In this case, they were going to be in long-term contact with local females.
A military maxim says: Never give an order you know won't be carried out.
Giving an order you know won't be carried out just makes the commander look like an idiot. "Rule One is still in effect" and mixing horny soldiers with compliant local females wouldn't work. Period. Why?
Some of the soldiers were just going to flat ignore it. They, too, would be affected by the reduction in critical decision making in the presence of sexual cues. I'd have guys slipping away from security posts to screw because that was when they could get away with it.
And the girls weren't going to stop them. Why? Compliance and "anything for a cracker." They would also see the males as their protectors.
Giving an order that's unenforcable reduces trust in the commander's decision-making capability. How can you trust somebody who's stupid enough to give an unenforceable order? That means that unit combat efficiency goes down as the troops second-guess their commander.
Trying to enforce Rule One would, therefore, be worse than saying "Here's the girls. They're yours."
If, however, I put in place logical and rational restrictions under the circustances, it could be handled. Rotas, etc. If the guys knew they didn't have to slip away for a quicky, they wouldn't. They'd do their jobs.
Some of the guys would probably be such paladins that, at least at first, they'd take their "rota" as a chance to snuggle with something comfortable. Others were going to use the girls like the Kleenex and towels they were jacking off on already. There would be issues between those two types. That's what sergeants are for.
And they'd get their tubes cleaned. With a bunch of testosterone laden males stuck in the middle of nowhere, no real way to get home, etc. I was looking at the sort of potential mutiny that led to the Bounty, anyway. Right now, if the guys mutinied, they could set themselves up as local lords and fuck Rule One. There was no indication, at all, we were going to ever get relieved. I'd had the question practically every day. I knew there was talk. Heading that off was a good thing. Getting their tubes cleaned was a way to head that off.
In the end I made, I think, the logical decision. The haunted eyes of Salah, multiplied by hundreds in my head, had nothing to do with it. I'd eliminated that, I'm pretty sure successfully with the "Salvadoran" argument. I think Sergeant Rutherford would have approved. (Found out later he died in Savannah. So I never got to ask. Voodoo fuckers.)
The question remained: How to bell the cat?
Up to this point we were having as little to do with the refugees as possible. We tossed them food from the safety of our tracked vehicles. We treated them like a pack of wild dogs.
But we had Salah for information. Apparently after the attack when we'd killed the whole convoy, some of the men of the camp had grabbed the guns. The leader, at this point, was called Abu Bakr. That probably wasn't his real name, since it was the name of one of the successors of Mohammed. But he had the largest family group in the camp and his family had managed to grab the most guns. The shots we'd heard had not been happy noise. His family or people he trusted had the guns. She'd been on the outs with one of his cousins which had led to the incident that had her in the camp.
She didn't know a whole bunch of the people in the camp. But when it was tacitly suggested that we might, maybe, be interested in bringing some women in for support, she nearly broke down. Apparently things were not going well for women at the moment.
Side note: Any feminist who is against modern technology is an idiot. Okay, I'm being redundant but it's true. Women seem to make up a large majority of the "if we all just returned to nature" kumbaya movement.
Modern technology and Western culture are the only things keeping women from a life of utter hell. Every society where social order breaks down it's not necessarily "the poor" who get hit hardest, it's the women.
Kumbaya only works when you've got guys like, well, me keeping guys like Abu Bakr from making your life hell.
End of side note. I could go on, but I won't.
Maybe later.
Was I going to be a total paladin? Oh, hell no. I told her what I needed, about thirty females, young, decent looking, who would cook, clean and provide other "support functions."
Note, I was working through Hollywood, the translator.
"Other support functions, sir?" Hollywood asked.
"What's that Shia thing about "temporary brides"?"
Shia and Sunni. Think Catholic vs. Protestant but more so. I'm not going to get into a five thousand word treatise about the difference. I did note, though, that Abu Bakr was normally a name that would be associated with the Sunni and this was a Shia region which made things in the camp . . . interesting. But one of the things with Shia is that they have this . . . tradition called "temporary marriage." A mullah can "temporarily marry" a Shia female to a guy and for the time that the temporary marriage lasts, say one hour and that will be two hundred bucks, she is legally married and thus does not suffer "dishonor." The "mullah" gets four and you get one, go find another sucker with two hundred bucks, bitch.
Use "pimp" as a translation for "mullah" and you're getting a very accurate picture.
"Uh, we'd need a mullah for that, sir."
"Yeah, and it's a violation of so many regulations I don't want to begin to list them. Rule One, for example. But we need the hands and we need to be relieved. You an Islamic?"
"Uh, technically, sir."
"Good. Then tell her you're a mullah. I'll get you a pimped out Caddy when we get back to the States. Spinners and what-not. Maybe a big hat with a feather."
"I'm not a mullah!"
"I don't care how you explain it to her, as long as she gets the picture."
I don't know how he explained it. She got the picture.
She didn't even mind. Let me put you in her perspective.
You're a seventeen-year-old girl. Your father—who has been your boss your whole life and will be until you are married and your husband becomes your boss—is dead. Your whole life has been ripped apart. You are barely holding onto life in a desert. You have no control over your life or over your body. Once a day a big metal tracked vehicle comes out of a place and there is food and water. Maybe you are allowed to keep some of it. From the look of Salah, not much. You only get a bit of water, less than most Americans drink in an hour. And it is hot (not as hot as normal, but up in the 90s) and men take you whenever they please and any way that they please and usually more than one at a time.
Beyond the berm is paradise. So far, despite being surrounded by men, you have not been raped. You have been given more food than you've seen in months. You can have all the water to drink that you like. You can even dream of having a shower or a bath, something you haven't had in months. You're in air conditioning.
And all they are asking, asking mind you, is if you're willing to work at cooking and cleaning and, oh, yeah, spending some time on your back. Probably in a bed not the hard desert floor. You're not being told, mind you. You may not quite realize that, you may be thinking that they're being nice now but will change their mind soon. But you're being asked. And asked if others would be willing.