Retribution (Soldier Up - Book Five 5) (3 page)

“No sir I haven’t,” Colonel Lambert responded. “Would you like to take it, sir?”

“Thank you Colonel I would,” President Washington replied.

For the next forty-two minutes, the President summarized the overall status of the entire military on the West Coast, civilian population and the camps, the fight against the Islamic States of America and the retaking of Southern California from Mexico and the mega-gangs of Los Angeles.  He couldn’t overstate the use of the USS Hornet and USS Iowa as well as emphasizing the rebuilding of the United States Military, all branches, and how they were trained and deployed.  All of it done in over a year.  After the President finished running through the highlights the conference room at Fort Bragg was quiet.  Every Officer and NCO in the room was quiet, lost in thought.

“Sir, “General Portson said. “That’s quite a story. How’d they do it?”

Everyone in the conference room was wondering the same thing

The President responded to General Portson’s question, “Colonel John Clayton.”

General Portson and the others were confused by the President’s response except for General Moon, “Sir, are you referring to Colonel Clayton of the 19
th
Special Forces Group?”

“No, I’m now referring to Brigadier General Clayton, Special Advisor to the President of the United States. He was previously known as Colonel Clayton of the 19
th
Special Forces Group.” President Washington said.  “He was the architect of the recovery on the West Coast and did some rather amazing things with far less resources than you and I have now.”

What President Washington said was meant as a rebuke to all of the officers in the conference room at Fort Bragg.  “I’m just as responsible for not acting, for not seeing the bigger picture and thinking outside of the box.  I failed the people of the United States, well at least those in and around the Washington D.C. area.” President Washington ranted. 

Everyone in the room nodded at the President’s admission, which was something quite unexpected.  “General Clayton quickly recognized the event for what it was,” President Washington said.  “He took immediate action by securing Camp Parks and quickly getting a status report of all units on post and sent his staff out to gather all of the information on available resources.  From there he opened the Special Operations facilities and went to work. He waited a week to move on Hayward and surrounding communities to secure all of the retail facilities and fuel in the area and brought it all on post.  He got to work accepting refugees and that started to settle around the camp.  He started his own recruitment drives for the services and started to rebuild there.   Once they were strong enough, they secured the refineries around the bay area and got control of gangs and militias that had formed.  Listen Gentlemen I can go on and on about what he did.  The bottom line is that they have an active Army and Air Force, they have a Navy for what it’s worth, that has ships that can bring the fight, and they have the Marine Corps, which fought hard to survive. We’re behind the gun on this, gentlemen and we have a ways to catch up.”

“Is there a plan?” General Moon asked.

“You bet there is,” exclaimed the President.  “General Clayton is here in Washington now working with the Pentagon and putting together a plan as we speak.  We have aircraft generals; we have B-29s and B-52s. We can go where and when we want.”

Every single jaw dropped in the conference room, “Sir what are your orders?” General Portson asked.  The commander of the 82
nd
Airborne Division smiled, “Looks like we’re back in business!”

It had been a year since the event and life at the Camp One near the main gate to United States military post Camp Parks was tolerable.  They had electricity twelve hours a day, which was free of charge provided by the military.  They had shelter, which was also free of charge and also provided by the military with specific stipulations such as a home inspection once a quarter.  This was to ensure cleanliness and functionality of the dwelling, since they were all living in very close quarters. Because of the demise of modern medicine, disease was a very real worry.  To be fair the military had the same expectations of the military families on Camp Parks.

              Every adult was required to work, but there were many jobs to pick from – administrative, security, laborer, nurse, doctor—many of the same ones that existed prior to the event.  However, several of the jobs required traveling around each township and collecting the dead bodies, trying to identify them, then moving them to the rather large morgue on Camp Parks to be dealt with there.  They were also jobs that went around cleaning up the fallen aircraft that had literally dropped out of the sky on the day of the event.  As they found out it took a long time to clean up the crash of a fallen airliner.

              There was also the searching of empty homes, places people had abandoned and never returned.  After searching and taking anything that could be used which was sent back to Camp Parks they marked the house or building for destruction.  The rationale behind that was it was unsanitary and dangerous, especially as time passed and the buildings fell into disrepair and started to fall down.  This created all sorts of hazards where wild animals took refuge and many of those animals were from local zoos: large cats such as lions, tigers, jaguars, mountain lions and others that seemed to be flourishing without people around.  There had been dozens of attacks by these animals over the past several months, which killed adults and children alike.

              These buildings were also fire hazards, especially during lightning storms.  These fires had spread over many blocks consuming the dilapidated structures.  The fear that one of these days the fire would spread to well within the camps and hurt and or kill many people.  Tribal bands who didn’t belong to a camp also started fires. They were nomadic and as they moved from town-to-town and city-to-city they occupied these old buildings.  They accidentally or purposefully set fires, which in some cases did get close to the camps that surrounded Camp Parks. 

              There were exceptions to the ”Everyone work” rule; for instance a man or woman was given the opportunity to say home with a newborn until the child became a toddler. Then there was a community daycare or preschool for the child to attend that ran twenty-four hours a day.  Everyone was paid in coined currency, which was minted in San Francisco in the US Mint.  The value of the coin in gold, silver or copper was the actual value of the coin.  Each camp had a government store that was supervised by the military.  The items within the store were things that had been collected over the past year from the big box stores, supermarkets, pharmacies, warehouses and abandoned homes and storage facilities.   In turn that money was put back into the camps by the government to build new waste treatment facilities. In some cases that meant digging new latrines and burying the old ones, certainly there were other stores that were in each camp where people could buy locally grown farm fresh fruit and vegetables. There was plenty of available land to grow on.   The military had set up a process where people could apply for small grants of land to grow vegetables and fruits on and by no means were they required to sell any of it.  Many of the ranches and farms in the area provided people with meat, which could be rather expensive given the time of the year.  There was some refrigeration, but mostly on Camp Parks and it was primarily used for certain medicines they had recovered and for meat and other items that a strong military needed. This wasn’t a secret and did cause some resentment between the camps and the military.

              All of the camps had access to the youth schools – elementary, middle and high schools.  Schools were located on post to help keep children and staff secure.  There were a lot of bad people off post and to varying degrees in the camps that surrounded Camp Park and since working was a requirement at the camps the parents were gone during the day.  Most of them felt the best place for the children to go was on post.  There were after school activities such as soccer, baseball, softball, basketball and others.  They did as much as they could to keep the kids busy and engaged. There had been some discussion in a couple of the camps to start their own schools and or after school activities.  To be sure, there were some, such as tutoring services, where some of the youth practice fields were off post and within or near the camps, which was a necessity as most people didn’t have a car. 

              Most people got around by walking, bicycling, horseback riding, scooters or motorcycles, but fuel was hard to come by, as the military was very stingy about its use. With the winter months coming, the military made heating oil and kerosene available through the government-run stores.  It was expensive right now to buy it, as wood was still the warmth source and there was plenty of it.  With the number of houses and buildings being torn down there was a surplus of wood that was free, but it burned fast and because much of the wood had been chemically treated, it could be toxic.  The military assured the civilians that more and more heating oil and kerosene was becoming available and there would be plenty of it.  They were working out the processes to make more of it and they were well on their way to being able to refine it, so there would be plenty of it and it would be cheap too.

              Water came from various resources; catching rainwater in large trash cans that people had acquired from housing areas was the easiest by-and-large.  Some people realized the monetary potential in having large water farms where they collected water in anything that could catch it.  They then boiled it and placed it in plastic bottles.  After an outbreak of cholera due to bad water, an unscrupulous water farmer didn’t purify the water; he bottled it and sold it as was.  Over a hundred people died from it before the military figured out who the culprit was.  Out of this came a government agency that inspected each one of these water farms.  Later on it was expanded to the farms and ranches after various outbreaks of different diseases. To a certain extent it was the FDA, but they didn’t call it that.

              Overall life wasn’t too bad in camps around Camp Parks they didn’t realize the worst was yet to come.

Life in and around Oceana NAS was bad, not horrible, like it had been earlier. Now over a year later it had gone from horrible to bad, which was a step up.  They had electricity every other day for four hours at night, because there was a real fuel crunch.  The Navy had been slow to react when the event hit and didn’t secure the gas stations and was only now starting to look at gaining control over the gang infested refineries—not that there were many. Since they were slow to react many saw what was happening, recognized it for what it was and found a way to pump the fuel out of their underground storage.  Once out the fuel went onto the black-market and sold quickly over the first few months of the event. 

People burned through what fuel they had most still not making the long-term connection and how it was going to affect them.  When all of the fuel on the black market ran out the civilians demanded the Navy turn over what they had.  The Navy wasn’t having any of it and had recently secured many of the gas stations that hadn’t been hit by the black-marketers.   There were several fuel riots around Oceana, which were brutally put down. In oncoming months, there would be more food and water riots.

  The military was largely unpopular for hoarding what fuel there was. The average civilian that had been in the camps from the start didn’t see any immediate threat to them or the Navy.  The Navy on the other hand was far more concerned with any long-term unforeseen threats as their job was to protect and defend the nation as a whole, not only Virginia Beach and its surrounding communities.  Again, the Navy became even more unpopular for hoarding food and water; people were slow to recognize what was going on regardless how many times the Navy did their best to explain what was happening.  It was difficult for people to grasp a situation when they saw their family members dying from lack of medicines, food and water.  Sometimes the simplest infections were the worst and people died from them. There was nothing they could do but watch.  They in turn blamed the Navy for not helping. Even though the Navy explained they didn’t have the means themselves to treat everything that was out there, people didn’t believe it.

The Navy did their best to bring some sort of shelter to the camps; their first attempts were to set up GP small, medium and large tents and assign two individuals to a GP small, two small families to a GP medium and up to four families to a GP large tent.  It looked good on paper, but there was a lot of fighting on who was getting a tent and who wasn’t. The Navy decided the tents went to families with babies and toddlers first then worked their way up.  Of course the Navy was criticized for that. Then there was an absolute lack of security in the three camps that had literally popped up overnight around Oceana.  With the security problems there were also huge sanitary problems throughout the area. People could be truly disgusting when it came to their own personal hygiene and how they lived.  This was a very real issue with families living in close quarters in the tents.  Some families were plain dirty and stank. If they were living with another family that was organized and clean real problems arose.  There were fist fights and even killings over the sanitary conditions in the camps.  Finally the Navy tired of all of the complaints and ordered all dwellings within the camp to be inspected by Navy personnel.  Each living area had to meet specific criteria set forth by the Navy for personal and living quarter cleanliness.  If anyone was found to be in violation there were given two written chances to clean up.  If they failed, then they were moved out and asked to leave the camp.

Some people welcomed the Navy stepping in and others resented it and fought it tooth and nail.  Within the first month a dozen individuals and seven families were asked to leave the camps, escorted out by the Marines.  After the Navy cleaned up the individuals and housing they then turned to cleaning up the areas within the camps and outside the camps, which helped solve many of the sanitary issues.  New heads (outhouses) were built, and the Navy put people back to work, which ninety percent of the people were all for, but these were largely manual labor jobs and that last ten percent thought the jobs beneath them.  This led to another unpopular directive by the Navy to the people in the camps. Everyone, with few exceptions, would work.

Months after the event the Navy found that people with too much time on their hands were a bad thing. Ideally the Navy was trying to leave it up to the civilian community to police themselves, but it wasn’t working.  Some had tried to set up a type of township government within the camps, but people weren’t interested in following them.  There was no law enforcement; rather it was the strongest and fittest ruled.  Again, not an ideal situation and the Navy did its best to stay away from imposing martial law and running the camps themselves.  It became apparent that after six months the crime rate was soaring in the camps—murder, rape, and robbery you name it.  The complaints were coming in to the Master at Arms on post by the boat load.  Finally, Captain O’Hara was forced to act to protect the civilians.  Captain O’Hara working alongside the Marines created a better trained Combat Naval Force that would take on the security of the camps as well as the surrounding areas.  This left the only company of combat Marines on base free for other activities that Captain O’Hara deemed necessary.

Six weeks after the first Navy CNF graduated from the course that the Maines had set up, the sailors were having a very positive impact within the camps.  That positive impact included the eviction of over twenty-five men and women from the respective camps for all sorts of crimes.  The Navy didn’t want to deal with prosecuting these people. There were plenty of witnesses, not to mention most had been caught in the process of committing the crime. Instead, they were exiled from the camp with what they had on their backs.  Some people in the camps protested the idea of sending them out into the cold with no protection. It was still the Wild West out beyond the camps.  Even before, when the camps had security issues they were still safer than being outside of them.

The population within the camps was still relatively small in comparison to the larger communities that surrounded Oceana prior to the event.  This spoke to the larger number of people that died two to three months after the event for various reasons or people that packed up and left the area, believing there were greener pastures over the next hill; they thought the only way to find that out was to head West.  However, most were killed by the gangs and many died of starvation or thirst.  Many of the communities to the West had bottled themselves up for protection and wouldn’t let anyone else in, no matter what.  They protected their water and food sources. The only way a person had a chance to get into one of those tightly knit well protected communities was if they had something to offer.  For instance, if you were a doctor or nurse you had a very good chance of being invited in, or some item to trade.

It wasn’t fair and it certainly wasn’t American if you wanted to look at it that way. Many of those communities routinely turned away families as well as the sick and elderly.  It was what life had become in post-event society. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t going to be fair anytime soon.  Until the military or law enforcement had pushed their way out to these areas not much was going to change.