The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

  But if we got a serious attack, and one was bound to happen sooner or later, we couldn't do much about it. Unless we had more troops.

  And the Nepos were just sitting there.

  Well, no, they weren't. They were cleaning our clothes and fixing our food and maintaining some of the support equipment while we were defending the base. Sidenote: It takes ten people to keep one infantry soldier functioning in battle. Yeah, many of those are really "rear echelon motherfuckers" (REMFs) but that also includes cooks, techs and whatnot that are absolutely vital to an infantry unit. We'd been left with a few techs but damned little "other support." "Other support" was what the Nepos were doing.

  But as the main job of getting the defenses in place was winding down, I started to give some thought to other uses for them.

  Yes, they weren't Ghurkas. But at this point I trusted them to hold a gun while behind me. At least if they could hold a gun and not have an AD. Thing being, I wasn't going to tell the troops they now had to cook. Laundry, sure. Cooking? Not these guys. And the troops were already busy.

  Women could probably figure out how to cook and clean. And, hell, it would relieve some other pressures. Might create new ones, but there were some pressures building up right before my eyes I did not care for.

  By the way, the Nepos were not entirely straight. Oh, I'm not saying they were all queer as a three-dollar bill. I think it was more like prison, maybe a function of their culture. Samad had a slighter built Nepo who always seemed to be hanging around and that he bunked with. Sure. They were just friends.

  For that matter there was, I was pretty sure, at least one "couple" among the troops. I didn't give a shit as long as it didn't affect the unit and it didn't seem to. Don't ask, don't tell.

  (For clarification: Once Samad got a wife, I never saw hide nor hair of male "close personal friends." And he thinks the question is funny. Most things the Nepos and Americans see pretty eye to eye on. Some things not. Different cultures.)

  So. There was an argument for bringing some of the refugee females, if they were amenable, into the camp. When we got relieved, pardon the pun, we could write them off as "locally hired support staff." Whoever was incoming could deal with that.

  The question was, what would the nature of our "relief" be? A new unit to sit on the junk? Or leave it all behind? Or destroy it in place?

  In the first case, well, camp followers rarely worry about which camp they're following. There might be some broken hearts and pining. Get over it.

  In the last two, though, which at one level I considered likely enough to be formulating plans in the back of my mind, there were . . . issues.

  Say that we were told "destroy everything, we're coming to get you." (By the way, that would mean coming in by helo. There was no way we were going to work through the airport at this point. Iran had no government. The place was slowly being reorganized under local strong-men. It wasn't until later that such got functional in the Abadan area and when it did . . . Well, ahead of myself again. Point is, we weren't going out by 747.)

  If we got extracted we might be able to argue for extracting the Nepos. But a bunch of local civilian women? Uh, uh. Which would probably leave them worse off than before.

  I knew my logic was getting messed up. Normally, I could see a situation and make a decision without any real difficulty. Things were black and white. This looked like shades of gray and I wasn't good with gray.

  So I took a walk.

  Somebody, probably an overzealous engineer lieutenant, had put a "sentry walk" up on the berm near the main area of the base. It was a lousy item, defensively. We didn't have sentries walk the parapets because normally they'd be dead meat for a sniper. But the area faced southeast, where there was fuck-all for miles and we had thermal imagery cameras set up so anyone approaching, especially at night, would be detected at artillery ranges not sniper ranges.

  It was, therefore, a decent place to walk and pace.

  I think it was the character Horatio Hornblower who used to pace all the time. I didn't. Pacing, to me, was a sign that the commander didn't know what to do. But the truth was, I didn't. And pacing did help me think.

  So I put on my battle rattle, headed up to the parapet and paced.

  The night was clear and damned cold for Abadan in the summer. The wind was from the east, down off the mountains as it often was. And it was a cool breeze, lemme tell you. But it also helped me think.

  I knew that two aspects of the question were fucking with my logic. The first was "female" and the second was "refugee." I'll take the second first.

  About fifteen years back was the only time I think it made the news. But UN aid workers in two or three areas were trading refugee supplies to underage refugees, male and female, for sexual favors.

  That was, to say the least, a violation of honor. The people were, hands down, scum. They were given a trust and they violated it.

  I was contemplating doing something that was, on the surface, identical. Violation of honor? Would I be "scum" even in my own eyes?

  The answer depended simply on whether it was the logical decision given all the factors. That led to the "female" part.

  Males have a notable fall-off in long-term critical decision making in conditions of sexual cues. And this situation was one huge sexual cue. So I first had to eliminate, for the time being, the term "female."

  One way would be to ignore the females, maybe do something to improve the situation but not bring them into the base, and bring in males.

  I could not, in good conscience, take in the local males. After disastrous experiences in the first part of the Iraqi occupation, the military never hired locals or even Islamics for anything where they could be a threat. One remaining hardcore that we let in undetected could gain access to the ammunition and explosives on the base, there was no way to control internally with the forces I had, and do untold damage. Bringing in male refugees for support was out of the question.

  Females, by the way, did not have the same security risk. Females in most of the local societies were trained, very early, to be nonviolent followers. They were extremely compliant. That would create its own issues, but it virtually eliminated them as a security threat.

  I also was going to have to dig out another decision making tool I often used when unsure. "What would Sergeant Rutherford do?"

  Sergeant First Class Rutherford had been my platoon sergeant when I led the Scouts. A harder, colder, more stoic NCO I never met. Talking one time he told me that his secret to getting things done was "Do one thing every day that you don't have to do immediately and you don't want to do." A better definition of stoicism I've never seen. And a better way to get stuff done I've never found.

  But the question was, what would he do in this instance? How would he make the decision?

  Frankly, he would be able to ignore the fact that he was considering females. Not because he was gay, but because he was an ultimate stoic. I was not, and knew it.

  So I did a little change in my mind. I quit thinking of females.

  I imagined that there was a group of males, say Salvadorans, who had somehow gotten caught in the refugee camp. Because they were not locals, they were being abused by the guards.

  Item One: I needed more hands. There were too many tasks I felt necessary to complete the mission for the personnel I had on hand.

  Item Two: I could not trust the local males.

  So I imagined the females as these hypothetical Salvadorans. If I had a group of non-Islamic males in the camp from a friendly country, would I bring them in to help out?

  Oh, hell, yeah. The logic, that way, was clear. Thinking of the potential support in terms of a bunch of Salvadoran former workers that got left outside the walls made it clear it was a rational decision. What would Sergeant Rutherford do? Bring in the Salvadorans.

  Okay, but they're not Salvadorans. They're females. They are compliant local females who will do just about anything for a cracker and some water. If they weren't that compliant be
fore, they were now from the reports I was getting from the camp.

  That left the question of how to deal with them inside the walls.

  Rule One included the rule "No Fraternization." Fraternization is a nice way of saying "Don't fuck the local females." (It was assumed soldiers wouldn't fuck the local males which in numerous instances turned out to be erroneous. But I digress.)

  The way that the Army maintained Rule One with a bunch of horny young soldiers was to virtually eliminate contact with local females. Units went out from the FOB on missions and then returned. Mostly for very good security reasons. But the point was, there were no local females inside the base and when males ran into them outside they were a) on a mission, b) in the company of a large number of other males and c) not going to be around long to chat.

  In this case, they were going to be in long-term contact with local females.

  A military maxim says: Never give an order you know won't be carried out.

  Giving an order you know won't be carried out just makes the commander look like an idiot. "Rule One is still in effect" and mixing horny soldiers with compliant local females wouldn't work. Period. Why?

  Some of the soldiers were just going to flat ignore it. They, too, would be affected by the reduction in critical decision making in the presence of sexual cues. I'd have guys slipping away from security posts to screw because that was when they could get away with it.

  And the girls weren't going to stop them. Why? Compliance and "anything for a cracker." They would also see the males as their protectors.

  Giving an order that's unenforcable reduces trust in the commander's decision-making capability. How can you trust somebody who's stupid enough to give an unenforceable order? That means that unit combat efficiency goes down as the troops second-guess their commander.

  Trying to enforce Rule One would, therefore, be worse than saying "Here's the girls. They're yours."

  If, however, I put in place logical and rational restrictions under the circustances, it could be handled. Rotas, etc. If the guys knew they didn't have to slip away for a quicky, they wouldn't. They'd do their jobs.

  Some of the guys would probably be such paladins that, at least at first, they'd take their "rota" as a chance to snuggle with something comfortable. Others were going to use the girls like the Kleenex and towels they were jacking off on already. There would be issues between those two types. That's what sergeants are for.

  And they'd get their tubes cleaned. With a bunch of testosterone laden males stuck in the middle of nowhere, no real way to get home, etc. I was looking at the sort of potential mutiny that led to the Bounty, anyway. Right now, if the guys mutinied, they could set themselves up as local lords and fuck Rule One. There was no indication, at all, we were going to ever get relieved. I'd had the question practically every day. I knew there was talk. Heading that off was a good thing. Getting their tubes cleaned was a way to head that off.

  In the end I made, I think, the logical decision. The haunted eyes of Salah, multiplied by hundreds in my head, had nothing to do with it. I'd eliminated that, I'm pretty sure successfully with the "Salvadoran" argument. I think Sergeant Rutherford would have approved. (Found out later he died in Savannah. So I never got to ask. Voodoo fuckers.)

  The question remained: How to bell the cat?

  Up to this point we were having as little to do with the refugees as possible. We tossed them food from the safety of our tracked vehicles. We treated them like a pack of wild dogs.

  But we had Salah for information. Apparently after the attack when we'd killed the whole convoy, some of the men of the camp had grabbed the guns. The leader, at this point, was called Abu Bakr. That probably wasn't his real name, since it was the name of one of the successors of Mohammed. But he had the largest family group in the camp and his family had managed to grab the most guns. The shots we'd heard had not been happy noise. His family or people he trusted had the guns. She'd been on the outs with one of his cousins which had led to the incident that had her in the camp.

  She didn't know a whole bunch of the people in the camp. But when it was tacitly suggested that we might, maybe, be interested in bringing some women in for support, she nearly broke down. Apparently things were not going well for women at the moment.

  Side note: Any feminist who is against modern technology is an idiot. Okay, I'm being redundant but it's true. Women seem to make up a large majority of the "if we all just returned to nature" kumbaya movement.

  Modern technology and Western culture are the only things keeping women from a life of utter hell. Every society where social order breaks down it's not necessarily "the poor" who get hit hardest, it's the women.

  Kumbaya only works when you've got guys like, well, me keeping guys like Abu Bakr from making your life hell.

  End of side note. I could go on, but I won't.

  Maybe later.

  Was I going to be a total paladin? Oh, hell no. I told her what I needed, about thirty females, young, decent looking, who would cook, clean and provide other "support functions."

  Note, I was working through Hollywood, the translator.

  "Other support functions, sir?" Hollywood asked.

  "What's that Shia thing about "temporary brides"?"

  Shia and Sunni. Think Catholic vs. Protestant but more so. I'm not going to get into a five thousand word treatise about the difference. I did note, though, that Abu Bakr was normally a name that would be associated with the Sunni and this was a Shia region which made things in the camp . . . interesting. But one of the things with Shia is that they have this . . . tradition called "temporary marriage." A mullah can "temporarily marry" a Shia female to a guy and for the time that the temporary marriage lasts, say one hour and that will be two hundred bucks, she is legally married and thus does not suffer "dishonor." The "mullah" gets four and you get one, go find another sucker with two hundred bucks, bitch.

  Use "pimp" as a translation for "mullah" and you're getting a very accurate picture.

  "Uh, we'd need a mullah for that, sir."

  "Yeah, and it's a violation of so many regulations I don't want to begin to list them. Rule One, for example. But we need the hands and we need to be relieved. You an Islamic?"

  "Uh, technically, sir."

  "Good. Then tell her you're a mullah. I'll get you a pimped out Caddy when we get back to the States. Spinners and what-not. Maybe a big hat with a feather."

  "I'm not a mullah!"

  "I don't care how you explain it to her, as long as she gets the picture."

  I don't know how he explained it. She got the picture.

  She didn't even mind. Let me put you in her perspective.

  You're a seventeen-year-old girl. Your father—who has been your boss your whole life and will be until you are married and your husband becomes your boss—is dead. Your whole life has been ripped apart. You are barely holding onto life in a desert. You have no control over your life or over your body. Once a day a big metal tracked vehicle comes out of a place and there is food and water. Maybe you are allowed to keep some of it. From the look of Salah, not much. You only get a bit of water, less than most Americans drink in an hour. And it is hot (not as hot as normal, but up in the 90s) and men take you whenever they please and any way that they please and usually more than one at a time.

  Beyond the berm is paradise. So far, despite being surrounded by men, you have not been raped. You have been given more food than you've seen in months. You can have all the water to drink that you like. You can even dream of having a shower or a bath, something you haven't had in months. You're in air conditioning.

  And all they are asking, asking mind you, is if you're willing to work at cooking and cleaning and, oh, yeah, spending some time on your back. Probably in a bed not the hard desert floor. You're not being told, mind you. You may not quite realize that, you may be thinking that they're being nice now but will change their mind soon. But you're being asked. And asked if others would be willing.

  Oh, HELL
yeah.

  When you've been slowing dying in the desert, you'll do a lot for a cracker and some cool water.

  I knew that was the reason she was answering in the affirmative. Did I feel like a heel?

  Oh, HELL no.

  Because I knew that my guys, and the Nepos, would treat them gently or I'd damned well beat the shit out of them. We'd seen what was going on in the camp. We'd seen the lines from time to time. That was probably when some girl, maybe Salah, was being put in her place. Rape is a technique of power. You teach a bitch, be that a guy in prison or a female under your control, who is boss by raping them. It is very nearly the ultimate loss of control over one's body.

  I couldn't take in all the female refugees. But I could do some good in the fucking world. Gray good, but still good.

  But how to bell the cat?

  I decided that the best way to bell a cat is kill it. Hell, talk about good in the world . . . Hmm . . .

  The next day, bright and early, Strykers started rolling out of the front gate of the camp. Nobody was moving in the direction of Abadan except the continued trickle of refugees. There were, in other words, no secondary threats. Good thing because most of the company was buttoned up and coming to call on the refugee camp.

  At first people got up and started heading towards the road thinking that it was the daily food and water ration. We'd shifted to morning for various reasons so that was reasonable.

  But as more and more Strykers rolled out, the people set up a wail. They thought we were leaving.

  The Strykers formed up around the gate, then rolled down to the camp. Then they spread out to surround it.

  Each of the Strykers had the commander "out and up" in his cupola. The Strykers had been slightly redesigned over the years so the commander's cupola was now a circle of armor which just his head peeked over. They were not good targets.

  What were good targets were the two guys on the top deck. Of course, each of them was holding a military grade sniper rifle. So you weren't going to get many shots.