Tiltjuice wrote:Actually, seeing all the mentions of recycled chars, can I get links to their original apps so I know what not to make?
Previous incarnation: viewtopic.php?p=29818306#p29818306
I think all chars are accounted for in the roster.
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by Mincaldenteans » Mon Mar 20, 2017 9:44 pm
Tiltjuice wrote:Actually, seeing all the mentions of recycled chars, can I get links to their original apps so I know what not to make?
by Reverend Norv » Tue Mar 21, 2017 7:15 am
CONSTITUTIONAL DEFENSE BRIGADE (CDB): pro-democracy American rebel group, 2006-2011.
The Constitutional Defense Brigade was the largest, best-organized, and most successful rebel army in the United States of America during the Reclamation War. Founded in 2006, it grew to control most of the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, as well as much of Utah and Nevada. It repeatedly defeated federal forces in pitched battle before being itself crushed in December 2011. Its headquarters was located at Aspen, CO.
Origins
In the first six weeks of the zombie outbreak in North America, federal authorities attempted to turn the Grand Teton mountains of Wyoming into a fortified safe zone for Western communities. In mid-May 2016, the outbreak spread to Denver, and security forces there were rapidly overwhelmed. Consequently, elements of the Army and the Army National Guard required the population of Colorado to evacuate northward, primarily on foot, to the Grand Tetons. Local militia groups and first responders - including police officers, firemen, and emergency medical technicians - provided protection and support for the evacuation effort. Nevertheless, the evacuation - which became renowned as the Retreat from Fort Collins - was a physical and psychological ordeal that led to thousands of civilian deaths.
The suspension of civil liberties following the military takeover of June 12, 2006 led to worsening conditions for evacuees in Wyoming, who were interned under armed guard in refugee camps. After the declaration of martial law, draconian rationing of food and medical supplies led to the deaths of many of the aged and sick refugees. Law enforcement officers were required to conduct public floggings and summary executions, while militia fighters were repeatedly sent into battle against the infected without sufficient supplies. After the execution of six teenage civilians for smuggling medicine, a widespread revolt broke out at the Jackson Hole Refugee Center: militia groups, local Army reservists, and police officers turned their guns upon the federal authorities and took control of the camp. Approximately twelve thousand civilians and irregular troops began to travel south toward the Colorado border, liberating internment camps as they went; en route, thousands of deserters from the police and National Guard joined the nascent movement as well.
By the time this mass migration reached Colorado, it numbered almost twenty thousand, of whom roughly eight thousand were battle-ready. On July 8, these irregular forces retook the ski-resort town of Aspen from the infected. In the aftermath of the battle, thirteen of the community's leaders declared their movement to be the Constitutional Defense Brigade. In a nine-point manifesto, the Brigade declared that the military government of the United States was illegitimate and illegal, and that ordinary citizens therefore had the right to govern themselves independently. On August 15, in a free and fair election and after extensive campaigning, former Marine colonel Isaiah Krauss defeated former newspaper editor Thomas Lynch and was sworn in as the Commander of the Constitutional Defense Brigade.
Organization
The Constitutional Defense Brigade, despite its name, was always a political movement more than a military unit: at no point during the Brigade's existence were a majority of its members active combatants. By Colonel Krauss' definition, anyone living in CDB-controlled territory was automatically a member of the Brigade. As a result, the unit's organization was complex and multifaceted.
In one sense, the CDB could be understood as a strong command economy. Every adult member of the Brigade was assigned a rank, a unit, and a work duty. Radio broadcasters, ranchers, doctors, teachers, and store clerks all theoretically reported to their superior officers and worked directly for the CDB; one of the Brigade's great strengths was its ability to match its members to jobs that made good use of their pre-war expertise and training. Nonetheless, every citizen in CDB territory was required to receive military training and to carry a firearm; alternative forms of service for conscientious objectors existed, but were rare, especially after 2010. All children in CDB territory, male and female, received training in tactics and marksmanship as well as conventional subjects in the Brigade's makeshift schools. The CDB's high command maintained a rationing system for food and fuel from the moment of the Brigade's establishment until its final defeat, and most CDB personnel were paid in ration slips rather than in cash.
The Brigade directly operated most of the infrastructure necessary for its survival. CDB engineers constructed and maintained wind farms and solar panels all across northern and central Colorado, ensuring that electricity was more widely available in CDB territory than in many government safe zones. Large areas of Aspen were turned into indoor hydroponic farms that yielded year-round harvests of produce and grain. But ranchers and farmers in CDB territory, while they were required to sell to the Brigade, were not forced off their land: local CDB commanders traded medicine, protection, and sometimes actual help on the farm in exchange for beef and corn. A robust black market in ration slips also thrived in CDB territory, with the unofficial support of the Brigade itself. For a brief period in 2009-2010, food was abundant enough that ration slips were used as currency far more often than as guarantees of nutrition.
The CDB also built democratic safeguards directly into its chain of command. Isaiah Krauss was reelected as Commander in 2008 and 2010, both times in the face of determined opposition from the Brigade's libertarian wing. Civil rights - including free speech, not generally prized in military organizations - were held sacrosanct; despite their supposedly absolute authority as officers, CDB commanders typically ended up debating with their subordinates in order to develop consensus, rather than insisting upon unconditional obedience. Robust anti-discrimination policies distinguished the Brigade, and a number of its top commanders were women or belonged to racial minorities. CDB officers who exercised civil authority outside the Brigade's core area as district administrators could be removed by a referendum of their civilian constituents. Brigade courts implemented a modified version of Colorado law, not the Uniform Code of Military Justice: CDB members were treated as citizens first and soldiers second. And at every level, the Brigade's rank-and-file elected People's Councils to bring their concerns and priorities to the attention of their commanders - and Brigade law made willful disregard for the Councils a court-martial offense for any officer.
The CDB's military wing began as a confederation of mostly autonomous units - National Guard companies, citizen militias, groups of police deserters, and so on - each of which possessed its own chain of command and supply system, and reported independently to the Brigade Commander. Beginning in the spring of 2008, Colonel Krauss adopted the 21st Century Cavalry Plan developed by Logan Armstrong, under which the CDB's fighting force was divided into two halves. The first half, including most of the militias, was assigned to reserve duty and dispersed across CDB territory to provide every community with the capacity for self-defense. The second half of the CDB's troops were reorganized into ten columns of two hundred soldiers each, all mounted on horseback and carrying their supplies on pack mules. These flying columns were designed to move rapidly over extremely difficult mountain terrain far behind government lines, living off the land and wreaking havoc as they went. The columns also operated under extremely strict rules of engagement - codified in ten standing orders that became known as "Logan's Laws" - which declared civilian casualties to be entirely unacceptable under virtually all conditions, no matter how desperate the military situation might be.
Expansion
In the summer and autumn of 2006, the Constitutional Defense Brigade put in place two policies that decisively shaped its future. One was an open-door policy toward refugees fleeing the chaos of war and the hordes of zombies. By contrast with the government's safe zones - which frequently turned away such refugees in order to conserve limited supplies of food, medicine, and housing - the CDB committed itself to welcome all refugees, even if it was unable to feed or house the newcomers. Logan Armstrong later defended this policy in a famous aphorism: "Everyone dies. No one deserves to die alone." The open-door policy ensured both that the Brigade was constantly struggling with shortages of material resources, and that it benefitted from an abundance of human resources: refugees included doctors, engineers, ranchers, teachers, and other individuals whose skills sustained the movement.
The CDB's second early decision was to go on the offensive, expanding its control across Independence Pass and along State Highway 82 to Interstate 70. CDB patrols, initially traveling on pickup trucks and gradually shifting to horses as gasoline ran low, roamed the countryside, making contact with surviving farmers and ranchers who had defied the government's evacuation order, and ambushing small groups of zombies until the infected presence dropped to manageable levels. Gradually, this zombie-free area - which the CDB called the Liberated Zone - expanded until it abutted the suburbs of Denver itself.
The Brigade's first winter in Aspen witnessed catastrophically bad conditions. With the town's hydroponic farming system not yet fully functional, food soon ran out, and pneumonia ran rampant in the poorly-heated houses. One in every twelve men, women, and children in Aspen died of starvation or disease, and the experience tested the CDB's open-door policy to the limit: many Brigade members were outraged at the thought of trying to feed more refugees when people in Aspen were already starving to death. Nevertheless, Isaiah Krauss stayed the course, and local ranchers and hunters found just enough food to save the Brigade from extinction. By March, the crisis was clearly on the wane, and the First Winter became a mythical symbol of endurance and generosity amid hardship. The CDB's open-door policy was never meaningfully challenged again.
In spring and summer of 2007, CDB expansion accelerated, and the Liberated Zone began to overlap with regions still theoretically controlled by government forces. The Brigade's local popularity grew rapidly: in return for food and horses from local farms and ranches, the CDB provided free medical care, patrols to deter zombies and bandits, and public education for children. As word of the Brigade spread, displaced persons from all over the American West began to migrate to Colorado, bringing with them a wide array of skills, talents, and resources. Among the refugees were Logan Armstrong and Angela Velasquez, former classmates from Charlotte, North Carolina, who became two of the CDB's most effective leaders.
The CDB's expansion soon brought it into conflict with the military government. In September 2007, after a failed attempt by US Army Rangers to retake Denver from the infected with helicopter gunship support, the CDB used its intimate knowledge of the city and a supply of powerful explosives from a nearby mine to demolish key buildings, blocking roads and trapping the zombies in isolated pockets walled off by rubble throughout the city. Over three weeks of hard fighting, the Brigade cleared these pockets one by one, retaking the largest city in the Rocky Mountains. Enthused by its success, the Brigade then declared itself the de facto government of Colorado, reiterated its longstanding view that the military regime was illegitimate, and ordered all government forces in Colorado to cease evacuating refugees to internment camps. When local Army commanders refused to halt the evacuations, fighting erupted: the CDB attacked the remaining refugee camps in an effort to liberate the occupants, and the military regime declared the Brigade and all its members to be guilty of treason.
From that point on, the greatest threat to the CDB was the United States military, not the zombie epidemic. Nevertheless, for the first three years of the Brigade's war with the military, the CDB had the clear advantage. Its commitment to civil rights and freedom of movement, not to mention its open-door policy for refugees, made it much more popular than the military among civilians across the Rocky Mountains. Beginning in the spring of 2008, Logan Armstrong designed a comprehensive new approach to the CDB's military operations, based on fast-moving, off-road cavalry columns and extensive misinformation. CDB flying columns living off the land raided military supply depots as far afield as Oregon and Arizona before vanishing back into the trackless mountains, where horses could move quickly but motor vehicles could not venture, and where tree cover hindered aerial surveillance. The Army itself soon became the CDB's primary source of military materiel, and the constant threat of ambush and raid forced the government to contract its supply lines, retreating out of the mountains and leaving tens of thousands of square miles under de facto CDB control. An increasingly sophisticated network of CDB double-agents fed false intelligence to the CIA and FBI, and this misinformation led military counterattacks straight into well-prepared and entrenched CDB ambushes. One of those ambushes, commanded by Logan Armstrong, led to the capture of six Army Rangers in a firefight in northern Utah - the greatest number of Rangers lost as POWs in any single engagement since the Vietnam War.
The CDB also began raiding into government territory adjoining the mountains, launching a campaign of sabotage and assassination that undermined the Army's ability to retaliate effectively. Crucial to this campaign was the so-called Bad Company led by Angela Velasquez: a sniper team that assassinated senior military officers and officials - including Major General Catherine Dobbs, the commander of the entire Army Military Police Corps. In the most daring engagement of the war, Velasquez and her team led a sophisticated multi-pronged surprise attack on Folsom, which stormed the prison there and freed thirty-four political prisoners - including Logan Armstrong, who had been detained and tortured for almost eight months after a botched raid near Auburn, California.
By May 2010, the CDB had reached its greatest geographic expanse. It controlled territory from the outskirts of Salt Lake City to the Canadian Rockies, and from the Black Hills to the Sierra Nevada. More than eighty thousand people voted in the Brigade's elections, and its flying columns numbered close to five thousand cavalry troopers. Its food situation had stabilized, and living conditions in CDB territory were far superior to those in any government safe zone. Top commanders in Aspen were beginning to work out five-year plans to take the offensive against military strongholds like Los Angeles and San Antonio. One essential part of the successful expansion that had led the Brigade to the peak of its power was its increasingly sophisticated and persuasive ideology.
Ideology
The Constitutional Defense Brigade's success was due in large part to its ability to secure and maintain the voluntary loyalty of ordinary people across the West, both in CDB territory and in military-controlled territory. The Brigade's broad base of public support was the foundation of its operations. That support was due in large part to the Brigade's consistent and powerful ideological message. Logan Armstrong, whom Isaiah Krauss described as "our prophet," was the main architect of the CDB's ideology, and his medium of choice was the mass-produced pamphlet or booklet. But numerous other writers and radio hosts, including Angela Velasquez and Chandrasweeroopa Seerljka, also played an essential role in developing and disseminating the Brigade's message.
The core of the CDB's ideology, which predated Armstrong's arrival in Aspen in December 2006, was a response to the claims of the military government that democracy and individual rights were luxuries, while national survival was a necessity. The Brigade's founders rejected this argument, asserting that every human life had value, that liberty was a natural right, and that survival could not justify enslavement to the Army. Isaiah Krauss liked to cite Patrick Henry: "Give me liberty, or give me death!" In this view, the Constitution came before everything, even survival; the defense of democracy was worth the risk of national extinction.
Under the influence of Logan Armstrong, this uncompromisingly simple claim gradually evolved into a more compassionate and persuasive philosophy. In Why We Fight, a documentary pamphlet profiling dozens of CDB members, Armstrong implicitly advanced the claim that there was no single ideology that motivated everyone in the CDB. Instead, the Brigade's value lay precisely in the fact that it allowed people to hold different and sometimes contradictory opinions; the CDB's commitment to individual freedom, including the freedom to disagree, was exactly what made people willing to die for it. The natural conclusion was that a democratic organization could inspire more selfless loyalty than a military junta, and therefore that democratic societies were more likely than autocratic ones to survive the crisis of the Reclamation War. Democracy did not take priority over survival; it was itself the best way to guarantee survival.
Armstrong expanded and clarified this core idea in two booklets, Self-Evident Truths and Times That Try Men's Souls. In Self-Evident Truths, Armstrong argued that the essence of American identity, the thing that made Americans American, was their commitment to universal ideals of liberty and justice. Those ideals allowed a nation of countless ethnicities and languages to stand as one. Armstrong argued that the military, in staging its coup, had betrayed those ideals, and had therefore attempted to destroy the one thing that gave all Americans a common identity. To destroy democracy, Self-Evident Truths suggested, was to destroy America itself. Without liberty and justice, no American identity was possible, and national collapse was the inevitable result.
In Times That Try Men's Souls, Armstrong emphasized the broader implications of this argument. Here, for the first time, Armstrong advanced a philosophical idea that extended beyond the CDB, and that cast the CDB in an almost religious light as the exemplar of a universal truth. Essentially, Armstrong argued that human beings believe that idealism makes them weak, because ideals limit their ability to do whatever they want. In fact, Armstrong claimed, idealism makes human beings strong, because it allows them to act selflessly on behalf of each other - and only that kind of selflessness can allow people to survive an existential crisis. These two facts create a self-destructive paradox: the more danger people are in, the more tempted they are to abandon their ideals, but the more essential those same ideals are to their survival. The moment when a man most needs to keep the faith is the moment at which he most wants to abandon it. Consequently, the darkest times in human history, the moments of greatest suffering, require a leap of faith: they require that people trust in the power of their ideals to bring people together, even at the risk of their own lives.
Armstrong's greatest work, Labor of Love, was written in secret while he was imprisoned in Folsom. Published after his escape, the full-length book became an instant bestseller even when possession of it was banned by the military authorities. Armstrong himself summarized the book's contents in a 2011 interview with CDB journalists:Basically, the idea is that democracy is an action, not an institution. It only works for as long as we believe in it. The moment we get too scared, and doubt creeps in, our democracy collapses. That's what happened in '06: we panicked, and our trust in each other and in our ideals - it failed. So democracy has no inertia; it requires constant work; it is recreated with every new election. It is an action, not a system.
But democracy is also based on freedom, so it cannot demand faith or coerce work. It cannot force people to put in the effort and belief necessary to sustain their own freedom. The choice to believe in democracy, to labor so that democracy might endure, can only ever be a free choice. That choice has to be made based not upon obligation, but upon unforced love - for one's country, one's fellow citizens, and the idea of liberty itself.
So democracy is not a system, but a labor - and it is a labor of love. You cannot have democracy without love. Love is the start and end of everything.
This connection - the idea that liberty and love are inseparably linked, that it is impossible to have either without the other, that fear is the enemy of both, and that together liberty and love make life worth living - became the very core of the CDB's ideology. This idea is the key that unlocks the Brigade's entire worldview. Armstrong argued that the zombie outbreak was so damaging because it caused fear, and fear destroyed both communities and democracy, because both communities and democracy require people to commit to constant and selfless work, motivated by love, on behalf of something larger than themselves. Similarly, the CDB's open-door policy toward refugees was, in this worldview, directly linked to the CDB's commitment to democracy - because, once again, both hospitality to strangers and commitment to self-government were unselfish labors of love. "All oppression grows out of fear," Armstrong wrote, "because fear moves us to beware each other and to seek safety in the power to oppress each other. But love moves us to trust each other and to find safety in our shared liberty. This is why democracy must always triumph in the end: fear is the enemy of love, and the labor of love is more powerful than the labor of fear."
Defeat
In the late summer of 2010, the tide began to turn against the Constitutional Defense Brigade. The military government had by that time retaken most of the east and west coasts of the continental United States, and forces from both coasts were moving inland in order to secure the American heartland. The CDB's vast mountain stronghold was a key obstacle to the effort to connect the military-controlled coasts by land. To deal with this obstacle, the military government created Task Force Cohort, a new organization that included Special Forces operators, Army Rangers, CIA operatives, DHS agents, and other federal personnel. TF Cohort's mission was to search out and destroy CDB forces, assassinate CDB leaders, and reduce CDB morale.
It proved very effective. By January 2011, more than twenty percent of the CDB's top officers had been killed, and task force raids on outlying CDB settlements, ranches, and farms had forced the Brigade to make its rationing regimen more strict, leading to food shortages in Aspen. As conditions deteriorated, the military government offered amnesty and housing in the Los Angeles Safe Zone to any CDB member who defected with information about the Brigade. Thousands of men and women took the government up on its offer, and the intelligence that they provided made it difficult for Logan Armstrong's misinformation campaign to lead Task Force Cohort into ambushes. Slowly but steadily, the CDB lost the initiative.
Seeing its opportunity, the government committed additional resources - including two infantry battalions, more Army Rangers, and substantial air assets - to the war against the CDB. The Brigade quickly began to lose territory. In March 2011, after a prolonged long-range firefight in which she personally killed more than seventy government personnel, Angela Velasquez led the CDB retreat from the Black Hills. In August, Logan Armstrong's Column 5 was encircled in Pueblo, CO by an air-assault force of Army Rangers. The column rapidly exhausted its ammunition, and then lost half its numbers in an escape that became legendary: a cavalry charge at the gallop, armed with tomahawks and other bladed weapons, that took the Rangers entirely by surprise and managed to burst through their cordon to the safety of the mountains.
By December of 2011, what remained of the CDB was surrounded in Aspen itself. The former resort town was subjected to twenty-four-hour bombardment by heavy artillery and B-52 bombers. With the hydroponic farming complex destroyed, and Aspen cut off from resupply, food ran critically low: the young, sick, and old began dying of starvation. As the bombardment reduced every building in Aspen to rubble, and a brutally cold winter front moved in, malnourished CDB troops began to freeze to death as well. Logan Armstrong agitated for the Brigade to attempt to break through the government cordon and scatter into the hills, to continue the fight as underground guerillas. Isaiah Krauss refused, citing the inability of freezing and malnourished civilians to survive such an escape attempt. The remaining CDB combatants - just under a thousand troops - ate their beloved horses and dug in around the perimeter of Aspen to await the inevitable assault.
On December 24, Christmas Eve 2011, a blizzard moved in over the Continental Divide and caused subzero temperatures and whiteout conditions throughout Aspen. Army Rangers using individual thermal optics, with helicopter gunships flying erratically in support, attacked the blinded CDB defenders from three directions simultaneously. Coordinated resistance collapsed almost immediately: most CDB combatants were killed or wounded in the first hour of the assault. In several areas, including the ruins of the town hall and the public library, CDB units dug in and fought to the last man, holding out for almost nine hours. Elsewhere, a few hundred CDB personnel, most of them noncombatants, managed to sneak past the infantry cordon around Aspen and escape into the mountains, where most of them froze to death. By sunrise on Christmas morning, the CDB had been annihilated. The day of its demise became known as the Bloody Blizzard.
Legacy
By the start of 2012, the Constitutional Defense Brigade was destroyed beyond repair. Isaiah Krauss had been captured at Aspen. Most of the Brigade's other top commanders were in custody or dead. A few, including Angela Velasquez and Logan Armstrong, escaped Aspen and went on the run; they remain among the very few living CDB commanders who never surrendered and who were never taken prisoner. The small number of Brigade rank-and-file who escaped Aspen mostly accepted the government's offer of amnesty in return for cooperation. Treatment of CDB personnel who were captured or surrendered varied; some were disarmed and released in accordance with the terms of their amnesty, while others were subjected to reeducation by military psychologists, tortured for information by the CIA, sent to work crews building the wall around Black Zone in the Great Plains, or conscripted into penal battalions guarding the Mexican border.
But the CDB's ideology lived on. Armstrong continued to publish covertly while living on the run, and his writings now circulate widely on the internet. The memory of the Brigade remains strong and fond across the American West: anonymous polling suggests that most residents of the Rocky Mountains regard CDB veterans as heroes rather than as rebels. Today, the Brigade is well-known even in areas where it never operated: many in Texas, the Appalachians, and the Ozarks sport CDB bumper stickers and other symbols of support. As a result, the CDB has inherited a sort of shadow existence: annihilated as a military force, it lives on as a nationwide symbol of uncompromising loyalty to democratic government, human rights, and communal solidarity. Equally, of course, the CDB is a nationwide symbol of treason and naïveté for Americans who served in the armed forces and who continue to support military rule: for many citizens, the willingness of the republic's elected leaders to flee their posts in 2006 is a far more significant fact than the CDB's accomplishments. Therefore, the Brigade's legacy, while hotly contested, is central to the nation's current political situation.
As the United States moves slowly toward a return to democracy, the legacy of the Constitutional Defense Brigade is becoming ever more well-known and influential. Labor of Love, possession of which was recently legalized, is a nationwide bestseller. The burgeoning Constitutionalist Party regularly uses CDB iconography and rhetoric in order to attract support from former Brigade loyalists and the general public. Novels, movies, and television shows are beginning to be released that portray CDB members as romantic heroes - though this also remains extremely controversial with many pro-military Americans. "Though we lost the battle," Logan Armstrong wrote in a recent anonymously-published leaflet, "though we were shot and shelled and starved and frozen, though we were tortured and brainwashed and enslaved to build the Army's wall, though our bodies rot in shallow graves - yet we won the war. For this country will be free again. The flame we kept alive in the darkest hour of the night now blazes like the rising sun, and the memory of our life and death has become the taproot of democracy."
by Rupudska » Tue Mar 21, 2017 9:18 am
by Reverend Norv » Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:43 am
Rupudska wrote:Just a reminder that this Angela will not have surrendered to the US Army by the start of the RP.
by Rodez » Tue Mar 21, 2017 8:47 pm
by Rupudska » Tue Mar 21, 2017 9:00 pm
by Mincaldenteans » Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:31 pm
by Cylarn » Wed Mar 22, 2017 5:14 am
by Reverend Norv » Wed Mar 22, 2017 7:09 am
Cylarn wrote:Norv, the CDB bio is superb and I shall add it soon. That being said, I am concerned that the faction is "too" noble in the eyes of the American people. I am not asking you to negate their value or anything, but keep in mind that far more Americans served the government, and many (although respecting the goals of the group) hold them in a negative light for fracturing national unity in a time of extreme crisis. As great as democracy is, the fact of the matter is that the elected leaders of our country mostly fled their posts in the beginning.
Cylarn wrote:Another issue I am foreseeing is the fugitive status of Angela and Logan. By this point, they would be on the FBI's Most Wanted for their crimes, especially Angela. Whether or not they are shining knights of liberty, equality, and fraternity, remember that Angela shot a lot of men in the war. If they were still fugitives, would Call really risk his own liberty and safety by harboring them? My advice would be for the two of them to accept an amnesty plea following the Fall of Aspen, and 2-3 years of penal duty on the US-Mexican Border.
by Cylarn » Wed Mar 22, 2017 7:34 am
Reverend Norv wrote:-snip-
by Reverend Norv » Wed Mar 22, 2017 8:07 am
- From the Personal Journal of Logan Armstrong -
Name:
"Right. Let's do this. Time to remind myself of who I am, in spite of everything. So: my name is Logan Armstrong. My friends used to call me Loge, or sometimes Logey. But I'd expect that most of them are dead now.
"That was harder to write than I expected."
Age:
"I am2930- I can't remember when last I had time for my birthday. I was born in November of '84, so - 32. I'm thirty-two. Almost thirty-three."
Gender:
"I am a man. I think that's more important to me than it used to be. Its meaning isn't constant, but the fact itself is, and I can always find new meanings within it: dignity, purpose, honor. And this is one of those things that can never be taken away from me. A man's a man for a' that, and so on. It's a safe foundation on which to know oneself: I am a man."
Appearance:
"So: I am a man. What do I look like?
"How would I know? We live our whole lives without ever seeing our faces. We see reflections, sure, more or less distorted. But I will die without ever having truly seen my own face. I find that frightening, that lingering doubt.
"I'm a man of medium size, neither tall nor short. I'm lean, now, very lean, Bushman/Lakota lean, like a man who spends about as many calories catching his food as he gets from eating it, and has no nourishment left over for frills. Which is about right. There's muscle left under there: iron-hard, cords instead of slabs, ugly and functional, fit to run for miles without tiring. I can see that strength in my hands, these days: fingers like metal bars, with a grip like steel.
"I used a lot of metal metaphors there: iron, steel. But that's who I am. I do not bend. I survive. I endure.
"Not always, though. I have scars, not pretty ones, not well-cared for: the long ribbons of shrapnel across my back, boxer's scars across my right eyebrow, the matt of frostbite scarring where my left pinky finger used to be. My skin was white once. Now it's a faded brown, blasted by the undiluted power of the sun at twelve thousand feet. On my bad days, I think it looks a little grey. My hair's much the same, brown bleached to the color of dust, short and roughly cut. There's a fair amount of steel-grey mixed in there now. Another scar.
"I refuse to believe that it was all for nothing. By my scars, I kept the faith. That's victory in itself, of a kind.
"And my face? In the mirror these days, it looks hatchet-like, Scots-Irish, John Brown/John C. Calhoun: cheekbones like flying buttresses, a thrusting narrow chin, a blade of a nose, a deep brow ridge. It's a gaunt face, but I think that there's intelligence in it still: an intellectual's high forehead. And I have my mother's eyes: blue, but dark, cobalt-colored, unusual. Women have loved me for those eyes, if sometimes for nothing else. These days, I need glasses to see up close.
"I have never seen my own eyes, not really. And I never will."
Likes:
"So much for the wisdom of mirrors, then. Who am I beneath the skin? A more important question, this. Character is what you do in the dark, right? And there are no mirrors in the dark.
"Plainly, I like to think, probably too much. I keep this journal, and every year I analyze myself and my own life. Most people don't feel the need to do that. My mother was a great intellectual in her own humble way, and I have inherited her love of books and reflection, debate and research. At bottom, life is all about learning, and learning is all about truth. I have given my life to the truth as I understand it.
"But there are other pleasures too. I learned to hunt and fish, hike and track, from my father. Self-sufficiency soothes me; working with my hands relaxes me; exercise is balm, the tougher the better. Being alone has never bothered me; when I'm confused or angry, a walk in the woods has always worked to clear my head. But time by myself eventually starts to feel like time wasted; fulfillment comes from working with other people, from writing and speaking, leading and inspiring. I take comfort from helping, and I'm happy to accept help from others. That's why we were born, I've come to think: to give love, and to receive it. That's when I feel God's pleasure flowing through my veins, and I know that I'm fulfilling my purpose.
"What else? To say that I like democracy, or that I like God, seems like an absurd understatement - but I suppose it's true. If I'm honest, I think the more important point might be that I like being right; I like the inner strength that comes from having something to stand for, a code, ideals. Again: I have given my life to truth. That - feeling - lets me know that, no matter what else is taken from me, there are still some things that I can rely on: God is good, and freedom is worth dying for. Remembering that gives me strength, and I like having the strength to face the day. Doesn't everyone?"
Dislikes:
"I'd like to think that I define myself more by what I'm for than by what I'm against, but I'm not so sure that's true anymore. Philosophically, I think the ultimate point is that I dislike power. Power leads to coercion. Coercion is wrong, because all people are born free and equal. So I don't like power.
"This is especially true of arbitrary power, which is basically coercion made manifest. I'm well past the time in my life when 'Because I say so' was a justification for anything. Every crime, every system of oppression, boils down to: 'I have the gun/money/church, so do what I say.' That's nothing but institutionalized bullying, and I can't abide it.
"There are other things, too. There's this current of anti-intellectualism: 'I can hunt and farm and keep the undead from the door, so I don't need no damn books!' Well, I can do all those things too, and I can guarantee that you do need the damn books, or you might as well be just another dumb animal. I can't stand people who find virtue in ignorance, and weakness in thought. I don't understand people who are unwilling to yearn for some higher purpose.
"I guess people annoy me, probably more than they should, considering how much meaning I derive from my relationships with them. People who talk too much bother me, mostly because it feels like they're shutting other people out of the conversation: power again, right? Hypocrisy infuriates me, and so do lies, and so does self-indulgence: because they're the opposite of the inner strength, the truth, that matters most. When you say one thing and do another, or sacrifice your self-respect for a pack of cigarettes - well, you've sold your own integrity, and I have no respect left for you.
"Freedom comes from virtue, I think. If your life is ruled by lies or addiction or fear, you are just as much a slave as if you are ruled by the tyrants and the generals. And at bottom, I fear and hate people who accept their chains, because I know how seductive that kind of life can be."
Fears:
"That's one of the fairly few things I do fear, actually. Not death, at least not in and of itself. I've seen plenty of men welcome death: that last moment before the light goes out of their eyes when they see the long rest ahead, and are glad of it. As for pain, there's a kind of clarity in it. It's an ugly thing, but it's real, and ugly things that are real have the beauty of truth.
"I fear chains: helplessness, of the body and the soul. In Folsom, I wrote my book on toilet paper. That was okay: my mind was free. But before that, they put me in a box, a packing crate, for I don't know how many hours. I thought I might never come out again. And that - that was fear. There was madness, there in the dark, that little girl outside Asheville crumpling to the ground over and over and over again. And when I felt myself weakening, knowing that if they asked me to betray my truth, my principles, my God, then I would - that was the greatest fear of all.
"I think that's what it must be like to be a zombie. Trapped inside your body, all your principles and reason and memory burned away, alone in the dark forever with your irredeemable loss. In the eyes of those things, before they die, mostly I see nothing. But sometimes, just occasionally, I think there's gratitude.
"That's my fear."
Hobbies:
"Write about something else.
"I'm tired of running, fighting. I'm tired of the blood and the fear and the waste. But there's still a lot of things that I enjoy about living in this world.
"There's the intellectual side of it all: reading, writing, speaking. It's odd to describe those things as hobbies, since in some ways they are my whole purpose in life, but there it is. I always have a few books in my saddlebags, and I trade them in when I reach a new town; I never stop learning. And I'm always writing, too, plugging away in my moleskin notebook at a draft for a new pamphlet or article. Exercise for the mind is just as important as exercise for the body; maybe more so.
"Similarly, at this point, it's kind of hard to talk about hunting or fishing or horseback riding as hobbies: these are the activities that keep me alive from one day to the next. But as with reading and writing, they're not just chores: I enjoy them. I'm a very good hunter; out of all my childhood friends, I started hunting earliest and I stuck with it the longest, both for recreation and for survival. And I've lived most of the last decade in the saddle or on foot, riding and trekking thousands of miles all over North America; I enjoy that kind of exercise, the slow constant burn and the sense of physical achievement in moving inexorably across the landscape. I like dealing with horses, cattle, sheep, dogs: there's a wonder in communicating with another life-form that I've never quite gotten over. On the other hand, I've gotten to be a pretty good camp cook into the bargain.
"Somewhere in between the physical and the intellectual is machinery: the synthesis of both, one of the things that make us human. I like machines: real machines, not computers, machines with interlocking pieces and intermeshed parts. I'm good with engines, hunting traps, tents, shelters, things like that. They make a certain intuitive sense to me. And I'm good with firearms: my father was a gunsmith, and some of my earliest memories are of him teaching me to disassemble rifles, clean them, put them back together, shoot them. I'm no sniper; I can't factor in the rotation of the earth or the effect of atmospheric humidity on my shots. But I can keep a gun in fine condition with very limited resources, and repair it using makeshift materials, and hit what I'm shooting at more times than most folks, and that's for sure."
"Also, I can play the fiddle, old time-style, all jigs and reels. 'Cluck Old Hen' was always popular, back around the fireside in the Brigade. And I sing, like my Papaw taught me: nasal, twanging, like a fiddle itself more than a voice. Rifles and music: that's what my family left to me. And now that I think about it, that was enough."
Traits:
"I'm proud of that, actually: rifles and music. I'm proud of who I am more generally. I think that's why I write this out, once a year: in the end, I am my own achievement, and I made myself well.
"I'm tough: mentally, physically. I can cover thirty miles on foot in a day, or stay in the saddle for endless hours, or carry fifty pounds on my back over the mountains for weeks on end. I can ride like a Lakota brave and find water in the desert like a Kalahari bushman. I'm still one of the best hunters I know; most of the meat I've eaten for the last decade has been killed by my own hand. In the wild, I can disappear into the landscape in a million different ways. I can treat basic injuries with a first-aid kit, and brew up herbal remedies for most common ailments. Sure, maybe I can't bench press as much as some bodybuilder, but I'll be alive long after he's dropped dead under the weight of his own bulk. I'm a survivor.
"And I'm a killer, too, though I didn't use to be. Hand-to-hand, Cal or Mark could probably still thrash me. If my skills aren't great, though, I still fight hard and without hesitation; in '08, I bashed out an Army Ranger's brains with a tree root. The Colonel gave me some personal lessons in knife-fighting, so I'm better with a blade than with my bare hands. And with a rifle, I'm every bit a match for any government vet: calm, accurate, efficient. Plus, my father taught me well; nobody takes care of their weapons more carefully than me. Ultimately, though, I kill most efficiently by proxy: I'm a very good combat leader. I came up with the CDB's flying-columns strategy, with the disinformation campaign, with the idea of twenty-first-century cavalry. I think outside the box, I inspire the troops, and I win.
"Or at least I used to.
"But there's more to me then that, still, maybe now more than ever. I'm well-educated, and then some: I can quote the Bible, Shakespeare, every major philosopher of the last millennium, and most of the more important poets as well. And I'm always reading, always learning, always remembering and adding to my mental library. But it's not just repetition, parrot-like: I can write, argue, persuade, inspire. I can put my knowledge and my ideals and my fire, my faith, into words that other people can understand and experience. I can touch them; I can connect; I can make them see what I see. In the end, that's the gift God gave me.
"That, and the fact that I never, ever, ever give up. Anyone who knows me knows that. If you want to stop me, you have to kill me. I do not change my mind."
Personality:
"At bottom, I think that's what defines me: I never give up. It's because I'm an idealist: principles, promises, and concepts are as real to me as food or money. So, sure: I'm stubborn, because the things that matter most to me are the things I hold inside: truth, integrity, honor. I don't compromise, because to compromise on those things would be to betray myself, and nothing is worth that kind of shame. If I give you my word, I will keep it, even if it means my death. Devin once called me the last Puritan, and he had a point. I have my code, and I live by it, come hell or high water.
"I suppose the strange thing is that I've never really found it all that hard. A lot of guys in the Brigade tended to have an issue with the killing, and we all worried about the ones who didn't: nobody wants to share a foxhole with a psychopath. But violence has never bothered me, in and of itself. If it's necessary, then it's necessary, and I don't let it trouble me. Ultimately, there's right and wrong in this world, and that's why I do what I do. I will help you if I can, and kill you if I must, and neither will cost me a minute's sleep at night. To kill for the right reasons is honorable; to kill for the wrong reasons is damnation. I have done that once, and I will die before I do it again.
"The same goes with most other things. Pain, exhaustion, sickness: they're real, they're a part of my life, but they don't touch me, not in any way that really matters. I push through them, and I find it pretty easy to do so; I'm not sure why. Even emotional pain doesn't tend to slow me down. When I led a flying column, I lost men, a lot of men, because I knew that aggressive tactics were essential to our success. That never bothered me either. I spoke at the funerals of the fallen, soothed the pain of their comrades, reminded them what we were all fighting for - and then I got on with the job. Those men died good deaths in a good cause; we should all be so lucky.
"But I'm more than my code, though sometimes these days that's hard to remember. I'm good to my friends, and my friends tend to try to be good to me; I'm a good judge of character in that respect. I give trust easily, though I expect it in return. I do have a sense of humor, but it takes a while for people to realize it, since it's very, very dry. Knowing that people care about me makes me choke up, and I care about people in return, most everyone I meet, even when I know that I shouldn't.
"And yet, in the end...I'd sacrifice every damn one of them if I could be sure that it were the right thing to do. And maybe there's a part of me that still shrinks in horror at that realization, but I believe in truth. And that's the truth: there are principles in this world that matter more than me, that matter more even than those I love. Those principles are the only things worth dying for - and as Dr. King once said, a man who has nothing for which he is willing to die doesn't deserve to live."
Birthplace:
"So what has my life been, then? I was born in Boone, North Carolina, in '84 - back before it was full of boutiques, back when it was still just gas stations and gun stores and loggers hauling pine down out of the Blue Ridge Mountains."
Nationality:
"I'm as American as they come: born of a Scots-Irish warrior clan on my father's side and a Swedish missionary lineage on my mother's."
Education:
"In my life, I've earned a high school diploma, a Bachelor's degree in political philosophy from Princeton, and - briefly - a commission as a second lieutenant in the US Army."
Occupation:
"Over the years, I have been a gunsmith's apprentice, and then a cadet and a philosophy student, and then a military officer, and then a vagrant, and then a scout, and then a strategist, and then an author, and then a commander, and then a fugitive. At this point, I'm a professional dissident, living on the kindness of strangers and on what I can hunt and forage between towns. And someday soon, I expect I'll either be a prisoner, or I'll be dead. And yet somehow, in all of these different jobs, I have always served the same purpose; in an Aristotelian sense, these occupations are the accidents of my life, various manifestations of the same fundamental essence."
Basic Background (2 or more paragraphs):
"But to begin at the beginning: I was born in Boone, North Carolina, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My father's family had lived in Boone, and further north across the state line in West Virginia, for centuries. My mother moved from Charlotte to Boone to study nursing at Appalachian State University, and met my father there. Pa was a gunsmith, and he did good business selling and repairing hunting rifles and bird guns for local families.
"We were pretty poor, but so was everyone else in Boone, and my father's family - one of those big Scots-Irish hillbilly clans - helped a lot. I have - had - more than a hundred cousins, and we all found jobs and homes for each other whenever times got rough, and we all got through together okay. We'd all meet at my great-aunt Martha Jean's house once a month or so to catch up, drink shine, play old-time music, argue, fight, make up, drink some more. Boone public schools being what they were, I learned more from those meetings than I did from elementary school.
"And what did I learn? Plenty, I'd say. I learned to hunt; my father started bringing me along in the early mornings when I was six, and I was bagging squirrel and raccoon with a .22 by the time I turned nine. Pa taught me to be quiet, and stay still, and vanish into the forest, and find and follow tracks, and hit what I aimed at on the first shot. Papaw taught me to brew shine, to use good dry wood, and how to smell when the mash was just sour enough. His wife, my Mamaw, taught me to tend a garden, and forage mushrooms and berries and herbs, and fix some foul-smelling remedy for whatever ailed my little sister that week - Rose was always sickly. I learned to help out those weaker than me, and pray to God for help, and never give up, and never roll over for anybody, because all we had was pride and family, and those two things together were enough.
"But when I came out of the woods, my mother would point me to the shower, and then put a book in my hands, and make sure I did my homework. And I came to think more and more about this wide world of books and ideas and history, all sorts of different people and experiences far beyond the Blue Ridge.
"At any rate, when I was thirteen, my family moved to Charlotte to take care of my mother's parents, who were ailing, and to find a better-paying job for my mother herself at the big-city hospital. For his part, my Pa started a new gun store, and did just fine. The move pretty much did a number on me; I felt totally out of my depth, in this alien world with people who didn't talk or act like my kin. At school, my accent and way of dressing and so on came in for plenty of mockery. Ultimately, I fell in with a raggedy group of kids from all over Charlotte, who spent most of their time getting in trouble. That was the Gang; my friends never saw a lost dog they didn't like, and I was pretty damn lost.
"Anyway, I spent a lot of time with Devin and Cal and Angela and Mark and the rest. I was a year older than most of them, and tried to keep them out of trouble, and mixed it up with the best of them when I failed - I once told Russell Smith to his face that if he laid a finger on Devin, I would kill him. That didn't end well. There were good times too, though: I taught more than a few of my friends to drink safely, like my Papaw had taught me when I was ten, and I listened to the home troubles of a few more and offered what advice I could. If Cal was the hell-raising team dad, then I was the team mom: a moral center, a source of advice and moderation, always ready to listen.
"At the same time, I did well in school, really well: I poured my energy and my confusion into it, and Ma encouraged me, taught me never to give anything less than one hundred percent. It helped that I didn't play a sport; I spent most of my free time hunting, and from the age of fourteen I worked in the gun store as an apprentice to my Pa, learning to clean and repair and modify firearms. But mostly, if I'm honest, it was just that I was really smart: when I applied myself, I flew ahead of the rest of the class. I was our valedictorian - a quarter of a point ahead of Cesar, if memory serves. By then, I was in love with learning, addicted to it. I wanted the best education I could find. My family had a little cash put aside for college, and I got merit-based scholarships and need-based scholarships. I joined the Army ROTC to make up the difference, and because my family had fought in every war since the Revolution, and because right after 9/11 it seemed like the thing to do. And then I headed off to Princeton.
"I took a few courses in a bunch of different subjects, settled into the ROTC program. The military side of things came easily enough: I could already shoot, and navigate, and tactics mostly seemed like common sense. The regimentation and restrictions of military life drove me a little crazy, but I endured. Academically, I settled into political philosophy. It brought together most of the things that mattered to me. My family had taught me loyalty, and that loyalty extended to my country and its ideals - so I set out to understand them. The Bible had taught me about justice, and that principle extended to all people - so I set out to see how justice could be made manifest. And my mother had taught me about the importance of ideas, so political science - the how - mattered less to me than political philosophy - the why. Truth begins with why.
"I did well at Princeton. That's where my education really comes from, my ability to throw around quotations, develop reasoned arguments, express myself clearly and powerfully. I'd always had the germ of rhetoric and leadership within me; Princeton let those qualities blossom. At the time, I knew about the zombie outbreak in Southeast Asia, and I worried about it, and I kept up-to-date on the news. But when push came to shove, it was still a long way away, and I couldn't quite believe that it would ever reach the States. I still took some things for granted.
"That all changed in '06. I was in my junior year, second semester, and I went to study abroad in Istanbul. I was working on a thesis about the religious bases for democracy, and how they varied between Christian and Muslim societies. Two months after I arrived, the undead overran the city. The Turkish government had been censoring reports of the epidemic to prevent panic, and the first I knew of the crisis was when a classmate started shaking me awake at three in the morning, screaming in Turkish. The streets were full of blood, so we scrambled across the rooftops of the Galata down to the Golden Horn. The ferry was overloaded; we couldn't get on; it sank halfway across the Bosphorus. My friend got bit, I stole a motorcycle and headed for the bridge. It was blockaded, soldiers turning everyone away, shooting anyone who got too close. I stumbled across the bodies, waved my US passport, got taken across.
"Ten minutes later, they blew the bridge. I sat on the shore of the Bosphorus for twelve hours, waiting for evacuation, listening to the screams of six million people being eaten alive on the other side of the straits. The soldiers sat nearby and smoked.
"After that, I didn't take anything for granted. And the sight of soldiers made me sick to my stomach.
"When things fell apart, it happened fast. In Princeton, the fall of New York was the primary concern. A week before my graduation, refugees started pouring down the rail line; then the National Guard came out, soldiers on every street corner, just like in Turkey. The refugees stopped coming. I thought of bridges blown up, people left to die. I called my parents every day, got ready for graduation.
"Then came the longest three days of my life.
"Day one: I graduated cum laude, walked the line in my gown. A beautiful day, clear blue skies, my parents in the audience. That afternoon, I was given my commission on an accelerated basis. State of emergency, et cetera. Welcome to the Army, Lieutenant Armstrong.
"Day two: call-up by my CO at four in the morning, hotel phone ringing off the hook. A green platoon of Jersey guardsmen, sent to hold a rail juncture north of town, like we were fighting a foe that needed logistics. And then a noise like thunder coming down the line, like a train, like a storm rolling down from the mountains back home. And the dead filled the rolling Garden State horizon from one side to the other.
"We shot them down, ran out of ammunition, got overrun, lost half the platoon, ran for Princeton in whatever vehicles we could find as the Air Force dropped incendiaries behind us.
"Day three: evacuation. We were pulling out of the East Coast, we were told, running for the safe zone at Asheville, choppers picking up essential personnel since all escape routes by land were overrun. I held the line with what was left of my platoon, then ran for a chopper. They told me that military personnel and their families were essential, guaranteed evacuation.
"They lied. After I landed in Asheville, I searched among the half-million refugees for my parents. I never found them. They never left Princeton. The army left them to die.
"I thought of the bridge across the Bosphorus.
"But the next day, I found my sister Rose, and I got a new platoon, and new orders. The Army figured out that I knew the territory, and put me with a recon unit running patrols. I made sure Rose got the medicine she needed, and I felt like I was protecting people. The rationing was strict, and unfair; soldiers got the most, old folks the least. I shared my cans with Rose, and tried not to think about it all.
"I've never been good at that.
"After a month, the order came down from on high: safe zone had reached capacity, additional arrivals would cause immediate exhaustion of food and medical supplies. No additional arrivals will be permitted. The recon units got word first: if you see refugees, turn them away. If they won't go willingly, you make them.
"I did it. Just once. I thought of Rose, and when they came forward, emaciated and begging, and didn't pay attention to the warning shots -
"- I did it.
"I went home that night. I thought about killing myself. I told Rose what I'd done. She said to me: 'God has a purpose for you, Logey. But it's not here.'
"Rose gave me permission to leave. Said I wasn't abandoning her; said she'd be okay. I hope she made it through. Things got bad, later, even in the safe zones. But I can hope my kid sister made it through. I'll know soon enough, one way or the other. But I can - I have to - hope.
"Rose was right. God had a purpose for me elsewhere. God would deliver me, all of us, somehow, someday: deliver us to life, or to a decent death. Or God was not God.
"So I left. It was that, or suicide, because I couldn't pull that trigger on a child ever again.
"Desertion wasn't hard, not in those mountains that I'd known since I was a kid. I got a good horse and rode west through West Virginia and Kentucky, scavenging food from abandoned homes and vehicles as I went, hunting and fishing and foraging, not heading much of anywhere in particular. I stayed away from army patrols, helped out at farms where people had refused to flee, trawled the abandoned Louisville Public Library for reading material. I started to write, and to keep this journal, to remind myself of who I was. I let myself enjoy the sun on my back, the wind in my face, the pleasure of a clean kill while hunting. I put myself back together again.
"It was while I was working a few days on a farm in Missouri that I heard about the Constitutional Defense Brigade. Word was that they had just started up in Colorado: emergency personnel and local militia, trying to protect locals from military policies and the zombies alike. I thought of what Rose had said: God had a purpose for me, out there somewhere, waiting.
"I turned my horse's head to the west, and rode hard across the empty plains for Colorado.
"By the time I reached Aspen, the CDB had been around for a few months, and it was holed up in Aspen waiting for winter. It was still a pretty small group at that time, only a couple thousand men and women fit for battle, a real mess. I ran into Chancy, who was salty as ever, torn up about Cal. She figured he was dead, didn't want to talk about it.
"At any rate, Krauss - the Colonel, we called him - was interested in me, on account of my having crossed half of North America alone and on horseback. He figured he could use a man like me as a scout, and he gave me a team of teenage refugees and National Guard deserters, and told me to head down Highway 82 for to find food and medicine. Before I answered, I asked the Colonel what to do if I found refugees on the road; back then, we could barely feed the people we already had in Aspen, and winter was coming on fast.
"'Bring 'em home,' Krauss told me.
"I think I may have started crying.
"For the next eight months, I led a scout platoon. The Rockies were a lot bigger than the Blue Ridge, but the lessons I'd learned in Boone mostly held true, and I turned that ragged platoon into a model for the Brigade, an object lesson in the usefulness of twenty-first century cavalry. We made it through the winter by the skin of our teeth and the fire in our hearts, though I lost my pinky finger to frostbite. I ended up reporting personally to the Colonel every Sunday, briefing him on refugee numbers, remaining food sources, incursions by looters. Those meetings got progressively more informal. I started talking to Krauss about concrete ideas: windmill-driven irrigation, public transit within Aspen. Then we started talking about more abstract things: the meaning of popular sovereignty, the role of a citizen militia in a free society, the status of conscientious objectors. Without ever quite realizing it, I became one of the Colonel's key informal advisors, and he took it upon himself to groom me for greater things.
"Around the fall of '07, when things looked more stable and we were expanding the Liberated Zone - I suggested the term, by way of contrast with the Army's "safe zones" - Krauss asked me to put together some pamphlets, written in simple language, explaining what the CDB stood for. That turned into "Why We Fight," my first major publication (and homage to Capra). I interviewed hundreds of CDB personnel - soldiers, civilians, of every race and age and creed, and including Angela and Chancy - and arranged their statements so that the common themes - liberty, community, equality, compassion - were blindingly obvious. We fired up the printing presses in Boulder and put out fifteen million copies of the pamphlet in two years. It got to the point where they were common currency even in the LA safe zone. I supplemented "Why We Fight" with two longer booklets: "Self-Evident Truths," about government by consent and the military's betrayal of the Declaration of Independence, and "Times That Try Men's Souls," in which I argued that national emergencies require more rather than less faith in democratic institutions. By the start of '10, Krauss had taken to calling me "the prophet": more than anybody else, I was responsible for developing and explaining the ideology underlying the Brigade's struggle.
"At the same time, though, I was working on strategy and the military side of things. By the spring of '08, the Army was pressing us hard, ambushing foraging parties and hedging off our territory with roadblocks and patrols. I reread Seven Pillars of Wisdom and went to the Colonel with an idea inspired by Lawrence of Arabia: the CDB should take the offensive. We would form flying columns, mounted on horseback, moving off the road over terrain where the Army couldn't follow, and we would hit the enemy behind their lines, targeting the gasoline and munitions depots that they needed in order to function. We would turn our lack of logistics into an advantage, and the foe's reliance on resupply into a crippling weakness. At the same time, we would feed misinformation to the government's informants, ensuring that the Army's attempts at counterattacks would end in our own ambushes.
"Krauss liked it, and gave me control of Column 5: two hundred of our best. We rode hard to the south all through that winter, crossing Utah and Arizona, keeping to the mountains and blowing up tens of millions of dollars worth of fuel and munitions. I wrote "Self-Evident Truths" during that campaign. But mostly I remember it because I managed to convince the CIA that we were a single squad, and they sent a Ranger platoon after us. We ambushed the ambushers, and although the Rangers fought like hell - I lost nine dead, fifteen wounded - we killed most of the platoon and captured five of the survivors. Including Cal.
"Well, we hauled Cal and his buddies back to Aspen when the passes opened again in the spring. I tried to convince Cal of the error of his ways, but he kept telling me that the civilian government simply couldn't handle an emergency like this one. My side of that argument turned into "Times That Try Men's Souls." Figuring out that Chancy was still alive hurt Cal more than anything I could say anyway. In the end, I gave up and took the column out for another six months, west this time, hitting rear-echelon government bases all over the Cascades and Sierra Nevada. And that's when I got grabbed.
"It was overconfidence and bad luck - just like Lawrence of Arabia in that way too, now that I think about it. I took a small team into Auburn to run a recon on the depot there. The guards were jumpy, worried that we were coming. One of my scouts - Kathy, a small serious girl who never talked about what had happened to her on the road to Aspen - got too close. The guards got handsy. Another of my guys, who had a thing for Kathy, got off a round, and things went downhill fast. Kathy and her beau got shot dead, my other three guys high-tailed it, I caught a slug through the calf muscle and wound up in a windowless room in Folsom.
"The CIA didn't know exactly who I was. They knew my background: that the Logan Armstrong who'd written "Why We Fight" had come from Boone, gone to Princeton, and so on. They even had my old driver's license photo. But by then I looked so different from that photo - leaner, darker, harder - that they still weren't totally sure I was their guy. They did their Abu Ghraib thing: set a dog on me, stuck me in a meat cooler, kept me awake for God only knows how long. I kept telling them I was Mark Damjanović; I made up a backstory based on my old friend's life, close enough to remember when I was delirious from sleep deprivation but different enough not to lead them to the actual Mark. When they got frustrated, they waterboarded me, and I screamed till my larynx scarred. And then they put me in that packing crate, alone in the dark, unable to move, and left me there. Buried alive in my own coffin.
"That just about did it. When they took me out - I don't know how much later - I was too incoherent to tell them much of anything. Fortunately, they decided that this meant that I really was some Serb named Mark, and they dumped me in a cell in Folsom and forgot about me. I spent the next six months getting control of my fear, moving past the nightmares. I started writing, using toilet paper and a stub of pencil that the inmates in the political-prisoners wing secretly passed around from cell to cell. I wrote from dawn till dusk, as often as I could, and in the words I found meaning, courage, strength. I wrote about why I fought, why freedom was worth fear and torture and death, why we never need love and faith and hope and liberty more than when the world is at its very darkest, why there is never a right time to give up on a better tomorrow.
"After eight months, the Brigade busted me out. Angela and the Bad Company led a brilliant, flawless operation and got thirty-four of us out in a single night, tying down the guards with misdirection and delaying any counterattack with a simultaneous spoiling attack on the airfield. The ride through the mountains back to Aspen almost killed me, and I spent the next ten weeks recovering in the hospital. The Colonel visited me every Sunday, just like back in the beginning. The roll of toilet paper became Labor of Love - and writing that book was the most important thing I'll ever do. It spread like wildfire in churches, university campuses, even army camps. Last year, when protesters took to the streets by the thousands to demand the return of civilian rule, they brandished bootleg copies of that book. Labor of Love is the proof that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that not even the Bloody Blizzard could kill the idea that we fought for.
"Rose had told me that God had a purpose for me, somewhere out there. She was right.
"By the time I was out of the hospital, it was February of '11, and things were falling apart fast. Task Force Cohort was advancing, the flying columns were forced to fight on the defensive, and we were losing the farms and ranches we needed to feed Aspen. Our troops got hungry, and started to slip away at night to amnesty in LA. I took to walking through the camps at night, reassuring the men, praying with them, talking to them about why we fought. But they were sick and starving and so, so tired.
"The Task Force did try to kill me once. A sniper from most of a mile away. He missed by a couple inches, and the kill-team got away before we could respond. But it let me know that the CIA had finally matched my face to my name.
"By that time, I was one of the only senior CDB commanders left. When Pueblo fell, I led the breakout to Aspen, and saw half my men vaporized in B-52 strikes. When TF Cohort closed in on Aspen, I told the Colonel that we had to take to the hills: disperse into small teams, shift to guerrilla tactics and harassment. He refused; he knew that we couldn't evacuate the children and the old and the sick, not with winter coming on, and he wouldn't leave his people defenseless when the army arrived. So I helped to organize the defense of the southern perimeter of Aspen, and I waited to die.
"The army closed in around us, pushing back the teams I sent out to harass their supply lines. We were so low on food by then that I could barely stand. Then the bastards shelled us all night, pounding us with bombers and mortars and howitzers, flatting every building inside the city limits, women and children and all. Then came the helicopters, flying low and slow through the billowing snow to strafe what was left. A Hellfire rocket shredded most of my back and pitched me into a snowdrift. By the time I woke up, it was all over; everywhere I looked were soldiers, and trucks full of bodies: skeletally thin men and women, who had fought for their freedom to the very end.
"So I did more or less what I had done back in Asheville: I wrapped myself in bandages, limped a few miles outside of town, found a horse and a rifle at a supply cabin in the mountains. And then I rode away.
"It's been almost five years since then. Most of the other survivors turned themselves in, hoping for amnesty, hoping for some kind of ordinary life in a country that's gradually putting itself back together. Not me. My back has healed, if badly, a great mass of ridged scars. I'm still on the FBI's Most Wanted list, as far as I know. But in small towns across the West, a survivor of the Bloody Blizzard never buys his own drinks; people remember the flying columns, the regular elections, the promise of a warm hearth for refugees even in the depths of winter. I ride from town to town, hunting and fishing for my sustenance on the road, working odd jobs for mechanics and farmers. I stay one step ahead of the regime, with a little help from the kindness of strangers. A few old friends who took the amnesty and have since made heaps of money will send me a briefcase of cash now and then. I get by: the last soldier of a bygone war.
"I still write, too. The Internet's mostly back online now, so I write articles, and people share them around on Facebook, at least until they get censored. Small-town newspapers run by brave publishers will let me use their presses for a new round of pamphlets now and then. I get my word out on the transition back to civilian rule: making sure that people remember the cause we died for, making sure that we as a nation commit to ensuring that our liberty will never again be surrendered in the name of necessity, making sure that the public watches the military like a hawk for signs of delay or deception. These days, bootleg copies of Labor of Love are everywhere, so people pay attention when a new article from Logan Armstrong appears. I'm sure that ticks the feds off to no end, but they haven't found me yet.
"In the end, though, it's just a matter of time. It's pride that keeps me on the road, at this point: as long as I am free and writing, the fight goes on, and the Brigade endures through me. If I make it through to the end of the transition, and full constitutional rule returns, then in some sense it will feel like we will have won. All our sacrifices, all my scars, will not have been in vain.
"At least, I hope that's what it will feel like. Maybe then I can take the amnesty, or the trial, or whatever else the generals have planned for me. Maybe then I can rest.
"Christ, I'm tired. Ten towns in the last two weeks. That's too far to go alone. More and more these days, I catch myself thinking of Rose, and wondering if she made it. The question keeps me up at night. I daydream about seeing her, about getting her some medicine, about cooking lunch for her in our old house like when I was a boy. And after all, why not? I wrote once that liberty and love are one and inseparable: we cannot be both free and alone. And I have been alone for far too long.
"Enough, then. Enough running. Let them kill me if they want. I'm going home."
by Cylarn » Wed Mar 22, 2017 9:24 am
by Rupudska » Wed Mar 22, 2017 10:08 am
Cylarn wrote:Reverend Norv wrote:-snip-
I'll make an exception for Logan. Working in Logan's search for his sister, I could also foresee Angela or Chancy (if Patton joins up) offering Logan a place in the group, without Cal's immediate knowledge. Sure Cal would be upset, but I fear that he could be brought around to the idea when faced with opposition from the others.
by Cylarn » Wed Mar 22, 2017 10:48 am
Rupudska wrote:-snip-
by Rupudska » Wed Mar 22, 2017 10:50 am
Cylarn wrote:Rupudska wrote:-snip-
Prosecution of the CDB, at this point, is limited to the pursuit of individual fugitives who are viewed largely as "lone-wolves" in order to prevent their actions from affecting lawful efforts at reform. The military campaign officially ended with Krauss surrendering at Aspen, though holdout groups remained in the preceding months until they were either wiped out or their members surrendered to the government. In my mind, a cadre of high-echelon officers within the military administration have made way for the expansion of free speech and formation of the current "Constitutionalist" political party, which itself is made up of many former CDB members. This political movement is protected under the administration's regulations on free speech.
I would still prefer her to be pardoned, at least by the beginning of the RP. I am foreseeing either Angela or Chancy as being Logan's ticket into the city.
by Cylarn » Wed Mar 22, 2017 11:18 am
Rupudska wrote:-snip-
by Rodez » Wed Mar 22, 2017 2:34 pm
Cylarn wrote:Righto.
Norv, the CDB bio is superb and I shall add it soon. That being said, I am concerned that the faction is "too" noble in the eyes of the American people. I am not asking you to negate their value or anything, but keep in mind that far more Americans served the government, and many (although respecting the goals of the group) hold them in a negative light for fracturing national unity in a time of extreme crisis. As great as democracy is, the fact of the matter is that the elected leaders of our country mostly fled their posts in the beginning.
Another issue I am foreseeing is the fugitive status of Angela and Logan. By this point, they would be on the FBI's Most Wanted for their crimes, especially Angela. Whether or not they are shining knights of liberty, equality, and fraternity, remember that Angela shot a lot of men in the war. If they were still fugitives, would Call really risk his own liberty and safety by harboring them? My advice would be for the two of them to accept an amnesty plea following the Fall of Aspen, and 2-3 years of penal duty on the US-Mexican Border.
Of course Devin is back on board. I will put together the Dramatis Personae today.
Rodez, allow me to consult with my Co-OPs. Also, cocaine withdrawal is not easy to hide without getting yourself killed. I work part-time at an in-patient detox facility, and I have seen more than a few clients having a rough time coming off from cocaine, despite taking meds to assist with the symptoms. There is a story on Awesome Shit My Drill Sergeant Said that follows along similar lines, but even I doubt its legitimacy.
by Cylarn » Wed Mar 22, 2017 7:54 pm
by Nature-Spirits » Wed Mar 22, 2017 11:25 pm
by Cylarn » Thu Mar 23, 2017 7:52 am
by Rodez » Fri Mar 24, 2017 10:54 am
by Cylarn » Sat Mar 25, 2017 10:24 am
by Rupudska » Mon Mar 27, 2017 11:01 am
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