Short Brigade Excerpt

Short excerpt from The Brigade, by H. A. Covington:


Hatfield wasn’t offended; he understood the need for suspicion and precaution and he knew that in a movement like the NVA, trust and comradeship was not something that would come overnight. It had to be carefully forged and then tempered in the fire of combat. Nothing loath, he started talking. He was lucky in that Coyle’s bullshit detectors were excellent and they detected none; it occurred to him that if Coyle had sensed anything off kilter about him he wouldn’t be seeing the bus station again. But Coyle sized him up and at some point, he approved. After a time Zack could feel the conversation easing into serious business between colleagues. "So what does the big picture look like?" he eventually asked.

"A lot of thought has gone into the question of how the revolution in the Northwest will flow, so to speak, with relation to the urban-rural question," Morehouse explained. "Mao’s classical dictum was that you always take the countryside first and the cities last. That’s fine for the Third World, but it doesn’t always work. There are a hundred other factors that come into play. That countryside-to-city flow worked in China and in Cuba, then Che Guevara tried it in Bolivia and fell flat on his ass. The Iranian revolution was almost entirely urban, the Afghan resistance against the Russians and later the Americans was almost entirely rural, and the Iraqi insurgency is a well-balanced hybrid of both, although in Iraq the resistance has massive support of the people of a kind we don’t have yet, and they have more numbers than we’ll likely have for a long time."

"They also have massive world opinion on their side and beaucoup outside sources of supply, as well as recruiting and training bases across every border," Zack reminded him. "I remember one of the classes we got in guerrilla warfare from the TAC school in the Rangers. The instructor was an egghead professor type from some neocon think tank, and he told us that it’s always been considered that a completely self-contained insurgency based inside the country of operation, without foreign bases and outside supply lines, was impossible."

"Nothing is impossible," said Coyle vigorously. "We’re going to win this, period, end of story. We have to take that attitude right from the start."

"It always helps to have allies and exterior sources of aid, true," agreed Morehouse. "But it’s not completely necessary. The Bolsheviks had none in 1917, and the Provisional IRA and the Taliban always made do with a minimum. We will eventually develop some outside resources, of course. A lot of people across the world want to see the United States go down, and they’ll be willing to help once they observe that our men have the right stuff and we are seriously pinning down American forces which would otherwise be used against their own countries. The Russians in particular won’t have any objection to stepping back up to superpower status while we mangle ZOG from within. Bear in mind that there are certain advantages in fighting from within the belly of the beast. For all the incipient collapse and waste of the past three generations, this is still the richest country on the face of the earth. Everything we need to fight and win is right here; we just have to take it."

Coyle nodded. "You’re right, Red. It’s all there just waiting for us to stiffen our spines and take it. We need weapons and ammunition? We don’t need gunrunners from outside. There are enough guns left in private hands in this country to get us started, guns we can beg or buy, or just take. From then on it’s simple. We fight and kill the enemy and then we take their weapons and ammo. The Old Man always said that gun control was never really that important an issue. There was no point in having a right to keep and bear arms if we were never going to use it. How many right wing cranks have we all known down through the years who had a whole rec room full of guns, all gathering dust and rust, not one of them ever used to fire a single shot in anger at the real racial enemy?"

"Oh, I have seen some private arsenals in the hands of right wing eccentrics that would make us all drool with envy," Morehouse chuckled. "Rusting away while the owners got older and older and more senile, until they died and their liberal asshole kids gave the guns to the police. Weapons kept obsessively clean and well oiled-and never taken out of the closet even when things were at their worst. It’s like the Old Man always said-once we get some iron in our souls, we’ll find a way to get some iron in our hands."

"We need safe houses, training and staging areas?" Coyle continued. "The Pacific Northwest is huge; the feds simply won’t have the manpower to put a soldier behind every Douglas fir tree. Remember how it was, Zack, when we tried to occupy Iraq with only 140,000 men? There were hadjis behind every window and in every ditch, and we never knew where they were. The Northwest Homeland is at least three times the size of Iraq, and most of it is heavy forest and mountain, not empty desert. Screw outside help. It’s all here for us, if we’re man enough to use it. We have to get rid of this attitude that the federals are somehow better than us or superior to us. They aren’t. They’re not the bosses in this land anymore. We are. The police and the FBI are no longer the baddest motherfuckers on the block; the NVA is. The NVA does not fight on the defensive. They do. They don’t hunt us. We hunt them. We can get all the weapons and ammo we need with a little hustle, explosives as well, plus what we can make ourselves. If we run short on anything else, we can always just raid the local Mighty Mart. Our sources of supply are right under our nose. We’ve got the elbow room to float like a humming bird and sting like a bee. This is a spiritual problem, not a material one. What we need are men and women with enough balls to pull the triggers and live the life."

"The size and terrain of our new country is in our favor," pointed out Morehouse. "A completely self-contained revolt might have small chance of success in some small and overcrowded country like England or Belgium, or some tiny state like Vermont or New Hampshire here, where the occupation forces can monitor pretty much everything and bring their superior forces to bear on any point quickly. This is the problem the Palestinians have always faced. They’re trying to fight in a strip of land the size of a postage stamp, crowded in like sardines with their own people. But here in the Northwest we’ve got room to maneuver."

"Maneuver exactly how?" asked Hatfield.

"What the Army Council finally decided on is a series of small crews raising as much hell as possible in the cities, to keep the enemy forces mostly occupied in the urban centers, and make even fewer troops and cops available for large stretches of countryside and small towns like the North Shore where your company will be operating, Zack. This should make your job in this area a lot easier, since hopefully they’ll be so occupied protecting their own institutions and people in Portland that they’re just not going to be able to spare much in the way of manpower to chase you and your boys over hill and dale through hundreds of square miles of forest, or go rooting around for you in every isolated farm and logging camp. For the first year or so, in addition to direct operations against all federal authority and personnel in general, we want the combat crews to concentrate on gofers."

"On what?" asked Zack, puzzled.

"General Order Number Four," said Coyle. "GO-4 enforcement actions. Gofers. Get it?"