by John Grit
Nate leaned back in his chair. “Growing up, I heard of those old stories. Later, I also read that claims of veterans of that war being half nuts were grotesquely exaggerated. The great majority of Vietnam vets went on to live happy, productive lives, many becoming very successful.” His eyes locked on his son while he answered Chesty’s question. “As to your question of why a smaller war could be harder on those who fought it… Ponder this: I read that during WWII, a U.S. infantryman averaged 10 days of combat in one year. In Vietnam, an infantryman averaged 240 days of combat in one year. If there’s any truth at all to that, it explains a lot.”
Chesty whistled. “Damn.”
Brian swallowed. “And what about that little jungle war you were in?”
Nate regarded his son with unblinking eyes. “By your 14th birthday, you had more true stories of life and death struggles than most military retirees, and you had been wounded.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to bore you.”
Brian looked down at the table for a second and then at his father. “I wasn’t expecting to be entertained.”
Chapter 30
Capt. Donovan walked into the courthouse with a roll of maps under his arm. Sergeant First Class (SFC) Quint Bartow was with him.
Donovan looked around the office at everyone. “Bad news.”
Chesty was about to go out on patrol. He put his shotgun back in the rack. “Oh hell. Is it the crazies?”
“Yes,” Donovan answered. “The ones in Washington. They’re already raising hell about your people using state land go grow food on.”
Nate immediately saw trouble. “What’s it to them? That land belongs to the State of Florida, not the Feds. I expect there are national forests being farmed right now. Let them bitch about that.”
Donovan unrolled his maps on a table. “There are still a few environmental wackos in Washington that lived through the plague, and they’re raising hell.” He looked as guilty as a priest caught handing money to a whore. “Don’t ask me how they found out about your farm.”
“Uh, how did they find out?” Chesty asked.
“I told you not to ask.”
“I just did.”
“Well shit.” Donovan froze for a second. “A certain Army Captain included in a report a short paragraph about how the locals were feeding themselves by farming a wildlife preserve.” He looked as if he expected rotten tomatoes to be tossed at him any second. “A general decided to brag to a Senator on how well things are going in parts of Florida. The Senator told reporters. It wasn’t long before the enviro wackos were buzzing like hornets after a cow kicked their nest open.”
Brian broke in. “Reporters? They must be farther along in the rebuilding than down here in the South.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea.” Donovan shook his head. “Things are no better in Washington for the common citizen. The people are starving and crime is worse.”
“What do you expect?” Chesty said. “It’s full of politicians.”
Nate steered the conversation back to Washington’s plans for the farm. “Have they ordered you to kick everyone off that land? You know that would be a death sentence. Many of these people will starve without that farm. They just now have been able to enjoy a few meals from those fields after all of their work.”
“It’s not quite like that but almost as bad.” Donovan looked around the room. “They are thinking about taxing you.”
Chesty’s mouth dropped. “How? I haven’t been paid in over a year, and neither has anyone else I know. What are they going to tax?”
Donovan’s answer was, “They want one third of your crops.”
Nate’s voice echoed in the room. “There is no way they can spare that!”
“They’ll starve,” Brian added. “They’ll be lucky if they don’t starve this summer when the warehouse food runs out. If they work themselves to death, and if they have good weather, and if the bugs and animals don’t eat most of it, they just might scrape by another year.”
“Add another if to that,” Nate warned. “They must also preserve and store enough food to last till the next harvest.”
Chesty raised a hand. “Hold on. I’m confused. How in the hell did this thing go from environmental concerns to confiscating a third of the crop? Only in Washington could they go from one to the other without skipping a beat.”
A smile played around the edges of SFC Bartow’s mouth, but he managed to keep quiet.
Donovan found a chair and sat in it. “I have more news for you, but I guess it can wait a few minutes until everyone has digested the tax nonsense.”
“Nonsense?” Nate glanced at the top map in the stack Donovan left on the table. “It might be nonsense but the hunger it causes will be just as real.”
Donovan rested his hands behind his head and leaned back in the chair. “Relax everyone. They have put me in charge of collecting that tax.” He looked around the room. “Thirty percent? They’ll be lucky if they get ten. We’ll send them the worst of your produce. There are hungry people all over who need anything you can spare, but the fact is your people worked for it and produced it. It’s yours. Forced wealth redistribution is bad enough, but when you take food out of the mouths of those who produced that food and expect them to go hungry the same as if they had never put any effort at all into coaxing it out of the ground and harvesting it…well, that’s a recipe for civil war.”
Nate still wasn’t ready to let it go. “And when they replace you with someone less reasonable?”
“We’ll have to deal with that when it happens.” Donovan pointed. “I saw you looking at one of the maps. It marks the location of dozens of small garden patches in the county. Most of them belong to regular folks trying to survive. A few are being worked by the radicals.”
Brian feigned surprise. “You mean they actually work? Isn’t that against their belief that everything should be free? Working a garden is the same as paying for food.”
“Even anarchists will work if they get hungry enough.” Nate became interested in Donovan’s map. He lifted it aside and scanned the next one in the stack. After twenty seconds, he stopped and cast his eyes on Donovan. “It appears Washington has inventoried every garden patch in the county. Looks like they put satellites and drones to use, flying over every inch of land and taking photos. Is that for the tax?”
“Yep,” Donovan answered. “The military is running out of food and will be in the same starvation boat as the rest of the population by sometime next year. Washington says the Army and Marines will be the new IRS, but we’ll be collecting crops and livestock, not money.”
Chesty looked sick. “You do realize that you’re talking about the government turning the American people into serfs. Sounds like we’re going to be like feudal Europe.”
Brian’s eyes rounded. “I remember reading about serfdom in Europe and how those who couldn’t pay their taxes to the land-owning warlords would ‘pay through the nose,’ meaning a soldier would punish them by putting a knife in their nostril and yank, slitting their nose.”
“I think that nose slitting was in Ireland,” Nate added.
“None of my soldiers are going to be slitting anyone’s nose,” Donovan promised. “As for Europe, they’ve already returned to the Dark Ages in many ways. Citizens have been drafted, not to serve in the military, but to work in coal mines, slaughterhouses, and meat-packing plants, as well as on farms. In countries like China, it’s even worse, because they’ve had massive hunger riots that dwarf those in Europe and have been on the verge of civil war for many months.”
Nate’s mind raced. “So the people will soon be expected to feed your soldiers, even though they’re going hungry themselves? How much are you going to lean on them to extract your portion of the fruits of their labor?”
Donovan flinched. “That’s a moral dilemma everyone in the military is losing sleep over.”
“You mean those with a conscience,” Nate added.
“Yeah,” Donovan said. “Those with a conscience. Keep in
mind, though, even they have to follow orders. I’m thinking cooperation will be more productive than intimidation. Soldiers can work in the fields as well as anyone and carry a rifle while they’re doing it. Still, I think our protection and other assistance is worth something and we should get some consideration from the local people for that. I’m just hoping we can hold things together until the country is back on its feet.” He bit his lip. “If not, we’ll soon be looking like Europe and Asia.” He didn’t seem to have much faith his hopes would be realized.
Nate tapped the stack of maps with his index finger. “The tax aside, what are you planning to do with this information? And if you order airstrikes, how can you determine which of these garden patches are being worked by the violent anarchists and which are being worked by peaceful citizens?”
Donovan crossed his oversized arms. “That’s the question.”
“I would expect most of them are just folks trying to survive.” Brian looked to his father for support. “I mean, the crazies can’t be more than a small percentage of the people in this county.”
Chesty walked over and looked at a few of the maps. “Wow. There’s a lot of gardening going on out there.”
“If there wasn’t,” Nate said, “there would be a lot of starving going on out there. People are hungry as it is. I think being slaughtered by the Army for the crime of trying to feed yourself would be just a little unjust. Brian is right; most of these people are not violent radicals. They’re just people struggling to survive. Using aerial photos of garden patches to hunt for terrorists is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of government doing.”
“Oh?” Donovan turned to Bartow. “What do you think, Sergeant?”
“I think the Army isn’t in the justice business. On the other hand, we’re not in the business of slaughtering Americans either. As for how stupid government is, that goes without saying.”
Donovan rubbed his chin. “According to Washington, we’re now in the ‘social justice’ business, meaning we’re to take from those who have food, no matter how hard they worked to produce that food, and give it to those who are hungry, no matter how lazy those hungry are.”
Nate winked at Brian as he spoke to Donovan. “Like you said, you’ve taken over for the IRS.”
Chesty laughed. He stopped short. “What’s wrong with me? There’s nothing funny about this.”
“Might as well laugh as cry,” Donovan said. “The government painted itself into a corner by starting up and then expanding all of those entitlements. They couldn’t end them without facing economic disaster and a voter uprising, and they couldn’t sustain them through taxes and printing more money, not forever. Buying votes with social programs for generations would’ve been the downfall of America, if the plague hadn’t come along. America was broke, fiscally and morally.
“Now they face a problem not unlike the one that was solved by the massive die-off. They must feed the hungry to avoid a civil war, but to do that they must take food from the industrious, since government has no food of its own left, or won’t in about six months. But how do they do that without pissing off the industrious and causing the civil war that they’re trying to prevent? What’s worse, if they piss off the industrious, they’ll be facing a much more dangerous foe than if they just allowed the lazy to go hungry. On top of that, they know it’s the industrious they need if we’re ever going to rebuild, not the lazy.”
Nate smiled. “You putting it that way makes it seem like the plague never happened. Government has been taking from those who work and giving to those who don’t for generations, only now that there’s no economy and money is worthless, they’re going to take food. Someday they’ll be taking our labor by ‘drafting’ us to work on government farms like in Europe. Remember, the UK did the same thing during WWII. Not everyone who was drafted served in their military and fought in the war, many worked in coal mines, factories, and on farms. Anyway you look at it it’s slavery.”
Chesty snorted. “Damn Nate, you’re scaring the shit out of me. If I didn’t know the good Captain and Sergeant to be reasonable men, I’d be reaching for my shotgun already.”
“Enough civics and history.” Donovan leaned over the stack of maps. “We’ll deal with Washington later. How to handle the radicals; that is the question.”
Chapter 31
Deni told Mel to stay where he was. Mel wasn’t part of her team, wasn’t even in the Army, and she wanted him out of the way. His superiors must have really liked his reports, because he had managed to talk someone in the Guard into letting him stay months longer than the original days he had been allowed. Whatever. She liked him and considered him a friend and a competent soldier. Any friend of Nate’s and Brian’s had to be okay. Nevertheless, she wanted him out of the way and instructed him to stay with the vehicles on the Jeep trail. The next thirty minutes would prove to be either boring or culminate in a bloody firefight and violent death for many. She planned to make sure none of them were her soldiers.
Mel caught movement down the trail. It was another convoy, this one made up of civilian vehicles, three pickups loaded with armed men. He recognized the driver and front passenger of the first vehicle, and saw Chesty and Atticus in the cab of the second. “No offense, but if you’re going to make me stay by the vehicles, I think I’ll join Nate’s team. He has men with him who were military contractors, and they claim to be high speed operators. Just out of curiosity, I would like to see them work.”
Deni looked down the trail and saw Nate driving the lead pickup. “Good. Nate might need a real soldier when it hits the fan. I’m not so sure about those contractors. Where have they been all this time? The townspeople could’ve used them. Now all of a sudden they decide to volunteer for this operation? I notice Nate wouldn’t let Brian come to this little party. I suspect he has the same worries.”
Mel reached into the HUMVEE and grabbed two grenades. “May I borrow these?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, if you bring them back in one piece.”
He gave her a half-smile. “I’m not going to carry them just to weigh down my ass against the wind.” He grew serious. “I’ll watch his back. You keep your mind on your problems. Nate asked me to watch out for you, so he’ll be pissed if you let some asshole kill you after I went with his team instead.”
She smiled. “And I’m going to be pissed if you let some asshole kill him.” She waved at Nate, still 50 yards away, and led her team into the woods. Already behind schedule, she couldn’t wait to talk to him.
Mel stepped out into the Jeep trail and waved for Nate to stop. He walked up to the open window. “Deni doesn’t like my company, says for me to watch your back.”
Nate obviously didn’t like it. “Damn it, Mel! I asked you to watch out for her.”
Mel appeared to be genuinely embarrassed. “Sorry, friend. She ran me off.”
Nate stabbed his left thumb over his shoulder. “Hop in. We don’t have all day. Our target’s miles from here.”
Mel yelled, “Make room or I’ll use you for a landing mat!”
Two irritated men scrambled to get out of his way and pushed others in the process, resulting in a storm of profanities from all.
Mel grabbed onto the truck a foot behind the cab with his left hand and swung his lower body up over the side and into the back with one motion, using nothing more than his leg muscles and pivoting on his hand. He landed on his feet as if he did that kind of thing every day. With the full kit he had strapped onto his body, weighing close to 100 pounds, it impressed more than one of the contractors. He stood in the truck and cast his smirk on the others. “Damn boys, I only needed two square feet. I think a couple of you are going to have to get married now that you’ve become so familiar with each other.”
A mixture of laughter and more profanities ensued.
Nate smiled and shook his head. He spoke to Tyrone, who was sitting on the passenger side, “Mel always was full of shit. You either like him or hate him.”
~~~
Though the weather was bright, clear, and crisp, sweat dripped from Deni’s chin as she peered through brush and scanned the area around a small shack. Chickens in a coop clucked peacefully and scratched at the bare ground in a futile search for something edible. A boy, who appeared to be about nine, was hoeing weeds in the winter garden. They had a greenhouse made of scavenged materials. The walls were a mosaic of windows that had been removed from abandoned cars, and the roof was made of tempered glass that appeared to have been pilfered from store fronts. A decades-old diesel pickup sat near the shack, more rust than paint covered its dented body.
Deni thought her first raid was going to be a bust. This looked to her to be nothing more than a family surviving the hard times, not terrorists. A little girl of around seven years of age walked out of the shack and skipped to the garden to join the boy. Worries over losing one of her soldiers diminished and transformed into a resolve to be sure no innocent people were hurt.
Her radio squawked. She hurriedly turned the volume down and put it to her ear. The soldier’s message changed everything. “We found a pole barn back here. Two white males, early twenties. One white female, a little older. All armed with rifles. It looks like they’re making bombs.”
She spoke into the mike, “Don’t move in until I give the word.” She was waiting on a team of soldiers kept in reserve to report.
She didn’t have to wait long. Her radio came to life and a soldier reported three more armed men around another shack 70 yards back in the woods. The shack was so small and well hidden under three large oaks growing close together, air surveillance hadn’t spotted it.
Deni issued new orders over the radio. “That shack and its occupants are now your responsibility. The other teams will have to do without your backup. Be careful. There are at least two children with the civilians at our position.”
Only a few feet from Deni, Private Brenner scanned the area with binoculars, kneeling behind a pine tree and leaning only enough of his upper body out to allow him to see. He had stuck a few green leafy branches into the webbing of his helmet cover and the upper half of his pack to provide extra camouflage. The lower part of his face was covered with an olive-drab mosquito net veil. “Wish we knew how many people are in that shack and how many are armed.”
