The Living Will Envy The Dead (25 page)

The first issue raised, much to my surprise, was gun control.  In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all.  Don’t get me wrong; Americans, particularly military veterans, are not gun-crazy freaks.  We just have a tradition of an armed citizenry as the final bulwark against official tyranny and the occasional official fuck-up, such as the Jail Posse.  If the Stonewall Prison had suffered an escape, we were
not
going to be hiding in our homes while the State Police – or whoever – searched for the escaped prisoners.  Quite a few of the survivors of the Final War had even planned to fight the government, or the UN’s mythical fleet of black helicopters, or both.

(Which actually leads into a very important point regarding governments.  The people running the governments have self-interests of their own.  At best, this results in Empire-building on a small scale, at worst this results in official tyranny.  You can’t give the vast powers of a People’s Commissioner to someone and not expect them to be tempted by the possibilities.  Russia is – was – studded with the results of such people, from
dachas
that are effectively mansions to massive and completely useless factories.  It only gets worse when non-governmental organisations, with even less accountability, are involved.  They tend to think that just because they’re a charity, they know better than the people who have lived in the area for hundreds of years, even when they evidently do not.  Your charitable donation, far from helping, might have done untold harm…but I digress.)

The argument raged backwards and forwards for nearly an hour before Ben-David finally managed to work out some kind of consensus.  I didn’t take any part in the argument, although like all Americans, I
do
have a position on practically anything.  (Heinlein was wrong; everyone has opinions on everything, even if they don’t know anything about the matter under discussion.  It isn’t just sex and religion.)  I suspect that the real issue wasn't gun ownership, or even gun control, but preventing gun misuse.  A gun in the hands of a citizen who knew how to use it – and took care of it – isn’t particularly dangerous to the innocent.  A gun in the hands of an armed robber – as the saying goes, once guns are banned, only outlaws will have guns – is incredibly dangerous.  If I learned that someone was on the verge of doing something really unpleasant, like a college shooting, I would insist on disarming him for the safety of everyone else.  You might feel that I was infringing on his rights, but no one has the right to take a pot-shot or three at the innocent.  It’s easy to see why the entire issue becomes so muddy, with claims, counter-claims, and threats.  No one is rational when it comes to guns.

I wasn’t entirely surprised at the outcome.  The right to own guns would be inalienable for every citizen, although criminals would be banned from owning guns once convicted – stupid, I thought; criminals would have no problems obtaining guns illegally, even if it was remotely enforceable – and full training would be provided in schools in using guns.  That was a better idea, I felt; proper training can lead to avoiding the handful of accidents that can occur when guns are involved. If the myth of gun-ownership leading to superpower status, or at least being treated as bestowing a dangerous glamour, could be discredited, we’d have fewer accidents.  A gun is a tool, nothing more.  Owning a gun doesn’t make someone a warrior.

(I doubted that they would follow Uncle Billy’s method.  He’d told me, right from the start, that if I played silly buggers – his exact words – while he was teaching me, the first time I’d be spanked so hard I wouldn’t be sitting down for a week and the second time he’d just stop teaching me.  I took that warning seriously.  It might have kept a few dozen idiot kids paying attention.)

The discussion verged onto other themes.  The women who wanted to ban everything got up and made a long speech, which was interrupted by someone throwing a tomato with dubious accuracy.  It missed her – shame, really, or so I thought – and came down on some other poor bastard, who hadn’t been wearing a hat.  I took a moment to evict the tomato-thrower and in the meantime the woman had been shouted down by most of the crowd.  It always amuses me how many people seek to improve other people’s lives by means of the law, regardless of how their victims think about it, and…well, it always struck me as short-sighted.  If you want to end a particular kind of behaviour, it’s a good idea to pick on something that would give you the support of the vast majority of people. 

The more serious issue took longer to resolve; governmental interference.  The government had a habit of telling people what to do and that was, naturally, resented.  The government had, before the war, been leaning towards the ‘green’ way of farming – long story there, look it up – and urging farmers to adopt it.  They might have had the best motives -  they always did, of course – but farmers resented being treated as idiots, particularly when they weren't.  Sounds simple, right…?

But…the government was also needed to ensure minimum safety standards as well, and to act as umpire when Management and Labour clashed.  (If, of course, it was a fair-minded umpire enforcing fair play.)  How could anyone square this particular circle?

Perhaps I need a second Iron Law of Government:

“The trick to maintaining a government is to keep it balanced between doing too little and doing too much
.”

Luckily, before I could go mad, I found myself with other responsibilities.

We didn’t know it yet, but we were on the verge of war.

War is not a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided.

-Philip Bobbitt

Personally, I blame Mac.

Ok, that’s not entirely fair.  While I’d been doing exciting things like overseeing the Constitutional Convention – oh joy – and supervising exploration and scavenging missions, Mac had been sitting down with the other military professionals to hammer out the details of the new army.  Yes, we had agreed fairly quickly on that the ‘common defence’ was a common concern, which was a surprising development, because politics before the war had rarely focused on internal defence.  The generation that survived the war took a far more pragmatic approach to defence. 

It helped that most of the Principle Towns had a high percentage of
real
military veterans.  I’m not talking about desktop warriors, or high-grade Rear-Echelon Mother Fuckers who moved from flying a desk into a high-paying ‘consultancy’ for one corporation or another that produces war-related materials, but veterans from every war since Vietnam.  Men who have been there and done that, seen the elephant and survived spitting in the bastards eye, real soldiers in every sense of the word.  Oh, there were Marines, Navy, Air Force and other units – some of which had been heavily classified before the war – in the area, but most of them had some experience of being on the sharp end.  They had experience in real war.

There’s a joke civilians are fond of telling; soldiers – particularly the stereotypical generals – are always preparing to fight the
last
war.  In a sense, they’re entirely correct; where else could they learn from their mistakes, or their successes?  Military officers are not blessed with the ability to see the future, although war games do offer a shadowy glance into the possible future of war, but they can learn from past wars.  Its not uncommon for the wrong lessons to be drawn – the Gulf War, which drew heavily on Vietnam, was turned into a brief war that didn’t even manage to rebuild the status quo – but again, where else can they learn?  The men – and some women – in the Principle Towns had learned from Iraq, Africa and even Central America.  They had never expected to be fighting in America itself.

Actually, that’s not entirely true.  Most of them, like me, had given some thought to how they would defend their towns if attacked, something that probably played a large role in their survival.  It’s normally good to have a contingency plan, even if it doesn’t quite work out in practice.  They had saved their towns and, now, were devoting their mental energies to keeping the roads open between the towns.  There were bandits in them there hills…

(Actually, I haven’t told you about the Principle Towns yet.  The Principle Towns were the largest – population wise – to survive the war and had the greatest chances of survival before we started to make contact with other towns.  They were, naturally, very important politically and ended up sending the most representatives to the Convention to discuss the future.  They all agreed that we needed an army and that, at least, we could organise without having to wait for the Convention to produce a vote.)

Anyway…what they’d agreed on had been a three-tier system, one that would allow them to split their interests in defending their own towns with working towards building a secure environment.  We were, to some extent, involved in a counter-insurgency campaign and they’re never easy, although in this case it was pretty much a matter of simply outlasting the insurgents.  The problem with any sort of counter-insurgency campaign is that people are loyal to their own towns, but not always loyal to the whole country.  It had been a serious problem in Iraq.  We would recruit and train up a group of volunteers and send them to another location, where they would make themselves unpopular, while their hometowns and villages were attacked by insurgents.  The solution we found – finally – was to have people defending their own towns and the story of how we did it makes shameful reading.  We should have pushed for it at once.

I’d built the barebones of the system in Ingalls and Dutch and the others had had similar ideas.  The first-tier would be the regular soldiers, insofar as such a term could be used, volunteers and trained to as high a standard as possible.  (There would be no laser tag-like training tools for us, or some of the other really neat toys that we’d used in our own training.  We had to be a lot more careful.)  They would spend their entire careers as soldiers, defending the entire United States – which was really a third of West Virginia, at least at the time – and be rotated through the different towns and villages.  That wasn't just to get them used to the idea of defending the entire state, although that was a factor in our thinking, but also to let them get a feel for the terrain – the new terrain.  Places like Clarksburg and, later, Charleston, no longer looked like their maps.  Visiting one of those ruined cities was a depressing experience.  I had to remove several people from the scavenging teams after they had breakdowns.  The soldiers would be the front lines of our defence.

The second-tier would be the militia.  They were basically composed of conscripts in the different towns, charged with defending the town against attack, if – when – it was attacked.  They were all conscripts – and therefore couldn’t be pushed as hard as the volunteers – but we would train them as hard as possible…and, of course, they would have the advantage of their own ground.  It wasn't going to be easy to be them, not when they would be splitting their time between defence duties and everything else – mainly farming – but I had faith in them.  And again, they were more expendable than the vets.  The vets were everywhere.  There were only a handful of them we could take away permanently without something falling to pieces.

And, finally, there was everyone else.  Rose had been insisting that the girls learned to fire guns and fight as well, and, of course, the veterans would have to take up arms in their own defence, those who weren't already part of the militia.  If the defences were broken, it would be the task of every man – and woman – in the place to fight to the last to defend their town, or face whatever fate the raiders had in mind for them.  We had seen enough harrowing examples from various places that hadn’t been so well-defended – everything from rape to cannibalism – that our final defenders were very well motivated indeed.  I’ve always said that the best way to discourage a rapist is to ensure that all the women know how to carry and use a concealed weapon.  Mr Darwin takes care of the rest.

So, we had the bare bones of a military.  What else did we have?  We had a small selection of vehicles, the best we could recover, for as long as the gasoline held out.  There were plans to build a 1900s era oil refinery and some other possible sources of oil – and we had worked hard to conserve as much as we could – but we couldn’t get dependent on it.  We had radios – they worked over short range, those that had survived the EMP – and we had some other equipment, but…well, let’s just say that the men of my old Company would have laughed at us.  We weren't
that
much better equipped than the Iraqi insurgents had been, although we were far better trained and we didn’t face a powerful and well-equipped opposition.

(There were several teams working on trying to obtain an air force, of sorts, but that program hadn’t shown any results yet.  I let it continue, just on the off chance they would succeed, even though the EMP had crippled every aircraft we had discovered, those that had survived the war.  An air force would be very – very – useful indeed.)