They pointed out the guys who had been on the burial detail. They got extra rations and the translator told them to dig some slit trenches or find somebody to dig them for latrines. Or the food wouldn't come out the next day. And if there were dead bodies, bury them.
Day Two: No major incidents.
Oh, one but not about refugees or attackers. The BC called. He told us we were doing a great job and that our contribution was extremely important. I asked how long we were going to be stuck in this armpit. He said that hadn't been determined yet but finding out a fixed timetable for redeployment was at the top of his list.
Yeah. Right.
Day Three.
Everybody didn't walk out to the refugee camp. There was a fair car-park building up. People were using them for shelters and such.
A line of "civilian style trucks, vans and cars" came out from Abadan.
Same shit as Day One. Guys started unassing and robbing everyone in sight.
The ROE had been adjusted. And this time we had a response platoon. (The Nepos were taking up a lot of the work.) But we didn't really need it.
The gate Stryker rolled out. It got close enough to "engage the vehicles with careful, aimed fire" and started shooting them the hell up. It continued rolling forward to the edge of where the refugee's shit was scattered and fired more shots over the group.
Now, by this time the attackers and the refugees were sort of mixed up. The refugees were mostly trying to run away, but some of them were fighting. The stuff they had was all they had. They weren't just going to give it up.
Many of the "attackers," though, were armed. And quite a few refugees got shot by them.
But when the Stryker rolled up and started lighting up their rides, they fired at the Stryker, which was buttoned up and thus a lousy target, and started trying to run.
We did not give them the opportunity. Every single "armed person" was engaged and all the "convoy" was fired up and destroyed.
Quite a few bodies to bury, though. So we rolled an engineering vehicle out and dug a slit trench. We were going to roll it out the next day but somebody had already filled it in. And the bodies were gone.
Were there wounded among the refugees? Probably. Were we going to send one of our two medics out to find out? Or if anybody had eye problems or goiters or a host of other shit we'd fixed around the world?
Nope. Not then.
There were some shots from the refugee camp that night. Didn't know at the time if it was happiness that they had weapons or people settling personal disputes. But there weren't any bodies in the morning.
There were the day after. And pretty much every day as time went on. But they got buried and that was all we cared about.
Was there "pilfering" going on? Yeah, probably. Some. But, remember, we were in the middle of a big ass flat fucking plain. I mean flat like the flat parts of Kansas. And we were slightly elevated. (Slope of the plain coming up from the river. There weren't any hills, trust me.) We could see all the way to the Shat Al Arab, Abadan and the refineries. The closest point of concealed approach was about four miles and that was from a line of trees by the refinery. That was to the west and southwest. To the north there wasn't much but the trace of the highway (big one) running to Awhaz. To the south, flat plain that eventually became one of the world's biggest and flattest salt marshes. On a clear day, and there weren't many that clear, you could see the edge of the Gulf.
To the east, way the fuck away, were the Zagros Mountains. You could tell the progression of the seasons by the way the snow on the top slid up and down. Point is, you could see them.
Anybody approaching with any sort of vehicle we were going to detect miles away. Well, once we got eyes in every direction. That took about four weeks.
Chapter Three
Pax Americana
What was happening in that four weeks?
Inside the berm, a lot of changes. We cleared an open area around our zone and rebuilt a FOB inside the LOG. (Fort Lonesome.) It was pretty big for even a company to hold but every time Fillup and me figured we had everything we could possibly need we thought of something else.
I'm from Minnesota. I don't know any Minnesotan, not a real Minnesotan, who's not a pack rat. It's in our genes. I could never have enough parts, rations, water, fuel, to satisfy me. Okay, maybe I was in the right place being an S-4. I hated being left to guard this fucker, but having it all? Mine all mine? The only person to tell me I didn't own it a face on a videophone who was way too far away to force me to do anything? Heaven.
Mine, mine, mine.
Speaking of mines.
We got Fort Lonesome minimally prepared to withstand a significant assault. Then we got started on securing the whole base.
We shouldn't have had to do it. But the ROE that came down on high (which we were still, technically, under) did not permit laying in mines. Don't know why we had so many of the fuckers, but we did. And we didn't lay the mines down first.
First came the outer perimeter fence. That was just to keep kids and dogs out. It took two weeks to lay in and used up just about all of our remaining military link. It was right at six and a half miles around the perimeter. That's one big fucking fence.
We put in gates by the main gate. (Later we played with that extensively.) The main gate had a series of berms, concrete barriers and such to keep suicide trucks from getting to it. The fence linked into the edge of those and we put in outer gates.
Then we got started on the inner defenses. More concertina. (The stacks were, to my amazement, dropping. Who could have known?)
Most of this was getting done by the Nepos. We had multiple patrols working, the gate guards, security for the workers on the fence and a reserve force. The troops didn't have time to do the manual labor.
I'd been pissed at getting the Nepos dumped on us but they were a godsend. Okay, first of all, the troops were, by and large, lousy cooks. The Nepos were decent. They tended to start to cook some odd shit without their British supervisors. If you let them get away with it we would have all been eating vegetarian curry and vindaloo. I'll admit I got a bit of taste for vindaloo but it was not shared by all the troops.
The nice thing, in my opinion, about vindaloo was that it was pork based.
There were problems. Oh. My. GOD were there problems. I'm not talking about security issues, either.
Electricity.
The power plant for the base was a big gas-turbine fucker. Nobody but nobody had any clue how to operate it. But there were back-up generators that were, essentially, diesel-electric railroad engines. Those the mechanics could figure out. And we had one fuck of a lot of diesel in the tank-farm.
We only needed power for the area we were inhabiting. The mechanics and a couple of the Nepos that had some clue about electric got those buildings hooked up to a couple of the generators. But we had a problem with power surging.
So we got on the phone to back home. No, we have no fixed date for your redeployment. You're doing a great job. Keep the faith.
(My fucking dad is dead you bastard and I'm stuck on the ass end of nowhere. All of the troops have gotten word that somebody in their family has died and to say the least morale should be shot. We're keeping it up by giving them shit to do but that's only going to last so long . . . )