Chapter 9

When we moved into Georgia beyond Savannah, we started running into real opposition from the military. At first, it was hard to tell who the other side was fighting for. It didn't seem likely that the grunts felt any loyalty to the bosses or the unions, so it had to be loyalty to the now nonexistent USA or loyalty to their commander. We talked it over and decided that it had to be loyalty to their commander. It could be the local commander or the overall commander, but General Williams thought the latter was unlikely. Now we had a situation that I could understand. The grunts were loyal to their immediate commander, and these officers were loyal up the chain of command.

Oh, man, things were going to get complicated if we started having major battles between troops all wearing the same uniforms. We needed to have a distinctive uniform so that our troops could identify each other. In the short run, we needed something quick, so I suggested that we go back to the arm bands we had first used. Our people would wear a white arm band on both sleeves—that was something that we could set up quickly and easily. That would be distinctive enough to keep our men from shooting each other, but it would not do too much to spoil the camouflage offered by the regular uniforms. Hank agreed that it would do until we thought of something better.

It turned out that we now had effective air cover with the helicopters that had joined us. Previously, they had just been flying around impressing the natives, but we now needed to call them in for some serious fighting. At the moment, all of the armor we had was the light stuff on the APCs, while we were starting to see real tanks on the other side. Fortunately, we were still operating in swampy areas where tanks were at a very significant disadvantage. It reminded me of stories I had heard of the problems the Germans had at the Battle of the Bulge during WW2. There, as here, the tanks were confined to the roads, so the defenders were able to halt the German tank advance by the simple expedient of destroying the lead tank. All of the others backed up behind it, completely blocked from making any kind of advance.

Our first big battle was just north of Savannah in a swamp that was full of snakes, but there weren't enough alligators to make any difference. A lot of the troops were in units that had been rushed down from New York, New Jersey, and New England. Many of those men were city boys who thought that the stories of poison ivy, quick sand, and poison snakes were just stories intended to scare them, but there was no real truth to the tales.

On the other hand, our men were all locals, or else had been shown the truth by locals, so that they were able to appreciate the extra dangers of the swamp. The battle lasted for two days, but it probably would not have lasted that long if we had really pushed our advantages. We were going easy in the hope of saving some lives on the enemy side. That was a mistake we wouldn't make the next time we fought.

The enemy treated the snakes, especially those prettily colored copper heads and corals, with total contempt. Therefore, it was possible that more of the enemy died of snake bite than from our bullets. Not only that, we captured men with horrible cases of skin damage from poison ivy. There were even some fools who died from chewing the poison ivy leaves, thinking that they were mint, or some such. A few men died in quick sand, but that stuff is easier to escape from than most people realize, provided you don't panic.

One thing: we refused to take prisoners. If a trooper wanted to defect, he was welcomed with open arms. But some fool who simply surrendered when it was obvious that he would be killed, after trying like hell to kill us, was treated completely differently. He was stripped of his weapons and his clothes and shipped back to his lines, buck naked. After a little bit of this, they quit surrendering. Instead, they just dropped their weapons and ran like hell.

The battle had opened with an artillery barrage from our mortars and the few howitzers that we had. We kept the barrage short, since we were short of that kind of ammunition. Besides, we were announcing that we were coming, as we always had done. Previously, this had resulted in a lot of defections, and everybody else had simply run away.

Not this time. Our people were riding forward, all fat and sassy on trucks and APCs, until they were hit with devastating fire from automatic weapons and mortars. A lot of our guys were killed and wounded, a situation which made our people very mad! The return fire was from Southern Boys who were out for blood! We had no better weapons than the enemy, but we had years of hunting and fishing experience in the swamps around home just to make a living, so we were able to sneak up and kill a lot of the Damyankees with knives and bayonets. The advantage here was that the Damyankees never had any warning from massed gunfire, so they were often sitting ducks!

Once the hot blood had a chance to cool off, our people backed away from the enemy, and we hit them with a storm of propaganda. For reasons we did not understand at the time, this gentle persuasion didn't work, and we had to go back to old fashioned fighting. It was a grind at first, but when the enemy finally realized that they were fighting two fights: against us and against the swamp, they kind of caved in, and we spent most of our time mopping up.

Shit! I hated it when we lost those troopers to enemy fire. Jimmy and Hank tried to make me understand that such losses were bound to happen. They didn't like them, either, but they were resigned to it happening. They pointed out that I would go crazy if I didn't back off from my funk and hatred of the enemy for what they did. I promised to buck up, but I knew that I was going to shit carpet tacks every time we had big losses, or even little losses, for that matter. I remembered how the loss of Jud way back when had affected me. Dammit, I had to get myself in hand or resign from the triumvirate, and I sure as hell didn't want to do that!

It was almost crazy the way the defectors became such fanatical supporters of New Ochnee. Most of them had switched to our side because they really weren't anxious to kill anybody. After a couple of weeks with us and they had found out the differences in the way our people lived as compared to the way the citizens on the other side lived, they became almost fanatical enemies of the bosses and the unions. This was especially true for those who had family or relatives who were caught up in the union system.

Usually, the rule of the bosses didn't make much real difference to the average citizen, but the rule of the unions was a literal life-and-death situation. The only way to have a job was to belong to a union, and people starved without a job. No matter how shitty the job was, and most of the union jobs were shitty, the employed people were infinitely better off than those without a job. Even if an unemployed person had access to food, the quality was lousy and it was never enough. The lifespan of the unemployed was somewhere in the 20s, if he made it that long. The lifespan of the employed was rarely over 45, because he was worked to death!

The contrast of that with the life of the citizens of New Ochnee was enough to turn the new recruits into killing machines, and we had to ride herd on them almost constantly for the first three to six months. Usually, by then, their zeal had learned moderation, and they could be trusted not to kill everybody who they suspected of being a union supporter. Nevertheless, we had to run monthly classes to remind all the troops just what we were fighting for and fighting against. The major point we wanted to make was that absolutely nobody was forced to do anything he didn't want to do, unless he was harming somebody else in the process of his current activities. That, we wouldn't stand still for!

I think that the sole exception to this was that kids were forced to attend school. School was so foreign to most kids that they didn't know whether they would like it or not. The bosses and the union leaders couldn't care less about school for the peons, so there was no such thing as universal schooling. The Triumvirate was determined to change that, so all kids had to go to school, whether they liked it or not. This rule sometimes caused difficulties, but most parents supported the idea, so it worked well in most cases. The novelty of being able to read carried most kids through the early learning cycle, and we hadn't been around long enough to worry about the later phases of learning.