Combat retrain means starting from the ground up. Soldiers train on individual tasks while officers try to remember how to conduct operations. The latter is mostly "TEWTs," Tactical Exercises Without Troops, and can range from sitting at a table working over a problem to sand table exercises to going out in the field and considering how to take terrain to full up computerized battle with independent scorers.
Later on the officers and troops are "mated up" for field exercises and then finally go through a test to see if it's taken. Generally, after the test (called an ARTEP) there's a stand-down for maintenance to fix all the shit that broke in training then the unit, if it passes the test and the inspection of its equipment, is considered "combat certified." It's ready to go to war.
Normally, "combat retraining" is a six-month process.
We were scheduled for three.
I looked at the, very tight, schedule, kissed sleep goodbye then looked again.
We were scheduled, if everything went well, to be "combat certified" one month before the end of Carson's requested "six months."
We weren't going to be the first "combat certified" battalion available while Carson still had "Emergency Powers" authority, suspending habeas corpus and posse comitatus (the law that said you couldn't use federal troops in United States territory for police forces) but we were going to be one of the first.
Okay, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. What is four?
It's a puckering feeling in the rectum.
I still didn't have the word "Detroit" in my head. But I did have the word "pacification actions." Okay, it's a phrase.
I also didn't have the word, phrase, whatever, "Centurions" in my head.
We started training. Part of the training was learning to be a battalion commander without:
A. Being an S-3 (operations officer).
B. Being an XO (second in command of a battalion).
C. Ever having been to or even taken the correspondence course for Command and General Staff College, which was normally a "must have" for battalion command.
I'd had experience with "large force" command. Don't get me wrong. Hell, by Istanbul I was commanding the forces of a light brigade. Or a heavy battalion "team."
But that was there under make-it-up-as-you-go-along rules. Now I had to learn to play by Army rules and there were a lot of them.
But I had very good help. All the staff officers were excellent. They'd been trained in by my previous commander and for the first month or so I just let them keep doing what they were doing. Hell, I never really made a lot of changes.
And my company commanders were also "hold-overs." They'd all been doing their jobs a bit over time for when they should have rotated out. They knew them well.
The only fly in the ointment, at first, was me. But I'm a quick learner. I didn't make the mistakes I'd made as a company commander because, among other things, I'd sort of done this job before. I just had to figure out the details.
We trained up, hard. We had a pretty decent budget for it, thank God. And I knew some tricks to get more. Budget was a "use it or lose it" proposition. You had to use up all your budget by the end of the year.
Unfortunately, we weren't near the end of the year but there were still some units that were looking at their projected training and going "I'm not going to use all this budget." Normally, it's the other way around. But there were some. I found them and got more budget for stuff like ammo for live-fire training.
(Hell, there was a lot of ammo sitting around. We hadn't been using much for the last couple of years and we'd stopped very abruptly in the middle of a war. There was plenty of ammo. Less fuel but that just meant the troops learned to walk.)
We were getting ready for ARTEP, not up to that point but close, when I got orders cut for TDY to the Pentagon. What the Fuck? I'm a commander! You don't send battalion commanders TDY (temporary duty) to the Pentagon for fuck's sake! Not when there's an ARTEP scheduled in two weeks!
I got on a plane and flew up to the Puzzle Palace, again, cursing under my breath.
And got "briefed in."
The mission of my battalion, like it or not, was to "pacify" the city of Detroit and return it to "normal order" under the laws and customs of the United States of America and the State of Michigan.
But that wasn't all.
I was asked, not ordered, asked if it would be possible to reactivate the Centurions stories for the mission.
Some of those meetings were totally fucked. The PIO assholes had somehow become involved. They had lots of "recommendations" on ways to improve Centurions.
Look, I'd made it up as I went along but it was still the highest rated show in reruns in the U.S. and maybe the world. A lot of people were just starting to get back TV, especially cable. And they'd heard about Centurions but had never seen it. DVDs were selling like hotcakes. (I swear, Murdoch owes me, big-time. The bastard.) It was about the only thing that was selling, consistently.
I didn't need PIO shit-for-brains giving me recommendations on how to improve Centurions. Especially recommendations that amounted to turn it into a steer. It was a bull. That was its horror and glory. If they couldn't figure that out, they could kiss my ass.
Oh, and they wanted it more "family friendly" and "gender friendly" and "culturally friendly" and . . .
I wasn't just meeting with them, though. I was meeting with serious colonels and generals who were laying out the problem. Detroit had to be taken down while we still had posse comitatus. The President was smart but he hadn't realized how long it was going to take to get units back in shape for combat. And it was going to be combat. The caliph had seized NG military hardware early on, both convoys that were under orders not to defend themselves and stuff that was already in the Detroit area. An entire company had been "suborned" and turned over military grade weapons and hardware. He might have all the shit I'd faced before. Low ammo for most of it, maybe none. But he had the gear and some ammo was very much missing.
And with the caliph being held up as a shining light by the news media, it was going to be a shit-storm. The MSM wasn't going to just take us taking down the caliph. They were going to spin for all they were worth. And they were going to be all over the mission. No way to keep them out, practically. If we did, it would look like "censorship" and that was the last thing we needed.
We had to get the word out about what was really going on in Detroit. And we needed to get the word out fast. And hopefully show what the media was spinning.
And the one thing the generals agreed on, but weren't going to shove down my throat, was that the name needed to change.
Thus was born The New Centurions mini-series.
I started getting balky. I was getting dozens of "briefings" on every conceivable subject. Some of them were useful, much of it was crap (especially any that involved PIO). I was digesting all of it, sure. But I was on short time. My battalion was getting ready for its final exam and I was having to be thinking way past it to a mission that still wasn't clear and was going to be very very complicated. And very secret. That we were going into Detroit was Top Secret. That we were planning a Centurions broadcast about Detroit was Top Secret and compartmentalized.