299 Days: The 43 Colonels

by Glen Tate

  Ben said softly, “This is hard, ladies and gentlemen.” The crowd instantly became quiet.

  “Ashur, or rather Colonel Bet-Kasha, spoke a moment ago of the sad fact that taking back freedom is costly and hard. Our next honoree, Col. Lorraine Bryan, exemplifies this.”

  Ben pointed down at the empty seat. “She cannot be with us because she was killed. She was hung by the Limas as a common criminal.” The crowed was silent.

  “I was in my new office a few weeks ago when I saw the video,” Ben said, referring to her hanging. “I was hiding out on the Prosser Farm when it actually happened, so I didn’t see it at the time,” he said. “Everyone I’ve talked to about this remembers exactly where they were when they saw it.”

  “I was talking to Lt. Col. Hammond about this and he said something very profound. He said that when he saw the video, he announced to his troops, ‘the rules have changed today.’” Ben let that sink in. “The rules did, indeed, change that day. Col. Bryan’s hanging made it crystal clear to millions of us what the Limas were all about.”“We all complained about the government in the months and years leading up to the Collapse, right?” he conversationally asked the audience. “We all complained about taxes in particular.” Most in the audience were nodding their heads.

  “I remember the first time the self-checkout machine at Home Depot asked me if I wanted to ‘purchase’ a bag with my purchase,” Ben said. “That was the new ‘bag tax’; remember that? It was to ‘encourage’ people to save the environment by bringing their own bags. It started out at five cents but, not surprisingly, it kept going up and up. I remember, after the inflation hit really hard just before the Collapse, the bag tax was up to two dollars.”

  “They raised the gas tax so many times I lost count,” Ben said. “Then they started the mileage tax to 'encourage' people to take the bus and ride their bikes—and then they taxed bus tickets and bikes!” Ben felt very comfortable giving speeches about how ridiculous taxes had become. “Anyone remember $25 packs of cigarettes? Of course, no one actually bought taxed cigarettes; the local Indian tribes made a killing on untaxed cigarettes.”

  “The tax laws and their arbitrary ‘interpretations’ became so complicated.” Ben said, “I remember my accountant telling me, ‘I have no idea how much you owe.’ This made all of us, even people trying to pay all their taxes, criminals because the government could claim we didn’t pay some amount based on some unpublished ‘interpretation’ they came up with. Remember all those Department of Revenue seizures of property, cars, boats, and bank accounts?”

  “Speaking of bank accounts,” Ben said, “Probably the most memorable new tax was the ‘bail-in,’ remember that?” Ben asked. “Instead of the government doing a ‘bail out’ of the banks, they came up with the ‘bail-in’ where the depositors—you and I—had a portion of their deposits seized and given to the banks to cover their bad loans to other people.” The bail-ins were what finally got many average Americans to realize the great United States was collapsing. “Oh, but only the ‘rich’ had to pay the bail-in. At first, only deposits over $100,000 had a 5% bail-in —’fee’—they actually called something you had to pay and that they took right out of your bank account a ‘fee’ as if it were voluntary. But $100,000 didn’t buy much with all the inflation, so the ‘rich’ were really just ordinary people. The next day the bail-in was 10%, then 40% by the end of the week.”

  Ben paused, “I remember my poor, sweet grandmother, rest her soul. She said, ‘I thought bank accounts were insured by the FDIC.’ Not when the FDIC is out of money, Grandma, because the government ‘borrowed’ all the money from the FDIC to pay for welfare.”

  Ben went on, “Then it was 401(k)s and mutual funds subject to the bail-in, followed by the stocks. It happened in one week—remember that?”

  “I remember seeing the news that was leaked a few days before the bail-ins that the politicians and the truly rich people were all getting out of stocks and were closing their bank accounts,” Ben said. “I remember realizing that this was the beginning of the end. It was no coincidence that the insiders got out of their accounts right before the bail-ins.”

  “Do you remember how you felt when you realized your life savings had just been stolen?” Ben let the crowd think back in their lives to when that happened to them.

  “Lorraine Bryan had been telling us the whole time,” Ben said. He added, “Which is why they hung her.”

  “Who was Lorraine Bryan?” Ben asked the crowd rhetorically. “I spoke with her family and this is what they told me.”

  “First and foremost, she was a mother. She had four adorable children, who were her whole world. She was a single mom and her life revolved around them. She wasn’t a political activist and never dreamed of being a martyr. She was just a mom. And, even though she became nationally famous, she lived right here in Washington State.”

  “But she wasn’t ‘just’ a mom,” Ben said. “She had a deep, deep sense of fairness, of right and wrong. She couldn’t allow bullies to win. She was just made that way.”

  “And she wanted the best for her children, as any mother does. She remembered what America used to be, the goodness we used to have, and she looked around at what America had become. The meanness, the corruption, the despair. She wanted better for her children. She missed America.”

  “Much like the colonels being honored today, Lorraine fought bullies. She was determined to fight the bullies destroying America for their own personal greed and lust for power.”

  “And that,” Ben said, “meant fighting the old government.” He let that sink in.

  “But how does a single mom fight the government?” Ben asked. “‘By starving the beast,’ she said. By starving the beast.”

  “You see,” Ben said, “Lorraine was extremely intelligent. She had a very unique kind of intelligence: she could simplify complex things. Many so-called smart people love complexity; they create equations and map DNA. That’s fine, but it’s just one kind of smart.”

  “There’s another kind of smart, though,” Ben explained, “and one that’s much more useful. It is the ability to simplify things, and that was Lorraine. She realized that the millions of tax regulations all had one simple purpose: take money from people so the government could, first and foremost, spend it on themselves and their friends and, secondarily, buy votes to keep themselves in power. She realized that all the bad things happening in America were a direct result of the government taking money and spending it. The answer, to Lorraine, was simple: decrease the money coming in to the government and the bad things will decrease. And, she realized, there was a tax-revenue tipping point. At some point, if the money wasn’t coming in in big enough chunks, the politicians couldn’t keep paying people off. They had made so many commitments that they had to—absolutely had to—have more and more money coming in. They knew that the moment they couldn’t pay one of their bills, all their other special interest groups would realize that the party was over and then their so-called ‘friends’ would jump ship.”

  “Which is exactly what happened during the Collapse, and which is why the Limas took out so much of their anger on Lorraine.” Ben realized he was getting ahead of himself and returned to telling Lorraine’s story.

  “So Lorraine started off by doing the things many of us did,” he said. “She wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper, which no one read anymore. She started talking to her neighbors, most of who had no idea what she was talking about and didn’t really care; life was going well for them, so why rock the boat? Then she ran for precinct committee officer in her local Republican party. She quickly found out what a waste of time that was.”

  “But she would look at her kids, remember how good America used to be, and think about how much she wanted it back for them to enjoy. She wouldn’t give up. ‘What message would that send them?’ she told her friends.” Ben paused, “That was a wonderful question, Lorraine.”

  “So she started a blog about all the stupid taxes. It becam
e very popular because, while most Americans weren’t willing to actually do anything about taxes, they were more than willing to spend a minute or two, with a cup of coffee in their hands, reading someone else's articulation of their own complaints.”

  “Her blog became too popular. It gained the attention of the authorities, and…” Ben paused for dramatic effect, “… guess what?”

  “Audit!” someone in the audience yelled out.

  “You got it!” Ben said. “Coincidentally, she was audited by every taxing authority from the IRS to the local fire district.”

  “Did she get scared?” Ben asked. “No, not at all. She blogged about what was happening to her. She put up all the ridiculous things the authorities were claiming in her cases for the whole country to read.”

  “We know from inside sources we had at the IRS and State Department of Revenue that, at first, the authorities actually were glad Lorraine was blogging about all the retaliatory audits. They thought that the sheeple out there would be scared of the harassment, litigation, asset seizures, and threats that happen when someone stands up to them.”

  “Surprise!” Ben said whimsically. “Instead of people being afraid of what was happening to Lorraine, they got mad. Really, really mad. She was a beautiful woman, and, we need to be honest, that made it easy for her to get on TV. Her adorable kids were also very sympathetic. When her little daughter said on camera, ‘Why are the policemen taking Mommy’s minivan?’ it melted hearts across the country.”

  “Did the public relations geniuses at the IRS realize this was a problem?” Ben asked, slightly sarcastically. “Nope. They went into their familiar playbook and decide to increase the pressure on Lorraine and her family. They decided to seize her house and evict her and her children in the middle of the night, but…”

  Ben knew everyone in the audience was aware of what happened next. “Our side learned a thing or two from the other seizures and arrests taking place. Camped out at Lorraine’s house was an amateur film crew of Patriots. When the local SWAT team swarmed in, blew the front door off, and streamed into her dark house with machine guns, it was captured on video and streamed live to a secure server where the authorities couldn’t delete it. Millions of people quickly saw the video of her crying and terrified children. They saw a beautiful and strong woman screaming at the officers to take their hands off her children, and then saw the police punch her in the face and handcuff her. The Limas attacked a mama bear in her den and it didn’t look very good for them.”

  “Hundreds of Patriots offered to take her and her family in,” Ben said, “at the risk of ‘harboring a teabagger,’ which would get them audited, too.”

  “Our contacts at the IRS and state taxing authorities told us that the video of the raid on the mama bear’s den, as they started to call it, was immediately deemed to be a huge mistake by the Lima political people. They realized, too late, that they had just infuriated the biggest political prize in American politics: soccer moms. Millions of formerly quiet and obedient soccer moms turned into mama bears. They had generally been okay with high taxes because they were told the money was going to the ‘children’ for social spending. But now they realized what the cost was: terrified children, abusive police officers, and one of their own being punched in the face and handcuffed. The tax issue was no longer just some male politicians arguing with each other; it was now real to the mama bears. It was about one of their own.”

  “Lorraine’s troubles worsened after the raid on the Mama Bear’s Den,” Ben continued. “The authorities went to the standard move of taking her children, which only worked temporarily. The outrage was enormous; hundreds of angry mama bears stormed the local Child Protective Services office. The politicians thought they could make this go away by giving her kids back. They figured that they’d scared enough sheeple to pay their taxes by taking Lorraine’s house and belongings. They didn’t want to stir up any more mama bears.”

  “That might have worked on someone other than Lorraine,” Ben said. “But, after her kids were securely hidden in a series of Patriot safe houses, she went on the attack. She started a speaking tour and the crowds got bigger and bigger.”

  “Besides being an innocent mom abused by the system, the other extremely dangerous thing Lorraine did was tell the simple truth: there weren’t enough tax officials, SWAT teams, judges, or even jails to enforce all these laws. ‘They can’t put us all in jail!’ she would tell crowds, which became the chant. It started appearing in graffiti, especially on tax offices, police stations, and courthouses.”

  “That,” Ben said dramatically, “is when Lorraine went from being a political headache for the Limas to a hated enemy. You see, that was the big secret of the old government: they couldn't put all of us in jail. For generations, they scared decent people into thinking there’s some jail cell waiting for them if they don’t follow all the laws. They can’t even keep real criminals in the relatively few jail cells they built; there is no way to jail even a small fraction of a percentage of Americans.”

  “This terrified the Loyalists,” Ben said. “Their secret was out, and it was Lorraine Bryan who was exposing them.”

  Ben paused. He realized that Lorraine’s children were in the audience, so he wanted to downplay the violence their mom had suffered.

  “We’ll never know who gave the order,” Ben said softly. “We’ll never know.” He thought to himself that whoever gave that order should be swinging from a noose him or herself.

  “But one night, right after a big speech and rally a few weeks before the May Day Collapse, Lorraine was walking back to her security detail’s vehicles, staffed by Patriot volunteer security, and a massive raid enveloped them. Dozens of DHS vehicles and several helicopters. The Patriot security volunteers shot it out with the DHS agents and several brave Patriots fell that day. Lorraine escaped initially, but didn’t make it through the Lima’s secondary perimeter. This, too, was captured on live-streaming video and saved on the secure server to be replayed millions of times.”

  “For several weeks, Lorraine was missing,” Ben said in an emotional near whisper. He realized her children were hearing everything, but they’d been through so much that his description of the events couldn’t be the worst that they’d experienced. “The Collapse was unfolding during this time and,” Ben looked up at Lorraine’s kids in the gallery, “many people had too many other problems on their hands to think about Mama Bear.”

  “Then, on the one month anniversary of the Collapse, the Limas decided they had lost control of enough of the population and needed to take an action to scare them. They had tried just about everything else, but had one trick—one brutal trick—up their sleeves. They decided to show the population what happens to anyone, even a mama bear, who challenges them. That’s when we all saw that video on the government TV and internet stations.”

  Ben looked at Lorraine’s children again and said, “I’m sorry I had to remind you of that, kids.” The two youngest kids, her sons, were crying, but the two oldest, her daughters, solemnly nodded, signifying that it was okay.

  “So, with great honor and extreme reverence,” Ben said, now sounding very much like a governor instead of the friend telling a story, “the New Washington State Legislature is pleased to award Lorraine Bryan with a posthumous colonelship.” The crowd soberly and sadly applauded.

  Ben looked up to the ceiling and said, “Rest in peace, Mama Bear.”

  Chapter 338

  Col. Chester Volz

  (The Exit 79 Bandit)

  After the sad and moving dedication to Col. Lorraine Bryan, Ben wanted to change the mood to something more upbeat. He decided to approach it from an unusual angle.

  “I don’t normally quote bloodthirsty communists who are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people,” he said to a stunned audience. “But a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

  “Chinese dictator Mao Zhe-Tung once observed that all revolutions have three phases. He was right about that.”


  Ben put up one finger and said, “The first phase is political work. This is when revolutionaries work among the general population to win them over and build a base from which to operate.” He motioned toward Lorraine’s kids and said, “Col. Bryan was an example of the first phase. She won over millions of the general population, and for that we are very thankful.”

  He put up two fingers and said, “The second phase is guerilla warfare, when insurgents fight the state, but do so through harassment and attacks on the current government’s communications and logistics. The objective is not to win territory, but to weaken the enemy while consolidating the support of the population behind the revolutionary’s cause.”

  Ben looked down onto the floor at a solider in the seat next to Lorraine’s empty chair and said, “Our next honoree exemplifies the guerilla warfare stage.”

  Ben held up a third finger and said, “The third phase is conventional war. Once the enemy is weakened from the first two phases, the revolutionaries have enough strength, at least relative to the weakened current government, to fight large-scale battles and thereby take, and hold, territory. Some of the war heroes we will honor today fit into the third category.”

  “But,” Ben said, “as you can see now, and will see even more clearly as you hear about all forty-three of the colonels, there can be no third phase without the first two.” Ben swept his hands out at the audience to signal that he was about to talk about all of them.

  “We all knew this instinctively when, at the beginning of the Collapse, we looked at all the impressive firepower the Limas had and said, ‘There’s no way we can win.’” Ben knew many in the audience had secretly thought this; he certainly had. “It’s okay to admit it, ladies and gentlemen: the Limas seemed invincible.” Several in the audience slowly nodded their heads.

  “Memorializing how we won is one of the reasons we’re awarding these colonelships,” Ben said. “Each and every person deserves the honors they are being given,” he said, “but thousands of others did remarkable things in this war.”