299 Days: The 17th Irregulars

Chapter 196 Shanghai

“What about walk-ons?” Grant asked. “You know, people coming to the gate? Could you use any of them?”

“Sure,” Ted said. “If they meet our criteria. Who would screen them?”

“There’s a guy at the gate who does that,” Grant said and explained who Al was. “I have established a relationship with him. I can talk to him about sending us potential military recruits.”

“Whoa,” Ted said. “Who is he and can we trust him? I mean, I don’t want anyone to know what we’re doing out here.”

Grant was a little mad that Ted seemed to be assuming Grant would just blab to Al about what was going on at Marion Farm. “He won’t truly know what’s going on out here,” Grant said. “He’ll be told the ‘rental team’ cover story.”

“Oh, OK,” Ted said, “I guess that’s OK.”

Grant had another question. “What are you looking for in walk-on recruits? So I can tell Al what to be looking out for.”

“Guys with nothing left to lose,” Ted said. “Homeless, hungry, mean. Not psycho mean, but revenge mean. Preferably people who lost everything because of jackass politicians. Maybe they’re looking for a way to get even.” This kind of person had been the backbone of guerilla movements and revolutions for thousands of years.

Ted thought some more. “Single guys. We can’t really take in their families. I mean, we can’t have a daycare at a guerilla camp.” Ted had actually seen that in some of the camps he’d operated throughout the world. “Well, maybe we could take in families, but they’d have to have the right skills. Some really good skills, like a guy whose wife is a nurse. I’d take that family.”

“Do walk-ons need military experience?” Grant asked.

“Not really,” Ted said. “However, it’s a huge plus. If you get some AWOL FUSA guys, I’m interested. AWOL cops would be another good find. But I’m interested in people with engineering, construction, machining, and agricultural backgrounds. Of course medical is always welcomed. We need to have a mini town out at the Marion farm for months before we deploy. We need people with…” Ted searched for the right term.

“Town-running skills,” Grant said. It wasn’t exactly a military term, but Grant wasn’t exactly a military person.

“Yeah,” Ted said, “‘Town-running skills.’ We’re like Pierce Point: we need people who know how to keep a town running. We’ll hand them a rifle before we deploy. We’re an irregular unit, not Delta Force. But we need people with important camp skills or skills we’ll need in the city we’re occupying.”

“People with town-running skills will be assigned to your civil affairs team, Grant, and they can go solve those problems in the city we take,” Ted stated.

It sounded weird to Grant to hear Ted say “your civil affairs team,” but totally normal at the same time. It was weird because now they were the civil affairs team, with no formal training whatsoever. But not weird because it just made sense and serving in the civil affairs role had basically been assumed ever since Ted and Sap arrived that first night on the beach.

“What about fidelity to the cause?” Grant asked. “‘Cause that will be hard to assess with certainty as we’re interviewing them at the gate.”

“That’s a tough one,” Ted said. “You can’t polygraph them at the gate.” Ted paused. “Do the best you can on the fidelity issue. I suspect most people coming to the gate, wondering around with nothing, aren’t exactly thinking about politics. They’re like the homeless dudes the government paid to go out and protest and intimidate people at the beginning of the Collapse. Well, we can do the same. We can say to people ‘Want to be fed and have a mission in life? Come with me.’” Ted felt bad using people who were in a bad situation, but war was a bad situation. Winning it was what counted.

Sap added, “We’ll have some pretty good controls in place in the camp for making sure recruits aren’t communicating with Limas or anyone else. Even if we get someone who is a Lima, we’ll be able to handle him. So, take the risk at the gate and we’ll correct it in camp if necessary.”

“The walk-ons coming to the gate can’t be told what we’re doing out here, of course,” Grant said. Everyone nodded. “We have the cover story of the ‘rental team.’ But that raises another problem.”

“Shanghai,” Ted said.

“Exactly,” Grant said, amazed that Ted predicted what he was thinking. But, then again, Ted was a professional.

“Huh?” Scotty said. “Shanghai? As in the city in China?”

“Yep,” Grant said. “You know, ‘shanghai’ is the term for when people get tricked or forced to join an army. They get ‘shanghaied’ and have to serve against their will. I think it came from a few hundred years ago when the British Navy would nab people and take them off to Shanghai and force them to serve.”

“Oh, right,” Scotty said. He’d heard the term before.

“We run into this all the time in indigenous guerilla units,” Ted said. “We have volunteers come to us, but we can’t tell them, at least at first, what we’re doing and where we’re doing it. So we take them into the unit without giving them full disclosure of what’s going on. But, what if they don’t want to be a soldier? We can’t let them out of the camp and we can’t spare the personnel to guard them at the camp while the unit is on the march. Plus, our guards watching them would be left behind in what might be enemy territory. And we can’t have that.”

Wow. This sucked, Grant thought. This war thing wasn’t easy. It was full of problems. It wasn’t like a video game, or like people just join up with the good guys and everything is fine. There are complications and moral questions. War was full of shitty situations.

“Thoughts?” Ted asked. He and Sap had a plan for this, and HQ had come up with some guidelines before they’d departed for Pierce Point, but Ted wanted to see what the Pierce Point guys came up with. It was quiet for a while.

Grant decided to pipe up. His rental team cover story went over so well that he was more confident in giving his suggestions.

“Well, these walk-ons are being told they have a job on the ‘rental team,’ right?” Grant said. “They know they’ll be fighting and will be exposed to danger. They could be told that the rental team will not be hired out to government; just to citizens defending themselves.”

Ted and Sap were smiling. They knew what Grant was about to say.

“Go ahead,” Ted said.

“So,” Grant said, “the walk-ons know that they’ll be fighting—but not for the government.” He sensed he was giving the right answer which made him speak even more confidently.

“This means,” Grant continued, “the walk-ons know that what they’re doing is totally illegal and the Limas could kill them on the spot. So, when they are told the rental team story, they basically know everything they need to know: They’re fighters, not for the government, and they’re breaking the law. They need to be cool with that.”

Ted and Sap looked at each other and smiled.

“Exactly,” Ted said. “The walk-ons, by being told they’re a ‘rental team,’ basically know everything they need to know to volunteer for the Patriots; not fully everything, but enough that if they hesitate at being on an outlaw rental team, then they don’t want to be in a Patriot irregular unit either.”

Grant had one more pressing question.

“What do we do if one of the walk-ons finds out what we’re doing out there and then doesn’t want to be in the unit?” He asked. “We’d have to keep them guarded at the farm. That would suck. I mean, we can’t shoot them, can we?” Grant was implying they could.

“No, we don’t shoot them,” Sap said, disappointed that Grant had come up with that.

“We’ve found that, once men come into camp, they don’t regret it,” Ted said. “They have a job and nowhere else to go. Camaraderie develops. We work hard on that. We foster camaraderie. I’ve seen reluctant men turn into a band of brothers. So, odds are we won’t have this problem.”

“But what if we do?” Grant asked. He knew that they needed a plan for every problem they could think of in advance, which wasn’t even all the problems they’d actually face. But, at least they’d have a plan for the foreseeable problems and what to do with reluctant fighters was one of those problems.

“In the past,” Sap said, “we’ve had a few personnel stay behind in the camp, if that’s possible, and guard the people who refuse to go out with the unit and fight.”

“What if it’s not possible?” Grant asked.

“Well, in this particular situation, Pierce Point, that is,” Ted said, “you have a jail, right?”

Grant nodded.

“We throw them in the Pierce Point jail,” Sap said.

“What if they talk about how they just left a Patriot irregular camp run by Special Forces located out at Marion Farm?” Grant asked.

“We tell everyone that they’re crazy,” Ted said. “Hell, we’ll lock them up in the mental ward you got out here.” Ted thought some more and said, “And, if the unit is out of the camp and on the march, there’s less damage they can do to us by talking. We’re already out of the area.”

Everyone nodded. That sounded like a decent solution; better than shooting them.

It was silent again. After a while, Grant came up with another question.

“What about women?”

“Depends,” Ted said. “If they have skills, they’re welcomed. I’ve seen some female soldiers in the IDF that would blow your mind.” Ted was referring to the Israeli Defense Forces, which had many women soldiers.

Ted was being polite when he said how great it was to have women fighters, however. There was nothing wrong with women. They usually fought well when they had something important to fight for, like their families. They had the physical strength to do what an irregular unit did, which was carry a rifle, but not much else. An irregular unit wasn’t a commando unit. They didn’t need to carry an eighty pound pack for three days without sleep. Less is demanded of an irregular unit, which is why they could be full of civilians. They were secondary troops, and some women were perfectly fine secondary troops.

But, truth be told, Ted really would rather not have any women in camp. It wasn’t that he didn’t like women, or that they didn’t have any skills, but they distracted men. Ted viewed women in camp like a river or minefield that needed to be crossed: something to be dealt with because it was just part of the landscape. Ted knew that men needed women and that men would fight the hardest for their women and children, but women just complicated everything.

Ted realized that the rest of the world might find that to be “sexist” but he didn’t give a crap. All he cared about was successfully executing the mission he was given and bringing back every one of his fighters alive. Everything else was a distant second on his list of concerns. Very distant.

Ted knew quite a bit about the problems women caused in a camp. He knew, from spending years of his life in dozens of camps full of fighters in several countries all across the world, the effect women could have on a guerilla unit.

“Women can be in camp, but they must have a very clear and much-needed job,” Ted said. “If they have town-running skills or medical skills, awesome. If our best engineer is a woman, she’s the chief engineer.”

“But,” Ted said, putting his finger up for emphasis, “if women don’t have a well-defined and needed job, they often turn into girlfriends and that causes all kinds of problems for discipline.”

Everyone looked at Wes. He flipped them off.

Sap added, “To be honest, if you have a choice between letting in a pretty woman and a plain woman with the same skills, pick the plain one. There will be less fighting over her.” The Team looked at him like he was crazy to not have the prettiest women possible around.

“Seriously,” Sap said. “I know what I’m talking about.” Ted nodded. They’d dealt with this before in Columbia when they were there “advising” that government on getting rid of the narco-terrorists.

“Speaking of women,” Grant said, “our young fighters here”—he pointed to the Team—“have girlfriends. Let me guess, they can’t bring them to the farm?”

“Correct,” Ted said. “The only women at the farm are ones who are working there. Ones with skills we need or family members of men we need, and even they have jobs. No girlfriends.”

Grant knew what his guys were thinking. Celibacy? Really? That might be a deal killer. They had signed up with the Patriots and devoted their lives to this dangerous cause. But no girlfriends? The deal might be off.

“I had assumed the Team would be in Pierce Point much of the time,” Grant said. “I think you said earlier that the Team will train at the farm during the day and come home to Pierce Point at night most nights. Right?”

“Pretty much,” Ted said, looking at Rich and Dan. “I’d like to see the Team spend about half their days at the farm and the other half on patrol in Pierce Point. Of course, the Team would be on call for Pierce Point even when they’re at the farm. If something does go down in Pierce Point, you guys zoom over here to handle it.”

Rich and Dan looked at Ted as if to say, “Damned right.”

“There will be some night training, especially toward the end,” Sap said. “For that, we’ll need you guys spending the night out at the farm.”

“Without girlfriends,” Pow said.

“Affirmative,” Ted said.

“How often will that be?” Bobby asked. He had fallen hard for his girlfriend, Sammie.

“Rarely for the next couple months,” Sap said. “Then once a week, then every other night. Towards the end, when it’s very close to deployment time, then every night.” Sap shrugged. “It’s the life of a soldier.”

Ted quickly added, “And you are soldiers now.”

That reminded the Team that they had taken an oath to something much more grand and important than getting laid. The Team realized they were being a little whiny about the girls. They were soldiers now. This wasn’t some big party at the yellow cabin. They were in a war and better get used to it.

“Understood,” Pow said. He looked at all the guys and said, “Understood?”

“Understood,” they all said. Ted noted that Pow was a leader. They followed his lead. He remembered Chip telling him that Pow was the tactical leader and Grant was the strategic leader. After seeing Pow and Grant in action that evening, Ted understood what Chip was talking about.

Grant decided to change the subject.

“How many walk-ons do you need?” He asked. “I mean, if you don’t need many then we can be very picky about their skills. If you need a lot, we’ll have lower standards.”

Ted smiled. “An excellent question,” he said. “The answer is that we can be picky at this point. We have a core of screened former military coming in the first wave. We will have some raw civilians that we’ve screened back at HQ coming after that. We have a few dozen already, so we have about half the hundred or so slots filled now. We’ll fill the other fifty or so slots in a few weeks with a combination of more raw civilians that come to us from HQ and some of these walk-ons from here. So, be very picky now and we’ll have a better idea of how many we need in a few weeks.”

“Will you be using any other Pierce Point people?” Dan asked.

“Well, a few of your guards,” Ted said looking at Rich and Dan, “but you guys get to limit the number of them. You guys talked to me last time I was out about which guards had skills, could be trusted, and could be spared. Only about eight, you told me. So about eight it will be.”

Pow got ready to ask the question the Team had been waiting to hear.