The Second Civil War- The Complete History

by Adam Yoshida

  “That which cannot continue will not do so indefinitely. Now, given this, we have a choice to make - a vital and world-changing choice. Either we have the courage of our convictions and declare that we will not simply be the slaves of events, or we become complicit in attempting to preserve that which must and shall not ultimately survive and, in so doing, we sacrifice our own souls.”

  “The question is not whether the President has committed a crime in a strictly legalistic sense. We all have heard what they lawyers have to say. We know that the legal actions arising from the President’s order will take years to sort out. We know that. And we are told that there is nothing that can be done. That, in the words of the President, ‘elections have consequences.’”

  “And, they do, my friends. They truly do. As the American people entrusted him with the Presidency so too they gave us of the Congress the power to act against him should their trust prove to be misplaced. This is the way of things. It is how things are meant to be in America. Power acts against power. The Congress, under our Constitution, has the power to remove the President from office for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors. This, and not merely the law itself, is the ultimate check upon the power of a President.”

  “The actions of the President, in usurping powers that properly belong to the Congress of the United States - in assuming a power to tax and spend of a virtually unlimited character - fall precisely under the definition of a high crime and misdemeanor as intended by the authors of the Constitution. The question is not simply whether the actions of the President are legal - and I maintain that they are not - but whether they are consistent with the conduct of the Chief Executive of a republic. Can anyone truly dispute that they are not?”

  “Therefore, I am introducing a resolution before this House. To wit, that nothing in existing law authorizes the President to issue money in the fashion proposed and that, so doing, would, in the opinion of this House, constitution an impeachable offense on the part of the President.”

  The Pentagon

  At the Pentagon, General Richard Hall sat in his office and flipped through the latest reports coming from Central Command as he sipped a cup of coffee. The Army Chief of Staff had long favored reading reports directly, rather than simply being briefed on their contents by subordinates. In the course of a thirty-four year career in the United States Army, beginning with a stint at West Point where he had graduated second in his class, his keen eye for details had been critical to his progressive advance from one success to another.

  The 4th Infantry Division, Hall noted, had left its positions near Tehran and had now moved south to Qom. There was nothing particularly unusual in that, given that the US Army was still engaged in fighting off desultory efforts by the remnants of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other elements to carry on the fight on behalf of the dead regime. With a quick click he flipped through some of the other reports that had had been copied on. It was five minutes later, when reading fuel consumption reports by the Third Army, that he saw something to give him pause. General Hall opened Excel and began cutting and pasting figures across reports that spanned several weeks. When he was done, he checked the figures a second time before saving the file and forwarding it to a subordinate.

  Mike, he wrote, these fuel consumption figures for the Third Army look off to me. Can you have someone double-check them and see what’s up?

  A few hours later, the report he had requested hit his inbox. Quick calculations indicated that, in fact, the Third Army was using nearly twice as much fuel as its operational reports suggested it ought to be using. Curiouser and curiouser, thought Hall as he read the back-of-the-envelope figures. He briefly considered writing General Mackenzie directly but he knew, based upon long and tortuous experience, he would receive an other-than-welcome response to an inquiry that some, especially the officious CENTCOM commander, would regard as an invasion of their exclusive prerogatives. Instead he sent another e-mail, this one to a different subordinate, asking him to take a look and see if it were possible to reconcile the reported pace of operations by the Third Army with higher consumption of not only fuel but other goods as well than were suggested by the official reports.

  Ottawa, Ontario

  The Prime Minister checked and re-checked the figures in front of him. They were, to put it simply, mind-numbingly awful. He flipped them over in his hands, squinted, and then set them back down upon the conference table. Finally, he spoke.

  “Can it really be as bad as this?”

  “I’m afraid so, Prime Minister,” the Chief of the Defense Staff apologetically explained, “the Army was never very large. It’s been decades since we deployed a complete Division either within Canada or anywhere else in the world. We simply don’t have that many soldiers and we are having a terrible time recruiting more, especially for the purpose of fighting other Canadians.”

  “I understand,” said the Prime Minister, “thank you, General. I believe that at this point, the discussion must become one of a rather more political nature.”

  “Of course,” said the General, who quietly gathered his papers and left the room.

  “The plain truth, Prime Minister,” the Deputy Prime Minister finally spoke up, “is that we can’t fight a war without soldiers. At the present time I don’t know if we have a single reliable battalion, let alone the sort of forces that would be necessary to put down the smaller revolts throughout the West. When people are willing to shoot at their own flag, it requires rather extraordinary efforts to convince others to put them down.”

  The Prime Minister looked across the table at the NDP Leader for a good ten seconds before he responded.

  “In other words, the rebellion will only be defeated by a complete national mobilization.”

  “I’m afraid that it will require more than that,” the Solicitor-General spoke up quietly, “for I do not feel that we will be able to raise a force of the sort required for the restoration of regular order with simply promises of the Confederation-that-was. The Canada that emerges from this is going to be a new and, frankly, different country that existed when this began. After all, what can we promise to boys from Ontario to drive across the country and fight their cousins? If we’re going to do this, than this is going to have to become a genuine sectional war, with all that that entails.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” replied the Prime Minister, “but what is the alternative to that? To give up the country and all that we built together over the course of generations to a bunch of... Redneck yahoos from the West? To give up everything that my father built here?”

  Members of the Cabinet began to shift uncomfortably in their chairs.

  “My father brought in the Charter - and with it genuine Constitutional protections for the human rights of all of the Canadian people - for just an occasion such as this. Our mission... No: our destiny is to stand up, during this time of challenge, in order to protect the rights of all Canadians, across all regions of this country.”

  The Capitol, Washington, DC

  The Joint Resolution introduced by Rickover, “clarifying” the meaning of the law for the President, passed through the House and the Senate without much difficulty - the primary bar to such a resolution, the threat of a filibuster, having been removed by the actions of the Vice President. The Republican leadership had chosen to go with the Joint Resolution rather than a revision of the law itself for two reasons, first that doing so would concede that the President’s action was founded upon a reasonable interpretation of the current law and, second, that the President would be able to veto any amendment to the law and that such a veto, being likely to be sustained by the Congress, could reasonably be interpreted as a legal endorsement of the President’s actions.

  The lack of any legal effect notwithstanding, the President nevertheless proceeded to symbolically “veto” the resolution, an act which had essentially the same effect as the resolution itself.

  “Well,” said Rickover as he watched
the President grandstand some more on television with the volume muted, “at least we’ve set a redline now, even if he doesn’t want to acknowledge it.”

  “The key is going to come when the next Continuing Resolution comes up for a vote. Now we can add language to it forbidding the President from doing exactly what he’s doing.”

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  William Thomas Jackson had always detested the summer climate of Vancouver. While it was neither particularly warm or humid by the standards of those who had grown up in hotter places, it consistently struck him as unremittingly unpleasant. Of course, the General had not - in all of his travels around the world - found a single climate zone that suited him year-round. He preferred the temperate days of a mid-spring or early-fall Vancouver and, failing that, his second choice was always to remain indoors in a climate-controlled environment. However, even the unpleasant warmth of a ninety-three degrees heat was not enough to detract from the charms of this particular day.

  The command of the First Armored Brigade had, after some wrangling, been given to Colonel Anthony Wayne, a former Canadian Forces officer who actually had experience with commanding armored forces in the field. As a means of consolation, Jackson had been granted a brevet promotion from his more-or-less self-assumed rank of Colonel to the official (if theoretically temporary) rank of Brigadier General and granted the official role of Deputy Chief of Staff of the Western Republic Army. Some had objected to the granting of a General’s rank to a politician who had never previously served in the regular military but others had pointed out that is was in conformance with practices of previous wars where a new army had to be raised by an insurgent force and, in any case, much of the resources of the Western Republic were being provided by the company that he and Augustus King controlled. The matter of finding King, who did not claim to be (nor did he seek recognition as) as citizen of the Republic proved to be somewhat thornier. Following some debate, the Western Congress had voted to, after certain precedents from the Revolutionary War were cited, appoint King as the Inspector General of the Army.

  Jackson and King stood side-by-side watching as their carefully-acquired Merkava tanks were fueled and prepared for combat. Their crews consisted of a motley mix of Canadian veterans and volunteers, and groups of American and Israeli soldiers motivated by some combination of politics and money. Even with several months worth of training, they hardly consisted a coherent field force but, under the circumstances, they would have to do.

  “Well,” said Jackson, “I guess this is it.”

  Colonel Wayne’s tanks began their steady progress at shortly after 4AM on the 11th of August, crossing from their positions in North Vancouver over to the rest of the Lower Mainland via an improvised bridge thrown across to Belcarra before rushing forward at high speed through the communities of Anmore, Port Moody, and Coquitlam and then wheeling towards the city of Vancouver itself. This allowed them to thread between the supply base established at Pitt Meadows and the Federal forces actually in Vancouver proper.

  The movement of the rebel forces came as a surprise to the Federal Army. During the months since the First Battle of Vancouver the forces under the command of Brigadier General Francis Cauchon had grown to nearly five thousand men and women, but they had continued to be relatively lightly-equipped and had suffered through near-constant IED and sniper attacks launched either by the Western Army itself or by supporters both sanctioned and unsanctioned.

  General Cauchon was at the Pitt Meadows base, now designated as Camp Pearson, when the attack began. The first notice that the General received of the attack was when an explosion rocked his tent and woke him up.

  Major Landry, his aide de camp, stuck his head into the tent.

  “More mortars, it would appear, mon General,” he announced just as another explosion nearly rocked him off his feet. Cauchon steadied himself.

  “Those don’t feel like mortars. The blasts are too big,” he said quietly as he stood and grabbed his uniform jacket.

  Captain Max Julian watched carefully as his Company moved down Highway 7A. So far it appeared that the Western Army had caught its Federal counterpart entirely by surprise with the First Armored Brigade having encountered not the minimal resistance expected during the early part of its mission but, in fact, no resistance whatsoever.

  The Captain had no real expectations of his this particular plan would turn out. On paper it seemed to be solid enough, but it was more-or-less in defiance of any kind of standard military doctrine. The limited number of soldiers available to the Western Army as well as the limitations placed upon the shipment of supplies to it meant that the First Armored Brigade was nearly unsupported in its thrust. Conventional doctrine would have required substantial air, artillery, infantry, and general logistical support before a regular army attempted such a movement. Also, in his opinion, it would have made more sense for the Brigade to be sent against the Federal army logistics hub at Camp Pearson than into the City of Vancouver itself. A fully-supported combined arms operation, even with the limited resources at hand, would have sufficed to overcome the Federal forces there and, with that mission complete, a bloodless surrender of the rest of the Federal army in British Columbia (or at least in the Greater Vancouver area) might have been obtained.

  As the his Company passed from Coquitlam into the neighboring city of Burnaby, Julian continued to marvel at the lack of resistance. His tanks made good time, moving at twenty-five miles an hour along good roads.

  Camp Pearson had plenty of infantry. It had a team of staff psychologists and medical professionals of every kind. It had a cook who specialized in producing gluten-free meals demanded by one of the senior Federal officials who had stationed there. It even had, following sporadic mortar assaults, two batteries of good mortars to engage in counter-battery fire. What it did not have, (despite my frequent fucking requests thought General Cauchon) was any Goddamned artillery.

  Everyone was now under good cover and, so far, thirty or so 155mm artillery shells that had fallen on the base hadn’t killed anyone. That was good, so far as Cauchon was concerned. However, without any artillery or air support, he lacked anything to shoot back at the distant howitzers with and that left the General with a deeper feeling of frustration than he had ever experienced in his life.

  “How the fuck,” he berated his intelligence staff from within his bunker, “did we miss the fact that they were armed with fucking long-range artillery?”

  “Look: we’ve been warning Ottawa for weeks about what might be coming in in terms of cargo,” noted the brigade’s S-2, “it doesn’t take too many cargo ships rolling into one of the ports that they control to bring in just a little bit of this sort of gear. I mean, the rate at which they’re firing - half a dozen rounds a minute - doesn’t suggest that they have a huge quantity of shells or of platforms to fire from. They might have as few as one or two Howitzers. How were we going to be able to detect that without having the ability to conduct blanket surveillance?”

  “Do we have a fix on where they are, yet?” Cauchon asked his Operations officer, effectively conceding the point by moving on.

  “Our best guess is that they’re up in the hills, over somewhere in the Tri-Cities. Perhaps up on Burke Mountain or the area that the locals refer to as the Westwood Plateau. We’ll know more as soon as we can get a spotter up into the air.”

  “Ok then. Let’s get some guys ready to move and take them out. Has there been any word on air cover?”

  “Ottawa is looking into if they can get us some of the planes that they’ve been using to hit insurgents in Alberta. But they’re concerned about our lack of a decent air base.”

  Throughout the long months of the occupation, a low-level guerrilla war had occurred throughout the Greater Vancouver region. Sniper and mortar attacks, combined with the damage done during the first battles, had proven to be more than enough to keep both the Vancouver and the Abbotsford Airports closed to military traffic for the duration. An informal agreement had al
lowed both sides to use Abbotsford, Vancouver International having been too badly damaged, for limited civil traffic and each side cheated slightly by using it to smuggle in some military personnel and supplies. However, the ever-present threat that the use of military force could easily severe that last civilian lifeline had prevented either side from even seeking to convert it to entirely military purposes. Within the cities themselves, soldiers had waged a constant battle against the occupying forces. However, for reasons of both humanity and prudence, they had avoided attempting to fight a pitched battle on the streets of the city of Vancouver itself. Now, however, with the big push on all of the irregular forces of the Western Army were called into regular service in an effort to clear the path of the tanks.

  Anthony Wayne, Max Julian, and the rest of the First Armored Brigade were more than prepared to sweep away the opposition that could be offered by a handful of armored personnel carriers. Far more concerning, so far as they were concerned, was the threat posed by infantry in all of the tall buildings of the city itself. Tanks fighting in built-up areas were incredibly vulnerable to anti-tank missiles fired without warning from close quarters. The normal response to this threat was an indiscriminate use of both air power and artillery but, in the case of the Western Republic, this was not an option for both practical and political reasons.

  As the Western tanks reached the edge of the city, five hundred irregular infantry - some of them veterans of many battles, some of them fresh recruits with practically improvised weapons - began to move around the city.

  Second Lieutenant Evan Dunford checked his watch. The Federal army had been using the old Sun Tower - once the tallest building in the British Empire - as an outpost since the first days of the occupation. Not only did it provide them an excellent vantage-point from which to observe movement into the city from the east but it also, as an older building, was better-suited to standing up to the occasional stray bullet or rocket than a newer building. His platoon was assigned to take the building.