“California was a failed state over $1.5 trillion in debt before the war ever broke out,” Morris told them. “Only tax revenue from the other states were keeping it in business and once the war broke out that federal tax money dried up to nothing. They were flooded with illegal immigrants who weren’t paying any taxes but were being provided social services free of charge, not to mention the sixty-plus thousand homeless people just in the city of Los Angeles. There weren’t many people working, and when the war broke out a significant chunk of those decided to move elsewhere. So the state was left with a whole bunch of people whose lives revolved around government handouts, what we like to call the FSA, the Free Shit Army. When the free shit stopped they lost their collective minds and went on the march.”
Morris looked over the crowd. “Even though there was never any actual combat between the Tabs and the ARF in LA, the riots and civil unrest in both San Francisco and Los Angeles lasted for most of a year. Big chunks went up in flames, and large areas look like this city.”
“And then Mexico moved in?” somebody asked.
“Not Mexico per se,” Morris told them, “but the cartels which are pretty much running the country. Now they run everything in coastal California from Los Angeles south. If this war against the Tabs ever ends we’re then going to have to go over there and clean that mess up before we can be a whole country again.”
Morris took a breath and continued. “As for the rest of the country, for most of the past year the fronts, such as they are, have been very stable. We control a lot more territory than they do, but they’ve consolidated their forces in large cities and urban areas, those areas of the country that have always embraced government overreach as long as they were getting the bread and circuses they were voting for. What’s the phrase, you can vote your way into communism, but you have to shoot your way out? The thinking high up is that the only way we are really going to retake those cities is by going in and rooting them out. It would require the worst kind of door-to-door and block-to-block fighting you can imagine, like what we all saw at the start of the war. Honestly, nobody wants that, it’d be a meatgrinder, a modern Stalingrad. We’d lose huge numbers of people even if we won, so we’re hoping we can convince them their position is untenable. We control almost all the farmland, and have cut off most of their food supplies.”
“A medieval-style siege?” someone said. “How long will that take?” He sounded dubious.
“Too long,” Morris agreed. “China, Russia, every communist or left-leaning country has been donating what resources they can to the Tabs in hopes of getting their claws into this country once the war ends. Food, fuel, ammo, whatever. Because they’re assuming we are going to lose. Because with their worldview they cannot envision us winning. We don’t know how many supplies they’re getting, or what their reserves are, but intelligence tells us it’s barely enough, and that’s in addition to getting pushed back in the field. They’re in a bad spot and they know it, which is why they’ve agreed to that sit-down just a few days from now.”
That caused another burst of excited noise from the assembled fighters, with dozens of shouted questions. Morris waved them down.
“The two sides are going to be sitting down across from each other in just a day or two, that’s the information that I was given. And that’s about all the detailed information I was given about that meet, I don’t even know where it is. But, if you haven’t heard, two days ago the ARF liberated a detention center and freed over two thousand people the government had there. Consider that a test run, to see if the Tabs would get so pissed off they’d walk away from the meeting. The meeting has not been cancelled, so we still have our green light for this mission. It showed them we’re still strong. And it shows us how desperate they are.”
“Are they going to surrender?” somebody asked, which got a lot of laughs. Very few of the dogsoldiers there could envision the Tabs surrendering.
“I didn’t think we were anywhere close to them surrendering,” someone else said over the noise of the crowd.
“This will never be over until one side gets defeated,” Morris heard.
Barker was right in front of Morris and growled, “There’s no way to peacefully coexist with a side that for generations has been trying to restrict your freedom, control everything you do, and put you in jail for exercising your God-given rights and daring to question the all-knowing and all-powerful government. The shooting just made this official, we had a cold war in this country between the two sides for decades before that.”
Morris nodded and pointed at the man. “While I will agree that as a general rule all politicians suck, at least the ones on our side know there’s no compromise with the other side. Compromise is what got us into trouble in the first place. As for the ones on the other side…” He gave an expansive shrug. “Most all of them were assassinated in the first few years. A lot of judges, too, back when the powers-that-be were still calling this ‘widespread civil unrest’ instead of the war it was. But there’s always more where they came from. So that’s where you guys come in.” He looked around at all their excited faces. “Officially the two sides are coming together simply for talks, but the Tabs are really hurting, we know it, and they know we know it even though they won’t admit it. There’s very little armor left. We’ve barely got any in the heavy combat areas and we’ve got more than the Tabs. Only reason there’s still tanks in this city is because the CO here is protecting them. And because they barely have enough fuel to run patrols. As for the rest of the country, they keep losing people, they keep losing territory, and us liberating that re-education camp a hundred miles behind their lines is, hopefully, just a taste. The thinking, the hope is that if we can hit them far harder than they expect in places that they don’t think we should even have a presence, we can use it to get them contemplating, maybe even talking about surrender.”
“You mean a ceasefire?”
Morris answered the faceless question. “No, not just a ceasefire, an actual surrender.”
“I just don’t think that will happen as long as any politicians on the other side are sucking air,” Brookelynne said loudly.
“It ain’t the politicians who are pulling the triggers and fighting on the line,” somebody else observed.
“You’re right,” Morris said. “They really don’t want to give up. They’re led by a number of true believers, the same kind of people who got us into this mess in the first place, who didn’t care that socialism and communism had never worked, ever, anywhere, they were sure this time would be different, if they just raised taxes high enough, jailed or executed enough of the right people…” His face grew dark, but he shook off the anger. “We’re hoping we can get some of the people over there, particularly their military leaders, to see the light. We want to show them that they are in a far worse position than they thought. That’s why I’m here. We want to initiate a number of big strikes deep inside enemy lines, in areas that aren’t really contested, or haven’t been since the beginning of the war. Not just this city but in a number of them around the country, places they’ve controlled for years. We want to turn their world upside down.”
“So what’s the objective?” someone impatiently asked.
“The object is to hit them hard. Hit them so hard that their losses compromise their position in this city, and completely shake their perceptions. A city way behind enemy lines, a city where the war, except for a few snipers and malcontents, is supposed to be over. And this city is far from the only place this is happening. We want to show them that we don’t give a fuck that it’s been ten years, we’ve only begun to fight. When you’re sitting down to a negotiation, you want as much leverage as you can possibly get. You want to negotiate from a position of strength, and if everywhere they thought they were safe is on fire…”