A state of disobedience

Las Cruces, New Mexico

The legislature had voted, the people had assembled, the busses had come and gone.

New Mexico was not quite yet ready to join Texas' protest in the way Texas was protesting. Neither was it ready to leave a neighbor in the lurch. "You just don't do that, in the American southwest; you pitch in and help." That was what Governor Garrison had told the Legislature before they voted.

What had they voted for, then? They voted to pay for transportation and food, to pay for their own national guard to set up tents for, and to provide food and water for anyone willing to go to the Army and Marine Corps assembly areas near Las Cruces to protest the coming invasion of Texas. They also cast a vote for the First Amendment, especially with regards to the news media. Lastly, New Mexico had voted to send the bulk of its own national guard, one very fine brigade—the "best by test" in any component of the U.S. Armed Services—of air defense artillery to join Texas' Forty-ninth Armored Division, along with the state's other combat support unit, a battalion of six-inch self-propelled guns.

And as the Air Defense Brigade and artillery had gone, so, answering a freed, and more than a little annoyed, news media, the people had come. Not so many, of course, in any objective sense; New Mexico was not a populous state. Yet there were enough. From Lordburg, from Deming, from Alamogordo and Albuquerque, from Socorro and Santa Fe, they came. They came in numbers enough to block the highways through Las Cruces; to block the flow of fuel and parts and ammunition to the cavalrymen and marines rotting in dusty tent cities between Las Cruces and El Paso.

And those people sat on the roads and would not move.

Normally, of course, the armed forces would have called on the local police authorities to disperse the protesters.

"That's not going to work here," muttered the commander of the Marines. "I don't even want to ask. Hell, the State Police are out there with the protesters, keeping order."

"We could clear them out ourselves, sir," answered an aide. "Or tell the Army to do it."

"No, Johnny. The cavalry colonel has already told me, in so many words, 'Don't ask.' And I don't know what we'll do if the police and the guard open fire. Then too, what will those Texas boys at El Paso do if it does turn nasty?"

"No," the marine sighed. "No. We'll buck this one up to higher."

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