By the way, the Nepos were not entirely straight. Oh, I'm not saying they were all queer as a three-dollar bill. I think it was more like prison, maybe a function of their culture. Samad had a slighter built Nepo who always seemed to be hanging around and that he bunked with. Sure. They were just friends.
For that matter there was, I was pretty sure, at least one "couple" among the troops. I didn't give a shit as long as it didn't affect the unit and it didn't seem to. Don't ask, don't tell.
(For clarification: Once Samad got a wife, I never saw hide nor hair of male "close personal friends." And he thinks the question is funny. Most things the Nepos and Americans see pretty eye to eye on. Some things not. Different cultures.)
So. There was an argument for bringing some of the refugee females, if they were amenable, into the camp. When we got relieved, pardon the pun, we could write them off as "locally hired support staff." Whoever was incoming could deal with that.
The question was, what would the nature of our "relief" be? A new unit to sit on the junk? Or leave it all behind? Or destroy it in place?
In the first case, well, camp followers rarely worry about which camp they're following. There might be some broken hearts and pining. Get over it.
In the last two, though, which at one level I considered likely enough to be formulating plans in the back of my mind, there were . . . issues.
Say that we were told "destroy everything, we're coming to get you." (By the way, that would mean coming in by helo. There was no way we were going to work through the airport at this point. Iran had no government. The place was slowly being reorganized under local strong-men. It wasn't until later that such got functional in the Abadan area and when it did . . . Well, ahead of myself again. Point is, we weren't going out by 747.)
If we got extracted we might be able to argue for extracting the Nepos. But a bunch of local civilian women? Uh, uh. Which would probably leave them worse off than before.
I knew my logic was getting messed up. Normally, I could see a situation and make a decision without any real difficulty. Things were black and white. This looked like shades of gray and I wasn't good with gray.
So I took a walk.
Somebody, probably an overzealous engineer lieutenant, had put a "sentry walk" up on the berm near the main area of the base. It was a lousy item, defensively. We didn't have sentries walk the parapets because normally they'd be dead meat for a sniper. But the area faced southeast, where there was fuck-all for miles and we had thermal imagery cameras set up so anyone approaching, especially at night, would be detected at artillery ranges not sniper ranges.
It was, therefore, a decent place to walk and pace.
I think it was the character Horatio Hornblower who used to pace all the time. I didn't. Pacing, to me, was a sign that the commander didn't know what to do. But the truth was, I didn't. And pacing did help me think.
So I put on my battle rattle, headed up to the parapet and paced.
The night was clear and damned cold for Abadan in the summer. The wind was from the east, down off the mountains as it often was. And it was a cool breeze, lemme tell you. But it also helped me think.
I knew that two aspects of the question were fucking with my logic. The first was "female" and the second was "refugee." I'll take the second first.
About fifteen years back was the only time I think it made the news. But UN aid workers in two or three areas were trading refugee supplies to underage refugees, male and female, for sexual favors.
That was, to say the least, a violation of honor. The people were, hands down, scum. They were given a trust and they violated it.
I was contemplating doing something that was, on the surface, identical. Violation of honor? Would I be "scum" even in my own eyes?
The answer depended simply on whether it was the logical decision given all the factors. That led to the "female" part.
Males have a notable fall-off in long-term critical decision making in conditions of sexual cues. And this situation was one huge sexual cue. So I first had to eliminate, for the time being, the term "female."
One way would be to ignore the females, maybe do something to improve the situation but not bring them into the base, and bring in males.
I could not, in good conscience, take in the local males. After disastrous experiences in the first part of the Iraqi occupation, the military never hired locals or even Islamics for anything where they could be a threat. One remaining hardcore that we let in undetected could gain access to the ammunition and explosives on the base, there was no way to control internally with the forces I had, and do untold damage. Bringing in male refugees for support was out of the question.
Females, by the way, did not have the same security risk. Females in most of the local societies were trained, very early, to be nonviolent followers. They were extremely compliant. That would create its own issues, but it virtually eliminated them as a security threat.
I also was going to have to dig out another decision making tool I often used when unsure. "What would Sergeant Rutherford do?"
Sergeant First Class Rutherford had been my platoon sergeant when I led the Scouts. A harder, colder, more stoic NCO I never met. Talking one time he told me that his secret to getting things done was "Do one thing every day that you don't have to do immediately and you don't want to do." A better definition of stoicism I've never seen. And a better way to get stuff done I've never found.
But the question was, what would he do in this instance? How would he make the decision?
Frankly, he would be able to ignore the fact that he was considering females. Not because he was gay, but because he was an ultimate stoic. I was not, and knew it.
So I did a little change in my mind. I quit thinking of females.
I imagined that there was a group of males, say Salvadorans, who had somehow gotten caught in the refugee camp. Because they were not locals, they were being abused by the guards.
Item One: I needed more hands. There were too many tasks I felt necessary to complete the mission for the personnel I had on hand.
Item Two: I could not trust the local males.
So I imagined the females as these hypothetical Salvadorans. If I had a group of non-Islamic males in the camp from a friendly country, would I bring them in to help out?
Oh, hell, yeah. The logic, that way, was clear. Thinking of the potential support in terms of a bunch of Salvadoran former workers that got left outside the walls made it clear it was a rational decision. What would Sergeant Rutherford do? Bring in the Salvadorans.
Okay, but they're not Salvadorans. They're females. They are compliant local females who will do just about anything for a cracker and some water. If they weren't that compliant before, they were now from the reports I was getting from the camp.
That left the question of how to deal with them inside the walls.
Rule One included the rule "No Fraternization." Fraternization is a nice way of saying "Don't fuck the local females." (It was assumed soldiers wouldn't fuck the local males which in numerous instances turned out to be erroneous. But I digress.)
The way that the Army maintained Rule One with a bunch of horny young soldiers was to virtually eliminate contact with local females. Units went out from the FOB on missions and then returned. Mostly for very good security reasons. But the point was, there were no local females inside the base and when males ran into them outside they were a) on a mission, b) in the company of a large number of other males and c) not going to be around long to chat.