The Second Civil War- The Complete History

by Adam Yoshida

  It was interesting to those who understood such Constitutional minutia, but it certainly did not seem to be about to change a great many minds.

  “This is going nowhere,” Speaker Halverson declared as he disgustedly switched the television off.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” replied Rickover, “even if the Senate won’t convict - and I’ll concede that, given that there hasn’t been any new evidence, it seems unlikely - this has served to strip this President of a great deal of legitimacy.”

  “But with his actions, arguably confirmed.”

  “You don’t get impeached by two hundred and forty-seven Congressmen and then have fifty-something Senators vote to remove you from office and have your standing come out enhanced. At least not immediately. Even Clinton was neutered when we impeached him, whatever standing he later picked up. Think of how Gore ran from him in 2000. And that was with Clinton able to play the cart of sexual liberation martyr or whatever that was all about,” said Rickover.

  “You’ve heard the speeches that he’s given,” said Halverson, pointing in the direction of the White House, “he certainly thinks that this helps him. From the way that he’s talking - and the whispers I’m hearing out of the White House - he practically views a failed impeachment as being as good a mandate as a re-election.”

  “That’s delusional,” said Rickover. Halverson shrugged.

  “Perhaps. But that’s what we’re dealing with now. If he comes through this power grab intact - and he’s going to - then who knows what he’ll feel emboldened to try next. He already thinks that he’s invincible. This will just confirm it.”

  Cleveland, Ohio

  General Richard Hall was making one of his rare public appearances, in this case at the dedication of a convention of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans being held in Cleveland. As his C-20 made its final approach to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the General carefully reviewed the words of the speech that he had prepared for the occasion, struggling to concentrate as the chatty handler that the White House had forced upon his blabbered on.

  “...fight. I mean, I don’t know... I do like him. Actually, I like him a lot and we’ve spent a lot of time together since I moved to Washington...”

  Caesar had a precursor, the General had written, before him came Sulla. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was an interesting fellow. He lived openly with a drag queen after his second Consulship and he surrendered power when he was doing reorganizing the republic, in the best tradition of Cincinnatus. But he was not Cincinnatus. The question is now how he gave up power - and it is commendable that he did - but how he took it in the first place.

  “Right, right,” the General nodded as his White House aide continued to speak.

  “...but I don’t think that I’m ready for that sort of commitment...”

  “Of course,” replied Hall, his mind still focused on his speech.

  An hour later, the General was in the hall and he was in full-swing.

  “...but once that door was opened, where was it to be closed? Marius used force to displace the followers of Sulla and then Sulla in turn used force to rid Rome of Marius. Personalities dominated the day. Politics became degenerate - a contest of one mob against the other. It availed them of nothing that Sulla might have been right about the issues of the day because, once Sulla drew his sword against Rome and did so with success, he made it inevitable that the next contestant would do the same and that the process would repeat itself not once but many times over.”

  “When the sword is unsheathed, republican government ends.”

  “There is a story that is often told. When the Framers had finished the Constitution, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government that they had given the people. ‘A republic, if you can keep it,’ he replied.”

  “If you can keep it. That is the key. A republic can only be conserved so long as the citizens consent and so long as it is not haunted by forces more powerful than the people. That is why, so long as it remains the lawful government, the soldier must always be subordinate to the state. That is the proper order of things. Because when military judgement is substituted for political judgement, even - especially actually - when military judgement is superior to political judgement than the latter will inevitably give way to the former time and time again.”

  “This great nation can endure, has endured, and will endure folly and foolishness in its politicians. That is to be expected. But this folly can and will always be corrected so long as regular government and regular order is maintained. Those who believe that we may preserve or restore liberty through overturning the state by the sword are embarking upon a very dangerous path from which there is no election and for which there are no guarantees as to the final outcome.”

  “As a private citizen, I have, do and, will in the future disagree with policies of governments. As a soldier, however, I vow to you - as every true soldier must vow - that I will always follow the lawful orders of my superiors and that I will remember every word of the oath I took to defend this nation and its Constitution against all enemies, both those foreign and domestic.”

  Arlington, Virginia

  Mark Varro looked at the gleaming broadsword that he was holding in his hands with satisfaction. Shooting, he had decided, was too good for his enemies - and the broader enemies of America - to ever really get his message. This would be impossible to mistake, for what ordinary criminal act was ever committed with a sword? The sensationalism would be irresistible to a media whose eagerness to embrace the prurient at all turns would be its own undoing.

  His target was a man who, though he now styled himself as a teacher, had, in his youth, waged war upon the United States of America. It was only through a quirk of the modern justice system that he had escaped genuine justice. He allegedly taught “philosophy” now but, in his youth, he had posed for smiling pictures - pictures that could be found with a few keywords typed into any search engine - alongside North Vietnamese soldiers who had definitely killed Americans. Then he had come back and helped to bomb police stations. He would have bombed a military graduation ceremony too had not one of his compatriots - as foolish a bomb-maker as he was an ideologist - triggered an explosion that had resulted in what was left of three revolutionary soldiers being sprayed across and into the walls of a Hyde Park house. He’d gone into hiding after that, emerging only in the early 1990’s, by which time everyone was glad for the 60’s to be long over and therefore had been more than happy to look the other way as the charges against him had been quietly dropped due to alleged irregularities in the evidence.

  But, when it came down to it, Varro asked himself, was there really any doubt as to the man’s guilt? Had he ever even expressed any remorse for his crimes? No and no. Well, his time of judgement, though long-delayed, had arrived at last.

  Ottawa, Ontario

  The Western forces, having taken Winnipeg, had continued to press on into Ontario. But the Federal Army was not yet ready to stop them, the Prime Minister knew. Sure, the Canadian government had plenty of foreign support - the propaganda campaign against the idea of a “right wing coup” in Canada having gained nearly as much international and online traction as that of the Western cause as a revolutionary one that shared more than a passing kinship with the American founding. However, the supporters of the East had, in general, proven to be far less eager to volunteer themselves for combat than the supporters of the West had.

  “The army is not ready, but the army must be ready,” the Prime Minister declared as he carefully studied the maps being projected in front of the Cabinet War Committee.

  “I understand that, Prime Minister,” the Chief of the Defense staff carefully explained, “but these things take time. After the first battles in the West we began if not quite from zero than from something very close to it. We cannot simply generate an army, especially one that will effectively fight, overnight.”

  “The economy is coming apart and it’s getting progressively worse with each passing day,” the Finance Mi
nister noted.

  “The West can float itself on energy and resource exports - especially with the economic boost that occurred when people simply stopped paying Federal taxes - but the same cannot be said for us,” added the Deputy Prime Minister.

  “Facts are facts, ladies and gentlemen,” the Chief of the Defense Staff said somewhat gruffly.

  “Then, perhaps, we need another set of facts,” the Prime Minister pointedly responded.

  “We would do well to remember that the Western Army, as much as ours, is a scratch force. Yes, they’re largely veterans and highly-motivated, but they don’t have a great deal of experience. And they’re running a very long supply line right now,” the Defense Minister, shifting uncomfortably in his char, volunteered.

  “That’s why they committed the crimes that they did at Winnipeg and at other points along their march. They fear that they’ll be subjected to a surprise attack from the rear,” added the Finance Minister.

  From the corner of the table, Major General Daniel LeFluer, the deputy Chief of the Defense Staff, spoke up.

  “I intend no disrespect to General Corrie, or to anyone else within the Armed Forces in speaking,” he began, “but I think that some elements of our professional military have not yet fully adjusted themselves to the situation that they face today. General Corrie’s function, of course, is in part to speak for the military leadership as a whole and I can tell you, having had countless discussions with them, that the views expressed by General Corrie are those shared by a consensus among the leadership and among most of the officers of the Forces. They are not, however, my views. May I be permitted to explain?”

  “Go on, General,” the Prime Minister said carefully.

  “The Western Army is a force organized along very conventional lines and, to a certain extent, it reflects the ambition of its founders - one obvious sign of this is the strange system of unit designations that we’ve explained. They have Brigade-sized Divisions and Division-sized Corps because they intend to scale up their forces in the immediate future and they wanted to send a sign to that effect from the outset. They also are made up of people who very much, based on their writings and what they’ve done during the course of the war to date, intend to fight traditional battles.”

  “The Army that we are organizing might, eventually, grow to the level that it will defeat them on a conventional basis. But General Corrie is right, that will take months, perhaps years to get ourselves to that point and who knows whether or not the external factors necessary to field such an army - both economic and political - will be in place when the time comes.”

  “What we need to do - and have wargamed out - is to begin a series of attacks upon the infrastructure that supports the Western Army, both military and economic. If the actions of the West have deprived us of the ability to airlift large formations into their rear areas, we still have the ability to scatter smaller teams, who will be able to attack supply convoys and the like. On the other side, we can begin a systematic process of dismantling the sources of economic power of the West through a targeted campaign launched against their petroleum infrastructure.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” General Corrie interjected, “the question that the Prime Minister and the Cabinet asked was not whether the Army could fight, but whether the army was as prepared as we would hope it to be. Of course, if ordered, we can move a substantial force to the frontier to confront the Western Army with a very high probability of success. I would prefer a certainty to a probability, but it is what it is.”

  “Ok then,” said the Prime Minister, “very good, General. Let’s talk about what success might look like.”

  Northern Ontario

  The so-called “sack of Winnipeg” had not been popular with many people, aside from those who got to enjoy it and for those on the political right in the Western Republic who felt a frisson of joy at the somewhat-gratuitous destruction. Well, I thought it was fun, thought Bill Jackson was the First Armored Division continued to press forward.

  Now the question before the Western Army was a simple one: what next? They could press forward further still, but where would that come to an end? Would they have to fight for Toronto or Ottawa? Would the fight, should it carry them across Ontario, be carried on into Quebec and the Maritimes? Would that not ultimately result not in Western Independence but the simple re-establishment of the old federation under a new government? Communications bounced forth between Vancouver and the front. The Army was not to cross the Ontario frontier. Then it was authorized to do so if it appeared to be under threat. The instructions could change from one hour to a next. The government that they lived under might have changed but the nature of politicians had not.

  “If we delay much longer, Henry Warren is going to survive impeachment and then, the politics of it be damned, he will send his army this way and it will all be over. A number of our volunteers simply won’t fight the U.S. Army, as much as they believe in the cause and hate Mr. Warren. They know that it would be futile and they have no desire to kill fellow Americans,” General Wayne announced pessimistically.

  “If there is to be a fight, what better time than now, and what better place than here?” Jackson asked himself softly. Wayne nodded.

  The First Armored Division was racing down Ontario Highway 17 as quickly as fuel supplies would allow. With the arrival of an extra tank battalion fresh from the depots in BC the force now had nearly two hundred tanks available to it, along with plenty of supporting vehicles. The Paratroopers of the First Airborne Brigade protected the flanks of the advance, riding along on up-armored HUMVEEs that had been brought in from overseas, guns at the ready to strike anything that stood in their way. There was no time for subtlety - and not many options open for it at any rate.

  “Speed is the key, Goddamnit!” General Jackson declared from the side of the road as he watched the vehicles race by the wreckage that had been hastily cleared from the road.

  Already that morning the first engagement of the invasion of Ontario had been fought as the Merkavas of the Second Battalion of the Third Brigade had encountered a Federal patrol attempting to bar the path of the Western Army just outside of Kenora. The Eastern force, consisting of two companies of light infantry, had been ordered to block the highway for as long as possible while a larger force was assembled further behind the lines to meet and blunt the Western attack.

  Captain Evan Dunford had, after Second Vancouver, been promoted to command one of the Companies of the division when it was expanded for the march to the East. Since then he and his men had seen action in every action of the Western Army: the crossing of the Rockies, the liberation of Calgary, the trans-Prairie campaign, the Battle of Winnipeg, and now the drive into Ontario. Post-Vancouver the Federal resistance had been largely perfunctory, a mix of fighting by stay-behind units of the old Army and attacks by local guerrillas and special forces. Outside of Kenora, however, for the first time the fully-organized Western Army had run into determined resistance by a professional Federal force.

  A Federal anti-tank missile had, seemingly out of nowhere, arced across the sky and disabled one of Dunford’s tanks. Standard doctrine - which admittedly Dunford was largely familiar with from hastily-assembled packages of PDF files that someone had e-mailed him - would have called for the company to back off and let infantry and artillery engage the tank trap. That, however, would have taken up precious time: time that every man and woman in the Western Army knew was in terribly short supply.

  “Company,” he ordered, “advance.”

  With the Merkavas leading the way, blazing away with both their main guns and their secondary armament, the Company had managed to clear the trap with the loss of just another tank. Throughout the movement, Dunford and the rest of his men had frantically mapped out the locations of the enemy’s blocking positions on their GPS-linked maps. Once they had pulled themselves clear of the enemy’s engagement envelope, they turned to engage the defensive positions from the rear with direct fire from maximum range wi
th their tanks.

  120mm high explosive shells struck one position after another from maximum range, as the Federal soldiers on the ground scrambled to turn and engage the enemy that had bypassed them. To the west of the Kenora, a second company was ordered to temporarily halt its transit.

  Avi Stern and his fast-movers were coming into Kenora hot. The carefully-gathered targeting information passed on to him and his fellow pilots allowed them to plan their route with the utmost care. The Federal air force, after weeks of running battles between the seemingly-endless supply of Western MiGs and a dwindling force of CF-18s was no longer capable of truly challenging the Western Air Force, except over vital cities and installations, but one could never been too careful in planning ahead for, at some point, it seemed inevitable that they would commit their carefully-hoarded reserve of aircraft and pilots to the fight. As well, though the foreign supporters of the Canadian government had not provided them with additional combat aircraft, they had managed to give them a substantial quantity of modern surface-to-air missiles.

  The MiGs came in low and fast, creating vibrations that could be felt all across the despoiled Ontario farmland. With a thud followed by a crack of thunder, one bomb after another fell upon the Federal positions, shattering bodies, equipment, and ground and mixing them all together so throughly that when the government of Ontario later took over the scene they opted to simply, after making a decent effort to identify the dead, mechanically dig a large pit and simply bury everything. A second wave of tanks was happy to accept the surrendered of the physically-drained and emotionally-shattered survivors.