GWOT V - Rollin

[drewkitty]

GWOT V - Rollin'


GWOT V - Rollin'


Ever since those very first frentic days at the beginning of the Firecracker War, I've been accused of doing things backwards.

Pretty much the instant we had a (somewhat) secure perimeter, I'd started setting up an auto shop.

Dead and dying Employees, little food, radiation, periodic harassing attacks (which only got worse over time) ... and the security manager wants to play with automotive toys?!?

My logic was very simple.

We didn't have enough food to feed the people we were sheltering. We also hadn't recovered some (most!) of the people we needed to go save. So that meant leaving the Site to do the things, and that meant vehicles.

Working vehicles. In good order. Because breakdown meant death, or walking back.

I'd only ended up walking back three times. Each was ... memorable.

_That_ is why the auto shop.

So pretty much the moment we had everyone at McNasty under canvas of some kind, I'd started setting up the auto shop. Same reasons, same logic.

I can't control a border by sitting with my thumbs up my ass forty miles away. Or even eight - the true line distance from here to Mexico.

This was helped somewhat by the burned-out wreckage of what had been the apparatus bays for the pre-War conservation camp from which McNasty took its name.

McNasty had gotten thrashed in at least five separate events.

When it had been no longer used as a conservation camp pre-Firecracker. Abandoned in place, to face the vagaries of weather and migrants and trespassers. (1)

When Homeland had reopened it as a processing center and killing site. Put in some temporary buildings and tents, brought in backhoes and bulldozers and a couple of excavators. Nice neat trenches full of bodies, occasionally lighting them off with whichever accelerant was cheapest that week - when the smell got too bad. (2)

When some nice people (the Resistance, the descendants of whom I now worked for as an Army officer) blew up the Homeland control point at Boulevard, in a burst of practical logic the Homeland sector commander had shut down the processing center, sped up the killing, and used the newly emptied facilities at McNasty as his new command post. The outlying buildings were used to house Special Police, who treated their new homes with all the respect and decorum they treated detainees and the public, i.e. none. (3)

When the Resistance in turn blew up McNasty (4), only to abandon it in place again (5).

So we'd brought in a bunch of 40' metal storage containers, placed and leveled them, and made a fortress of sorts. Eight of them, double stacked two deep and two high, gave us an 80' by 40' area covered first by canvas and tarps, later by an engineered truss roof. This was our multi purpose area, which as the name goes served many purposes.

All that was left of the apparatus bays was concrete slabs. But they were exactly what I needed to put in vehicle lifts.

In peacetime building a shop like this would take two to three years. Design, construction, environmental reviews, funding, construction, safe work practices, yada yada yada.

Instead I placed an order on the California Construction Corps onion site. Charged it to my Sector budget.

Three weeks later, a field construction team arrived with my order, assembled it to spec, ate in our cafeteria, pissed in our porta potties (as the one working flush toilet was reserved for the infirmary), and departed north to safer climes.

So we had eight working bays, a tire shop, a welding shop, a paint enclosure, secure storage, an armory complete with weapons shop and test range, and metal racks as far as the eye could see - or at least to the perimeter berm - loaded with possibly useful scrap.

That was a third of the problem, a place in which to work.

Then we needed the people to do the work.

Mechanics were in very short supply in the post-Firecracker California Republic. Nearly all of them could demand and get better working conditions than an isolated field site subject to casual Cartel sniping.

One of the joys of commanding a unit of any size is that if you take the people upside down and shake them, you find skills. So I had a couple soldiers who liked to work on cars, an apprentice welder (she got better) and a landscaper who really liked small engines and wanted to move up to the big time.

It was a start. So I placed another order, on the California Prison Industry Authority onion site - CALPIA for short - and made several assurances, only stretching the truth a point or three.

This got me three mechanics. All wore orange. Prisoners.

Not that there wasn't a rich and recent history of prisoners being compelled to work at McNasty.

But you really want to _trust_ your mechanics, so your combat vehicle doesn't break down at an awkward moment.

So I met them as their convoy arrived, signed for them, met them in my office with the door closed ... and we had a little chat.

I could, if I chose, recognize their contributions as sufficiently meritorious as to allow them to join the Army of the Republic directly from prison. This would not only be based on their output, but on their willingness and ability to teach soldiers to help them do the simple stuff.

Or I could give them a ride back to CALPIA.

Meanwhile, they didn't have to wear orange as long as they stayed within McNasty - installation commander's discretion - and they could work and be treated like free human beings otherwise.

Two took me up on it. The third, a pro-American sympathizer, was more equivocal. It took me a few months but the other two wrenches and I turned him around.

Second third achieved.

The last, of course, was the actual vehicles and parts themselves.

In the old days, there'd been an array of programs that diverted surplus, demobilized and demilitarized equipment to local uses from the Feds.

That had basically gone up in smoke with the Firecracker. They needed their surplus, rather suddenly, as all the Good Stuff (TM) was sent to China and the rest was desperately needed.

At Site I'd had to buy, borrow, beg and steal vehicles beyond those that happened to be in the parking lot when San Francisco was vaporized.

Post-Resistance California was even shorter on rolling stock. Everything that had been made pre-War had been ridden hard and put away soaking wet. No one was making vehicles during the Resistance campaign. Only now were factories starting up, and the priority was medium trucks and tanks.

I wasn't getting a tank. I could call for armor, but they would arrive in formed units.

I needed trucks. But what I really needed was the World War II era Jeep. Or a Hilux or even beat up domestic pickup. Something with four wheels, a cab and a hardpoint. Welders could add the hardpoint.

I could wait in line with all the other California military units which needed rolling stock.

Or I could cut in line, buy, borrow and beg and steal.

So I did.

Exactly why I needed the auto shop.

In my initial force mix, I'd horse traded to get one medium duty wrecker - a tow truck with a flatbed and recovery cables.

I sent it out, with escort, to go recover whatever chassis we could scrape up. Some of this was merely to clear the roads and clean up debris. But a lot of it was to make it possible to turn six wrecked cars into one working one. If nothing else, metal scrap was metal scrap - and the occasional engine or transmission could be put to work.

By the time we were done, the results looked a lot like Mad Max vehicles painted by a ham-handed model vehicle collector who only liked drab colors.

But they rolled, and had brakes, and could shoot when appropriate hardware was mounted, and had enough electrical to power a radio and a mobile computer rig.

Now I'm going to get really pedantic and technical.

Says right here in the California Vehicle Operations Manual (CA-VOM, beloved only of a certain breed of logistician who liked to look at specifications but had never personally touched a wrench).

"Every vehicle in AotCR service shall carry a first aid kit, a fire extinguisher and field tools."

And so they did. Not always in the same places. Sometimes we had to bolt them on where they might fit.

But, gosh darn, sometimes we just could not make it work. Just couldn't make the shovel fit.

So those vehicles were surplus to Army requirements, and I could as unit commander cut the Army's losses and ... sell them.

Well, not sell them exactly. That was just money.

I could _trade_ them. For the vehicles I really wanted.

So I did. Both within the Army, and to other state and local agencies.

Because I had an auto shop and most of them didn't.

Our beloved CA Post's Sector office - California's answer to the United States Postal Service - didn't care what kind of vehicle they drove as long as it worked. So they got a trickle of the modern California Jalop - a Jeep clone - and gave _ALL_ of them to us in exchange for three times as many working vehicles of dubious heritage. But no first aid kits. Came with free breakdown and repair service, another savings.

The Jalop was one of those vehicles you either hated, or you hated. Spectacularly ugly and readily recognizable. But for its many sins, it was still four wheel drive.

Once I put it in Army colors and painted MP on five of six sides, it was a tolerable police car for the terrain.

I also was on the list for a Jalop. I think I finally got two total over the next year, to add to the fleet of fourteen less formally acquired.

Many little issues were identified and disposed of along the way. But the one I actually had trouble with, was courtesy of our friends at the California Environmental Protection Agency.

CAL-EPA - not to be confused with CALTRANS, CAL-OSHA, CAL-FIRE, CALPIA or CALPERS - had finally discovered that California agencies and facilities were engaged in disposal activities involving used motor oil, useless car parts, non working lead acid batteries, electronic waste, etc.

We had, in proper field practice, identified a sump pit where we could pour motor oil basically forever and it would never enter the local water table. It also happened to be a mass grave.

The dead batteries just piled up on pallets. We would find a recycler eventually. Or so I told myself.

Metal car parts were harmless to the environment. Or so I had thought, until the CAL-EPA inspector frostily told me that flakes from the car parts as paint were micro contaminants.

There was no point trying to bribe her. A true environmental believer.

So we had to build a containment area for the metal parts. So that the flakes from them would not enter the soil at a Homeland killing site, where any digging found recent human bones.

Logical it was not.

Fortunately for my cardiovascular health, I'd cheerfully lied when asked what we were doing with the used oil.

"We use that pallet tank to take it into San Diego for recycling."

The lie had to suddenly become truth when the CAL-EPA inspector asked _which_ recycling center.

Driving gallons of motor oil, using gallons of gasoline, a good fifty miles west where someone else would take the Republic's money and _then_ pour it into the ground, that much closer to an urban population and a fragile water table.

Oh well, stranger things happen in war.

But we had the vehicles with which to try to extend California's will over the Border.

Which saved entirely more lives than I had ever been expecting.