the land, it was about fifty yards in either direction to get off the bridge and onto solid ground—our steel Wolverine spans and the concrete sections that came through the first quake, or that we’d lifted back up with cranes. I couldn’t run; the bridge was going wild. I tried to hang on to a girder; it was like trying to hang on to one of those bull-riding machines. Felt like it went on forever, minutes anyway. Very long minutes. Our cranes all went over. One came down right across the bridge and almost nailed me.

  “You can’t even imagine how freaking scary it was. Thousands of birds were going insane, screaming and flying in every direction, just flying straight into things and breaking their necks. Lightning was striking all around us. The sky was kind of a sickly yellow from the chemical fires that were still burning over on the Mississippi River, and there was a new sulfur smell just to remind you that hell was opening up. You could smell it: the sulfur was so strong it burned your nose. It was apocalyptic, supernatural, anything you can think of like that—times ten.

  “The steel bridge girders were grinding and wailing, up and down, side to side, back and forth, and then it all let go. I was sure I was going to die. I went down with the bridge section; it was about fifty feet down to the water. I went underwater, and then I was like a goldfish in a blender full of black paint. I thought, ‘Well, it’s my turn now.’ I’d seen so many dead bodies since I’d crossed the Mississippi River into Tennessee…it was hardly a surprise that my time had come. I was on the verge of just taking a great big breath of Wolf River when I was spat up into the air, and then I was just carried along like on whitewater rapids. Mind you, this was on the Wolf River that most of the time barely moves. But there I was, just getting swept along for the ride with trees, cars, telephone poles, I can’t even imagine what. It was pitch black except for the earthquake lightning and the chemical plants back on the Mississippi River that were still burning.

  “I grabbed hold of a door or something that felt like a door and just held on for dear life. Everything was just tumbling and rushing around me, and I thought I was going to be killed, only this time I’d be crushed first and then drowned. But as sudden as it started, all of the crap I was surrounded by became still, and the water rushed out from under me. It was still almost totally dark, but there was no more lightning, just that stink of burning chemicals and sulfur. And dead bodies…there was always the smell of death since I’d gotten to Memphis. That was my last memory, being buried in a mountain of trash while the water was sucked away. The whole thing from the first shake to going into the river, to washing up high and dry maybe took ten minutes—but who’s counting minutes in the middle of a freaking nightmare from hell? My watch was gone anyway. I was wearing ACUs and combat boots; they were still on me anyway, thank God. My pistol, my wallet, my watch, they were all gone. But I was alive. Freezing cold, soaking wet, but alive. During that entire ride, from the bridge and down the Wolf River, I was sure I was going to die. Positive. So even freezing cold, cut up and bruised all to hell, I was happy. I was going to see another dawn. At some point I passed out. From shock, probably.

  “The sun woke me up. I was in a giant tangle of trash and debris. Broad daylight. Lucky for me, it wasn’t too cold for January, and I didn’t die of hypothermia or something. I was so packed into trash that maybe it kept me warm overnight. Insulation, you know? Otherwise, I don’t know how I didn’t freeze. When I came to, I was just shaking like a leaf. Shivering. It took me an hour to get myself untangled and work myself loose. I was weak, I had no energy. After I climbed out of my tangled-up nest where I’d spent the night, up on top where I could see a little ways, I saw things I never imagined. Cracks and crevices in the ground that were deep enough to fall into, and too wide to jump across. Huge trees, oaks even, split right up the middle from bottom to top. Half a tree on one side of a crevice, half on the other, just ripped apart like a celery stalk. And all around there were big white sand hills that formed during the quake. I found out later they’re called ‘sand boils.’ It’s like quicksand underground, then it shoots up like a geyser during a quake. Some of those sand boils were twenty or thirty feet high.

  “A lot of the land around there liquefied: houses and cars just sank into it like it was instant quicksand. You might see the corner of a car, or a man’s bare foot sticking out, and the mud all around it was just as smooth as a beach after a wave passes over it. I didn’t see much of anything during the quake; it was dark and I spent most of it in the river. Afterwards, the next day, I saw plenty. I saw people half-buried in mud, dead. Almost everybody was already in a bad way after the first quake, so it was like the second one came along three weeks later to finish the job. I saw dogs, wild dogs, dogs gone feral, feasting on corpses. Just chowing down on human bodies. That was commonplace. You saw that everywhere.

  “I had my uniform shirt and pants and my boots, but that was all. My wallet was gone, my M-9 pistol was gone from my holster, my watch was gone…and I had no idea how far I’d been swept by that flood. I couldn’t see the bridge supports, or the bridge. I was dehydrated, I was in pain all over, I’m sure I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought I was carried downstream of the bridge, toward the Mississippi River, so I started walking east, trying to get back to my unit. It wasn’t until later I figured out the quake had turned the Wolf around. That flood had already swept me way to the east, so I was just walking farther and farther away from my unit. Or what was left of it.

  “And it wasn’t easy going. It took all my concentration and effort just to make a little progress, weaving my way over and through piles of debris. I kept running into dead ends and backtracking. The Wolf was running the right way again, toward the west, but the banks were all washed out, and they were covered with every kind of debris. It looked like a picture I saw after the Johnstown Flood. Wreckage on top of wreckage, all tangled together and coated with mud. Eventually I couldn’t go any further. The debris had piled up against another wrecked bridge, almost like a solid wall or a dam. I had to try to go around it the only way I could. The river cut through more or less open country, but after I left the river I wandered into the edge of some suburbs, or what had been suburbs. There were survivors, digging into rubble.

  “It was all black people, African-Americans. It was a black area, I have no idea where. Small one-story detached houses, mostly tumbled down in heaps. Some apartment buildings pancaked down, they were probably three- or four-story buildings, but I’m just guessing. I couldn’t tell if they collapsed during the first quake or the second. No police, no ambulances, no paramedics, no sirens—no nothing. Just quiet, except for people cursing and crying over their fallen-down homes and their dead family members. And a few random gunshots, that was about it. No cars were moving. Even if you had gas, there was no way to drive with trees and poles and cables all over the roads. And there I was, Mr. White Boy, in my muddy Army uniform and boots. My empty military holster had a flap, so maybe it was hard to tell if I had a gun in it, but it was a weak bluff. I got a real bad feeling that I had better not go any further south, into Memphis. People were looking at me with pure hate in their eyes, or at least it seemed that way to me. Like the earthquakes were my fault, somehow. Or like it was my fault that they hadn’t been rescued by the federal government already. I turned
around and headed back to the Wolf. It’s not as if I was going to get to a telephone and call in to my unit. Who had a phone that worked? There was still no electric power since the first quake, three weeks before.

  “I edged my way back toward the river, got around the big debris field piled up against the other bridge, but it wasn’t my bridge, it was a different one, with a few big round concrete pilings in a line instead of lots of square pilings in pairs. That’s when I finally figured out I must be on the wrong side of my unit, walking further away instead of getting closer. That’s when it came to me, the way all the debris was piled up: the flood had swept in from the Mississippi, right up the Wolf River against the regular current. But hell, everything in the whole world was so strange by then…that it almost seemed natural that a river could flood backwards. Why not?

  “I didn’t know if I should turn around and head back west, or what. I hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink in probably eighteen hours. I was getting ready to drink straight from the Wolf, and I knew that was a bad idea. Everything from oil and chemicals to dead bodies was in that river. Anyway, I didn’t have to think about it long. I was pushing along between chest-high bushes and an old chain link fence, and I ran smack into a dead end. The fence ran right into the side of an old wall from a warehouse or something, and I had to turn around.

  “That’s when I was captured. It was just casual, easy, no problem at all. I turned around and there were three black guys trailing me about ten feet back. Two teenagers, and one maybe about thirty years old. He had a revolver, and he just waved me out. He was the tallest, my height, about five eleven, with a big pile of dusty dreadlocks bundled together up on top. That made him seem taller, maybe. The other two were carrying machetes, like Mexicans use. These two had spiky dreadlocks and they were very dirty, but they were all dressed pretty well, considering. Nice jeans and jackets, not ripped or filthy like you might expect, not three weeks after the first earthquake. Stolen or looted, probably.