299 Days: The 43 Colonels

by Glen Tate

  “But all of that was before the Collapse so it really doesn’t matter,” she said, getting the attention of the audience back. “At first, I thought the Collapse would make this problem worse, but it actually allowed us to improve things, as crazy as that sounds.”

  “I remember the day the Collapse hit. We were told we couldn’t leave the hospital. They said we’d be safe there and they’d take care of us. There were lots of county emergency management plans for us, so the one hospital in the county could keep up and running in any crisis. We even practiced for this, so it wasn’t as much of a shock for us as it was for people outside the hospital.”

  “Life on lock-down, as we called it, was stressful but okay at first. They fed us but there was nowhere to sleep. After a few days of constantly working and all the chaos, things got blurry and weird.”

  “One of the things I remember most vividly about the first days of the Collapse was the savagery. Crime went way up so we saw a constant barrage of gunshot wounds in the ER. And the gangs—we didn’t even know we had gangs in Longview—attacked the hospital to get our drugs, both medicinal ones and pain killers, which had, overnight, become very valuable.”

  She put her hands up for emphasis and said, “That’s when I knew how we’d solve this problem.” The audience was confused.

  “Yep,” she said, “What I saw when the hospital was attacked showed me the way to fix things.” She could tell that she had the audience’s full attention.

  “Truckloads of guys started showing up with guns,” she explained. “Not to steal from us, but to fight off the gangs. Word went out that the gangs were blocking the parking lot and entrance to the ER. These reports came from people trying to rush their loved ones to the ER, only to be turned away by the gangs. They went home and got their guns. They wouldn’t have this. We have a lot of good ole’ boys in Longview and, after a while, the gangsters were dead or ran away.”

  “Community,” she said, “I was watching the community. Those people who shot up the gangsters weren’t doing that for pure charity; they were doing it because they had an interest in the ER being open. Many of them watched their loved ones die because the ER was closed and they realized the next person to die in a car a few blocks from the ER could be them.”

  “After the hospital was secured, volunteers started to flood in. We had retired nurses and doctors, and medical people of all kinds coming to the hospital to help. We had people bringing food and water for us. I saw community once again.”

  “Another thing that got us through this was our mindset. I was the leader of the nurses and there was a meeting of the heads of various departments, including doctors, facilities people, and the fire department. Early on, we decided that we would give people ‘third-world medical care' as we called it. We would do all we could, but we wouldn’t burn a hundred gallons of precious diesel fuel to keep one child alive on a respirator. This was hard to do, and our volunteer security had to wrestle a few family members to the ground who refused to let us discontinue care. But we, the leadership of the hospital, realized that in a few days, no one would get any medical care if we tried to apply pre-Collapse standards to the realities we were facing now.”

  “When you simplify medical care, getting rid of exotic equipment and all that paperwork, it’s amazing what you can accomplish,” Deborah said.

  “The level of care at St. John’s in the early days of the Collapse started to resemble the level of care in the 1930s. It was crude and people died, but quite a few were saved, too.”

  “After about a week, we were running out of everything, including the low-tech things, like bandages and tape. Many of our volunteers were leaving. They had families to protect as the lawlessness raged on. Only the volunteers without a family stayed and became family.” Deborah was single and had no children.

  “Soon we had another problem: Portland,” she said. “We’re straight up I-5 from Portland and many of those residents were not exactly hearty and self-reliant. They were streaming out of that city and out to the ‘country’ like southern Washington State. They were bringing their sick and wounded, and expecting prompt and perfect health care. They were overwhelming us.”

  “This is about when the county Sheriff’s posse was fully formed and out patrolling. They made protecting the hospital one of their primary missions, which helped a lot, but we were now out of supplies.”

  “I came up with a plan; a controversial plan at first. I said that while we would treat anyone, we would demand payment from a patient’s family. We wouldn’t take their vehicle and all their gas, or all of their food. We wouldn’t take what they needed to live, but we would take—actually, just ask them for—everything else they had of value. I remember one family trying to escape from Portland. They got in a car accident on the crowded freeway and their daughter had a broken arm. We said we’d treat her, but we needed to search the car. We did and found some gold coins. We asked if we could keep them. The family agreed. To be clear, we never stole anything from people; we never pointed guns at them, we just asked them if we could have everything they that they could spare. “

  “We were starting to get some valuables like gold, silver, ammunition, gasoline, diesel, and even some Chinese currency from some of the rich Portlanders. Having these valuables was only half of it; we needed to trade them for supplies.”

  “This is where our mayor came in. He was a Democrat—everyone in Longview was a Democrat—but a pro-jobs one. He was, not coincidentally, the president of the local Longshoremen’s union.”

  “The mayor started calling his buddies in the government and telling them to send medical supplies. They said they didn’t have any. The mayor—I’m not sure how he phrased this—let them know that if they sent some supplies, they’d be handsomely rewarded. He basically told them that they could get all the bribes they wanted if they could 'lose' some medical supplies and send them to Longview. We would use the valuables we were collecting from patients to pay the bribes.”

  “Bribing the government got us some supplies, but we didn’t depend on that alone. I reached out to the local churches and asked them to help us by feeding us and sending security volunteers. They did what they could, which was quite a bit, actually. Churches were looking for a mission, and, next to helping their own members directly, they found that helping the hospital was a way they could help lots of people. They knew that we wouldn’t steal from them.”

  “Accountability was key,” she continued. “We set up a simple, but comprehensive, system where all of our contributors had free access to our records and could roam around the hospital checking to make sure that the valuables from patients and the government supplies were promptly checked into the locked storeroom. We allowed our contributors to supply the security volunteers to guard the storeroom, which created a nice check and balance on the various groups watching our very valuable supplies. Oh, and we always gave people their weapons back when they checked them in with us. That showed them that we were only concerned about security in our hospital.”

  “I made a special effort to involve the local immigrant communities. I knew that they would donate generously if it meant their community was being treated. I brought in the leader of the local Mexican community and the Guatemalans, two groups who didn’t like each other very much based on some old rivalries. I told both of them that their fighting stopped at the entrance to the hospital. Once they were in the hospital, it was all about treating people and getting resupplied. They could hate each other once they left the hospital, but, as I put it, ‘This hospital is my territory. I am in control, and I am in control to treat sick and hurt people. That’s all I care about. When you are in my hospital, you will listen to me and my staff and you will donate all you can to allow us to treat your children, parents, cousins, and friends. We will work for you, but you need to work with us. Understand?’ The answer I always got was, ‘Of course.’”

  “When I was laying down the law to the Mexicans and Guatemalans, it hit me: We could treat eve
ryone here—both sides of any groups that hated each other—as long as we were tough and made it clear that the hospital was our territory. We would give very valuable medical treatment to people, but we strongly asked them to give us things so we could buy supplies. Besides donating to us, the only other rule was that they couldn’t bring their feuds into my hospital. We would do this by refusing to treat any member of a group who did not abide by these two simple rules. And we would use our security forces to enforce this. I would look a leader of a group in the eye and say, ‘If you try to bring guns into my hospital and try to take out your enemies in here, my security guys will kill you and then we’ll never give medical care to your group. You want to be the one that got your group cut off from medical care? You want a little Jewish nurse like me to shoot you in the face? Think how embarrassing that would be.’” The audience was laughing. Deborah looked like she would actually say these things. While vetting the colonels, the Legislative staff interviewed several people who personally witnessed Deborah saying exactly what she was saying in her speech.

  “This worked well for a few weeks. Soon, we started to see that the Patriots were hitting the Loyalists pretty hard. Convoy after convoy coming up and down I-5 was getting blown apart by Patriot forces, quite a few of whom were local men and some women. I called a meeting with the mayor.”

  “I was a closet Patriot, but I needed to work with the mayor. I told him that we needed to work both sides in this fight. We needed the mayor to keep getting us Loyalist supplies and we needed to reach out to the Patriots to get supplies from them, too. I didn’t know how the mayor would react.”

  “‘Yep,’ is what he said. ‘I’ll call the Sheriff, who’s running the local Patriot forces and arrange a meeting.’”

  “‘You know that the Sheriff is running the Patriots?’ I asked. I had heard rumors, but I didn’t expect the mayor, who worked for the Loyalists, to be so casual about this.”

  “‘Oh yeah,’ the mayor said. ‘We both have wounded and both need the hospital,’ he said. What the mayor didn’t tell me, but what I found out later, was that he was preparing to defect to the Patriots as soon as the Patriots took our area, which everyone assumed would happen soon.”

  “We had the meeting at the hospital. It was short and sweet. The mayor and Sheriff both took off their guns, as was required to come into my hospital. They shook hands once they were inside and no one could see them. I asked the mayor to keep getting the supplies he was getting and he said as long as the valuables kept coming, he could make sure medical supplies were ‘lost’ and ended up here. The Sheriff laughed. He smiled and said if he were actually working with the Patriots, but of course he wasn’t, they could start delivering a portion of the supplies they were taking in the raids on the I-5 convoys and start leaving them at the hospital. They would send most of the medical supplies they got straight here and would deliver other valuables here to be given to the mayor’s FEMA friends. They both laughed. ‘Now I’ll have a field hospital for my men,’ the Sheriff said. ‘Me, too,’ the mayor said.”

  “Both the mayor and the Sheriff held up their ends of the bargain. They sent us supplies and we treated both sides. Another advantage of working with both sides was that when a large gang rolled into our area, both the Patriots and Loyalists would attack them. A gang threatening the hospital was a threat to the Patriots and Loyalists because it was a threat to both sides’ medical care.”

  “Not everyone understood that we wouldn’t take sides or allow armed parties from any side into my hospital. One time, some Homeland Security troopers came to the hospital with a wounded member of their unit. We told them they couldn’t bring in their guns; they drew their pistols and started barking orders, as they were used to doing. Our security volunteers held them at gunpoint until the wounded trooper started to go into shock from blood loss. At that point, the troopers decided that they could check in their weapons. That’s how we handled those situations: we were very practical and weren’t afraid to let patients die if they insisted on using my hospital for their fighting. I know I’m not supposed to say that we weren’t afraid to let patients die, but the old rules for the nice, polite, well-supplied pre-Collapse world didn’t apply anymore. I couldn’t have my hospital a battle zone. I just couldn’t. Then no patients would get treated.”

  “As summer turned into fall, we could tell that the Loyalists were having a tough time maintaining control over the I-5 corridor. Most of the people in the county were supporting the Patriots and the Patriot raids on the Lima convoys were getting more and more effective. I-5 would be shut down for days at a time. Pretty soon, the mayor’s supplies stopped flowing into us. That was when he and the Sheriff came to the hospital for another meeting. The mayor said that the best way he could help now was to give false reports to his superiors, misdirecting the Lima forces to other areas. He was reluctant to tell his superiors to put troops in areas where he knew the Patriots would ambush them. ‘Sorry, Jerry,’ he said to the Sheriff. ‘I want to get people fixed up at the hospital; I don’t want to get people killed.’ The Sheriff said, ‘Not a problem, Clem, we’ll find the Limas on our own.’ By November, the Patriots had run the feds out of our county and established permanent control of I-5. The mayor formally joined the Patriots right about then.”

  “People sometimes ask me why we called St. John’s the ‘no-flag’ hospital. We took down the American flag because it was, technically, the symbol of the FUSA. Besides, that flag had 50 stars and there were no longer 50 states in the union. We didn’t want to put up the 'Don’t Tread on Me' flag because we treated Loyalists and we loved to get their medical supplies. We decided to leave the flag off the flagpole and figure out which flag should fly over the hospital when all this got sorted out.”

  Deborah pulled a flag out from under the rostrum. It had been placed there in advance. She unfurled it. It was the New Washington flag.

  “Now we have a flag to fly again,” she said to a standing ovation.

  Chapter 345

  Col. Brian Schultz

  Olympus Arms

  “We do have a flag to fly again,” Ben said as the applause for Deborah was dying down. “And one of the reasons we can fly our new flag is because our troops had a bunch of rifles, AR-15s to be exact. Our next honoree is one of the reasons we had them.”

  “Col. Brian Schultz, please stand,” Ben said, motioning for the next colonel to stand. A man in his forties who looked like a blue-collar machinist stood up and waved to the crowd. He was smiling and very happy to be there.

  “Col. Schultz said he wasn’t much of a public speaker, so he asked me to tell you what he did for us,” Ben said. “I’m happy to do so.”

  “Brian Schultz owned a company in Seattle called Olympus Arms that made AR-15s and other firearms,” Ben began. “They got to be a large manufacturer, making their own rifles but mostly supplying many parts—bolts, barrels, trigger assemblies—to other gun manufacturers. It’s a surprise to most people, including me, that those ‘evil black rifles’ would be made in a town so full of gun-haters. Well, they were until the progressives realized this and started protesting in front of the plant. They quickly got the city to ‘reinterpret’ the company’s zoning approvals and pretty soon they ordered Olympus Arms to close down.”

  “This was a few years before the Collapse, and Brian could see that the country was about to fall apart. He knew that millions of Americans would need AR-15s for what was coming. He had a plan.”

  “Brian had made quite a nice bit of money making guns and gun parts. He was a bit of a manufacturing genius and had an almost psychic ability to determine which employees were good and keep them working for him. His employees became a family, an ever-growing family because he was so successful at making and selling guns and gun parts. When they were forced to leave Seattle, Olympus Arms employed 150 gun craftsmen and made millions of gun parts every year.”

  “The only part of an AR-15 considered the ‘firearm’ is the lower receiver, which meant that it was
regulated by the former ATF. It’s just a piece of metal that holds the trigger assembly. A lower receiver doesn’t take much to make; Olympus Arms was selling them for $50 before the Collapse.”

  “Brian knew that the ATF would regulate him on the lower receivers he made, but wouldn’t look into the parts he was making. Bolts, barrels, and trigger assemblies weren’t a ‘firearm’ and couldn’t be regulated.”

  “He decided to split his business in half. One subsidiary would make regulated lower receivers and another would make unregulated gun parts, but would have the manufacturing capability to instantly make lower receivers when the time came. He did just that.”

  “He relocated his lower receiver manufacturing company to Tacoma, where ATF closely watched the lower receivers he made. He made a fair number of them, but they were only a small part of his business. He sold the lower receivers to other gun manufacturers who finished the guns with parts from a variety of subcontractors.”

  “He moved the bulk of his company to a state where he knew he wouldn’t be harassed: Idaho. That state welcomed the new jobs. The Idaho governor even toured the new site and got his picture taken with Brian.”

  “Brian set up a state-of-the-art facility with the latest manufacturing equipment. He located it right across the border from Washington State and brought most of his valued employees with him to the Idaho plant.”

  “He also brought something else valuable to the Idaho plant: the blueprints for making lower receivers, but he never made them there. Until the Collapse hit.”

  “When the ATF was extremely busy trying to arrest gun owners, their inspections of manufacturers dropped off to zero. Just as planned, Brian abandoned the lower receiver plant in Tacoma. As far as the ATF knew, Olympus Arms was out of business and not making any guns.”