A state of disobedience

Camp Bullis, Texas

Texas, as did about forty other states, maintained a state owned "defense force." This was purely voluntary; unpaid except when it might be called to state service, scantily equipped and scantily trained. It was the one force available to the governors of those states which had them that the federal government could not legally take control of.

In the case of Texas, now, the seven notional—and, frankly, nominal—brigades of its state defense force had been mobilized and were in the process of expanding at various army camps. One of these, an old installation north of San Antonio, was Camp Bullis.

The old camp had gone through many permutations in the near century of its existence. Established in 1917 and named for a brigadier general prominent in the Indian Wars, Bullis had seen troops off to both World Wars, Korea and Vietnam. It had also seen them return, those who had returned.

Reduced from a high point of thirty-two thousand acres in 1918, the camp now boasted no more than twelve thousand.

Twelve thousand acres, however, was clearly enough for the thousands of new recruits to the Texas Defense Force that assembled there to train under its 1^st Brigade—a brigade in name only, further nicknamed the Alamo Guards, and soon to be named the 1^st Texas Infantry Division. That twelve thousand acres was enough seemed especially so as these thousands of new recruits had few weapons, none of those being heavy weapons, and boasted little other equipment.

"Weapons and equipment aren't the main problem," lamented the 1^st Brigade's commander, Colonel Juan Robles, to no one in particular. "The real problem is that we haven't a clue. We're an oversized battalion of quasi military police—old, fat, and undertrained ourselves except maybe as military police."

From a high place where the San Juan Hill scene from the film The Rough Riders had been shot in 1926, Robles looked down to a road where a disconsolate "company" of recruits struggled in a herd through the boot-sucking mud. Rather, it would have been boot-sucking if only they had had boots. The Nikes and Reeboks still shodding most of the men? The mud gulped these down whole.

Robles muttered, "No order, no discipline. No weapons, no equipment, no uniforms. But, worst of all, no leadership and no training. We're screwed."

"It's not so bad as all that, Juan"—the State Guard was pretty informal, as Robles' operations officer demonstrated by the use of his commander's first name. "The Adjutant General has already said that he'll send one in ten officers and NCOs by grade to distribute among the State Guard folks. That'll help. And we're starting to get a trickle of volunteers from among the military retirees. Some folks from other states are coming in too. The general even says we'll have some real uniforms soon; weapons too."

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