Soldier Up (20 page)

With the current operations all but wrapped up it was time to regroup, treat the wounded and bury the dead.  It was also time they started to think about training a security force that was representative of the people, not necessarily a police force, people over the years prior to the event had really grown to distrust the police, this had to be new something they could get behind and support.  They couldn’t keep the Army and Marine forces in the area forever, the purpose for the operation was to secure the refineries and ensure the military had enough fuel to operate for the foreseeable future.

              The A-Teams would train the new security forces, like they had done back at the camps at Camp Parks.  The 63
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Regional Support had just added a Civil Affairs unit they would handle the recruitment and testing, it also included a psych evaluation.  They didn’t want to bring on the type of people they just got rid of. 

              The units there that were there started the task of cleaning and clearing as well as accountability.  All militia weapons and ammunition would be collected logged and placed in a makeshift armory.  These weapons and ammunition would be used for the security forces, outside of the m249 or RPG’s which the military would keep.  They would be allowed to keep the SAWs, AK-47, AR-15, the occasional Thompson, shotguns and everything else.

              It turned out the two men at the Richmond operations center were beat up and sitting in a corner actually did turn out to be Engineers who knew the day to day operations of a refinery.  When they were interrogated they led the interrogator to believe there were other Engineers and staff still living close by and would be interested in coming back if they could guarantee their security.

              They meet with General Watkins and Colonel Clayton who assured them ultimately there would be security forces here to take over but they would for the time being answer to the military authority in the area which at this time was General Watkins.  After the Engineers saw what the military did to the militias they had no reason to disbelieve him.  The following day the two Engineers left the refinery with a military escort to find and convince the old staff, the ones that were still alive, to come back to work at the refinery.

              By late in the afternoon they were returning with a dozen or so of the staff, about quarter of them were engineers, the other quarter were operations specialists and the other half were the rig workers, the guys who did the nitty gritty work around the refinery.  “It was all a start,” thought General Watkins.

              On the third day in the Bay area Colonel Clayton had sent a platoon of men with two Abrams and a couple Bradley’s to check out the railroad station then the tracks out-of-town to check on their condition.  He had sent two squads back to Camp Parks and asked for them to send one of the trains up if it was possible.  Within four hours a train whistle could be heard throughout the area, people who had been hiding came out to see what it was, they were awe struck to see a real life train moving down the tracks.  It in its own way it brought them comfort a piece of the old world that they knew.

              The purpose of bringing the train up was to rotate some troops out and bring in fresh ones; they also needed the Civil Affairs Soldiers here.  There were lots of goods that needed to be moved back to Camp Parks and Fort Irwin.  They needed to load up several of the railroad fuel cars but first they had to move them to the refineries, load them and get them back to Fort Irwin who was in a lot more need than Camp Parks.  With all of the refineries secured and the fuel inventoried they realized they had enough perhaps for years with the current populations in the areas under their control which actually seemed to be growing weekly.

              The next military step was to send units across the I-80 into San Francisco; they had been sending A-Teams across at the 92 to San Mateo, then into San Bruno and South San Francisco.   The Intel they had gathered from the earlier excursions was bad, not because of gangs or militia’s they hadn’t found a lot of those, just a lot of wannabes who would run away when confronted.  What they found was a lot of death and sorrow.  People starving for lack of food and water, and an inspection of clinics and medical centers showed hundreds of people dead.  All the stores had been looted nothing of real use could be found.  Most of the people possibly headed south or east back across the 92 or north up into San Francisco, which would seem like a bad idea on the face of it.

              The people they did run into ran away, when the Soldiers saw them the people were skinny, sickly looking, dirty and clothes were torn.  They also had a terrified look on their face which was understandable, odds are there had been some gangs or even militia through here at one time who raped and pillaged their way through the towns.  As the Soldiers have been finding out everyone believed that the United States was gone, the only Law and Order were those with the guns and a willingness to use them.  No one thought the US Military survived but it had and was on the move to do their best to bring society back under some control and in the name of the United States.

              General Watkins and his staff had come up with a plan that would put more Soldiers and Marines into these areas; like in Iraq and Afghanistan they had FOB’s, forward operating base.  They would establish a FOB in the outlying reaches and conduct daily patrols of the areas they were in.  Back up would be twenty to thirty minutes away so they had to have enough firepower at each base to be able to hold off an assault for that long.  The Seabee’s were brought up by train with their equipment to start setting up the FOB’s once they were determined where they were going to be.  That’s what the A-Teams were determining; ideally they wanted to build it on terrain and high ground, which of course was hard to find in any town or city.  They didn’t want to occupy a police station (at least that wasn’t the plan) because then they would have to provide electricity, running water for plumbing and more.  The FOB’s were going to be primitive at best. 

               Units at the FOB’s would be rotated out every week and returned from their current base in Martinez, Rodeo, Richmond or Oakland, the troops in those towns were being rotated with fresh troops from Camp Parks and Fort Irwin.  New Soldiers and Marines who had finished Basic / Boot and AIT were being sent out to forward units as soon as they graduated.  However, there were some that volunteered to become paratroopers, they went to jump school right after AIT, and at that point they had the opportunity to go to the Special Forces Qualification Course.  All of this was new and was either now located at Camp Parks and or Fort Irwin, right now these units, especially SFQ Course was playing a lot of this by ear and just going with it.

              The Army element under Colonel Clayton was starting to develop plans to bring back Ranger Schools.  There were a lot of people interested but not enough time right now, they needed the civilian security forces trained and to replace the Soldiers and Marines.  As the civilian security forces were trained and released they would take over the FOB’s, the long term plans was to return electricity and running water to as many places as possible but that was too big of a job with the resources they currently had.

              Within the first week they were in the Bay area FOBs had been set up in San Mateo, San Bruno, South San Francisco, Redwood City and a few smaller towns.  At each FOB they installed a large flag pole, which flew the red, white and blue.  Again, Colonel Clayton believed in showing the colors whenever possible. FOBs were either all Army or all Marine seldom did the two mix which was best for Esprit de Corps and of course inter-service rivalries.  Patrols left the FOB’s in the mornings and in afternoons; they did their best to patrol a different area each time, after several days of patrols regardless of the FOB people who had been hiding started to come out to see what was going on.

              Then a few days later those people started to approach the patrols, carefully and slowly, after all they the patrols were heavily armed.  People started to get the sense that these Soldiers or Marines were not out to hurt them or they would have by now.  People wanted to know who they were and why they were here, simply put they were the US Army or the US Marines and they were here to protect them.  Some people just stopped and stared at them, some people started to cry and hug them, others were angry.

              The angry ones wanted to know where they were when all hell broke loose and people were dying, they didn’t take into account that the Soldiers and Marines had lost loved ones too.  The Soldiers and Marines let them vent and kept moving, there was nothing they were going to be able to tell them that would calm them down. 

              People also wanted to know what happened why everything all of a sudden stopped; the Soldiers and Marines told them they were told it was an EMP event what type no one knew for sure.  They wanted to know when the power was coming back on, when there was going to be running water, when food was coming, the Soldiers and Marines told them they didn’t know, that as far as they knew their Commanders were doing everything they could.

              A few days’ later people started to come to the FOB with their children, this was an eye opener for the Soldiers and Marines this was the first time they had seen any children alive.  They were happy to see them and offered them the candy out of their MRE’s.  This was repeated at all of the FOBs regardless of the area they were in.  People started to feel comfortable with the Soldiers and Marines, they also felt safe and secure when they were around.

              Early one morning the FOB in South San Francisco started to take fire, they couldn’t find the shooter first, while trying to keep their heads down one of the Soldiers took a hit to his shoulder.  The medic was able to treat him and call back to the rear and let them know they needed a medical evacuation.  While that was happening they finally spotted the shooter, he was firing from the second floor of a building about five hundred yards out.  They had an M-24 rifle with them which all of the men had trained on, one of them grabbed it, he waited for the next shot to be fired, damn near taking off his head, but he got a good sight picture on the shooter and fired, he dropped the shooter with the first shot.

                A patrol quickly readied and took off for the location to verify it was the one shooter, as they left the FOB the man with the M-24 covered searching the other windows on the floor.  The patrol entered and cleared the building with no further problems.

              At the FOB in Redwood City they sent a patrol one morning to check out the town of San Carlos just north of it.  While there the patrol came across the Hiller Aviation Museum curiosity getting the best of them they decided to take a tour of the museum which they ended up having to break into. Once in they found everything intact and there had been no looting. 

              As they walked through they were awestruck by many of the WWI and WWII aircraft that sat there in pristine condition.  Many of the Marines thought wouldn’t it be great if they ran then they would have some air cover.  Then the conversation turned to how do they know they don’t run? After arguing about it for an hour with no results, they decided they would mention it in the after action report.

              From there the Marines raided the vending machines for snacks and then were able to get some warm soda too.  After leaving the museum they continued further in San Carlos following the normal procedure of scouting out any gangs or militias, checking out grocery stores, pharmacies, big box stores, clinics and hospitals.  Many times the patrols were overnight and required the squad to find a safe place they could defend if necessary.

              The patrols never covered an entire town or city; it was only ten people in the squad after all and rule number one was not to break up the squad if you don’t have too.  As they explored the town and marked off the objectives they were supposed to check they took notes of what was left and the address.  One of the more grisly tasks were counting the dead bodies they came to and home much decomposition, they also needed to do their best to determine how they died, for instance gunshot wound, knife, or unknown.  Eventually there would be burial details that would make their rounds, when possible they would stack and burn the bodies or what was left of them.  They found they couldn’t dig enough holes for everyone.  The burial details did search the bodies for identification and took it when they found it.  The ID’s would be added to an every growing roster that could be potentially searched by loved one’s looking for missing family or friends.

              Once the squad returned to the FOB an after action report would be written by the squad leader, the after action report comprised of everything they saw and did regarding their objectives and anything out of the ordinary the squad leader would want to include, in the case about the planes at the museum.

              Once the report was done it would be sent back to Battalion which would be located in the rear some place, it would then go to S2 at Battalion to be reviewed which meant it was sent to an MI Company who would analyze it and then brief senior staff. In this case the Intel Soldiers didn’t think the information regarding the museum planes was important enough to add to the Commanders briefing.  During the Commanders briefing nothing was ever mentioned about the aviation museum in San Carlos.

              A couple of weeks later Colonel Clayton was inspecting the various FOBs and visited the Marines in Redwood City.  While he was there he spoke with the men at length about what they were seeing in the towns and cities and how it was affecting them.  During the discussion one of the Marines asked him if they were ever able to get one of those old airplanes to fly.  “What old planes are you referring to?” asked Colonel Clayton.