Back? Okay.
Less solar output equals colder temperatures. (Also, in eight hundred years, less CO2. In the meantime, it's going to keep increasing.)
Sunspots had been tracked for centuries. And sunspot activity had been found to be a, pardon the pun, stellar indicator of solar activity.
The sunspots on the sun were going away, one by one. They had their own lag. But the layer of the sun that caused them had gone into "recessive condition." That is, it wasn't working.
Bottomline, the sun was cooling off. Big time. And so was the Earth. Because less solar wind equalled . . .
And all the fucking weathermen could talk about was "global warming."
AND PEOPLE WERE STILL BUYING IT.
Christ. I lose hope for humanity sometimes.
The same lack of sunspots had last been observed in that mini-iceage back in Medieval days I mentioned. Reporting on its effects when it first kicked in was spotty. But archaeological evidence showed that it kicked in fast. Bogs have been found that had frozen practically overnight and then been covered by glaciers. Things got cold, they got cold fast and they stayed cold for a long time.
It looked as if that was what was happening. And the people responsible for reporting the weather were still talking about global warming.
(Yeah, kids, I know. What the Fuck? I mean, you all know that they were fucking idiots as you wrap up in your coats and blankets. But back then, Global Warming was going to end civilization as we knew it. And it was all Man's fault. If we only cut back on CO2 emissions we could all sing kumbaya. I know, it's hard to believe. But go look up things like "The Dutch Tulip Frenzy" and "The Internet Bubble." Humans are pack animals and when the pack stampedes they tend to follow.)
Don't get me wrong. There were people out there saying the opposite. Climatologists were screaming about it. But the ones who were doing the screaming were "global warming deniers" and had been put in the same category as Holocaust deniers (not going to explain that one, go look it up later) and thus were tuned out by the "balanced" news media. They were getting no airtime. "Too busy reporting on the H5N1 catastrophe and how our Glorious Leader . . .sorry, our First Female President is gloriously responding! All is well except for that continued pesky global warming and, you know, this Plague thing."
Lose. Hope.
Anyway, it was getting cooler, H5N1 was running rampant and the world, warming, cooling, whatever, was indeed approaching the end of civilization as we knew it.
The support contractors were already pulling out. International air travel had been suspended but they could still get charter flights under local government (where they were landing that is) rules. There was fucking nothing we could do positive in Iran and we sat there all through March, watching the reports from the U.S., getting hit by the occasional attack, people starting to line up outside the FOBs looking for safety, food, shelter, anything to survive.
April 1 we got our warning orders for movement. The U.S. military was pulling out. Everywhere. We had too many problems at home to try to deal with the rest of the world's problems.
But.
This was only a temporary emergency. Warrick had stated that we were going to maintain our international obligations. And since we were coming back, any day now, well . . .
Okay, we couldn't move all the fucking equipment we had in the Middle East. Just wasn't feasible. Moving it over there had taken years. Minimum redeployment time, under optimal conditions, was considered to be six months. A. We needed to get home, now. B. These were not optimal conditions. Most of the ships we would have used to get us home were either sailing in circles trying to avoid the Plague or tied up alongside piers with mostly dead crews or crews long disappeared.
This didn't even cover the stuff we had in Europe, Korea, Japan . . .
But the troops were going home. We mostly had unit "sets" (all the equipment a unit needs) Stateside as well. So the troops were pulling out.
What to do with the equipment? We're talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of inventory. One report I saw said that the pre-Plague value of the total mobile overseas inventory of the U.S. was at least one Trillion in old Dollars.
Well, in countries that were allies instead of totally fucked like Iran, we could just leave it. The units pulled their equipment and supplies, all of it, into holding areas and from there it was up to the local government to secure.
In countries which weren't allies and in which we had "security concerns"?
We were leaving it. With guards to "maintain and secure" it "until relieved."
Each area was different. I can only speak for Iran. (MY can I.) We had six brigades and all their supports in Iran. We had four separate major logistics bases and I don't know how many FOBs and COBs.
The Big LOG base, though, was in Abadan. Abadan is a city that sits on the Shat Al Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, and is right on the border with Iraq. For a lot of reasons, (security) we used Abadan rather than Bandar Shapur or Bandar Abbas for our prime logistics base. And it was a monster. Keeping six brigades fed and watered, not to mention the units that fed and watered them fed and watered, was a major undertaking.
People just don't understand the enormous mass of materials that modern units require to keep doing their jobs. I'll put it this way. Think of a really big football stadium. Now, imagine filling it to the rim with . . . stuff. You don't want to break stuff so you put tanks at the bottom. Put armored personnel carriers on top. Keep stacking. Fill it from side to side and all the way to the top. Ammunition, parts, rations, tents, snivel gear, weapons, batteries. (My God do we use a lot of batteries. Remember, I was responsible for making sure the guys in my battalion had all this shit. I know whereof I speak.)
That's the logistics we had in Iran for ONE brigade. A full stadium of . . . stuff.
One.
We had six in country. And all the supplies for the camp followers. (Support and supply.)
Over the course of April and into May we moved it all back to Abadan.
Well, okay, some of it we left. We left a lot of rations in place. Units that were in the last detachments to pull out said that there were riots as people flooded in to strip the camps. We left most of the tents and shit that couldn't be used directly as weapons.
We pulled out everything else (and most of the rations) and moved it to Abadan. And piled and piled and stacked and parked and stacked on top of parked and parked on top of stacked.
An ammo dump is a very scary place under any circumstances. Good ammo dumps have massive internal berms (big dirt walls) or big really tough bunkers to prevent one set of ammo going boom and making all the others go boom. And only ammo that is pretty much assured not to go boom should go in an ammo dump. And only so much in each sector.
We had to build another ammo dump for all the ammo that was brought in. And we were still stacking it to the top of hundred-foot berms. It was very spectacular when it finally got blown up.
Rations?
The Army does not run just on MREs. Most "long storage" rations are in large cans (called Number 10 for really obscure historical reasons.) Unless you've got really huge hands, you can't get two around them.