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GWOT IV - Babylon
"You who have defeated us say to yourselves that Babylon is fallen and its works have been overturned. I say to you still that man remains on trial, each man in his own dock. Each man is a little war.” - Frank Herbert
We are most of the way through the justice process. This, in my private opinion, is like being most of the way through taking a shit. Just a few more squeezes and then the inevitable wiping.
I am having to split my time between Alviso - running like a fine Swiss watch - and Sunnyvale, which is an absolute train wreck.
First of all, everyone at Alviso is now a detainee or a UC, Unlawful Combatant. There are no POWs at Alviso. All have been moved to Sunnyvale. This makes running the place a lot simpler. It also means that we can kick out the Red Cross almost entirely, except for inspection tours in which they are not permitted to speak to detainees.
Sunnyvale has three types of POWs: the ones we have held since the Resistance but moved to Sunnyvale recently as part of the consolidation, the ones who participated in the American rescue operation, and those we have captured since.
They are all mouthy sons of bitches. They are arrogant even in captivity, attributing their capture to bad luck not moral failings. We use less force than with the detainees, but when force is needed, the beatdowns have to be decisive.
One way in which I've co-opted the American POWs is by recognizing the prisoner command. It is American military law that the POWs must continue to follow the chain of command and to recognize the senior officer among them as the actual camp commander.
This is a dichotomy very familiar to me from contract security work. The client manages their employees; the contractor manages their employees. But in this case, the Americans supervise their folks and I supervise all the Californios.
One of the watch-words at Sunnyvale is that "We are Ameri-CANs not Ameri-CAN'Ts." They have supervised athletics. They hold classes. They even have arts and crafts.
They are all expecting to go home soon.
This is very, very different from what they expected earlier in the Resistance. They expected to be released and to tie in with Homeland to put California back in her place. This expectation no longer exists.
The first nail in the coffin of that particular hope was the recognition of a free and independent California by France and the United Kingdom.
The second nail was the demise of Homeland. The declaration of martial law, not Homeland's watered down form but the full McCoy, put either the US Army or the US Marine Corps in control of military zones that border the Six Sinners or contain devastated cities. The remnants of Homeland were flown to China, where they are being slowly used up and ground down in what the world media calls the American Territories and the Americans increasingly find an embarassment - those Chinese cities still under quasi-American occupation.
Sometimes the flies conquer the flypaper. The Chinese have dealt with warlords before. The leaders of the occupied cities might be American by birth but their grandchildren - should they live so long - will be thoroughly civilized. Nail number three.
Now that the battle lines have solidified and there are no great surprises any more, the Americans are expecting to be sent home, where they will be put to work building the peace.
I am careful not to dim this hope. Running a POW camp is expensive, and we want to send them home for that reason if not all the others.
Our diplomats are demanding prisoner exchange. We want all Californians returned. Full flat stop. There is a stinger in that tail, too.
How does someone establish Californian citizenship?
Say the words and it's yours. We mean it.
Then the Americans can stop running their prison system, too, because all their malcontents, all their dissidents, all their problem children ... send them to us. We will take your huddled masses, nurse them back to health, and arm them.
That last is the only point we don't discuss publicly.
Because of the nature of the conversations I had with a lot of people at Sunnyvale, I don't call any of them by names. I didn't use his name and that poor SpecOps sergeant I gave a guided tour of Alviso to still got sidewalked.
The American camp commandant and I had a lot of conversations. This was driven primarily by necessity. He'd been captured as an ejected pilot. He also had leadership skills, which for American pilots is not guaranteed.
I understood that in California service, pilot is an enlisted occupation. Not so for the Americans - only officers get to control aircraft.
As professional courtesy, we exchanged a lot of information about escape planning.
That's going to sound very odd, so I'd better explain before someone goes after someone on treason charges.
American POWs aren't supposed to give parole, and they are supposed to make every effort to escape. As their captor, I'm allowed to use force to keep them from escaping. If they injure or kill a guard, I can punish them. Otherwise, they have the right - as strange as it may sound - to attempt to escape, and I have the duty to not let them.
I suppose during World War II, it was some sort of game, until the SS took over and duly reported that a bunch of American POWs had been shot while attempting to escape, or while escaping, or just for the hell of it. The SS had even run a special secret camp for American Jews, which had been declassified in the 1990s.
Civil war isn't so pretty as all that. But I didn't want to piss in the oatmeal of a rich, powerful country that was our arch nemesis by breaking military law either. Especially with ten times as many Californians under American control.
So I would tell the American commandant about his escape plan and how I had foiled it. He would assure me that the guilty prisoners would be 'counseled' and that the plan was therefore dead, because I knew about it. He would then pump me for info about vulnerabilities, as I would pump him for info about his team's capabilities.
I didn't go looking for info about specific individual American persons. That wasn't the game I was choosing to play. But I did want to know who could build a secret radio transmitter, so we could find the friggin' thing and keep the needed parts away from those who knew how to do it.
(Sound strange? In a Japanese POW camp of extremely strict regime, armed only with wire and wood and a couple car parts, the American POWs of seventy years ago _made a radio transmitter_. Tech has improved since then.)
The problem was not the camp guards. I implored the Americans repeatedly, see the camp guards as your closest friends. Because Californian civilians will kill you for being Americans, and they're armed and don't respect military law or POW status.
They didn't believe me. Two Americans escaped through a classic impersonation swap, absolutely beautiful if it had only been a story. They were picked up in a train station near Sacramento. One was beaten to death by the crowd when they heard him claim POW status during his arrest for not having papers. The other was saved only because the railway police fired on full-auto into the crowd to do so. Four dead, seven seriously injured.
(The body was repatriated through Nevada. The surviving American was repatriated through Arizona, but decided to ask for asylum in that slightly more libertarian than Genghis Khan state. It was granted. The Americans still think I killed him. I don't know who killed him, but I suspect Homeland.)
So every escape attempt I could foil with words, fencing over a desk, saved lives on both sides of the wire - and as likely, California civilians as well. So I hated the game and played it like it mattered. Because it did.
I eventually got help from the Collections technical section. Least said about that the better.
I also had to deal with two defectors.
That was odd and unpleasant. A lot of American soldiers didn't like the hand their side had been dealt, but it took something to deliberately choose to go over to the losers. We didn't have the money or the motivation to bribe them - we had plenty of ex-American military personnel coming out of our ears, who had all defected during the Resistance. (A small handful of them were probably CIA agents, but finding them was strictly a Collections pastime - and we caught them mostly through techint. Again, the least said the better.)
One defector had just had a bad war, from what I could tell. Odd man out in basic training, in his military unit, left behind repeatedly on the battlefield, and defecting was the biggest "fuck you" he could come up with. We obliged him. I think he might be in Labor Corps now. We didn't make his life easy, nor would he ever be in a position of trust ever again. I believe the phrase is 'turned once is turned again.'
The other defector had been a victim of sexual violence. You read that right. Raped by soldiers from his own side. He volunteered from within the walls of the POW camp for Bear Force. After several interviews, they obliged him.
I can't go past a wall of Bear Force stars without reflecting that one of them stood for him. Poor bastard. You may rest assured that he was given a particularly valuable suicide mission with zero chance of personal survival. When a person is a problem, no person means no problem.
If I'd shared a side with them, I'd have been proud of all the rest of the Americans. But I didn't.
Obviously, the Homeland troopers and mercs and Special Troops were an exception. But they'd all gone to Alviso, where the justice process continued making them from men into meat, and the incinerator we'd confiscated from Homeland turned meat to ash.
Finally, the day came that the last bus of POWs was scheduled to leave for Las Vegas. The commandant, of course, was on that last bus. And was last to board, as I and my honor guard watched.
He turned.
He could have saluted. That would be respect.
He could have waved. That would be less respectful but more friendly.
He could have spat. That would have been honest hatred.
I saw the urge to do all three war within him.
He sadly shook his head, looking specifically at me, and boarded the bus without a word.
How dare you. How dare you be contemptuous of _me_. If I'd had a machine gun the day he'd ejected, I'd have walked a burst through his chute, waited a moment, and only then walked a burst through him. Who do you think you are, that you can judge me?
That night, at the subdued O-club party celebrating the closure of Sunnyvale POW Camp, I said as much to the camp Psyche.
She shook her head, as sadly.
"Warden. Sir. Not contempt. Really. Regret. Regret that a man as good as you was not on the same side as his. He could not re-evaluate his own side, so he had to assume that you are a good man but misguided."
"You know better," I said to her bitterly. She had been assigned to Sunnyvale, I would never see her again, we had no clinical (or any other) relationship. So she was a Psyche it was kind of safe for me to vent at.
"I do know better, [Echo 18]. I know you are very well guided indeed."
While I was parsing that, she helped herself to the bar and a bit later to the bartender.
If she'd called me a good man, I might have undone all her hard work getting me to be willing to speak to her at all.
It was only when I was on the outside of one too many drinks, watching them lurch towards an upstairs room, that I made the connection.
She had in fact done exactly that.
Dammit.
We are most of the way through the justice process. This, in my private opinion, is like being most of the way through taking a shit. Just a few more squeezes and then the inevitable wiping.
I am having to split my time between Alviso - running like a fine Swiss watch - and Sunnyvale, which is an absolute train wreck.
First of all, everyone at Alviso is now a detainee or a UC, Unlawful Combatant. There are no POWs at Alviso. All have been moved to Sunnyvale. This makes running the place a lot simpler. It also means that we can kick out the Red Cross almost entirely, except for inspection tours in which they are not permitted to speak to detainees.
Sunnyvale has three types of POWs: the ones we have held since the Resistance but moved to Sunnyvale recently as part of the consolidation, the ones who participated in the American rescue operation, and those we have captured since.
They are all mouthy sons of bitches. They are arrogant even in captivity, attributing their capture to bad luck not moral failings. We use less force than with the detainees, but when force is needed, the beatdowns have to be decisive.
One way in which I've co-opted the American POWs is by recognizing the prisoner command. It is American military law that the POWs must continue to follow the chain of command and to recognize the senior officer among them as the actual camp commander.
This is a dichotomy very familiar to me from contract security work. The client manages their employees; the contractor manages their employees. But in this case, the Americans supervise their folks and I supervise all the Californios.
One of the watch-words at Sunnyvale is that "We are Ameri-CANs not Ameri-CAN'Ts." They have supervised athletics. They hold classes. They even have arts and crafts.
They are all expecting to go home soon.
This is very, very different from what they expected earlier in the Resistance. They expected to be released and to tie in with Homeland to put California back in her place. This expectation no longer exists.
The first nail in the coffin of that particular hope was the recognition of a free and independent California by France and the United Kingdom.
The second nail was the demise of Homeland. The declaration of martial law, not Homeland's watered down form but the full McCoy, put either the US Army or the US Marine Corps in control of military zones that border the Six Sinners or contain devastated cities. The remnants of Homeland were flown to China, where they are being slowly used up and ground down in what the world media calls the American Territories and the Americans increasingly find an embarassment - those Chinese cities still under quasi-American occupation.
Sometimes the flies conquer the flypaper. The Chinese have dealt with warlords before. The leaders of the occupied cities might be American by birth but their grandchildren - should they live so long - will be thoroughly civilized. Nail number three.
Now that the battle lines have solidified and there are no great surprises any more, the Americans are expecting to be sent home, where they will be put to work building the peace.
I am careful not to dim this hope. Running a POW camp is expensive, and we want to send them home for that reason if not all the others.
Our diplomats are demanding prisoner exchange. We want all Californians returned. Full flat stop. There is a stinger in that tail, too.
How does someone establish Californian citizenship?
Say the words and it's yours. We mean it.
Then the Americans can stop running their prison system, too, because all their malcontents, all their dissidents, all their problem children ... send them to us. We will take your huddled masses, nurse them back to health, and arm them.
That last is the only point we don't discuss publicly.
Because of the nature of the conversations I had with a lot of people at Sunnyvale, I don't call any of them by names. I didn't use his name and that poor SpecOps sergeant I gave a guided tour of Alviso to still got sidewalked.
The American camp commandant and I had a lot of conversations. This was driven primarily by necessity. He'd been captured as an ejected pilot. He also had leadership skills, which for American pilots is not guaranteed.
I understood that in California service, pilot is an enlisted occupation. Not so for the Americans - only officers get to control aircraft.
As professional courtesy, we exchanged a lot of information about escape planning.
That's going to sound very odd, so I'd better explain before someone goes after someone on treason charges.
American POWs aren't supposed to give parole, and they are supposed to make every effort to escape. As their captor, I'm allowed to use force to keep them from escaping. If they injure or kill a guard, I can punish them. Otherwise, they have the right - as strange as it may sound - to attempt to escape, and I have the duty to not let them.
I suppose during World War II, it was some sort of game, until the SS took over and duly reported that a bunch of American POWs had been shot while attempting to escape, or while escaping, or just for the hell of it. The SS had even run a special secret camp for American Jews, which had been declassified in the 1990s.
Civil war isn't so pretty as all that. But I didn't want to piss in the oatmeal of a rich, powerful country that was our arch nemesis by breaking military law either. Especially with ten times as many Californians under American control.
So I would tell the American commandant about his escape plan and how I had foiled it. He would assure me that the guilty prisoners would be 'counseled' and that the plan was therefore dead, because I knew about it. He would then pump me for info about vulnerabilities, as I would pump him for info about his team's capabilities.
I didn't go looking for info about specific individual American persons. That wasn't the game I was choosing to play. But I did want to know who could build a secret radio transmitter, so we could find the friggin' thing and keep the needed parts away from those who knew how to do it.
(Sound strange? In a Japanese POW camp of extremely strict regime, armed only with wire and wood and a couple car parts, the American POWs of seventy years ago _made a radio transmitter_. Tech has improved since then.)
The problem was not the camp guards. I implored the Americans repeatedly, see the camp guards as your closest friends. Because Californian civilians will kill you for being Americans, and they're armed and don't respect military law or POW status.
They didn't believe me. Two Americans escaped through a classic impersonation swap, absolutely beautiful if it had only been a story. They were picked up in a train station near Sacramento. One was beaten to death by the crowd when they heard him claim POW status during his arrest for not having papers. The other was saved only because the railway police fired on full-auto into the crowd to do so. Four dead, seven seriously injured.
(The body was repatriated through Nevada. The surviving American was repatriated through Arizona, but decided to ask for asylum in that slightly more libertarian than Genghis Khan state. It was granted. The Americans still think I killed him. I don't know who killed him, but I suspect Homeland.)
So every escape attempt I could foil with words, fencing over a desk, saved lives on both sides of the wire - and as likely, California civilians as well. So I hated the game and played it like it mattered. Because it did.
I eventually got help from the Collections technical section. Least said about that the better.
I also had to deal with two defectors.
That was odd and unpleasant. A lot of American soldiers didn't like the hand their side had been dealt, but it took something to deliberately choose to go over to the losers. We didn't have the money or the motivation to bribe them - we had plenty of ex-American military personnel coming out of our ears, who had all defected during the Resistance. (A small handful of them were probably CIA agents, but finding them was strictly a Collections pastime - and we caught them mostly through techint. Again, the least said the better.)
One defector had just had a bad war, from what I could tell. Odd man out in basic training, in his military unit, left behind repeatedly on the battlefield, and defecting was the biggest "fuck you" he could come up with. We obliged him. I think he might be in Labor Corps now. We didn't make his life easy, nor would he ever be in a position of trust ever again. I believe the phrase is 'turned once is turned again.'
The other defector had been a victim of sexual violence. You read that right. Raped by soldiers from his own side. He volunteered from within the walls of the POW camp for Bear Force. After several interviews, they obliged him.
I can't go past a wall of Bear Force stars without reflecting that one of them stood for him. Poor bastard. You may rest assured that he was given a particularly valuable suicide mission with zero chance of personal survival. When a person is a problem, no person means no problem.
If I'd shared a side with them, I'd have been proud of all the rest of the Americans. But I didn't.
Obviously, the Homeland troopers and mercs and Special Troops were an exception. But they'd all gone to Alviso, where the justice process continued making them from men into meat, and the incinerator we'd confiscated from Homeland turned meat to ash.
Finally, the day came that the last bus of POWs was scheduled to leave for Las Vegas. The commandant, of course, was on that last bus. And was last to board, as I and my honor guard watched.
He turned.
He could have saluted. That would be respect.
He could have waved. That would be less respectful but more friendly.
He could have spat. That would have been honest hatred.
I saw the urge to do all three war within him.
He sadly shook his head, looking specifically at me, and boarded the bus without a word.
How dare you. How dare you be contemptuous of _me_. If I'd had a machine gun the day he'd ejected, I'd have walked a burst through his chute, waited a moment, and only then walked a burst through him. Who do you think you are, that you can judge me?
That night, at the subdued O-club party celebrating the closure of Sunnyvale POW Camp, I said as much to the camp Psyche.
She shook her head, as sadly.
"Warden. Sir. Not contempt. Really. Regret. Regret that a man as good as you was not on the same side as his. He could not re-evaluate his own side, so he had to assume that you are a good man but misguided."
"You know better," I said to her bitterly. She had been assigned to Sunnyvale, I would never see her again, we had no clinical (or any other) relationship. So she was a Psyche it was kind of safe for me to vent at.
"I do know better, [Echo 18]. I know you are very well guided indeed."
While I was parsing that, she helped herself to the bar and a bit later to the bartender.
If she'd called me a good man, I might have undone all her hard work getting me to be willing to speak to her at all.
It was only when I was on the outside of one too many drinks, watching them lurch towards an upstairs room, that I made the connection.
She had in fact done exactly that.
Dammit.