Eventually, over the course of the next several months (yes, people, months) we got Fort Lonesome to look like this:
Tanglefoot barbed wire (barbed wire strung tight at about shin-height) covering a thirty-meter cleared zone all the way around the fort except for two entrances. Get to them later.
Six strands of concertina piled against a twelve-foot military link outer perimeter fence. Three strands on top.
A cleared zone that was mined like a motherfucker. You had to work hard to get to the mines. Anybody that got to the mines got what they fucking deserved.
Another set of tanglefoot, this one laced with command detonated mines (claymores).
More concertina, staked down.
Berm with ground-level sandbagged bunkers heavy enough to shrug off a 105 round. (Aluminum aircraft pallets are great for making those. Don't know why we had . . . well a bit less than an acre of pallets but . . . They were just sitting there.)
All of the bunkers mounted M240 medium machine guns except for "heavy defense points" which had .50 caliber. I thought about putting .50 caliber all around and we might have gotten to it, but . . . Ah, hell, getting ahead of myself.
We weren't done.
The area was flat as a fucking pancake so a raised central defense area was out of the question. But we put the final defensive zone in the middle. There we had another berm with three exits, more concertina, mines, fences, etc. Covered trenches to the central redoubt. And enough armored vehicles that if it got down to brass tacks we still had a chance to fight our way out. I brought in two Abrams, along with six Strykers and two Bradleys. We also had fuel trucks, maintenance equipment and what-have-you in there.
That was Fort Lonesome. Inside its nigh impregnable defenses we could lay our heads with peace.
About the Nepos.
So while Butterfill was getting his act together, I wandered over to the mess area to see what I'd been left.
The barracks for the Nepos were halfway across the compound but most of them were gathered in the (vast) combined mess hall. And they looked dejected. About the only time I ever saw Nepalese looking depressed.
"Who speaks English?" I asked walking across the mess hall.
Lemme tell you about that. Imagine a high-school gym. No, imagine an aircraft hangar. Fill it with tables and those benches you ate on in school. Position lots of garbage cans. Have a serving area at one end. Cordon off a small area where there are more "civilized" tables and chairs and, you know, tablecloths and silverware.
Behind the serving area is the kitchen. You don't want to try to imagine the kitchen.
These guys were sitting or standing down by the serving area. The mess hall was, otherwise, completely empty and I'd never realized how much it echoed until I had to walk the whole length in near isolation.
"I am speaking English, sir," one of them said. "I am Samad."
Samad was not a Nepalese name. I, to this day, don't know why my friend is named Samad. I've never asked and hope to be able to refrain.
Samad was the straw-boss for the rest of the Nepos. Mainly because he spoke some English (it got better) and because he was a former Ghurka. He says he was a subadar major, a sergeant major or master sergeant. I figure he was a sergeant, maybe even a private. But I've never challenged him on it.
Ghurkas (okay, technically "Ghorkas") are all Nepalese but not all Nepalese can become Ghurkas. Ghurkas are recruited from four tribes in Nepal and the position has become to a great extent hereditary. And there's not much you can say that distinguishes Ghurkas except they're short, tend to be kind of barrel-like, have very tough skulls, smile a lot, are very disciplined and fight like ever-loving bastards.
Samad was the only Ghurka among the Nepos but all of the Nepos turned out to follow the same pattern. I told Samad that we'd been left behind and that they were working for me now. He translated and the whole group started to give those grins that are the trademark of their race. They had somebody to tell them what to do again. What it would be didn't matter. Just tell them what to do.
There was a lot of initial movement. The company wasn't barracked near the area we were planning on building up. Stuff had to be toted.
There were vehicles but it wasn't that far to walk. The guys picked up their personal gear and walked.
I told Samad the Nepos were going to have to barrack in with us and we headed over to where the procession was forming. The Nepos didn't even ask for orders, they just started grabbing gear, including packs from the troops. That took a bit of sorting out and we finally convinced them that infantry could carry their own packs a few hundred meters.
Samad was everywhere. At the time he had no real clue about how to expand on an order and acted a bit "active/stupid." Some of the things he had the Nepos doing were useless or counterproductive. It's one of the reasons I think he was a private not a sergeant major. But eventually we got over it. Took a while. I'll cover "training" later.
We moved. And we moved again. Then we started clearing.
We did send out patrols. One. Two fully loaded Strykers moving together. It was a deterrence patrol, not a guard.
You see, Titan Base was well out on the plains east of Abadan but people were making the trek anyway. Abadan was headed for the sort of hell only the worst areas in the U.S. experienced (see L.A. and Detroit) and people were trying to get away from the Plague and the chaos. People may rant and march and burn effigies about the U.S. when things are good, but as soon as the shit hits the fan they turn to American troops. Trust. They may not trust their government but all the propaganda about "abuses" in the world doesn't break the trust of people in the American soldier.
Problem was, one company could not do shit for them. Later on we figured ways to help, a little. H. R. Puffinstuff; we could do a little but we couldn't do enough. But that was later.
We moved. Then we started tearing down and rebuilding.
My office had actually been in the central command zone. I'd had one over in the Battalion S-4 shop but as part of the "reconsolidation" I got a new one, with more paperwork, in the central area. Actually, all the paperwork wasn't in the office. There was a trailer next door that had all the paperwork. All I had in the office were the summaries of the summaries of the summaries of what was in the trailer. And on my computer the "physical location for inventory" of all the fucking stuff that had been dropped off.
It had been a scramble pulling all the stuff in. And some of the stuff wasn't where people said it was. But given the scramble, the place was amazingly well organized. That general and his staff knew their stuff.
My main worry was the ammo. Without the ammo all the Tinkertoys we had stored weren't worth dick. But even the ammo bunkers, which were mostly on the other side of the base from our area, covered one hell of a lot of ground.
It was actually while we were moving, the first day, planes barely off the ground, that the "deterrence patrol" had to do some deterring. Two "military grade" trucks with Iranian Army markings came up the road from Abadan and turned towards the entrances nearest the ammunition depot. The patrol had been on the far side of the area when they started out and only got up to them when they were nearly to the gates.
They stopped when the Strykers came in view and a man in "military garb" got out of one and waved for the Strykers to approach.
Only problem being that the drivers of the trucks weren't in military garb. Oh, maybe they were laborers and maybe the guy thought he had some right to U.S. Army ammo. Didn't matter. The lead Stryker fired a burst of .50 caliber off at an angle while the trailer moved over to the gates.