GWOT VI - Walking Through Hell

GWOT VI - Walking Through Hell

This wasn't warfare as the world understood it.

The war in China had been nuked cities followed by large conventional warfare operations. I hadn't known too much about it at the time, being really busy with keeping Site alive, but I'd glanced over the propaganda and seen the dramatic photos.

Then I'd had a drive-by tour of the cities of the devastated Midwest, while escorting a transformer (electrical, not toy) from ruined Cleveland back to California. My impressions had largely been of armed patrols and J-barriers protecting the Interstate from anyone not authorized to use it.

Admittedly my memory of both was hazy. Torture does that.

So I'd literally had to read about the China War as I hustled to complete my officer's training using online tools, while actually running Campos Sector.

First was War Plan Red, the United States releasing over a thousand nuclear weapons to take China apart at the joints like a stewed chicken.

Then we'd put in conventional air strikes and cruise missile strikes, delicate nicks here and there to finish hamstringing a giant.

Conventional invasion had been next. And even with tactical nuclear artillery, that had been messy. "Like butchering a pig with your teeth," one US Army general had said.

It hadn't been as bad as Normandy in World War II, but it had been pretty damn bad.

That's when the difference between getting your supplies from a hundred miles away and ten thousand miles away had told.

Where forces clashed, localized rubble resulted.

Where nukes had detonated, there was a center of glass, edges of rubble, and damage all around.

Given any opportunity at all, the Chinese had defensively fortified. With concrete where they could, with agricultural machinery where they couldn't, with plain digging at last resort. The edges of shattered cities became mines for lumber and rebar.

American forces consolidated in the same way, less often with concrete but more often with machinery. Better gear but a lot less of it, and both making it and shipping it so far from home had beggared a once great nation.

The American invasion advance had ultimately bogged down, in most places less than a hundred miles from the coasts, with riverine logistics - and warfare - once again a major factor. Lines had solidified. "The American Sector" ultimately became the de facto "American cities."

Iowa wasn't like any of that. She was mostly flat as a pancake as she had been for known geologic time. The river was a border not a conduit. And she'd been spared nuclear re-paving.

The terrain modifier in Iowa had been human. The refugees. The entire reason for the civil war in the first place. The nominal survivors of Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Flint.

They'd been pushed west on the theory that Iowa could at least feed them. She had at first, and the Churches had organized to help their fellow Americans. At first.

Essentially the refugees had worn out their welcome. Some few had been recruited into the communities, put to work, often turned Christian - and become more radical, if only in desperate assimilation. Others had fled, all over the Americas, leveraging distant family and friends and job skills to find a place far from the horrors of what had been their homes.

The rest had taken up space, been awkward, committed minor crimes like stealing food. Many were what a past generation had called 'shell shocked.' Some turned to drugs. Others were just - useless mouths to feed.

But there hadn't been rubble fields and blasted cities here. So the native Iowans blamed it all on the people, not how they'd become refugees.

I had changed that, here and there.

Brought the war home to Iowa in the only way I really could.

By sheer quantity, the amount of explosives I'd expended was very small. The bulk of it was mortar shells brought in through the Dakotas.

But it really doesn't take that much mortar bombardment to wreck a town, especially if you use incendiaries.

I didn't have operational control over Bear Force. But I did mark targets for them.

Bear Force specialized in ED.

Not Erectile Dysfunction. Explosive Devices.

The usual term is IED or Improvised Explosive Devices, but Bear Force had learned all the tricks. Their stuff was not generally improvised. It was just spectacularly lethal.

I'd asked them to make sure they serviced the targets most important to me early on, before the Iowans tightened up what they already thought had been tight security. Bridges. Lots and lots of bridges.

Thing is, you can drop an overpass over a highway and block the highway. But some dozer work on either side and you have a bypass. Net effect minimal.

Flat terrain meant not that many bridges over drainages. Even then, deploy dozers and make fords and temporary crossings.

You can't truly wreck the road net in a flat state, at least not when it's dry outside. You can just fuck it up. The rains are what finishes wrecking the road net, once you mess up the drainages.

In a way, the Churches and I had a common objective. They wanted the refugees the fuck out of Iowa. I wanted the refugees away from the Churches. So we both wanted the refugees to move. I wanted them alive and hale and hearty. The Churches, at best, didn't give a shit about that. Their general preference was weak and sickly where not actually dead. Because corpses are merely a public health problem until buried. Dozers again.

So you could, even now, drive through most of Iowa and you would see mostly intact towns, mostly intact roads. A lot of scared people, with guns and without guns. Not much time to fortify. One weakness of militia - they don't work unless you make them, and that mostly meant they didn't fortify nearly as much as they could have.

Occasional exceptions.

South Fork was one of them. Early on, the militia of South Fork had told the Church of God and the Army of God to fuck off. They had also warned me, directly, to fuck off, stating categorically that there were no refugees in their operational area and that therefore the presence of UN troops would be viewed as 'affirmatively hostile.'

They had then fortified. My God, they had fortified. Turns out empty feed bags make good sandbags. Every approach to South Fork was covered by trenches, machine-gun nests, the stripped wreckage of vehicles used as barriers, barbed wire and straight wire and electrified wire in key places. The town had beggared themselves to buy what weapons they could.

They would get hungry by and by, and when the Churches destroyed everyone else, they would get around to South Fork. Meanwhile the war went around them as a truck swerves around obstacles in the road.

Another exception was Davenport. A real city, with the fringe of development so common to pre-War America. Invested by the Army of God, which unlike most of my other enemies knew what the fuck they were doing and had their "A" game on. They'd actually stopped Bear Force incursions. My motorcycle patrols had been forced to stop well short of the city by _their_ motorcycle patrols. Aircraft by day, tower mounted infrared and radar by night - and also by day. Ground fortifications were comprehensive and complete.

They'd suffered early on. But now Bear Force couldn't operate without a major commitment - which translates to dead Bear Force personnel. I certainly couldn't get close enough to use any artillery platform available to me.

I had no desire to piss off Nebraska any more than I did by existing. They had fortified heavily along the river border with Iowa. Patrolled aggressively, but only on their side of the line, and not all of that. If a sector was quiet, they neglected it. That was incredibly useful to me, so I let it alone.

Those were exceptions.

The general rule was that most roads were open, and people could walk where they could walk.

The more important question - if you were a refugee - was where could they hide?

Because the Churches and self-styled militias and Xtian terror groups would send out patrols that would come back covered in blood. They didn't like to go too far from their trucks. But if they could catch refugees close to the road...

So what it was to be a refugee in Iowa was to scurry from edges of farmland and waste land and drainages, across the many flat open spaces and narrow roads (wide roads are expensive), to the next hiding place. Move at night where they could, during the day if they must. Look for water, pray for food. Don't hide in the same places, because the Xtians would check the good hide sites for victims often. Stay moving. Anyone who couldn't keep up, left behind. At least them getting killed would slow down the patrol in direct pursuit, if any.

As refugees did, they left trash behind them. Possessions they had clung to, that they no longer needed. Wrappers from humanitarian rations. Human dung, if less and less as they ran out of food.

Plus the bodies of the unfortunate. Every one, I took as a personal reproach.

We couldn't waste time burying bodies. We avoided them.

Red Lion had complained. One tactic the Xtians were now using was to booby-trap the bodies of refugees, both dead and barely alive. In some cases they would cut out the tongues of the latter so that they could not warn would-be rescuers to stay away from them.

That was the sort of war crime I would not abide. So we had to look carefully, document for prosecution, target such groups on a priority.

That was why we kept dropping mortar bombs on churches. The one way I could reach out and touch someone, unless they heavily over-fortified as South Fork had, and thereby dropped out of the war.

So the dominant photo of the Iowa War was the burning, blown-out or collapsed church.

It should be the scattered dead bodies of the murdered refugees. But that just wasn't photogenic, and the 'stringers' - media mercenaries - took only those photos that would be healthy to find on their cameras if stopped by Xtian patrols.

We took lots of photos of lots of dead bodies, where we could. Uploaded many for propaganda value. Processed - in far away California - all of them for intelligence value.

Yes, we wanted to save as many refugees as we could.

But Bear Force and Collections had other reasons. A confirmed dead refugee, that California knew to be dead but America did _not_, was a potentially useful false identity for California operatives to cover themselves with, next week and into next century.

The refugees we could save, and did save, were coalescing into their own armed force. Carefully, so carefully, we would pick one now and again for service with California. Special knowledge, special skills. Sifting human debris, you find the strangest people. We'd even evacuated a few by air, for reasons that most of my people didn't know. But when you find an Air Force nuclear weapons technician, or a Navy submarine sailor ... and they had every reason to hate America now ... it's like getting the big stuffed animal with the claw machine at the arcade.

The vast majority of them never even knew that option existed. But we did give them an armband, and a captured weapon, and a few hours of lecture on the laws of land warfare. Add a couple solid meals and hey look, a friend.

Not all the refugees marching through Iowa were helpless anymore. Some were angry and armed. Most continued their retreat. But some few, suicidally brave or searching for family or lost to grief and rage - or all three - were now advancing. The Harriet Tubmans of our age. Going back to save others, from the Hell they knew so well. A network of trails, safe houses, hiding places, even weapons caches.

Bear Force, of course, was more than willing to help. I could officially prohibit it, but I could also piss in the wind and call it rain. Our Bear Force troops had walked out of their own hells, that was why they were Bear Force to begin with.

The Iowans were accusing us of making the entire war so much worse than it had to be.

They were, of course, completely correct.

We were making the genocide so much harder, slower and more painful that it would have been without resistance.

If there was one thing independent California knew how to do, it was to resist. Or Resist.

We could teach that... and we didn't charge. Not in money at least.

The elites of this war rode. I rode. Our troops rode. Our enemies rode.

A bad ride is so much better than a good walk.

There were no good walks through the Hell of Iowa.