(You know his really hot oldest wife? The serious "Islamic women's libber" who goes around unveiled and is on all the talk shows? "Gorgeous eyes?" Also a former ambassador? But more importantly the current head of the PU Secret Service and touted as the next president?
(Shadi is going to fucking kill me. She's got lots of assassins on her payroll. I'm going to fucking die.)
(Wife Edit: So that's why we get that big box of almonds every year. I'm not eating any when this comes out. You can have them all.)
So we rolled.
I'm not going to do an Anabasis and give a blow by blow account of the whole trip. Basically, it sucked. Not quite as much as it sucked for the Ten Thousand, but it sucked.
Oh, hell. Okay. I'll do the whole fucking Anabasis . . . Even if most people have seen it in reruns.
We were starting off, by then, in late September of 2019. We left on September 25th.
Now, in late September in Minnesota, back then you could get some frosts.
Abadan is on the same latitude as Jacksonville, Florida. And for some pretty straightforward meteorological reasons, it has a hotter climate. Way hotter in the summer, rarely as cool in the winter.
The day we had the wedding it snowed. Let's just say that it didn't used to snow much in Jacksonville anytime and it hadn't snowed in Abadan in recent memory even in the dead of winter.
Snow in September.
Yep, classic Big Chill weather. We all know that. Intellectually, I knew that. Problem being, we were headed north.
So that's the climatological issue covered for the nonce.
Second "issue."
We didn't want to go over by Ahwaz. There were still probably remnants of the HAMB over that way. My plan was, as much as possible, to get through all areas with as little incident as I could manage. I knew that there were going to be incidents.
("Incidents." Hah-hah-hah-hah! This is me madly chuckling. "Incidents." Bwah.)
I took a look at a lot of maps and had traced out a route I figured was going to keep us away from the majority of problems. We weren't going near any big cities and were going to skirt towns as much as possible. Unfortunately, for some really simple terrain reasons, we were going to have to get closer to Baghdad than I liked. And because we were moving to the east of the Tigris, which was the wetter side, there were going to be a lot of water crossings. That was going to totally suck.
Might as well talk about equipment, which has to cover personnel as well.
We'd dumped the girls. So there were three groups under my command and controclass="underline" The infantry company under Fillup, the Nepos, and the technicians under their NCOIC.
One thing I'd done, coldheartedly, was to figure out which were the most important to the mission of getting home and the order was: The technicians, the U.S. infantry, and the Nepos.
Why?
I only had a few technicians. (The satellite/internet/electronics geek from Fillup's company was now in that crowd.) We were rolling with a lot of wheeled and some tracked vehicles. Wheeled and tracked vehicles break. They need maintenance that goes beyond "filler up and check the oil." Commo breaks. Weapons break.
We were going to need to have most of this stuff most of the way through the mission. I needed those techs to keep it running. Lose one grunt or Nepo and I was out a shooter. I had lots of shooters. Lose one tech and I was probably fucked.
So the technicians were going to need careful handling and feeding. They were all, basically, Fobbits anyway. Oh, they could handle themselves in an ambush if they were firing from a vehicle but I wasn't going to be using them for any assaults even if they weren't as valuable as gold.
So the techs had to be protected.
Fortunately, there was a way to kill two birds with one stone.
Military equipment is very heavy. It's got lots of metal parts and then, of course, all that armor. With a few exceptions (and we weren't taking any Humvees at all) you can't tow it with your neighbor's car. You need big fucking metal to tow a Stryker very far.
Thus you have the armored vehicle recovery vehicle. (Heavy Equipment Recovery Combat Utilty Lift and Evacuation System: HERCULES.) Hercules looks sort of like a big fucking tank without a gun. And it's got more power than God. It can tow, I shit you now, two Abrams tanks at the same time. (The suckers weigh in at 73 TONS apiece to give you an idea what I mean by "more power than God.") It's not real fast, unfortunately, but it could keep up with us. We weren't going to be going fast.
There were over a dozen of them in the base. I'd pulled out four before rigging. We ended up taking two. Why two? Redundancy. More on that later.
Now, this was a big motherfucker. And it was designed to carry a "recovery team" of three guys. In other words, I could fit six techs in those.
Then there was another necessity. We were going to be crossing a lot of watercourses. Some of them we could ford. Some of them there were bridges strong enough to take even the recovery vehicles. Others we were going to have to bridge.
Big bridges were out of the question. They take, like, a fucking engineering battalion to put up. But the Army also has a cute little "fast bridging" armored system based on an Abrams chassis. It was the only Abrams chassis we were taking. I do love those big motherfuckers, even if they are hard to destroy. But they just sucked so much gas and were so hard to move through certain areas I had to leave my last two. (And I didn't destroy them. I left them for the mullah. Seemed like the Christian thing to do. And they had ammo.)
Point was, it could span a thirty-foot watercourse. Crew of three. More techs. They could learn as they drove. Driving an Abrams is not hard.
So I had lots of heavy metal wrapped around my techs. It gave me warm fuzzies.
We took two of the big rolling command post/commo vans. They were Strykers with a big ass box on the back and could keep up satellite commo and local radio even on the move. Lots of electronics I rarely fiddled with. They were supposed to be for battalions and above. What the fuck, I was a reinforced company. Close enough. Later I got closer. I'll get to it.
Then there were the Strykers. We had enough for all the guys and most of the Nepos. We could have had them for all the rest of the Nepos but I had another use for them.
Now, Napoleon said "An army travels on its stomach." Since I wasn't planning on walking to the Bosporus, much less low-crawling, this army traveled on more than its stomach. All those vehicles took fuel. Lots of it. Military vehicles are graded in gallons per mile not the reverse. (Strykers are a bit better, but not much.) We were going to need a lot of fuel.
Since I wasn't planning on looting local villages for olives and shit (see Anabasis) we were going to need food. That was mostly going to be MREs and BritRats. The latter were for the Nepos. And they'd brought some of their own food that they might get a chance to cook.
We were going to need water, both for the vehicles from time to time and for our own consumption. Most of the vehicles were towing a trailer. Some of them were water buffalos. We also had a portable ROWPU we could figure out how to use. Had an onboard generator. Quit working? Why do you think I brought the techs?
We needed ammo. We might need lots of ammo. There's never such a thing as too much ammo. There's only too much ammo to carry.