"I need a tanker unit. Enough for ten tanks and all the support they're going to need to keep them running in the field under awful conditions. And I need guys who can, no shit, no question, no ifs ands or buts, go wherever I tell them to go however I tell them to and can fight like motherfuckers when they get there. I need the best tank platoon in the Army and a couple of extras for spice."
I don't know if the Mongrels was the best tank platoon in the Army. I do know they were very good.
Second Platoon had liked their tanks and didn't like giving them up. They felt they'd proven their worth.
I had the Mongrels take them out and show them something about the systems they'd been using.
Technically, an M-1 has 4000 meters of range.
One of the Mongrel crews went over the pass and, with intent, went off a small cliff on the south side. Fired in air, gun pointed sideways. Hit one of the, admittedly stationary, Abrams that was out on the plain from nearly 5000 meters.
Before it hit the ground. Then it fired four more shots in about ten seconds as it headed down the, very bumpy, ridge. Three of the four hit other targets. Most at very near max range.
Second Platoon stopped bitching and went back to their Strykers.
The Mongrels were a "reinforced" platoon under a first lieutenant. He quickly learned about "coffee."
Chapter Twenty
Adana, Van, Christ It Sounds the Same with a Turkish Accent
Meanwhile I was shucking and jiving.
I offered all the Brads and the Abrams I'd left in the desert to the Kurds. Almost all. I needed to rebuild my losses. I also needed other things.
Most of the Kurds in the Mosul area came from that general area of Kurdistan. The tribes in the immediate "Iraqi" area.
I asked for, and got, Perg Mersha to "assist me in actions in the Anatolian region." But.
This is where I needed negotiation room.
I pointed out to the Turkish general that I was going to need some things if I was going to do this op. And he'd been informed that if I didn't get what I wanted, I had the final say-so on conducting my operation. Basically, he'd better geek or I'd pack up and go home.
Which is why the Kurdish areas of what was once Turkey are now "Kurdistan." (The Iranian areas came later.)
Also why Istanbul is named, again, Byzantium. (I wanted to go for Constantinople but my own guys talked me out of that one.) That one was kind of silly, but it had bugged me for years.
I didn't ask for the statue. I didn't know about the statue until it was practically done. That Turk general had my number. If he'd asked me I'd have screamed blue blazes. Fucking thing is a nightmare. Every damned ship, including cruise ships, that goes through the Bosporus can see the damned thing. I mean you can't fucking miss it. As an engineering work, it's pretty fucking impressive. Pissed me off, though.
I also didn't ask for the sword. Still got it over the mantelpiece, though. Heirloom and all that.
And I'm actually sort of surprised at the statue. When we left, the Turks were a little pissed at us.
But that's for later.
The Kurds were, basically, attacking in two directions with damned little in the way of logistics. Very Kurdish in that.
It took two weeks to get everything in place. Including plane loads of gear. I'd said I didn't need it then got pack-rattish. But, fuck, I needed it.
Then we set off to waves and yells from the Kurds. Somewhere they'd found flowers and all that stuff. The troops were getting kissed by girls and it was a grand send off.
It was snowing like a bitch. Nice of them to turn out in all that snow.
It snowed harder. And more and snowed and fucking snowed.
The first part was easy-peasy. The Kurds controlled all the territory up the Tigris well into what used to be Turkey. And the Tigris went way into Turkey. Since it cut through the mountains down that way, the roads and railroads kinda followed the same line.
Yeah, there was a railroad. I'd thought about loading the Abrams on it but things were kinda messed up and I was only a company. I couldn't get a railroad running. So we drove.
We'd gotten tank-carriers, though, for the Abrams. The Iraqis had them. We had to unload sometimes when shit got bad. The Abrams made dandy snow plows.
The shit got very bad. The Taurus mountains are not exactly Alpine but they are very rugged. And they're very volcanically active. We ran across the hot-spring we based "Elephants" around up in the Taurus and decided it was a good place to lay up for a couple of days. The guys camped (not CAM(P)ed, that was later) and warmed up in the water. "Battery" was later, too. But that was in Turkey. When it got worse.
There was actually a border post when we passed out of the Kurdish region. By then we not only had the "task force" of Bravo and the Mongrels and the Nepalese, we'd picked up a fair trail of Kurds. About a battalion of infantry under a tough old guy from the Turkish regions. The Turks really didn't like it when we turned up with him. Turns out he was wanted as a terrorist. Looked like one. But we were all friends now. I invited him to "coffee" and he brought a couple of lieutenants and the commo trailer was getting really overloaded. Since we were having to stop to log these days, we just scheduled a log-stop for "coffee" time and did it then. I missed the old "Bravo Company . . . arriving" thing but if they ever build a commo van large enough to hold an officers' call for a short brigade I don't want to be in it.
Once we passed out of the Kurdish region, though, things got tougher. The Kurds had been keeping some of the roads open. None of these were. And although the Turks said that this region was "under their control" there were, to say the least, areas where control was spotty. We got ambushed about every other day. Mostly it was the equivalent of bandits, guys trying to steal our shit. But getting hit by bandits isn't much different than getting hit by muj. And quite often you can't tell the difference in places like that.
Hell, there was a reason to hit us. We had food. Most of the region was starving already. What they were going to do in the spring and summer I had no idea. Assuming there was a spring and summer.
There was a main road running from Van to Ankara, where the Turk general's capital was. I thought he said they had it all under control and that it was open. Problem was, there was no good way to get to it.
Last Kurd control was the edge of Diyarbakar province. We were on little fucking hairpin roads trying to get to Mus, where the "highway" was. Passed the Kurd outpost in the pass above Mus. Fucking bunker with a stove going for all it was worth and the pass was already under six feet of snow. The Abrams were off their carriers and towing them.
Then they were trying to keep them from sliding off the mountain on the other side. I'd thought we'd hit some mountains in the Kurd region, got a new appreciation for the term in the fucking Taurus.
The Nepos, of course, loved it. Oh, they called them "hills" and said they weren't "real" mountains. But they were running around at every stop, and there were a lot of them, like little kids. We hit places where you had to sort of gasp for air. They said it was still too thick but getting better.
Runty Himalayan fuckers.
We finally made it to Mus. Not much to see. It was just another Plague-ridden city with a crashed population and, at that point, a serious weather problem. And, as it turned out, a group of hardcores that were more of a gang than anything. See "Battery."