The cars that had been drained of as much gasoline as the militiamen could get out of them for their trucks were taken by some of the new people that came in and some of the old people that came back. They occupied homes they had once lived in if they could. If they could not they took homes of others who were dead and gone. And if there were televisions, stereos, entertainment tools there that had belonged to someone at some point in time, well now they belonged to the people who were new, who were squatting on the property.
Most of the militia people had been in their twenties and thirties. Most of those in the forties and older age ranges were encouraged by the younger ones to get the hell out of town. Many in those age groups were simply shot to death for no reason. Some of them made it down to Missoula without managing to see a policeman and lived with relatives or simply moved on to parts unknown and by means unknown as well.
Some of them had homes in Frenchtown and wanted to come back. Some did return. Some took up residence as they had before the militia. Some of those who returned began to operate restaurants and motels and businesses of one kind or another. There was not much going on business wise but what little there was had people there to handle it within a month.
“AFTER THE MILITIA.” That was what we came to call that time. We were a little premature but we didn't know that then. As things settled down life returned as much to normal for all of us as it could.
Chapter 10
What is Going On In the World?
The question was always on our mind. All this had started so innocently or so it seemed. In fact, I am sure there were a number of people that wanted nuclear war. Those of the faith of Islam that thought it would enable them to establish a world wide Caliphate found that what it did was take their countries nearly back to the stone ages with a few notable exceptions. And boy did those begin to take control fast. The Saudi Royal family moved into Iraq, Syria and Lebanon post haste and established control over the small remaining populations in those countries as quickly as they could.
Baghdad no longer existed as anything except a constantly flaming pit of stinking burned up flesh. The same was true of Tikrit and several other Sunni cities in the western part of Iraq. The two major cities of Iran, Teheran and Qum, were much like Baghdad. New Delhi, many of the eastern and central cities of India, Islamabad and many other cities in Pakistan had simply disappeared in the ash and blast of powerful nuclear weapons. Many of the parts of Pakistan and India that had been hit by nuclear weapons were still burning.
In Lebanon, in Syria, in the Crimea, in parts of Ukraine, in much of the central part of Russia there were burned out hulks of what had once been cities. D.C. was gone. Most of New York was gone. Much of Miami and the central part of Florida had been bombed and shelled so badly that it was a series of holes, sinkholes and pock marked terrain.
The Cubans had been pushed back from advancing as far north as just below Atlanta. From there to the south in the U.S. was a mess. Much of the center of Nebraska was on fire. Much of northeastern Montana, western North Dakota and South Dakota was still on fire.
The North Koreans had been reduced to an army of men armed with rifles and artillery but little else. They decided when told by the Chinese to do so that they would stay out of any further conflagration. There was little else they could do. Their nuclear capability had been destroyed, their Air Force had been shot to pieces and their air fields bombed so badly whether they could ever be used again was an open question.
Formosa had received some bombing with standard weapons but all the damage had been repaired within hours. The U.S. Fleet in the South China Seas were no longer under threat by the Chinese. The problem for the U.S. Fleets around the world, those that were still at sea, was that no civilian command structure still existed. So they relied on their military leaders. In some areas of the world that is how the nuclear exchange continued. Iran was decimated by Israel. But it also hit the Israelis. Syria tried to do the same and was obliterated by American planes from the U.S. Fleet.
The Japanese were firmly in control of their people and Japan was still cranking out everything in its economy that it had been producing before. They just had to find different markets to plumb for a time. And that would not be a problem. The Australians, who had not been involved at all, wanted their products and those of the Chinese. So did the Malaysians and the Indonesians who had not been marked by the war. South America and Central America as well as Mexico were ripe for the products of the Far East and trade pacts were quickly authored with all those areas and countries by the Japanese and the Chinese. So apparently world wide trade was resuming without the booming/busting economy of the United States.
Most of the information we got came from Radio USA but occasionally we caught a television program out of Portland or Seattle. There were many problems with the microwave towers that had, prior to the nuclear exchanges, operated with such efficiency. The Electro Magnetic Pulse damage caused by the nuclear explosions was not limited to earth. A lot of satellites were damaged as well. Some were shot down deliberately by our anti missile defense system. That made it impossible for anyone to steer their nuclear missiles except by the initial programming and that could be off by hundreds of miles. That was how New York got hit. The unit that exploded over New York had been meant for D.C. along with the other seven units in that warhead. Six of those seven from the missile that hit New York got shot down. The other one got D.C.
So New York was out and the hub of the world wide stock exchange system had been destroyed. But then so had London, so had Moscow, so had Paris. That left China and Japan with the only viable stock exchanges in the world that had world wide capabilities. But they had no frame of reference any longer. The dollar, as the world's monetary standard, was gone. There was no way to measure its worth.
All the equities that had been so treasured by “investors” had been destroyed in the banks that had for all intents and purposes been melted when New York was destroyed by at least a twenty-five megaton thermo-nuclear warhead. No, not every building was completely rendered useless or even badly damaged. Some on the fringes of the city remained viable. Manhattan, Long Island, all the buildings there, the center of New York, the diamond district, the entire financial area, no longer existed. It was simply vaporized for all intents and purposes.
Real property holdings of famous families were worthless. There was no one to value them because they either did not exist (example the New World Tower) or the family had been destroyed in their beautiful homes, condos, whatever in New York City and its environs. Many famous families had ceased to exist except for remote relatives. And what could they inherit?
Could they inherit a home on Lake Chautauqua? Most of those were ravaged and damaged severely by looters and militia types within the first week after the nuclear exchanges. Upstate New York still functioned fully but many places out in the forests of northern New York and eastern Pennsylvania were being attacked by criminal forces and those of anarchy. The western U.S. was not the only place filled with idiots with guns.
National Guard units were brought together by their leaders where there was sufficient communication to be able to accomplish that task in the northeast. From the south came the urgent call to the defense of our borders. Many of the National Guardsmen, those who were younger and still possessed some sense of patriotism went south to be conscripted into the “federal” army that was fighting the Cubans.
And what was left behind, the older men, even those who had some experience at jungle fighting and preserving one's life in the forest, were forced out of the towns right away. If they were lucky they made it to the cities like Buffalo where law enforcement was still intact though under siege by the criminals and the anarchists.
We all waited. And by all of us I mean everyone that was still living. We didn't know exactly what we were waiting for. The war in Florida was winding down. But we had no idea how a new United States of America could form a government. The tunnels and underground installations in D.C
. had been inadequate to handling a nuclear blast there. They collapsed and buried the President, the Vice President, the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and virtually all the Secretaries of State and every other “cabinet” post under millions of tons of soil and concrete.
D.C. was not useful for anything at that point in time. How did we proceed as a “government?” At first it would have to be with the military as our “ruling body” it appeared. Elections would be impossible. There were no cross country communication systems left save for I-10 in the south and west and I-40 through the west and mid-west. But telephone systems were gone. The companies that ran them had been centered out of New York also.
Everything was in flux. Nothing was a certainty. So we waited, all of us, waited and waited for something to happen. And basically nothing did except time passed and the militias and anarchists got stronger.
At our “fortress” in the forest we made ourselves stronger than we had been before the war of the militiamen. We extended our listening and video capability in every direction. There was no way to approach the home area of half a mile or so in extent in every direction, without someone knowing that you were coming.
We quieted and updated our generators in capacity and power output and built in more capacity to store fuels with which to operate those generators. Dad and I built conduits into the canyon in a number of places where the exhaust of the generator was disbursed with practically no signature of heat at all.
That would eliminate any heat blooms from appearing to a helicopter with an infrared search capability. The ends of those conduits directed the flow of the exhaust into buffers that spread the heat over several feet and there were many of them. It had been of concern to us in the first instance and we didn't want to be vulnerable if someone came looking for us another time.
We let the forest grow back over the animal trails, walked up to several miles to our vehicles if we went to the city, never walked the same pathways twice in order to avoid creating lines in the dirt that led to our home. We encouraged the forest denizens to come around, put out some salt for them in camouflaged pieces, put out some feed for them that looked just like the dirt they were walking in. And we began to bring as much storage capacity for food as we could build into the cave area into existence. Some of it was refrigerated.
The exhausting of those gases was through the same system as that of the generator. We brought in a lot of dehydrated foods and right after the war with the Frenchtown militias was over we went to Arlee and commandeered all the remaining MRE's there were available there. We policed up all the brass we could find wherever there had been fire fights in the forest or out on the highways. We started our own loading system with feeds and automated systems that made it a lot easier and faster to load new ammunition. Powders for loading bullets was hard to come by but we managed to get enough for thousands of rounds. We made our own bullets out of swaging systems and then dipped them in melted copper, allowing them to drip to a conical end on an appropriate metal sheet from which we salvaged and reheated the copper that came off those cooling new bullets.
We maintained constant contact with the Montana State Patrol officers in our area and we tried to get news from the Idaho State Patrol as well. All of us knew that the panhandle area of Idaho had been a hotbed of militia groups before the war and probably was the center of any anarchist or militia movement if there was one left that remained after the war. We just hoped they would not come down I-80 and try and impose their particular brand of anarchism on our area.
One of the things that we all waited for was some new kind of monetary system. But while we still had dollars and no way to know their value we were willing to do our trading, what could be done, using that currency. Things did get a little pricey though. There were good reasons for that. Only about two fuel trucks a week could get up I-15 to I-80 and across the mountains to Missoula. They would not try to go further than that. Sometimes it was difficult for them to get through Utah.
But there was some commerce and most of it was done in dollars even if prices were a little dear. Gasoline was $100.00 a gallon when the truck had just left town. By the time the truck was back again to the stations that were given gas, those who could bear the cost of the purchase of that gasoline would be charged upwards of $200.00 a gallon.
It was impossible to get such things as milk or eggs most of the time. A whole lot of farm products were unavailable in any of the market places. The farms in the southwest, California, Arizona, New Mexico, where they were not in areas controlled by the anarchists, could not produce enough food for themselves and everyone else as well. What they could sell and what little did get transported north was very dear indeed.
But some locals had chickens and it was possible sometimes to buy fresh eggs. And some locals, even in the Frenchtown area, had some dairy cattle and it was possible to get milk every now and again. Once again those things came dearly. But powdered eggs and milk were available and sometimes even plentiful. Everyone that was still around learned fairly quickly that it was not necessary to hoard things.
And the ultimate bartering tool became ammunition. The .223 bullets that we were reloading and making ourselves were in hot demand among locals. So we could trade for milk and such things as honey, eggs, other forms of produce, and still maintain our large supply of ammunition. From time to time we also bartered a rifle, only those which were single shot AR-15's, and only to close friends and those we knew would not abuse having that kind of weapon, for example our friends in the State Patrol.
One of our friends on the State Patrol, as it turned out, was Allan. We had no problem with trading anything to Allan. He was a true friend, a combat “compadre,” a well-trained Recon Marine at one time but he left the Marine Corps, now a non-existent entity except for the structures and people that remained on a few bases, disciplined people that would not permit anarchists and militia types to take the armories or materials on those bases.
And when Allan left the Marine Corps he became a State Police Officer. With the militia war there had been casualties among the “statie's” as well and the result was that when we visited Allan in Missoula he was in charge of the barracks there and acting as a Major in rank in that police entity. It turned out, after we got to know him aside from fighting against the militiamen with him, that he was pretty well educated, married and had three cute girls and his wife, named Karen, was a tall, beautiful woman that obviously loved him to death and vice versa.
We got together as often as our constant work on the home property and his constant battles with militias elsewhere in Montana would permit us to do so. Karen and the kids even came out and stayed with us a couple of times. We taught Karen and the girls how to shoot a little better than what their dad had been able to take the time to accomplish. And we taught them a healthy respect for weapon.
Allan had taught them well that weapons were not toys nor extensions of their personalities. We taught them that guns could and did kill things. We took them to the cemetery in Frenchtown to show them the graves of the unknown numbers and unknown people who had died there. Of course Allan approved and usually was with us when we did those things. His family became ours, ours became his in a very real sense.
It turned out we still had a governor of the State of Montana. And even though he had been too slow to call out the National Guard or too sympathetic to the anarchists he was still the governor for now. But the structure of that entity, the Guard, was gone. Most of its weapons had been stolen, most of its facilities had been so badly damaged or vandalized that they were useless at that point. The heavy weaponry that existed in the armories of the National Guard centers in the State had been taken, as near as we could tell, to northeastern Idaho.
It appeared to us from all that we heard (including information from Allan) that a large and very well equipped army of militiamen had been formed in the area north of Couer d' Alene. It also seemed likely that no one would challenge them as to their cont
rol of that area of the state of Idaho at that point in time. So in respect to anarchists and militiamen we also waited, wondered, could not know what they were thinking or planning on doing. In many ways, though it certainly was a busy time, it was a time of great fears. So many things could still go wrong where we were, in terms of how safe our country was, in terms of the food and every day things we needed as supplies to use in our lives.
But one great thing came out of the entire situation. My wife, my children, my parents and I all had the opportunity to reconnect, to spend a lot of time together and to learn how to survive as a family unit without strife. It was particularly great for my wife and I. We even took several small “vacations” together. One that we took was amazing. As I said, the house that dad built was set with its back to a cliff. That didn't mean the cliff was not negotiable at all, just that it was a cliff.
Ruthie is not afraid of heights and neither am I so we rappelled to the bottom of the cliff, leaving our ropes in a position that would allow us to climb back up a few feet at a time while roped in to a strong point that would not fail.
There was a helicopter at the bottom of the cliff that had crashed there, due to my dad and I hitting it almost simultaneously with RPG grenades. We explored it a little. The human remains that were in the helicopter had long ago been recycled by Mother Earth. There were bones scattered around that the coyotes or bears, maybe even wolves, had gnawed at and left. The carrion birds had eaten their fill on these men as well.
Their names were forever forgotten. Their lives were forfeit for a cause that was not just. Neither of us wasted any sympathy on them. They would have killed us, both of us, after raping Ruthie repeatedly had they been given the chance. They were not given that chance. They were not worth our sympathy.
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