Well, by then my bio was so public record it practically was platinum. They all knew Dad was dead. So what's the bad news? So some reporter started sniffing around.
Before I knew it, I was only being asked what I thought of the Bitch's farm policies!
Oh, Christ. I didn't like any of her policies. Taking my farms was just icing on the cake. (And, yes, they were my farms. Dad was dead. I was his legal heir. My. Farms.)
That was into late December of 2019. Much had already been made of the fact that "Centurion" and his forces had been the ones responsible for opening up the Kurdish oil fields to start supplying Western Europe and the U.S. Quite a bit had been made, now that reporters could get in and interview others in the area, of that fact that Bandit Six had:
1. Established a new nation called Kurdistan with which the U.S. now had formal relations and which hadn't existed prior to the plague and only existed (so the story went) because of the Centurions and especially The "Centurion."
2. Had participated in diplomacy to essentially rewrite a good bit of the Middle East and had groups talking together and working together amicably who had been enemies for thousands of years.
3. Was held up as the major reason that there was a new republic forming around Iraq and the area that was very friendly with the U.S. It was expanding slowly but might soon have all of Iran and Iraq back to some semblance of civilization. And The Centurion was the primary cause.
Look, all I did was talk on the phone. It was the rest of those guys who were doing the hard work. But it's very hard to stop a meme once it gets started. I Was The Shit.
Because:
Heating oil, which was at a premium and rationed anyway, was only available because of "the heroic actions of these Last Centurions" who had somehow saved the world while doing nothing but running out of the Middle East with our tails between our legs. (Okay, not quite, but there were nights when that was what was going through my head.)
Ditto gasoline, natural gas, etc.
And politicians were already "declaring" their run for president.
And suddenly the fact that "The Centurion" had had his farms seized (months ago) by the U.S. government was a political hot potato. People were trotting out, I shit you not, that old story about Maximus that Russell Crowe did a pretty good job with in The Gladiator.
I was off the news so fast it was incredible.
I was "unavailable for comment." I was "on operations." I was "working hard for the nation."
I was in the fucking Pentagon.
BOOK THREE
THE NEW CENTURIONS
Chapter One
Ruminations on Durance Vile
It's said, justifiably, that in the Pentagon, light birds are the coffee bitches.
I was a fucking major. A very junior one. On temporary duty no less. I carried the piss-pot.
It didn't matter that I was "Centurion." The REMFs were just jealous and pissy. The warriors who were stuck in durance vile knew it was all a crock, anyway.
I thought they were just hiding me out. Oh, no. They were putting me to work.
I got stuck in "The Department of Emergency Supply Methodology."
Okay, an "oxymoron" is when two words don't go together. Jumbo shrimp. Happy marriage. (Wife edit: HEY!)
What is it when three words don't go together?
In an emergency, plans always leave out the emergency. So no matter what method you'd planned on using, you always end up finding out it don't work. "No plan survives contact with the enemy" or the disaster as the case may be.
And supply is always short.
Troxymoron?
So what was the "Department of Emergency Supply Methodology"?
It was the Army's Department of the Agriculture and FEMA combined.
USDA was just about the largest department in the government. It had, I shit you not, more county farm agents than there were total counties in the U.S. The one thing that is eternal, forget the stars—they burn out in a few million to billion years—is a government program. The USDA had programs that went back to the horse and buggy days. It had programs that were designed to "ensure critical military supplies of . . ." stuff that the military hadn't used in decades. Like, say, mohair wool. (I think that one actually finally got cut in the '90s.)
Were farmers at least in part to blame. Oh, hell yeah. We'd been major lobbyists since it referred to some hotel in DC where guys would hang out in the lobby to snag the arm of visiting congressmen. Back then, nobody stayed in DC if they could possibly avoid it (it was listed as a "hardship post" by the State Department) and most of Congress stayed in various hotels. The most powerful stayed in one in particular (damned if I can remember the name. The Lafayette?) and guys hired by various interest groups would hang out in the lobby hoping to snag them. And Farmers were one of the interest groups.
Am I gonna justify it? I could try. People that lived through 2020 and 2021, though, can probably justify it better by the results of farming "special interests" NOT getting their way in 2019 and 2020.
The point is the links between the USDA and the Army went waaay back. Back before the Civil War when it was the Agriculture Bureau of the Department of the Interior.
Here's a thing for you. Army veterinarians and vet techs (yes, the Army has both) were also the Army's food safety inspectors. Why?
Because the Army used to buy most of its meat on the hoof. And then slaughter same. You didn't used to be able to store beef and pork for very long. If you wanted meat, you slaughtered a steer and ate it. Vets made sure the beef wasn't ridden with diseases. Ergo: Food inspectors.
When storage methods improved big companies started supplying in big ways. ("Uncle Sam" actually came from the Civil War. One of the main suppliers of Union Forces was owned by a guy named Sam. The stuff was stamped "US." "We got another food delivery from Uncle Sam.") But the food still had to be inspected. Companies did then and do now occasionally cut corners a little too close.
Thus vets were the food inspectors. End of history lesson.
But, generally, the Army kept out of agriculture and the USDA didn't tell us how to fight wars. As long as USDA kept up the supply of food for the troops and we kept people from invading, nobody tread on each other's turf.
Problem was, in 2019 the USDA wasn't keeping people fed.
Don't get me wrong. The USDA can't feed a damned person. They're not farmers or distributors or processors. But they can, and their mission was, to "create a favorable environment for American agricultural production."
The problem being . . . the Bitch. And all the thousand of appointees she'd brought in.
Look, the Bitch wasn't, essentially, an environmentalist. I don't think so anyway, not beyond the "I won't throw stuff out my window cause that's littering" level of environmentalist. She contributed to some environmental groups, sure, but that's just feel good stuff unless you give all your money to them and live in a hut and a ragged shift.
But she had had to make a lot of political deals to get elected. And more notably to get the nomination because she was not what the hard left considered "a true believer." And while she'd packed important posts like Justice and Commerce and Defense and State with her more core supporters, mostly lawyers, she'd had to give stuff to the wackoes to keep them on her side.