The trucks turned around and went back towards Abadan.
It was duly reported and the deterrence patrol continued.
They also ran into clearly civilian groups. People were walking or driving out. The gates to the place were shut and the patrol fired warning shots to scatter them. We just couldn't do a damned thing for them. Not then.
Normally, American soldiers ride fairly openly and are notorious for handing out candy and food. Kids love them and vice versa. We couldn't be kind. We had way too much to do.
People started camping out. We were in the middle of a flat fucking plain ten miles from the nearest town, Abadan, and people just trickled out there. I don't know what they thought we were going to do for them, but they came in droves. And they stayed in ramshackle huts cobbled together from shit people dragged from the city.
Living on a desert plain with no water or food in sight is not a good option. Unless the alternative is worse. Gives an idea what it must have been like in Abadan.
And they died. We weren't interacting with them at all at that point. The patrols had orders to keep people at least five hundred meters from the berms and any time people tried to approach they'd open fire. Usually a warning burst from a .50 cal would turn people away. Not always.
Fucking drivers in the Middle East are the worst drivers on earth. And more totally oblivious than a blonde on a cell phone. They started to get the point after the fifth or sixth shot-up wreck on the road to the base. Yes, they were civilians. Probably. None of the cars blew up. And, yes, there were women and kids in the cars.
Did we like it? No. Was it necessary? Yes. Why?
Follow the logic. By the end of the first day there were three or four hundred people gathered not far from the main gates. The gates had six guys on them, all we could spare. They were in bunkers, but only six guys. Everybody else was busy creating someplace we could huddle "until relieved." Two Strykers trying to cover the entire perimeter and six guys on the gates.
So we let a car come up to the gates. People go in the direction of the pack. All those people wanted inside our walls for protection from . . . Well, it was probably pretty bad in Abadan.
If they weren't firing to kill, think six guys could keep three or four hundred desperate people from overrunning them? And then there would be three or four hundred desperate people running around the base. Think we could have maintained any semblance of order with a bare hundred soldiers? While trying to keep the rest of the base under control?
Later we helped out. Things got complicated. But for then, there wasn't anything we were going to do.
Oh, except keep it from becoming Abadan.
The evening of day one people had settled in. And two "military style" trucks approached the main gates, then turned off into the area where people were huddling. At that point, they barely had any shelter. It was just . . . people. Sitting in a fucking desert. (Yes, it was fucking with us, okay? We're American soldiers. Believe it or not, most of us are paladins somewhere in our heart of hearts. We did not like it.)
The trucks stopped and "males in civilian garb" began unloading and "attacking" the refugees. They were stealing what little food and water they had and apparently engaging in some rapes. Or started to.
The gate guards put in a call for the on-call platoon, which was mostly still engaged in moving shit, and the roving patrol. But the roving patrol was up by the ammo bunkers, about a mile away.
The main camp of people was about five hundred meters west of the gates. Five hundred meters is a long shot for any sniper especially into the sun, which was setting.
Captain Butterfill, however, and it was his idea not mine, had put two of his company snipers on the gates. Not a normal choice but it turned out to be prophetic. They "engaged the attackers at long range with careful aim." Apparently got three of them before the rest got the idea. Some people might have been kidnapped from the refugees. See also "raped." But the two "military grade" trucks drove off. Last we saw of that group of problem-makers but we were to have many many more.
By evening the movement was complete. Nothing else but we were centrally located and close to the gates. (We hadn't been before.) Units were rotated. A third Stryker was parked outside the gates. There were Klieg lights over the gates (and all along the berm although most eventually had to get shut off). They could still see the edge of the refugee camp.
A mortar carrier was sent out with an infantry Stryker in support. The Stryker stayed back while the mortar carrier approached the refugee camp.
Look, we're human, okay? People were dying in the desert and God wasn't raining mana. Well, maybe He was but the "mana" said "U.S. Army" on the side and it came in brown plastic packages.
Somewhere in the mass of shit were large numbers of "emergency civilian disaster support packages." They were sort of like MREs but they were made to fit just about any religious taboo and came in yellow packages instead of brown. We didn't have the time or interest to find them. We had MREs. We took MREs.
And bottled water. We had that, too. Not quite acres but a shitload. We also had a water processing plant and all sorts of shit we didn't know how to run. We were to figure it out.
In the meantime, we had bottled water. We took that and MREs out to the refugees.
Mistake? I dunno. Maybe. Maybe if we'd been hard-hearted enough to just ignore the people dying in the desert they would have gone away. Or maybe not. Maybe we'd have had a few hundred or thousand corpses from dehydration and malnutrition.
Saw this clip one time on a funny video show. First part was two ducks swimming in a pond. Mallards. The people were ooing and aaahing. Cool! Ducks in the pool.
They apparently fed them and the ducks eventually continued their migration well fed and able to prosper.
The next bit was the following season. The ducks had apparently reproduced or found friends. Ten ducks. Cool! Ducks in the pool.
The next bit was some following season. Must have been over a thousand ducks trying to get in the pool. Water was splashing twenty feet as they nose-dived into the throng.
Yeah. It was like that.
But we knew not what we did.
There were no attacks and people weren't trying to overrun them. They handed out one MRE packet and two bottles of water to each person who approached. They had extras and they left them behind. I'm sure that the toughest and the strongest grabbed the extras. Law of nature.
The guys also dropped off shovels and pointed to the corpses which, thus far, had been left to rot.
There were no major incidents.
Day two was spent digging out stuff we needed to toughen up our defenses. We found the engineering equipment we needed right where it was supposed to be. You couldn't miss the wire storage area; piles of concertina that high are noticeable. We drove construction equipment over and got to work.
More refugees. Hovels were going up.
This time before dark we sent out the food wagon. The corpses were just sitting there. The guys on the mortar track pointed to the corpses and went away.
Some people tried to run them down. The Stryker fired warning shots.
About an hour later, the gate guards reported that some people were burying the corpses of the guys who'd been shot the day before. When the mortar carrier went back out, the guys on the gate went with them. (There were replacements on the gate.)