2024

by H. Berkeley Rourke

  When dad and I took inventory of the stuff we had taken off those people we were surprised at the totals but not surprised at the lethality of the weapons they had been able to commandeer. Plus their money supplies were the banks, until they ran dry of currency, and the people that they killed.

  The cemetery in Frenchtown was filled up with bodies in shallow graves. God knows how many there were. The State Police thought it would be unable to identify half of them through any means but did find a body of driver's licenses thrown into a box in the barracks. Of course that did not give us a count of the children below the age of holding a driver's license. But from that bunch of driver's licenses the State Police decided the total number of murder victims of the militia had to be over a thousand.

  There was no way to know for sure that the money we confiscated came from the victims of murder or from the banks. There was no way to determine how to get it back to its “rightful owners” if there were any left at that point. All the banks in Arlee, Frenchtown and Alberton had long ago closed their doors. No one knew where the owners, operators, leaders of those institutions had gone, no one knew anything that could give us a way to return the money. So we kept it. In the run of time it was a good decision.

  It turned out that the militia we fought was only one of a number that tried to take control of various areas of Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, northern California, parts of Utah and Wyoming and most of Kansas and Nebraska as well as other pockets in other states like Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. I guess that the worst of the militia fights eventually took place in Texas. After the Cuban incursion into Florida had been beaten back and the Cuban forces decimated almost to a man the army forces fought and killed hundreds of militiamen in Texas who had seized control of some areas of that state.

  Our assessment, in learning that other areas were still fighting their militias, was that those kinds of wars would prove to be more devastating in the run of time to the population of the country than the nuclear attacks. Later we would discover that those thoughts were pretty much correct even though the large part of the population did survive everything including the militia wars. Don't get me wrong. Millions died in the nuclear exchange and millions more died in the militia wars.

  Normalcy, whatever you want to call it, just because the war with our militia was over, had not been reestablished in the country as a whole. Nor was it completely so in our own area. Up near Arlee the militiamen that were left there went into hiding further north into the panhandle of Idaho where many of their brethren were located. But a few continued to set roadblocks in strange places and continued their murdering, raping and thieving ways.

  The barter system had begun to replace currency in some places, we were told. That was not true in Missoula/Frenchtown. It was said that a nine millimeter bullet was worth more than a hundred dollar bill in many places. Everything was by word of mouth except for what little we got from Radio USA. Rumor mongering was a pastime for almost everyone.

  RUSA was mostly broadcasting news of the battles in Florida.

  Those of us who had plenty of currency in our hands were generally without worries as to supplies. As soon as Hwy. 80 and I-15 were completely open to traffic supplies began to flow to us from the cities of Oregon and Washington, from Utah and Canada and from California to a degree. We even began to get some produce into the stores that were reopening in Missoula and Frenchtown from Mexico that was being imported through Arizona.

  It turned out that the farming areas in northern California had not shut down at all. Salinas operated at full bore producing its array of “produce” for both its own state and the other states of the northwest, to whatever places it could be distributed safely. And Arizona was sending out fairly sizable amounts of its crops, lettuce, hay, and other forms of produce to those places that could afford to buy. The hay, of course, was used for silage in some places but mostly to feed the few cattle we could round up and pen so the markets could begin to provide meat to the remaining population. Eastern Montana had been a ranching area since the establishment of longhorn cattle from Texas by the passage over the Gallup Trail. But no one was going into eastern Montana because of the nuclear attacks in the northeastern quadrant of the state. No one really knew whether militias controlled the southeast of the state or not. Chicken farming began right away after the nuclear exchange in Missoula. And there were a few cattle ranches around the area as well. So meat supplies, though not abundant, were available if one had the price.

  So the first few weeks after the “war” of Frenchtown was over were given in terms of our time to the reestablishment of the defensive systems around our “fortress” and addition of a few newer ideas based on the battles we had fought in that area. But we also tried to get to a point where we could go down to Missoula, only fifteen miles from us and try to get news or supplies. Did we give up any of the weapons we had confiscated? No.

  Did we give up any of the ammunition that we had amassed? If you say that using ammunition to trade is “giving it up” then yes we did. But not a lot of any one caliber, especially not a lot of .223 caliber, that is used in the light machine guns, the SAW's and the M-16's and AR-15's. We had lined up walls full of rifles, SAW's, all the stuff we had taken away from those yokels and box after box of loaded clips of ammunition for every type of weapon we had. We would not let go of that for some time to come. But forty-five caliber bullets and some thirty caliber bullets were used to barter for various food stuffs. Mostly we froze everything we could. But boy was it a treat to get a head of lettuce or a couple of tomatoes or a dozen eggs; yes, real eggs.

  Were we supposed to give up those guns, the ammunition, the machine guns, the ammunition canisters and boxes? Technically I suppose we should have done that. But we had been through a month of hell. We had killed over one hundred fifty men and boys, some rather brutally. We had fought day and night to save ourselves, our family, and our way of life. We were not about to let the government know what we had amassed as a result of that fight. And why should we? Though we were not prescient in any respect we had an inkling that the militia wars had not ended in fact.

  There was no guarantee that the bastards that had run away would not come back with a lot more men and try again. So we kept what we had, we hoped never to use it again, we hoped against hope that things would get better and some idiot would not try to take over the area again. Remember the old saying wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which fills up first.

  A week or so after the battles were over I went down to Charley and Berneice's place. I thought sure that my car would have been discovered and torched or maybe driven off somewhere to take the gasoline if nothing else. But lo and behold it was where I left it, the gas was still in the car, the clothes and everything were still in the trunk. There was a road that dad finally showed me that came within about a half a mile from the house. It was what the militiamen had used to get into position to attack us from the southwest.

  After we finally were able to bury Charlie and Berneice I drove my car back out there, unloaded my stuff and packed it to the house. It was an amazing feeling to have all my clothing, to have all my shaving gear, everything that I had brought from D.C. with me at last. I felt almost whole, almost like I had arrived home, finally.

  The reality of the situation continued to be somewhat less than the optimum for sure. There were no telephones, either cell or land line. The tel-satellites that had been in orbit at the time of the nuclear attacks had been, in large part, destroyed by EMP blasts in space set off by one force or the other, either the U.S., the Russians, the Iranians, the Israelis, the North Koreans, the French, the English, the Pakistanis. All the nuclear powers had taken part in the war. All had suffered extreme devastation and one of the ways in which all of us were most heavily affected had to do with communications.

  Another way in which we were devastated and would have to work for years to overcome was in respect to the distribution of electric power. The state of Nebraska had been one
of the hubs of the electric grid. The infrastructure was just simply vaporized in many places. The wires, the large towers (poles) that held the wiring did not exist in many areas of Nebraska. And the redirection of the electric grid could not be completely accomplished without some or all of that infrastructure being replaced or repaired. So electricity was still a matter of generators that were run largely from gasoline. That meant, of course, that not many hours of the day were given to electric power generation because the amount of gasoline available was finite.

  Pipelines carrying “natural” gas from almost anywhere to anywhere in the U.S. had been the rule before the nuclear strikes. What was left of the pipeline system, no one seemed to know. According to what we were hearing substantial repair or replacement of those vital systems would take whatever amount of time it would take. Quien sabes?

  And it began to be bandied about that laborers, workers in general, were in short supply. A lot of people had been murdered on the highways. A lot of people had been murdered in small towns like Frenchtown. A lot of militias had been broken down by attrition of their numbers through people like me killing them. So where were the workers going to come from? Who was going to operate the backhoes, the trench diggers, the clamps that installed the heavy and unwieldy pieces of pipe into the trench? Who was going to do the welding to insure the pipes did not leak? Skilled labor was not exactly jumping out of the woodwork for these projects. Everyone was still a little scared.

  Some were afraid that a group of gang members or militia type people would attack them and they wouldn't be able to defend themselves if they were away from their homes. Some were afraid to carry weapons if they had them. Having a weapon in an area where there was civil control reestablished was tantamount to being a militia type or a gang member. And in the large cities like Chicago and Cleveland the gangs held more control in the night that did the police and the army. In those places the authorities were still trying to make things work the way they had prior to the attack on our country.

  And our reestablishment of our country as it had been would have to wait according to some. We were among those whose attitude was “go to war,” finish off the opposition, if it's a gang, if it's a militia no matter. Kill as many as you can, take their weapons, strip them down to a few that have to run or die. There could be no disagreement with that attitude in those early days. A harsh attitude was a necessity when it came to the murderers, the rapists that the Militias became.

  On my first trip into Missoula of course I went armed. And when I got to the State Police roadblock on Hwy. 80 they recognized me and let me go through without confiscating my weapons. Confiscation of weapons was what they were trying to do with everyone after the militia war in Frenchtown. But they let me through without a hitch. What that told me was that they trusted me not to attack them or the banks or other people indiscriminately. Maybe that is how we should have been looking at each other earlier, before the nuclear attacks.

  Weapons not in the hands of a madman cannot be used for the mad schemes that one dreams up. If you give him a gun he will use it to commit a crime. Once the crime is committed he will buy another in order to be able to commit a larger crime. That was the premise upon which the State Police and the Army were going.

  But there had to be some exceptions to those rules. Local cops had to be able to have guns, didn't they? When the State Police, my dad and Allan and his friends sat down to talk about these topics we tried to come up with exceptions that made sense. We left scratching our heads about the entire conversation and wondering what we had accomplished. I knew it was nothing.

  Guns, the reliance on guns to solve problems in our society has been an issue since the earliest days of our national existence. The construct of a national army in those early days threatened the smaller states especially. Those smaller states did not want a large standing army to be formed by the central government. They had seen that under the British and it was in part what had caused the revolution.

  They, those representing the small states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts, men like Patrick Henry, wanted each state to have its own militia. If each state had its own militia then no tyrant could use a large standing army to mistreat those not in positions of power in the government. That was what brought about the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

  So what happened with that part of the early experiments? Well there was a guy in Pennsylvania who wanted to make whiskey. And he was damned good at it. He was so good at it that he made a lot of whiskey and began to sell it all over the country. Then the federal and state authorities though he should pay some tax on the interstate commerce that he was conducting.

  He said no and both the state and the federal government got involved in a small war over taxing whiskey. It was called the Whiskey Rebellion. So how then could the states or the federal government create revenue? Of course they taxed commerce just as had the British before them. And in the ultimate the taxing power of the government, as near as I can tell, came down to having the power to enforce the taxation through the courts or through the use of force if need be. Hell the same thing happened with civil rights in the sixties. But somehow, after the involvement in the Vietnam War it became profitable to sell guns to the people of this country. And not just guns but military weapons. So the NRA became a “gun lobby” that gathered so much power that it could not be defeated. And the wars after Vietnam, Desert Storm that popularized the military in the country like never before, and Bush's Iraq war and the Afghanistan thing brought even more military weapons to the public. It was really a Catch 22 for the State Police.

  The first attempt at limiting military style weapons like AR-15 rifles and AK-47 soviet style rifles, so called “assault rifles” coming into the hands of the average citizen was passed by a Democratic Congress and then defeated by constant lobbying and the fact of a Republican Congress in both houses. In those times when that was happening I actually supported the end to the ban on military assault rifles. But the militia war changed my mind completely. I can tell you that we had, in my dad's cave, over one hundred plus military style rifles, some silenced, most with flash hiding devices, almost all of which would fire one shot at a time, bursts of three to six rounds, or full automatic. And we had a number of light machine guns that would fire bursts of six or more, and those that would fire only full automatic. But for the war, but for the idiots we took them from, I would have been happy to turn those weapons, all of them, in to the federal authorities. Why we did not I cannot tell you, except once again both dad and I discussed the possibility of more problems.

  But you give a guy a pistol, his age makes no difference, his race or culture makes no difference, and all of a sudden he is John Wayne. You give a military rifle to a young guy and he becomes a soldier in his mind, a legend in his mind as well. Give him a weapon that fires full automatic and it almost creates an erection of his penis just thinking about firing that thing. Here is something I read back in the period of about 2010. I was shocked by this one. In one year about 120,000 pistols were left laying on the ground at crime scenes. No wonder there were so many murders in Frenchtown.

  Weapons are purposeful tools for me, for my dad. We used them in the war in Vietnam for their designed purpose. We used them to kill other human beings. That is what they are designed for, that is their only real purpose to exist. The militiamen used them for that purpose as well. And then we turned our skills loose on those fools. Is there a difference between us and the militias? Qualitatively I constantly argue with myself that there is but I cannot define it very well. That has to do with the unfortunate killing we had to do.

  We used these weapons to defend our society, our home, our family and the families of others. They used them to steal, to murder without any restraint or reasonable basis for their actions. Does that justify everything we did? Hell I don't know. I will leave it to God to decide that issue.

  One thing I do know and that is the guns we faced in Frenchtown and in the forests
surrounding that little town, should never have been in the hands of those who had them. Here is the final arbiter in that regard in this reassessment of what we did. Had those in the militia had no guns, civil authority could have been maintained and the murders that occurred would never have happened, at least that is probably true.

  And the murders that were committed, the atrocities inflicted by those in the militia that we defeated were in the thousands. There were so many new graves in Frenchtown they could hardly be counted, and some of the dead had just been thrown into the forest. No one knew who they were and no one wanted to dig them up and find out.

  The only thing we really had to do then was to wait. But we did have to try and help the city people, some of whom had no experience or knowledge of how to operate a water system, for example. The water had been shut off because electric power was gone. That was still a problem. But water could be provided by the gasoline powered generators operating the pumps for at least a few hours a day. That would enable the people to go to the homes that they had fled. When and if they came back after the war and found their homes boarded up they would be able to reestablish themselves in a house, whether theirs or another, at the very least.

  It would also enable the State Police Barracks to operate again and it did so. The State Police eventually were able to bring in their own electric generator to have full electric power the day around. That enabled them to get their radio systems operable and then they could begin to patrol the highways again. But then they had to start hiring people to operate the emergency systems, jobs began to open in the governmental systems again and people began to go back to work. Many of the people, like the Powers families who had occupied three homes in Frenchtown, were all dead. Some of those who came back just moved into the homes that had belonged to the Powers family and began to live there as though they owned them. Title to real property had broken down completely under the militiamen. They were not concerned with ownership of anything except the stuff they were stealing from those they were raping and murdering. No one really cared about deeds of titles to cars after the war was over.