I've dealt with lots of cultures and races in my time. Most of them I don't care much for. Arabs are lazy as hell, Iranians are arrogant. But Iranians don't have a touch on the French and probably work harder even if they fuck much of it up. (Call it the Active/Stupid culture.) Kurds and Americans get along pretty well, all things considered, but Kurds treat their women like shit.
If there is a finer group of non-Americans than the Nepalese I have yet to meet them. They're some of the hardest workers I've ever met, tend to be fairly intelligent, have got a very broad sense of humor and are just tough as fucking nails. Disciplined, too.
Ghurkas, who are some of the finest infantry in the world, are drawn from some of the Nepalese tribes. Our guys weren't (mostly) Ghurkas. But working with them I learned why Ghurkas are so highly regarded. If the Ghurks are better than my Nepos, that's pretty fucking scary.
But at the time it was another pain in the ass I didn't care for.
So about that time Butterfill stopped by.
"Yo, Bandit. What did the Limey want?"
He was a captain now. He could call me Bandit.
"He couldn't get out his Nepalese. They're ours now."
"Well, that's the mess section settled."
"So, what are you going to do?"
It was a big question. As in, square miles and umpteen billions of dollars of gear big.
"I have a very complete action plan provided by the battalion commander. Actually, the S-3 working from the BC's concept plan."
"Uh, huh."
The S-3 was a pretty good guy. But if he had to create a plan from the BC's concept, it was unlikely to be good.
"We're to maintain continuous three-man roving patrols around the perimeter," Butterfill said. "Six of them, which means a platoon on patrol all the time. And one platoon on standby for reaction."
I winced. What he'd just said . . . Well, there were so many things wrong with it.
First of all, three-man patrols in uparmored humvees or Strykers were just waiting to get picked off. Attackers weren't going to hit us near the main base. They'd wait until a patrol was on the far side, separated from other patrols, and set off an IED or burn in with RPGs and light them up.
In a high-threat environment, and we were a very big and juicy target which was going to make this a high-threat environment, you did not send out three-man patrols.
The other thing was, there was no downtime built in. Eighteen guys on patrol meant a full platoon on duty at all times. They could do that for twenty-four to forty-eight hours, max. Another on "standby" and covering internal guarding meant they weren't exactly getting downtime. It would be better than being on patrol duty but not much.
And there was stuff that would have to be done. Technically, we were supposed to keep up with training. I figured that was out the window but still. And there was maintenance. Stuff did not run itself. We'd been left with one "support" platoon, most mechanics, to keep stuff running. But they didn't have enough hands to do it all. And, hell, if something broke it's not like we couldn't go out and find a replacement. But there was work other than patrolling that was going to have to be done.
Nobody would have so much as a day of downtime. Of any noticeable degree. And if we got hit by a big attack, we'd have a third of our unit scattered to fuck and gone. If the attackers were smart and put in an attack on a patrol, pulled out the duty platoon . . .
"And your opinion of that, Captain?"
"Six patrols aren't going to be able to prevent pilfering . . ."
"Pilfering, hell," I said. "I'm worried about getting fucking overrun."
"And then there's that."
Even the core base was too large for one company to secure in the event of a heavy attack.
"Technically," he added, causing more heartburn, "You're in charge."
"You're in charge of security," I pointed out. "I'm in charge of the support section and 'responsible,' fuck me, for inventory of all this crap."
"You're the senior officer."
"Oh, thank you very much."
"So if you have any . . . alterations you might suggest, I'd be under orders to implement them."
"Putting me in the position of violation of a direct order."
"There is that. On the other hand . . ."
"I don't want to end up as a trophy for some fucking RIF."
Well, hell, all that material was just sitting there.
The whole camp was protected by berms. But you can climb a berm. Teams of guys can climb a berm and "pilfer" quite a lot of stuff. Like weapons. And ammunition to go with the weapons.
Berms weren't going to keep the majority of them out. The roving patrols might slow them down. But only slow them.
So I started looking in the inventory.
Concertina is a razor wire that's wrapped in big rolls that open up into about three-foot circles. You might have seen it up on fences around prisons.
It's very nasty stuff. One strand was not so much. A bunch of strands made for a very tangled situation. You could get through it, but not easily.
You don't want to know how much concertina was in the inventory. More, by volume, than the MREs. Acres.
Wire, by itself, though, wasn't going to stop the RIFs.
Want to take a square area guess how many mines we had in the ammo bunkers? Cubic, actually, their boxes stack quite well.
Army engineers are normally the guys who put in major defenses. There had been a lot of engineers in Iran. (Sorry for calling you guys and gals "camp followers.") And over the years they've gotten tired of doing things by hand so they have some interesting equipment to do it for them.
They had, I shit you not, a big ass semiarmored . . . thing that could put in fence posts (big ones, twelve feet high) and hook fencing to it, all automatically. It looked like a big dump truck crossed with a factory. Another big ass . . . thing from the same family could lay down concertina at the rate of one mile an hour for as long as you fed it concertina.
Last but not least, they had an armored vehicle that could emplace mines for you as long as you fed it mines. In series, which means not just one at a time but three in a pattern.
And, hell, the Nepos were just sitting there.
But we didn't start with securing the whole base. First things first; make sure we survived.
Titan Base had had a permanent population of nearly five thousand, with military personnel and contractors, as well as a floating population (since it was used for replacements) of another thousand or so at any time. Since everybody was in tents and trailers, that was . . . Think acres again.
The core of the base, though, was smaller than a FOB. That is, the central offices and some senior officers' quarters that were still trailers but with slightly better amenities.
The latter, however, wasn't disconnected from the majority of the base in any way.
Well, the bulldozers were just sitting there, too.
I don't think the last plane was off the ground before we got started. One of the mechanics knew how to drive a bulldozer.
Look, technically we should have taken down the tents and possibly moved the trailers or something. We didn't have time and we didn't care.
Over the next three days we bermed the central area, renaming it Fort Lonesome, and started laying in wire. There were three kinds: Military link (sort of like chain-link but welded and much thicker), barbed wire and concertina.