Victoria, Book 1 by Bill Lind

Preface

The triumph of the Recovery was marked most clearly by the burning of the Episcopal bishop of Maine.

She was not a particularly bad bishop. She was in fact typical of Episcopal bishops of the first quarter of the 21st century: agnostic, compulsively political and radical, and given to placing a small idol of Isis on the altar when she said the Communion service. By 2055, when she was tried for heresy, convicted, and burned, she had outlived her era. By that time only a handful of Episcopalians still recognized female clergy, it would have been easy enough to let the old fool rant out her final years in obscurity.

The fact that the easy road was not taken, that Episcopalians turned to their difficult duty of trying and convicting, and the state upheld its unpleasant responsibility of setting torch to faggots, was what marked this as an act of Recovery. I well remember the crowd that gathered for the execution, solemn but not sad, relieved rather that at last, after so many years of humiliation, of having to swallow every absurdity and pretend we liked it, the majority had taken back the culture. No more apologies for the truth. No more “Yes, buts” on upholding standards. Civilization had recovered its nerve. The flames that soared above the lawn before the Maine State House were, as the bishopess herself might have said, liberating.

She could have saved herself, of course, right up until the torch was applied. All she had to do was announce she wasn’t a bishop, or a priest, since Christian tradition forbids a woman to be either. Or she could have confessed she wasn’t a Christian, in which case she could be bishopess, priestess, popess, whatever, in the service of her chosen demons. That would have just gotten her tossed over the border.

But the Prince of This World whom she served gives his devotees neither an easy nor a dignified exit. She bawled, she babbled, she shrieked in Hellish tongues, she pissed and pooped herself. The pyre was lit at 12:01 PM on a cool, cloudless August 18th, St. Helen’s day. The flames climbed fast; after all, they’d been waiting for her for a long time.

When it was over, none of us felt good about it. But we’d long since learned feelings were a poor guide. We’d done the right thing.

***

Was the dissolution of the United States inevitable?

Probably, once all the “diversity” and “multiculturalism” crap got started. Right up to the end the coins carried the motto, E Pluribus Unum, just as the last dreadnought of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy was the Viribus Unitis. But the reality for both was Ex Uno, Plura.

It’s odd how clearly the American century is marked: 1865 to 1965. As the 20th century historian Shelby Foote noted, the first Civil War made us one nation. In 1860, we wrote, “the United States are.” By the end of the war, the verb was singular: “the United States is.” After 1965 and another war we disunited—deconstructed—with equal speed into blacks, whites, Hispanics, womyn, gays, victims, oppressors, left-handed albinos with congenital halitosis, you name it. The homosexuals said silence = death. Nature replied diversity = war.

In four decades we covered the distance that had taken Rome three centuries. As late as the mid-1960s—God, it’s hard to believe—America was still the greatest nation on earth, the most productive, the freest, the top superpower, a place of safe homes, dutiful children in good schools, strong families, a hot lunch for orphans. By the 1990s the place had the stench of a third-world country. The cities were ravaged by punks, beggars, and bums; as in third century Rome, law applied only to the law-abiding. Schools had become daytime holding pens for illiterate young savages. First television, then the Internet brought the decadence of Weimar Berlin into every home.

***

In this Year of Our Lord 2068—and my 80th year on this planet—we citizens of Victoria have the blessed good fortune to live once again in an age of accomplishment and decency. With the exception of New Spain, most of the nations that cover the territory of the former United States are starting to get things working again. The revival of traditional, Western, Christian culture we began is spreading outward from our rocky New England soil, displacing savagery with civilization for a second time.

I am writing this down so you never forget, not you, nor your children, nor their children. You did not go through the wars, though you have lived with their consequences. Your children will have grown up in a well-ordered, prosperous country, and that can be dangerously comforting. Here, they will read what happens when a people forgets who they are.

This is my story, the story of the life of one man, John Ira Rumford of Hartland, Maine, soldier and farmer. I came into this world near enough the beginning of the end for the old U.S. of A., on June 28, 1988. I expect to leave it shortly, without regrets.

It’s also the story of the end of a once-great nation, by someone who saw most of what happened, and why.

Read it and weep.

Book 1: Dissolution

Chapter One

My war started May 7, 2016, at the mess night put on by my class at the Marine Corps’ Amphibious Warfare School in Quantico, Virginia.

I got killed.

A mess night, when it’s done right, is a black tie brawl. It’s a Brit thing, very formal-like and proper when it starts, with a table full of wine glasses and funny forks and Mr. Vice proposing toasts and rules like you’ve got to stand up and ask permission to go pee (usually denied). After enough toasts things loosen up a bit, with the aviators doing “carrier landings” by belly flopping on the tables and sliding through the crystal and the infantry getting into fights. At least, that’s how the good ones go.

One of the Corps’ better traditions was that we remembered our dead. The mess set a table apart, with the glasses and silver inverted, for those who had gone before us and never come back. And before the fun began we remembered the battles where they had fought and fallen; Tripoli to Chapultepec to Helmand. A bell rang for each, a Marine officer stood up and called that battle’s name, and we became pretty thoughtful. Another Marine Corps tradition, not one of its better ones in terms of what happens in battles, was to try to pre-plan and rehearse and control everything so there couldn’t be any surprises or mistakes. “Control Freaks R Us” sometimes seemed to be the motto of the officer corps, at least above the company grades. So a couple days before the mess night, the battles to be remembered were each assigned to a captain.

Iwo Jima went to a woman.

We were really steamed. We lost a lot of guys on Iwo, and they were men, not women. Of course, these were the years of “political correctness.” Our colonel was running for general, and he figured he could kiss ass by being “sensitive to issues of race, gender, and class.”

It’s hard to remember that we even had women in a military, it seems so strange now. How could we have been so contemptuous of human experience? Did we think it merely a coincidence that all armies, everywhere, that had actually fought anyone had been made up solely of men? But these were the last days of the U.S.A., and the absurd, the silly, the impossible were in charge and normal people were expected to keep their mouths shut. It was a time, as Roger Kimball said, of “experiments against reality.”

Like a lot of young Marine officers at AWS, I was a reader, especially of what the Germans had written about war. They were the masters, for a century and a half, and we were their willing pupils. I remembered, then and always, an essay written by a German general, Hans von Seekt, the man who rebuilt the German Army after World War I. The title, and the message was Das Wesentliche ist die Tat—The Essential Thing is the Deed. Not the idea, not the desire, not the intention — the deed.

So I did it. The moment came on May 7, during the mess night. The bell tolled our battles: Belleau Wood, Nicaragua, Guadalcanal, Tarawa. Iwo was next. The bell. I was on my feet before she started to move. “Iwo Jima,” I cried in my best parade-ground voice.

Our honor was safe that night.

The next morning, I was toast. The colonel’s clerk was waiting for me when I walked into the building. “The CO wants to see you at once,” he said. I wasn’t surprised. I knew what was coming and I was willing to take it. That’s something else the Germans taught me: Verantwortungsfreudigkeit, the “joy in taking responsibility” that is central to what character means in an officer.

The colonel generally specialized in being nice. But I’d endangered his sacred quest for a promotion, and in the old American military that was the greatest sin a subordinate could commit.

“You have a choice,” he said as I stood at attention in front of his desk. “You can get up in front of the class and apologize to me, to the female captain you insulted last night, to all the women in the corps, and to the class, or you can have your written resignation from the Marine Corps on my desk before the morning is over.”

“No, sir,” I replied.

“What do you mean, ‘No, sir?’ I gave you a choice. Which one will it be?”

“Neither one, sir.” An early lesson I’d learned about war was that if the enemy gave you two options, refuse them both and do something else. “I have nothing to apologize for,” I continued. “No woman has the right to represent any of the Corps’ battles, because those battles were fought and won by men. And people resign when they’ve done something wrong. I haven’t.”

“I’ve already spoken to the Commanding General,” the colonel replied. “He understands, and you’d better understand, what happens if word of what you did gets to Congresswoman Sally Bluhose, Chairperson of the House Armed Services Committee. I’ve been informed several of the female officers here are planning a joint letter to her. If you don’t help us head this off, she’ll have the Commandant up before the whole committee on this with the television cameras rolling.”

“Sir,” I said, “I thought when people became colonels and generals and Commandants, that meant they took on the burden of moral responsibility that comes with the privileges of rank and position. That’s what I’ve always told my sergeants and lieutenants, and when they did what they thought was right I backed them up, even when it caused me some problems with my chain of command. Is what I’ve been telling them true or not?”

“This has nothing to do with truth,” yelled Col. Ryan, who was starting to lose it. “What the hell is truth, anyway? This is about politics and our image and our budget. Congresswoman Bluhose is a leading advocate for women’s rights. She’ll be enraged, and I’ll take it in the shorts from Headquarters, Marine Corps. Don’t you get it?”

“Yes, sir, I think I do get it,” I said. “You, and I guess the CG here at Quantico and the Commandant, want to surrender to Congresswoman Bluhose and what she represents, a Corps and a country that have been emasculated. But the way I see it, and maybe this is Maine talking, if we’re supposed to fight, that means we have to fight for something. What’s the point in fighting for a country like that? Whatever defeats and replaces it could only be an improvement.”

“I don’t give a damn how you see it, captain,” said the colonel, now icy calm again. “You are going to see it the way I see it. Do I get the apology or the resignation?”

“Neither one, sir,” I said again.

“OK, then this is how it will be,” Colonel Ryan declared. “You are no longer a student at this school. As of this minute. Clear out your locker and get out, now. That’s a direct order, and I’ve already cleared it all the way up the chain.” (As if this guy would have farted without clearing it first.) “You’re going to get a fitness report so bad Christ himself would puke on you if he read it. You’re finished. You won’t even come up for major, and you’ll clean heads for the rest of your sorry days in this Corps. Dismissed.”

So that was that. The word spread fast around the school, as it always did. That was a good gut-check for the rest of the class. Most flunked. They parted for me like the sea did for Moses as I wandered around collecting my books and few other belongings. The handful with moral courage shook my hand and wished me well.

One, my friend Jim Sampsonoff, an aviator, said something important. “You’re a casualty in the culture war,” were his words.

“The what?” I replied.

“The culture war,” he said again. “The next real war is going to be here, on our own soil. It’s already begun, though not the shooting part, yet. It’s a war between those of us who still believe in our old Western culture, the culture that grew up over the last 3000 or so years from Jerusalem and Athens, Rome and Constantinople, and the people who are trying to destroy it. It’s the most important war we’ll ever fight, because if we lose our culture, we’ll lose everything else, too.”

“You mean there’s more to it than whether we’re going to have women in the infantry and gays in the barracks?” I asked.

“You bet,” he said. “Look, you’ll be heading back up to Maine sooner or later. Take a detour through Hanover, New Hampshire. That’s where my college is, Dartmouth. Go see my old German professor, now retired, Gottfried Sanft. He’s the greatest of rarities on an Ivy League campus, an educated man. You need to read some books. He’ll tell you which ones.”

I knew my Marine Corps career was over, but I hung on at Quantico until my AWS class graduated, to make my point about not resigning to apologize for my action. They assigned me to supervise cutting brush around the base, a point the brass carefully made to the mighty “Ms.” Bluhose as they ate toads for her. Come summer, I sent in my letter and headed back to Maine.

Was it worth it? Yes. I made early the choice everyone had to make sooner or later, whether to fight for our culture or turn from it and die. As is so often the case in life, what seemed like an ending was really a beginning.

On the way home, I took Jim Sampsonoff’s advice and paid a visit to Professor Sanft.

Chapter 2

When President Eisenhower of the old USA visited Dartmouth in the 1950s, he said it looked exactly the way a college ought to. By the late ’90s it still did, despite the fact that they’d built an ultra-modern student center on the traditional green —part of the “foul your own nest” maxim that ruled most campuses from the 1960s on. Those were the days when “art” was defined as whatever was ugly or shocking or out of place, not what was beautiful.

Professor Sanft had retired from the German department in 2012. Actually, he was driven out by the weirdos who then populated college faculties —the feminists, freaks, and phonies who had replaced learning with politics. I found him at a house in Hanover, which turned out to be not his residence but the college-in-hiding, otherwise known as the Martin Institute. It seemed some conservative alumni, recognizing that the barbarians were within the gates of their alma mater, had bought a house in town, brought in Professor Sanft and a few other genuine scholars, and were offering Dartmouth students the courses the college would no longer teach, like the great books of Western civilization.

I knew the prof and I would get along when I saw the Zeppelin poster on his office door and smelled the pipe smoke curling out the same. The office was a vast clutter of books and papers, pipes and walking sticks, straw hats and the occasional bottle of something refreshing; no old Sandinista posters on the walls here. Professor Sanft, dressed in a white linen suit for summer and the Raj, with a pink shirt and polka-dot bow-tie, bid me welcome. Jim Sampsonoff had written, saying I’d be by. I wasn’t quite sure why I was there, but the professor seemed to know.

“Jim says you’re interested in getting an education,” he opened.

“Well, I thought I already had one,” I replied. “I graduated from Bowdoin with a pre-med major, before I decided I’d rather make holes in people with a bullet than a scalpel. It’s quicker and more fun, though the pay is less.”

“What do you think an education is?” he continued.

“Going to college, taking some courses and getting a degree, I guess,” I responded, suspecting this was not the right answer.

“No, that’s just credentialing. It may help you get a job, but it won’t help you, yourself, much beyond that. Do you know what the word ‘education’ means?”

I allowed as I hadn’t thought about that much.

“It’s from the Latin ex, for ‘out’ or ‘beyond,’ plus ducare, to lead. An education leads you out beyond where you were, in terms of your understanding of life, the universe, and everything. Did Bowdoin do that for you?”

“Well, not really,” I guessed. But I wasn’t sure this was leading me where I wanted to go, either. “Jim said I should see you because you would help me understand why I got fired for doing what I thought was right. Would a real education help me understand that?” I asked.

“Yes, and perhaps a few more things besides,” answered Professor Sanft. “There was a fellow named Socrates, some years back, who had a similar experience. Ever hear of him?”

I had, and I remembered something about drinking some bad hemlock wine or some such, but beyond that it was hazy.

“You’re in the same situation as most of the students who come to me here,” he said. “You know where you are in space but not in time. You don’t know where you came from. You live in Western civilization, but you don’t know what it is. You don’t know that this civilization had a beginning and went through some rather remarkable times before getting to where we are today.”

“Without the songs and stories of the West, our West , we are impoverished,” he continued. “Weightless and drifting, we do not know where we are in history. We are what the Germans call mere Luftmenschen – in a free translation, airheads.”

The mention of history perked me up. Ever since I was about eight years old, I’d read a lot of military history. I learned to read not so much in school as by falling in love with C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels, which followed a British naval officer in his career from midshipman through admiral, in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. They were fiction, but rooted in fact. I didn’t realize it until much later, but they were also a great introduction to military decision-making.

“In the Marine Corps,” I said, “I saw that people who hadn’t read much military history could only follow processes, which they learned by rote. They could not understand the situation they were in. They had no context.”

“That’s an insight most Dartmouth students don’t have,” said the professor. “And it is what I’m talking about, on a larger scale. Just as your fellow Marines could not understand a military situation, so you can’t understand your situation in the war for our culture. Literally, you can’t see your place—situ—in it.”

“Jim said I was a casualty in the culture war. I always thought wars were fought by guys with uniforms and guns. I’m not quite sure what this ‘culture war’ is all about,” I said.

“Sadly, this great culture of ours, Western culture, is under attack,” the professor replied. “The universities today are active and conscious agents in its destruction. Indeed, they have generated theories as to why Western culture should be destroyed. Of course, they aren’t alone. The most powerful single force in America now is the entertainment industry, and it is also an agent of cultural destruction. Many of the politicians play the game too. The usual code-words are ‘racism, sexism, and homophobia.’ When you hear them, you’re hearing the worms gnawing at the foundation.”

I’d been told my high crime was “sexism,” so that clicked, and Col. Ryan was certainly a politician. It sounded as if there were a new battlefield I needed to understand.

“So where do I start?” I asked.

“By studying our culture – what it is, where it came from, what its great ideas and values are and why we hold them to be great,” Professor Sanft answered. “In other words, with an education.”

He’d brought me back to where we’d started, though now I grasped what he meant.

“That doesn’t mean going back to college,” he continued. “You can do it on your own. In fact, to a large degree, you have to do it on your own now, even if you are a college student. That’s why we have this institute, and why I’m here. And I can give you a small present that will get you started.” He handed me a copy of a book: Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe. “Another Darmouth professor, Jeffery Hart, wrote this a few years ago. Think of it as a road map, though I’ve heard it’s dangerous to give those to infantry officers,” Professor Sanft said.

“Thanks, I think,” I replied. Actually, we grunts did get lost a lot, we just tried to keep it a trade secret.

“It tells you what to read, what commentaries are best, and offers a few comments of its own,” Professor Sanft said. “The books don’t cost much, a tiny fraction of a year’s tuition at Dartmouth, but they’ll do for you what Dartmouth no longer does. They will make you an educated man of the West.”

I thanked Professor Sanft that day, though not nearly as much as I’ve thanked him since. I went to the Dartmouth Bookstore and stocked up. Maine would give me time for reading.

When we look back on our lives, incidents that seemed small at the time may take on great importance. That half-hour with Professor Gottfried Sanft changed my life. Most of my years since that day in Hanover have been spent fighting for Western culture, then rebuilding it, piece by piece, once the fighting part was done.

Thanks to Professor Sanft, this was one infantryman who wasn’t lost.

Chapter 3

One nice thing about Maine is that you can go home again. We Rumfords had been doing it for a couple hundred years. The men of our family, and sometimes the women too, would head out on their great adventure—crewing on a clipper bound for China, settling Oregon, converting the heathen (Uncle Bert got eaten in the Congo), going to war—but those who survived usually came back home again to Hartland and its surrounding farms.

Whether they returned as successes or failures made little difference. As I’d heard a chaplain say, in his day Jesus Christ was accounted a spectacular failure, so failure wasn’t something for Christians to worry much about. We had enough in our family to show we didn’t. I was just the most recent.

I wanted time alone to read, think, and simply live. I moved into what we called “The Old Place,” a shingle Cape Cod up on one of Maine’s few hills. The view down over the fields and ponds somehow helped the thinking part, especially in the evening as the water reflected the western sky, orange and crimson, fading to black.

No one had lived in the old place since my grandparents died, but we kept it because it had always been ours. It had no electricity, and the well worked with a bucket on a windless; by modern standards I guess it wasn’t a fit habitation. That suited me fine. I was tired of everything modern. I wanted a world with, as Tolkien put it, less noise and more green.

I’d put some money by during my time in the Corps, enough to cover me for some months anyway; the garden and deer in season (or, if need be, out of season) would keep me from starving. The whole country was overrun with deer, more than when white men first came to North America, because there were so many restrictions on guns and hunting. In some places they had become pests; we literally could not defend ourselves from our own food.

Once I got settled, I took up Professor Sanft’s books, “that golden chain of masterpieces which link together in single tradition the more permanent experiences of the race,” as one philosopher put it. Homer and Plato, Aristotle and Aristophanes, Virgil and Dante, and Shakespeare and the greatest literary work of all time, the Bible, which was once banned from American schools, which shows as well as anything what America had become.

I had some trouble getting going—Plato isn’t light reading—but I found my way in through my life-long study, war, beginning with the Anabasis of Xenophon. What a story! Ten thousand Greeks, cut off and surrounded in the middle of their ancient enemy, the Persian Empire, have to hack and march their way back out again—and they made it home. It was as exciting as anything Rommel or “Panzer” Meyer or any other modern commander wrote.

From Xenophon and Herodotus and Thucydides and Caesar and Tacitus and all the rest, military and not (I did finally make it through Plato, too), I learned three things. Maybe they were basic, even simple. I’m not a great philosopher. But they were important enough to shape the rest of my life.

The first was that these ancient Greeks and Romans and Hebrews and more modern Florentines and Frenchmen and Englishmen both were us and made us. They had the same thoughts you and I have, more or less, but they had them for the first time, at least the first time history records. Do you want a thoroughly modern send-up of Feminism in all its silliness? Then read Aristophanes‘ Lysistrata—it’s only 2500 years old. For a chaser, recall the line of 17th century English poet and priest John Donne: “Hope not for mind in woman; at their best, they are but mummy possessed.” Pick any subject you want, except science, and these folks were there before us, thousands of years before us in some cases, with the same observations, thoughts and comments we offer today. We are their children.

That led to my second lesson: nothing is new. The only person since the 18th century to have a new idea was Nietzsche, and he was mad. Even science was well along the road we still follow by the time Napoleon was trying to conquer Europe.

Back in the old USA, newness—novelty—was what everyone wanted. Ironically, that too was old, but early 21st century Americans were so cut off from their past they didn’t know it (or much else, beyond how to operate the TV remote and their cell phone).

You see, sometime around the middle of the 18th century, we men of the West struck Faust’s bargain with the Devil. We could do anything, have anything, say anything, with one exception: verweile doch, du bist so schön. We could not tarry, we could not rest, we could not get it right and then keep it that way. Always we must have something new: that was the bargain, and ultimately the reason we pulled our house down around us.

Satan, like God, has a sense of humor. His joke on us was that most of the stuff we thought was new, wasn’t. Especially the errors, blunders, and heresies; they had all been tried, and failed, and understood as mistakes long, long before. But we had lost our past, so we didn’t know. We were too busy passing around “information” with our computers to study any history. So it was all new to us, and we had to make the same mistakes over again. The price was high.

The third lesson, and the one that shaped the rest of my life, was that these thoughts and lessons and concepts and morals that make up our Western culture—for that is what these books contain—were worth fighting for. As Pat Buchanan said, they were true, they were ours, and they were good. They had given us, when we still paid attention to them, the freest and most prosperous societies man has ever known.

They were all bought at a price. Christ died on a cross. The Spartans still lie at Thermopylae. Socrates served Athens as a soldier before he drank its hemlock, also obedient to its laws. Cicero spoke on duty and died at the hands of the Roman government. Saints’dies natales, their birthdays, were the days they died to this world. Every truth we hold and are held by is written in blood, and sweat and tears and cold hours scribbling in lonely garrets with not enough to eat. None of it came cheap – none of it.

We Victorians, those of my generation anyway, know that fighting for the truth is not a metaphor. We killed for it and we died for it. By the 21st century, that was the only way to save it, weapon in hand. That, too, is nothing new, just another lesson we had forgotten and had to learn all over again.

Chapter 4

My next battle started around the dinner table on Christmas Day, 2016, and I’m not talking about the fight for the last piece of Aunt Sabra’s blueberry pie.

It began when cousin John asked me what I thought I was going to do in the way of earning a living. Hartland wasn’t exactly a boom town, and hadn’t been for a good hundred years. I said I was thinking of farming. That, along with sailing or soldiering, was what we Rumfords usually ended up doing, and like most Marines I’d seen enough of boats to last me a while.

“What you gonna faam?” John asked, the flat, nasal “a” instead of “r” suggesting he hadn’t been outside Maine much.

“Waal,” I said, talking Down East myself, “I thought I might try soybeans.”

“Don’t see them much up heah.”

“Didn’t see wine up heah either ‘til Wyly put in his vineyard. I gather his wine is selling pretty well now,” I said.

“I’ll tell you why you don’t see soybeans up here or on many other family farms,” said Uncle Fred. “It’s oil from soybeans that makes money, and the federal government makes it just about impossible to transport soybean oil or any other vegetable oil unless you’re a big corporation. Under federal regulations, vegetable oil is treated the same as oil from petroleum when it comes to shipment. You’ve got to get a hugely expensive Certificate of Financial Responsibility to cover any possible oil spill. You’ll never get the capital to get started.”

“But vegetable oil and petroleum are completely different. That doesn’t make any sense,” I replied.

“I didn’t say it made sense, I just said that’s what Washington demands. It makes no sense at all. Spilled vegetable oil is no big problem. It’s biodegradable. But the federal government mandates a spill be cleaned up the same way for both, even though that’s unnecessary. You need to scoop up any petroleum product if it spills, especially into water. But if you just let vegetable oil disperse, bacteria will eat it up. Anyway, the government doesn’t care that we lose hundreds of millions of dollars each year in vegetable oil that isn’t produced or exported. The bottom line is, as a small farmer, you can’t do it.”

Great, I thought. First politics gets me thrown out of the Marine Corps, now it’s trying to keep me from farming. “Okay, I’ll grow potatoes. We certainly grow enough of those here in Maine,” I said.

“Only land up at the Old Place that’ll grow potatoes is the bottom land. Government won’t let you do that neither,” said cousin John.

This was starting to get old. “What do you mean the government won’t let me grow down there? That’s the best land on the place. The rest is just rock,” I replied.

“It’s the EPA, the so-called ‘Environmental Protection Agency,” answered Uncle Fred. “They declared all that ground a ‘protected wetland‘ a couple years ago. It’s yours, or ours, but it might as well be on the moon for all the good it does us. We can’t touch it.”

Protected wetland? Hell, I didn’t plan to grow potatoes in the ponds. “That’s our property. We’ve owned it since Andrew Jackson was President. And most of it’s dry. How can they tell us we can’t farm it?” I asked, betraying how much those of us in the military got out of touch at times.

That got the whole table smiling the thin smile that passes for a good laugh among New Englanders. “Property rights don’t mean squat any more,” said Uncle Earl, who was the town lawyer. “The government just tells you what to do or what not to do and dares you to fight them. They have thousands of lawyers, all paid by your tax money, and they can tie you up in court for years. You got a few hundred thousand extra dollars you’d like to spend on legal fees?”

I didn’t, nor did anyone else, I gathered. “So we’re helpless, is what you’re saying?” I asked.

“Pretty much, unless you’ve got a lot of money for lawyers or to buy some politicians and get them in on your side,” said Earl. “It doesn’t even matter if the law is with you, because you can’t afford the fight and they can. If they lose, it means nothing to them; they still get their paychecks from the government. If you lose, you’re finished, and even if you win, you’re usually finished because the legal fight has left you bankrupt. What it comes down to is that we’re not a free country any more.”

“What King George III was doing to us in 1776 wasn’t a hill of beans compared to this,” I said. “We didn’t take it then. Why are we taking it now?”

At that point, the women turned the conversation to how Ma’s stuffing was the best they’d ever had. It always was.

***

Early next year, that year being 2017, I stopped in at Hartland’s one industry, the tannery. My old high school buddy Jim Ebbitt was the personnel department there, and this matter of earning an income was beginning to press a bit on my mind. But I knew the tannery always had some kind of opening, and after my years in the infantry I didn’t mind getting my hands dirty. They didn’t call us “earth pigs” for nothing.

Jim was glad to see me, but he couldn’t give me any good news. “Sorry,” he said, “but like every American company, we’re having to cut jobs, not add ʻem. The problem is this “free trade” business. What it means is that American workers are up against those in places like Mexico, Haiti, and now all of central and south America, since they expanded NAFTA into AFTA and took in the whole hemisphere. Labor costs now get averaged across national boundaries; it pulls their wages up and pushes wages here down. Of course, we don’t actually cut wages, but with inflation rising, we don’t need to. We just keep wages steady and cut the number of jobs. Maybe that will keep this plant in business. Then again, maybe it won’t. In any event, it means if I had a job to offer you, and I don’t, you’d quickly find yourself getting poorer, not richer, if you took it.”

“But you just put a lot of money into this plant,” I replied. “Hell, it used to stink up the whole town. Now you can’t smell it. Maybe that EPA does some good after all.”

“You think so?” asked Jim. “You’re right that we had to clean up our processes here, and we did put some money into the place. But the main thing we did was move most of the work on the fresh hides to Mexico. That cut 23 jobs here, jobs now held by Mexicans. I guess you can’t make Mexico stink any worse than it already does.”

“And the EPA still isn’t done with us,” he added. “They’ve got another investigation going now, which will cost us tens of thousands in legal fees even if that’s all it does. Seems they think we’re still doing something to the river.”

“River looks clean to me,” I replied.

“It is clean. It’s cleaner than it’s ever been, at least since industry, and jobs, first came to this valley. But that doesn’t count to bureaucrats in Washington. They’ve told us we might have to build a full water treatment plant, which would cost us millions. If they rule that way, it’ll be the end of the company here. It would take us 50 years to pay off that debt. There’s not that much money in leather any more, not up against the foreign competition.”

I thanked Jim for his time and drove back to the Old Place. My mind was no easier. Next day I’d pull my last ace out of my sleeve and go see my cousin, who had a car restoration place down near Pittsfield. I knew he was doing well, restoring old cars and selling them to the Summer People.

“Sure,” Ed said, when I stopped in on him, “business is good and I need a couple folk. I know you’d do good work. But I can’t offer you or anyone else around here a job. EEOC won’t let me.”

“EEOC?” I’d heard the initials, but didn’t know much more about it.

“The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They come around and tell you how many blacks, Hispanics, women, whatever you have to hire. Of course, all my employees are white, because everybody up here is white. I guess Maine winters are kinda hard on black folk and those from south of the border. Anyway, that doesn’t count with them. They’ve issued an order that the next six people I hire must be blacks. The effect, of course, is that I can’t hire anyone, not even you.”

This was the nuttiest thing I’d heard yet. “You must be kidding,” I replied. “How can they make you hire blacks where there aren’t any?”

“I don’t know,” Ed said. “But I can’t fight the EEOC in court. I’m a small business and can’t afford it. I just can’t expand, is what it comes down to. And you know how badly we need jobs up here.”

I did, from growing personal experience. “But someone must care that this is completely absurd,” I said. “There has got to be a limit somewhere to what Washington can do to us.”

“If there is, I don’t know where,” Ed replied, obviously a beaten man.

“You and I, and most folk up here, are members of the middle class. That means the government doesn’t do anything for us, it only does things to us. If you know a way to change that, I’d like to hear it. But these days, unless you’re some kind of “minority,” you don’t have any rights. Frankly, it’s just not our country any more.”

That summed it up pretty well. Somewhere along the line, in the last 30 years or so, somebody had taken our country away from us.

We remembered what our country was like. It was a safe, decent, prosperous place where normal, middle class people could live good lives.

And it was gone.

I was beginning to think that what I wanted to do was help take our country back. How I could do that, and how I could earn a living, were both puzzles. But where there’s a will, God often opens a way.

Chapter 5

About a week later I got a letter. It was from my old company Gunnery Sergeant, a black fellow and a good Marine. He was also a husband and father—rare among black males by the 21st century—and a Christian. He wrote to ask for my help.

Gunny Matthews had gotten out about a year before I did. He had done his twenty years and had a pension, and felt it was time to move on. He knew that the catastrophe that had overwhelmed many urban black communities in America by the 1970s—crime, drugs, noise, and dirt—was not due to “white racism.” It was due to bad behavior by blacks, toward other blacks as well as toward everyone else. He wanted to try to do something about it.

It was a measure of America’s decay that one of the most important issues facing the country—race—simply couldn’t be talked about. Not honestly, anyway. Oh, there was lots of talk about “racism” and how evil it was and how whites were to blame for everybody else’s problems. But we all knew it was bull.

The fact was that America’s blacks had crapped in their own mess kit. They had been given their “civil rights,” and had promptly shown they could not, or would not, bear the responsibilities that went with them.

Freedom is not doing whatever you want. Freedom is substituting self discipline in place of discipline imposed by somebody else. But nobody told America’s blacks that, so they just went out and did whatever felt good at the moment. The result was a black rate of violent crime twelve times the white rate. Most of the victims of black crime were also black.

Of course, not all blacks were into instant gratification and the drug-using, drug-dealing, mugging, car-jacking, fornicating, and whoring that it brought. But tribal loyalty was strong enough that most of those who lived decent lives wouldn’t condemn those who didn’t. The rest of America saw that in every city with a black government, which promptly descended into utter disorder and corruption. Detroit turned into 6th century Rome.

As early as the 1970s, the average white American spelled black c-r-i-m-e. That wasn’t prejudice, it was statistics. Anywhere near a city, if you were the victim of a random crime, the criminal was almost certain to be black. The only exception was if you were in a Hispanic neighborhood; the Hispanics were rapidly going the same instant gratification route the blacks had taken, with similar results.

Obviously, what was needed was a major crackdown. If a people cannot govern itself, then it must be governed by others. But the white Establishment hewed to the line that said blacks were “victims,” so their crimes could not be held against them. It was pure Orwellian Newspeak: criminals became victims, and the victims (at least the white victims) were the criminals because they were “racists.” So nothing was done, and blacks were emboldened to believe they could get away with anything.

The result, in time, was a full scale race war, which was in turn part of America’s second civil war. The blacks’ so-called “leaders,” most of whom derived fat incomes from their impoverished supporters, never seemed to care that when one tenth of the population goads the other nine-tenths into a war, it loses.

So Gunny Matthews had taken on quite a job. His letter told me how he’d tried to go about it.

The Gunny had grown up in Roxbury, near Boston, so that’s where he retired, “to help the people he knew best,” as he put it. There’s always advantage in fighting where you know the ground. A number of his friends and relatives lived in public housing, so he picked that as his Schwerpunkt, his focus of efforts. In most black communities, that was the worst place you could be. Drug dealers, drug users, prostitutes, the whole ugly smear ran the place, with normal people living in terror.

I’d seen in my job hunt the way government stuck its nose in where it wasn’t wanted, messing up people’s lives in the process. Gunny Matthews saw the other side of the coin, how government failed to do the things it was supposed to do. If there was one duty any government had, it was to protect the lives and property of ordinary, law-abiding people, regardless of their color. In the United States in the 21st century, it no longer did that.

The Gunny saw the problem in terms of counter-guerilla warfare. The scum were the guerrillas, and the key to defeating them was organizing the locals so they could stand up to the scum. He saw an opening, a “soft spot” as we called it in military tactics, in the fact that one public housing development had been given over to the tenants to manage. They formed a tenants’ association, and the Gunny helped them draw up rules for tenant behavior, a patrol system that tracked and reported violators, and liaison with the police. As soon as they identified a drug dealer or other scumbag, they got witnesses, brought the cops in and threw the trash out, permanently. Very quickly the place turned around. For the first time in years, the nights were not punctured with gun shots, there were no hypodermic needles in the halls and kids could play safely outside.

Then the feds came in, in the form of the Legal Services Corporation. Legal Services used tax money to pay lawyers to defend “the poor” in court. Only they had no interest in the honest poor. They were always on the side of the scum. They quickly went to court and stopped the evictions, on the grounds that the “rights” of the drug dealers and their molls were being violated. Just as quickly, the drug dealing, mugging and shooting started up again, and Gunny Matthews and his tenants’ association were back where they started.

He asked me to come down and give them some help. I knew how to fight enemy infantrymen, not lawyers and judges. But I also knew I couldn’t ignore the Gunny’s plea. If I was going to do something to take our country back, this was a place to start. So one snowy February day I loaded up the truck and headed to Boston. On the way, I did some thinking.

This wasn’t law, I realized, this was war. The Legal Services lawyers, the liberal judges who gave them the rulings they wanted, their buddies in the ACLU, they were just enemy units of different types. More, they were the enemy’s “critical vulnerability.” The scum depended on them; no lawyers, no scum (a point we have enshrined in Victorian law, where you must represent yourself in court). The tenants had already shown they could kick out the trash, if we could get the lawyers off their backs. So that had to be our objective.

The Gunny had set up a meeting with the tenants’ association for the night I arrived. They were a pretty down lot when it started. One mother of three kids, the association’s leader, tried not to cry when she explained how they thought they’d made a new start, then had it all taken away from them, thanks to Legal Services. They didn’t know what they could do, now. If I could help, they’d be grateful. But it’s clear they weren’t expecting much from a white boy from Maine.

“Okay,” I said, “here’s where we start. You’re in a war. You know that. You’ve got the bullet holes in your walls and doors to prove it. What we have to do is take the war to the enemy.”

“Amen, brother,” was the answer. “Are we gonna start shootin’ those lawyers?” one voice asked.

“That’s tempting,” I replied. “But you know that while they won’t put the drug dealers in jail, the law will come after honest citizens in a heartbeat. We’ve got to fight, but we’ve got to fight smart.”

I laid out a plan. The starting point was one of Colonel John Boyd’s maxims. Boyd was the greatest American military theorist of the 20th century. He said war is fought at three levels: moral, mental, and physical. The moral level is the most powerful, the physical the least (The old American military, in its love for hi-tech, could never understand that, which is why it kept getting beaten by ragheads all around the world.). We would focus our war at the moral level, and use the physical only as it had moral impact.

We’d start with the churches. Most of the black folk who were on the receiving end of black crime were Christians. We’d mobilize the Church Ladies—a Panzer division in this kind of fighting. We’d get them and the black ministers to go to white churches all over Boston and invite their congregations to visit the housing project. We’d let them see what those Legal Services lawyers and their friends among the judges and politicians were protecting. We’d take them through the drug markets, past the prostitutes, over the dazed, crazed addicts lying in the hallways. Then we’d ask them one question: Would they tolerate these people living in their neighborhoods? On the way out, we’d hand them a list of the names of their elected representatives with phone numbers.

The key judge, the one who always ruled in favor of the scumbags, was a federal magistrate, Judge Holland P. Frylass. We couldn’t touch him through the ballot box. But I thought there was another way. He was keen on making the folks in the projects live among the drug dealers and muggers and carjackers, but I suspected he would prefer not to do so himself. So we’d hold a raffle. We’d get black kids selling raffle tickets all over Boston. The proceeds would go to purchase the house next door to Judge Frylass’, in that nice section of Cambridge. We’d move in some drug dealers, whores, and gang members and see how he liked a taste of his own medicine.

Then a young mother, carrying one baby with two more grabbing at her coattails, spoke up. “That’s all fine, I guess,” she said. “But I got a drug dealer workin’ right outside my door. Somebody come after him, those bullets will shoot right through my walls and my babies and me. What you gonna do about him?”

“Swarm him,” I answered. The physical level of war also had its role to play.

“What you mean, swarm him?” she asked.

“Wherever he goes, or stops, we surround him. Twenty, thirty, fifty of us. We don’t touch him. We’re just there. We’re always there. We’re on every side of him. How much business do you think he’s going to do?”

“And just what do we do when he starts hittin’ out?” asked another woman in the crowd.

“Someone will always have a cell phone. He makes a move, we get it on camera. Then the cops can come in,” I replied.

But they knew the ground better than I did. “Hon’, we appreciate you comin’ all the way down here,” began one matron. “I think you’ve got some ideas we maybe can use. But this sure ain’t no boxin’ match. When these boys hit out, it’s with guns. Some of us gonna be dead if we try swarmin’ ʻem like you want.”

Now, I knew how to use a weapon, and I guessed I could shoot better than the average drug dealer. But I also knew I’d be the one in jail, not the drug dealer, if I got in a fire fight. And for a young, white, middle class male, jail in the 21st century meant homosexual gang rape. It was funny that the same bleeding-heart lefties who opposed the death penalty never made a peep about a punishment that would have appalled Vlad the Impaler. But I wasn’t anxious to have the joke be on me.

Gunny Matthews came to my rescue. “You folks know I’ve got a good relationship with the cops. You let me work on that one. I’ll get us some protection, protection that can shoot back. My question to you folks is, are you willing to do what the man says? We can talk here all night. But we’ve got to act, not just keep talking. Or give up.”

Das wesentliche ist die Tat. Always, in war, that’s what it comes down to. The important thing is the deed.

The Panzers were ready for battle. One of the Church Ladies got up. She was dressed perfectly for a shopping trip to Filene’s in 1955: floral print dress, pillbox hat, white gloves. “I can speak for my church,” said Mrs. Cook. “They sent me here as our representative. I don’t know whether it will work or not. But the Lord blesses those who try. He may bless us with success, and he will still bless us if we fail. I say we do it.” She turned to the young mother with the drug dealer camped outside her door. “Honey, I’m an old lady. If that bad man outside your apartment shoots me, I’m ready to go to Heaven. I’ll ʻswarmʼ him, as the man here says, even if I have to do it all by myself.”

“You don’t have to, Melba.” Her neighbor in the project was on her feet, in similar uniform, which events came to show was Urban Combat cammies. “I’ll be there too. I’ve got a heavy purse and a strong umbrella, and I know how to use both of them. We’ll ‘swarm’ this no-account piece of nigger trash all the way back to Alabama.”

With that the congregation were on their feet, Amening and Halleluliaing. I could understand now why, back in the 1950’s, so many Americans were enraged by the South’s segregation laws. It was the Mrs. Cooks they’d made sit in the back of the bus. If young blacks had tried to be like Mrs. Cook, integration might have worked.

What a pity so many chose Malcolm X and Snoop Dogg as their heroes instead.

Chapter 6

I gave the Gunny a lift home after the revival meeting. I was interested in how he thought we could get the police to help. I guessed the cops themselves would want to, but they worked for the politicians, who would probably want them to protect the scum from the Church Ladies.

His answer proved to be important beyond our fight to save one housing project. “A number of cops around here are former Marines. We’ve got a network set up among us,” he explained to me. “We’re getting together tomorrow night. Can you come?”

“Of course I’ll come. You think I’m some staff puke who comes up with a plan, then sends someone else off to execute it? I’ve done some thinking up in Maine. The real war is the war for our culture. This is a battle in that war. I’m in,” I replied. “Do you know a cheap place I can put up for the duration?”

“Sure, stay with us. My wife and I would be honored to have my old CO as a guest,” he said.

I was happy to accept.

***

The meeting with the cops was at the Tune Tavern, in Boston’s South End, the Irish ghetto. Nobody in Southie was likely to remember anything he overheard in a discussion among cops.

About twenty guys showed up, mostly city cops, with a few state troopers and even one transit cop thrown in. All were former Marines. I hadn’t known any of them in the Corps, but they knew who I was and why I was there and they had no problem with that.

Gunny Matthews was too smart to throw the problem on the table and hope somebody had a solution. The old Russian technique, “Let’s negotiate from my draft,” was more likely to result in action. So after outlining the overall scheme, the Gunny made a simple request: would at least one off-duty cop accompany each “swarm” that went after a scumbag? Off-duty cops were expected, by regulation, to be armed and to intervene when citizens were in danger, so no politician could go after them for that. But at the same time, no political sleaze-bag could order them not to be there, since they’d be on their own time. Lots of businesses hired off-duty cops as security guards; the only difference here is that we had no money to pay them.

“That’s not a problem,” said officer Kevin McBreen. “What you’re offering us is a chance to do the job we signed up to do, but usually can’t because city hall and the effing lawyers and judges won’t let us. We’re all willing to put some time into this.”

“Will it work?” I asked the question, even though the basic plan had come out of my brain housing group. These guys knew the local situation better than I did, and if the plan didn’t fit the situation, it was better to scrap it now than to see it fail later.

The cops were quiet. One state trooper finally spoke up, a former commo staff sergeant named Kelly (sometimes I thought half the Marine Corps was named Kelly). I found out later he’d been into Tactical Decision Games big-time, so he knew how to think situations through.

“As far as it goes, I think it has a reasonable chance,” he said. “In war, that is all any plan can promise. We’re looking for a breakthrough here, in that we’re trying to defeat not only the scum but their friends and protectors, the lawyers, judges, and pols. The rule in war is, small risk, small gain; big gain, big risk. The potential gain here is worth the risk.”

“My problem with the whole proposal is that it doesn’t go far enough,” he continued. “Down at 2nd Marine Division I sat in on a briefing Colonel Boyd gave. He said strategy is the art of connecting yourself to as many other power centers as possible, while separating your enemy from as many power centers as possible. It was the only definition of strategy I ever heard that meant anything.”

“We need some more friendly connections here. We need connections with the press. How this gets covered in the Globe and on TV affects the outcome. We shouldn’t leave that to chance. The same goes with the legislature. We should have friends there all set to go so the debate tilts our way. In other words, we need some strategy, not just good tactics.”

Trooper Kelly was on to something. When I was stationed at Quantico, I’d gotten to know a staffer on Capitol Hill. He explained to me that when the Senator he worked for wanted to make a major move, he had a meeting that included other Senators’ staffers, newspaper columnists, representatives from outside special interest groups, anyone who was in a position to affect the issue. Before the public saw anything, each of these insiders had his assignment: write a column, give a speech, organize a letter-writing campaign, whatever.

Then, when the Senator acted, all these other things happened as if they were spontaneous. But they weren’t. They were all arranged—“greased” was the term my friend used—beforehand.

“Great idea,” said one city cop. “But we’re just little guys. I don’t know how we make this happen. I can’t get through to a newspaper editor or a politician. Can you?”

“I can, and so can you,” Kelly replied. “We can do it the same way we’ve come together here: through the Marine connection. A bunch of members of the legislature are former Marines. So’s an editor at the Globe. I know him, and I know one former Marine in the State House. He can put us on to others. There’s even a regular breakfast where former Marines now in politics get together. Most of these guys think like we do. They’ll help.”

At this point I got one of those brain farts where a whole lot of pieces from a bunch of different puzzles come together to make something new. Boyd called it synthesis.

“Maybe what we need is a new Marine Corps,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Matthews said.

“I’m not sure. Let me think out loud here. The Marine Corps we all served in is supposed to fight our country’s battles. Yet all the Corps is doing now is fighting ragheads. Those aren’t our country’s battles. They are just games the politicians and State Department types in Washington like to play to feel important and justify their salaries.”

“This battle, for this lousy housing project, is a battle for our country. It’s a battle in the real war, the one being fought on our own soil between the people who live according to the old rules and the people who want to break all the rules, and usually do. We need a Marine Corps for the real war.”

“I think we’re seeing that new Marine Corps in action right here,” I continued. “The battle we’re planning is just one of what will be many battles, many campaigns, in the war to save our culture. We need a force that doesn’t dissolve when this battle is over, that sees the war right through to the end.”

The cops were quiet. So was I. I knew what I’d just proposed was scary. I hadn’t thought it through; it just came to me. I didn’t know where it might lead.

The transit cop spoke first. “Would this be like one of these militias we hear about?”

“No,” I replied. “We’ve all run around in the boonies in cammies enough for that to be old. And we don’t want violence. Violence will almost always work against us at the moral level of war. Think of it instead as a general staff for whoever wants to take our country back, wherever we could make a difference. Like we’re doing here.”

Again, there was silence, a long silence this time.

Trooper Kelly spoke again. “I think you’ve hit on the answer to what’s been bothering a lot of us for a long time. We work for a government that doesn’t work. No matter how many arrests we make, it doesn’t make any difference.”

“The whole system is rotten,” Kelly continued. “The big boys, the politicians, the lawyers, the judges, the media types, they all live well off the decay. They are scavengers, parasites. But for real people, it just keeps getting worse and worse – crime, lousy schools, rising prices that make our pay and pensions worthless, it’s all part of the same picture.”

“I hate to say so, but I think this country is finished. It’s beyond fixing. We need something new. What you are proposing, skipper, is a start,” he concluded.

“In 1775, the United States Marine Corps was founded in another tavern, in Philadelphia,” I said. “I think it’s time to do it again, here in Tune Tavern. Who knows, maybe we’re making history once more.”

The transit cop spoke up again. “A new Marine Corps I can see. Nobody’s fighting the battles that need to be fought. But what Marine Corps? Nobody has written a new Declaration of Independence that I’ve heard of. What kind of Marines are we?”

“Christian Marines.” The voice was Gunny Matthews’. “That’s what we are, most of us. That doesn’t mean we’re fighting to spread a religion. But our faith is where our first loyalty must be, because it is the thing we believe in most deeply.”

“In 1775, a man could be both a Christian and a United States Marine. Now we have to choose. The reason the government we have doesn’t work is that it has thrown our whole Christian culture overboard. I don’t care whether someone goes to church or not. But unless people follow the rules laid down in the Ten Commandments, everything falls apart. It seems to me what we’re fighting for here, in this housing project, is to make the Ten Commandments the rules again. And that is what this new Marine Corps should fight for, wherever it fights.”

“Sign me up,” said the transit cop, Meyer. “By the way, I’m Jewish. You may remember we had the Ten Commandments before you did. But we’re all in this together. It’s the whole culture we have to fight for, our Western, Judeo-Christian culture. I’ll still go to synagogue, but I’m happy to be a Christian Marine. After all, Christ was a Jew, and so were his disciples.”

And so it began, the Christian Marine Corps, the general staff for our side in the second civil war. I still have the piece of paper that went around the barroom table that day. It has twenty-two names on it. Seventeen of those men gave their lives in the war that was to come. I’m the only one left, now.

But those who died did so knowing they’d made a difference.

Chapter 7

The Battle of the Housing Project began on the last Friday in February, 2017. It proved to be Blitzkrieg, but into Russia.

Friday night usually meant big business for the hookers, pimps, drug dealers, and the rest of the “informal economy” that dominated the inner cities back then. Boston was enjoying a break in the winter weather, which should have drawn a big crowd out. It did, but not the kind they were expecting. The Panzers were in laager by 3 PM, 243 strong: the Church Ladies. Project residents were the infantry; they would make sure the tanks reached their objectives. The artillery was the press. The Marine connection worked, and we had reporters from the Boston Globe plus camera crews from several local TV stations. We also had twenty-five off-duty cops—in uniform and armed—and a couple video cams of our own; I wanted to have our own video tape, edited and ready to hand out ASAP.

Darkness comes early in Boston in February, and as it fell the bipedal roaches started crawling out of their cracks to sell their crack and whatever else. They didn’t need any of their own stuff for excitement that night. We had twenty-five “swarms” just looking for targets, and as soon as one of the scum made an appearance anywhere near the project, he was surrounded. Singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the Church Ladies and their allies made sure no business was done. One dealer was dumb enough to reach for his piece; before one of our cops could react, a swift umbrella brought him low.

But we faced no stupid enemy. The trash knew how the game usually went. Their friends in high places had already won the first round for them. So they retreated. They backed off, moved on, or went to ground and waited. Monday would see Judge Frylass in his chambers and the Legal Services lawyers before his bench, demanding and undoubtedly getting an injunction.

This time, we were ready for that. We picked a Friday to launch our attack because people would be home over the weekend to read the papers and turn on the TV. The next day, we dominated the news.

To keep the initiative, Saturday morning the leaders from the project and the ministers from the local churches held a news conference. They announced part two of the plan, an appeal to the white churches. Those congregations were prepared when our black Church Ladies arrived on Sunday and invited them to visit the project and see for themselves why we were fighting. We had the logistics carefully planned, with buses lined up, guarded parking lots available near the project and lists where we asked people to commit themselves to come for a tour on a certain date. Anticipating Judge Frylass’s action, we had the tours of the project begin on Monday evening.

Frylass did not disappoint us (in war, a predictable opponent is a great asset). With a ringing denunciation of “mob rule,” on Monday morning he issued an injunction against any “tactics of intimidation” directed against “the victims of racism and an oppressive economic structure,” i.e., the scum.

Monday evening, the scum were back. So were we, again with the black Church Ladies in the lead, but now with white Christians, including some priests and ministers, alongside. At Frylass’s order, state cops were present to enforce his injunction. That was just what we wanted. Tuesday’s news was filled with photos of Church Ladies and their allies, black and white, being handcuffed and hauled off in paddy wagons while the drug dealers grinned.

The public was enraged, and the politicians started to get scared. In the state legislature, former Marines got the state cops pulled off the case.

Tuesday afternoon, our ministers and Church Ladies, now joined by the Cardinal of Boston, the Mayor, and the Speaker of the Massachusetts House, held another news conference. They announced part three: the raffle to buy the house next to Frylass’s and give him a dose of his own medicine.

The public went wild. It was a chance to give one of these Lord High Panjandrums a kick in the butt. The demand for lottery tickets was so great they were bid for on the street at ten times their price.

At this point, our battle went national. Every network ran it as their lead story on the Wednesday evening news, using the video we had prepared. A Senate Resolution condemning Frylass went through by voice vote. Colleagues on the Federal bench began talking publicly about impeachment.

But as is often the case in war, an unpredicted event was decisive. Tuesday and Wednesday evenings had seen repeats of Monday, only bigger. We swarmed the scum, wherever we could find them. Federal Marshals, brought in by Frylass, made their arrests. Now, the televisions were full of businessmen in three-piece suits, white housewives, people from every class and race being hauled off. Wednesday the Cardinal himself was arrested, arm in arm with two Baptist Church Ladies, all singing “We Shall Overcome.”

Thursday the crowd started gathering early, around 2 PM. It was huge, it was angry, and it was largely middle-class. Somewhere, somehow, the cry was started, “Let’s go see the judge.” Everyone took it up. The mob started to move toward the Federal Courthouse. It was a couple miles, and as the march continued the crowd grew. Along the way they found a road crew working and took their tar truck. The crowd took up the chant, “Pillows! Pillows!”, and from every window along the route pillows came flying down. Enough had feathers in them to do the job.

They found Judge Frylass in his chambers, having tea. He made a fine sight, tarred and feathered, riding on a streetcar rail for a short journey down to Boston harbor, where he went for a swim. The harbor police fished him out, somewhat the worse for wear.

Friday, it was clear it was over. Every news broadcast and newspaper in the country called it “The Second Boston Tea Party.” The President, a man who knew the secret of political leadership was to find a crowd and follow it, announced the Attorney General was personally going to the Supreme Court to ask them to overturn Judge Frylass’s injunction. The Court, which had been more a political than a judicial body since Earl Warren, duly complied.

That was the triumph of our Blitzkrieg. It took less than a week.

We then learned why Blitzkrieg didn’t work in Russia. The enemy’s position had too much depth.

The key to our victory was our starting point, the takeover of the housing project by its tenants. That happened as part of an experimental program sponsored by the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD. Of course, like the rest of the Federal government, HUD was solidly enemy territory. The bureaucrats were leftists to a man (or, back then, woman), and what had happened in Boston horrified them. How dare ordinary people stand up to the government—and win!

So, once the furor had died down and the attention of the press had wandered on to newer things, they quietly changed the rules. There would be no more housing projects with tenant management. Federal bureaucrats would stay in charge, they would not evict the scum, so the scum would rule. And they did.

The lesson for our side was that we could win battles, but not the war. The war had to be fought on the enemy’s ground, the vast, incomprehensible network of government rules, regulations, and bureaucracies. That was our Russia, and it was just too big to conquer.

We had to let it fall of its own weight.

Chapter 8

After the battle, I figured I’d done what I could in Boston and got ready to head back to Maine. I still faced this problem of finding work. But before I left, Gunny Matthews wanted to get the Christian Marines together again for a “hot wash” critique and to figure where we went from here.

We gathered once more at Tune Tavern. Trooper Kelly led off the critique.

“The reason we won here is simple,” he said. “We prepared carefully, but did not try to exercise too much control once things began to move. The decisive action, the march on Judge Frylass, was something we did not foresee. But we were smart enough to let it happen anyway. By the middle of the week, everyone knew what we were trying to achieve—cutting the scum off from their supporters in the Establishment. So people could take the initiative, yet all their actions worked in harmony.”

“This is what the Germans called ‘mission type orders,'” I added. “In the German Army, an order didn’t tell you what to do, it told you what result was needed. You were free to do whatever you thought necessary to get that result. That’s why the Germans were able to win so many battles, usually against superior numbers. Mission orders turn everyone’s initiative and imagination loose, which is very powerful—far more powerful than an army of automatons with everyone doing only what they are told.”

“I was an MP in the Corps,” a Boston city cop said. “For most of my time, we were told exactly what to do and how to do it. Then, just before I retired, we got a new CO who understood this German stuff, what the Corps called ‘maneuver warfare.’ He told us, ‘I want you to cut speeding on base by at least 50%. How you do it is up to you.’ And we were much more effective, because each of us did it differently.”

Gunny Matthews jumped in at this point. “There are a lot of folks all over the country who want to fight for what is right,” he said. “The last time we met here, we did more than plan one battle. We decided to make a difference in the outcome of the whole war. The understanding of war that we share—mission orders, Third Generation war, maneuver warfare, call it what you will—is what the folks out there who believe as we do need in order to win. The question is, how are we going to provide it to them?”

Kelly had an answer. “Captain Rumford had it right when he said we Christian Marines should be the general staff. Remember, German general staff officers weren’t commanders, they were advisors. We can’t and shouldn’t try to muscle in on what other people are already doing to take back control of their own communities. They would resent that, and rightly so. But many of them would be glad to get advice from people who understood war. Because this is war, let’s not kid ourselves. And people out there are beginning to realize that.”

A cop I hadn’t heard from before, Lasky, raised what proved to be the key question. “I agree, but who is going to do the work? I’ll put some time in, but I have a regular job that doesn’t leave me a lot of time. If the Christian Marine Corps is to be a real organization, we need at least one person to work this full time.”

“Don’t complain,” I replied. “At least you have a job. I’m finding it mighty tough to get one.”

“Maybe there’s our answer,” Kelly said. “Skipper, you’ve got the time, you know how to think militarily, you’re willing to make decisions and act. You ought to do it. You should be the first Commandant of the Christian Marines.”

Great, I thought. A job with lots of responsibility, facing well-nigh impossible odds, risking arrest for sedition, all for no paycheck. But I also realized this was the critical decision point if I wanted to help take our country back. “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,” the old Anglican hymn says. For me, this was it.

“Well, I do have the time,” I replied. “And I was the one who proposed this new Marine Corps, so I also have the responsibility to do what I can to make it real. But I have to tell you, my family fortune ran out around 1870. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can take this task on and still make enough money to live?”

Kelly did have an idea. “There are now twenty-one Christian Marines, besides yourself. If we each put in $50 per month, that’s $1050 per month for you. Can you live in Maine for that?”

“I reckon I could,” I said.

“Can the rest of us pony up that much?” Kelly asked.

“Let’s face it, we each spend that every month on donuts,” Meyer answered. “Just call me one generous Jew. I’m good for it.”

So were the others, though McBreen looked a little pale when he thought of doing without donuts.

“So that’s settled,” said Trooper Kelly. “Skipper, now it’s up to you. You can call on each of us for help, and we have a responsibility to look for situations where we can make a difference, not just wait for direction from you.”

“But if the Christian Marine Corps is to mean anything beyond this one battle in Boston,” Kelly continued, “from here on out, it’s sweat, toil, and tears, and probably blood too in the end. This is the point where most movements die. The exciting part is over, we all face the press of everyday concerns, and building an organization is slow, dull, frustrating work. It’s also the work that makes the difference between talking around the bar and changing history.”

“Well and truly spoken, Trooper Kelly,” I replied. “In the old American militia tradition, I move we elect our officers, and I hereby nominate you to be the CO, Massachusetts Christian Marines.”

The vote was unanimous, and Kelly accepted the post at which he later fell.

“And in the Marine tradition, I propose a toast, gentlemen,” I concluded. “To the Christian Marine Corps, and confusion to our enemies.” Appropriately, it was drunk in Sam Adams beer.

Chapter 9

To understand what followed, you have to picture what the United States was like in the early 21st century. That’s hard to do, because life in the old U.S. of A. had departed so far from everything normal, everything natural to mankind, that any analogy, any description sounds hyperbolic. But it isn’t.

Real life, as countless generations had lived it, had essentially vanished into a “virtual reality” devoid of all virtue.

Husband and wife and children, home and household and community, field and farm and village, the age-old lines and limits of our lives, had been shattered into a thousand fragments. Reality was what came through an electronic box, not what you saw out your own front door. Not that you looked out your front door, for fear of what might be looking in, carrying a gun. It might be a stranger, or your own kid, or both.

Everything was political. You chose your words politically, your clothes politically, your entertainment politically. If all three were clean and dull, you were on the right. If they were dirty and suggestive, you were on the left. You had to be one or the other, because everything was.

You lived a lie, one or another, because everything was political and politics was all lies. We were told we were free. It was a lie, because the tentacles of government had a sucker on every sucker. We had elections, and they were lies because all the candidates were from the same party, the New Class.

America’s New Class was the French aristocracy of 1789, without the grace. Like that aristocracy, it performed no function beyond living well. Instead of “Let them eat cake,” it said “Let them eat free trade.” Instead of Marie Antoinette, who had charm and innocence, it gave us Hillary Clinton, who had neither. The French aristocracy held balls, ours held elections. Neither changed anything, but the French gave us good music.

The national sport was voyeurism, done electronically. Day and night, the television, Satan’s regurgitation into our souls, paraded the sad lives of other people for our entertainment. No need to peep in the neighbor’s windows – just turn on the box. Lucky the citizen who got to do the parading, as he or she thus became real.

Despite our fears, 1984 never came. We got a Brave New World instead.

We stopped making things, and kept getting poorer, but no one put the two together as cause and effect. The GNP continued to rise, because the government kept the statistics.

The solution, we were told, was more technology. We knew less and less, but computers would transmit our ignorance faster. Schools taught our children how to peck at the blue dot on the machine to get a piece of corn.

Or, the solution was big business. The New Class on Wall Street would drive down in their Mercedes to save us from the New Class in Washington. People would find dignity and security by being reduced to commodities. It was more efficient than slavery. You couldn’t sell an elderly slave, but you could fire one.

The New Class—cultural Marxists all—told us there weren’t any rules, then they set rules. They reached down into society’s gutter, plopped whatever they found there on the civic altar and demanded we bow down and worship it. So long as it was sewage—moral, cultural, behavioral—it was fine and good and worthy of adoration. Those who would not bow were ruled out.

We were, of course, collectively mad. There’s nothing new about that. From Athens under Cleon through the Tulip Bubble to Party Day at Nuremburg, collective madness has been part of the human tale.

The way to such madness is always the same. Create a false reality, through fine speeches, dreams of wealth beyond avarice, ideologies of revenge and redemption, video screens, whatever.

Stoke the fire hot enough that no one can look away from it. Drive the dance faster and faster, so it entrances, mesmerizes, draws all into it. Think and you’ll miss a step and fall. Fall and you’ll get trampled. Beat the tom-toms quicker and louder. Dance the Ghost Dance long enough, hard enough, and the bullets will pass through you without touching you.

Thud.

Reality always wins. The farther a people has danced away from it, the more they’ve done the danse macabre.

Americans had done quite a dance by the time we found ourselves in the 21st century. The gap between our virtual reality of techno-driven life-as-entertainment cultural freak show and reality itself was the size of the Mariana’s Trench. When America’s virtual reality collapsed, as it would, the implosion would be stupendous, as it was.

My task, as I settled back into the remains of a Maine winter in 2017 as Commandant of the Christian Marine Corps, was not to bring about the collapse. The nature of man would provide that, all by itself.

Rather, I had to think through what to do when it came. What did we want to rescue out of it? Could we rescue anything? How could a general staff of civilized men who understood war—really understood it, from history, not just by virtue of having had rank in some military bureaucracy—make a difference?

One thing I understood from the outset, again thanks to having some acquaintance with history. The answer did not lie in ideology, right or left, old or new. All ideologies failed and always would fail, because by their nature they demand and create a virtual reality. They all require that some aspect of reality, economic or racial or sexual or whatever, be ignored—more than ignored, deliberately not seen. That was a fatal error, always, because whatever part of reality you don’t see is the part that kills you.

A meeting in Waterville showed me the way around that problem, and also what we could fight for—not just against.

Chapter 10

If the Christian Marines were to be the general staff for our side in what was coming, I needed to figure out just what and who our side was. I wanted to get to know them, and, more importantly, let them get to know me. That was the first step in establishing trust.

So one April evening in the year 2017 I drove down to Waterville. When I got there, I could tell Spring was coming to Maine. I could smell all the winter’s dog poop melting on the green.

The local chapter of the Tea Party was gathering that night to hear one of their top leaders up from Washington. I knew enough about the Tea Party to realize it was on our side. Many of the folks in it later became brothers in arms and leaders in the Recovery. But like all such groups in the last days of the American republic, it had a fatal flaw, the nature of which I was to learn that evening.

The fellow from Washington, whose name I long ago forgot, gave the usual pitch the “Inside-the-Beltway” types fed to the local yokels. The gist of it was that the future of the country depended on them (in fact, by that point, it had already been determined); they should respond to what their leaders asked them to do (when it should have been the other way around); and, most important, send money.

After he’d made his pitch, there were a few questions, a bit of discussion of this and that. Then a tall fellow in back stood up. He was dressed in about the year 1945: well-cut brown double-breasted suit, wide tie, holding a brown fedora. By Maine standards, he had a good bit to say, and he said it well.

“I appreciate you taking the time to journey all the way up here,” began Mr. William Hocking Kraft. “But frankly, you represent the problem, not the solution.”

“The problem, put simply, is this. Our leaders always sell us out. Maybe they start out thinking like we do, I don’t know. But once they get to Washington, and see how nice life can be once you’re a member of the club, the Establishment, their goal becomes joining that club. But our goal is to close it down.”

“They—you—always end up getting sucked in to the Republican Party,” Mr. Kraft continued. “It holds the keys to the club. And it sold us out long ago. Sure, it tells us what we want to hear, but it snickers and winks the whole time it’s talking. The only people it delivers for are those on Wall Street and in the country clubs.”

“The fact of the matter is that you can’t create what we believe in, a country that follows the Ten Commandments, from Washington. The people in Washington follow only one commandment: Promote Yourself. You have to create it here, not by what you say, but by how you live.”

Kraft’s words brought to mind something my friend who worked for a Senator had said to me. He said the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party was the difference between Madonna and Donald Trump.

The fellow from Washington slid and slithered as best he could, but it was clear Kraft had said what others were thinking. And he was right. No matter what the group was, it ended up with leaders who wanted to join the club. Those leaders sold their own folks out, because that was the condition of club membership.

I was struck by Kraft’s definition of what we wanted: a country that followed the Ten Commandments. That was what the Christian Marines wanted, too. And we needed action, not just words. So when the meeting broke up, I introduced myself.

His reply to my introduction was a surprise. “I already know you, or at least know about you,” he said. “I have some friends in the Corps—I’m something of an amateur military historian—and I heard about your raid on the feminists at Expeditionary Warfare School. You showed the rarest of qualities in the American officer corps: moral courage. I would be honored if you would join me for dinner at my home, if you’re free.”

I was, and Kraft was clearly someone I wanted to know better. We walked out together to his car—an immaculate 1948 Buick Roadmaster. “I’ll wait for you here,” he said. “Just follow me.”

His house was a typical 1920s bungalow, nothing special from the outside, but when I walked through the front door I got a shock. It was like going through a time lock.

Everything was as it might have been seventy years ago. Everything—the big floor model radio (no television), the Brussels carpets on hardwood floors, the appliances, the 1948 calendar on the kitchen wall (as always in Maine, we came in the back door, through the mud room), even the way his wife and children were dressed. It had been a long time since I had dropped in on someone and found his wife in a nice dress waiting to serve dinner.

He introduced his wife as Mrs. Kraft, his young son as Master Billy and his daughters as the Misses Evelyn and Lula Bell.

I expressed my hope that my unexpected arrival for dinner was not a problem.

“Not at all,” replied Mrs. Kraft. “I always prepare enough so that if Mr. Kraft brings someone, we have plenty. That is, after all, one of the duties of my sphere.”

The feeling of having gone through a time warp was growing stronger.

We sat down in the dining room, with its 1930s floral wallpaper and oak wainscoting, polished mahogany table and built-in breakfront, and Mr. Kraft said grace—in Latin. Mrs. Kraft, and only Mrs. Kraft, served, from the kitchen. Somehow, it all felt right, even though my generation had been taught it was wrong.

“This is sure a change from most places I visit,” I ventured, being somewhat unsure how much notice I should give to what then counted as eccentricity, at the least.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Kraft. “It has taken some effort on our part, but we have created a home where you can leave the 21st century at the door. Here, at least, things are as they were, and should be.”

“We’re Retroculture people,” added Mrs. Kraft.

“I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the Retroculture movement,” Mr. Kraft said.

“I’m afraid we lead a rather sheltered life in the military,” I replied. “The only culture we get is the kind that grows on old bread.”

“You may remember what I said earlier this evening, at the meeting,” he continued. “You cannot create, or, more precisely, re-create, the world we want simply through words, least of all through the words of politicians. You have to do it by how you live. The Retroculture movement is people—individuals, families, sometimes whole neighborhoods—striving to live again in the old ways, following the old rules.”

“I’m sure you’ve been told, ‘You can’t go back,'” Mr. Kraft went on. “Like most of what you are told these days, it’s a lie. The one thing we know we can do is what we’ve already done. We can live in the good, wholesome, upright ways our forefathers followed.”

“So there is more to this than furniture, clothes and manners?” I asked. The manners were obvious: we were holding an adult conversation at a table that included three children.

“Of course,” Mr. Kraft replied. “Things are important tools; our furniture, our clothes, my Buick, all help separate us from the modern world, which is what we want to do. We’re like the Amish in that respect. But also like the Amish, the essence of Retroculture is our beliefs, morals and values. We believe what Americans used to believe. We hold the same values, follow the same moral rules our ancestors followed.”

“What era do Retroculture people want to live in?” I inquired.

“Any time before 1965,” Mr. Kraft responded. “That year marks the beginning of the cultural revolution that destroyed America. Our period is the 1940s, though many of the things you see here are older than that; back then, people didn’t throw out their furniture every ten years.”

“Many Retroculture people have chosen the Victorian era as the time they want to live in, and for good reasons. The Victorians were astoundingly productive people, building, inventing, creating, conquering, all the things we need to do if we are ever to amount to anything again, other than a Third World country. The basis of their success, of course, was their strong, Christian morals.”

“But other Retroculture folks have chosen the 1950s as their era, or 1910, or even the colonial period,” Mr. Kraft continued. “The specific time period does not matter, so long as it is a time when traditional American culture was strong.”

“Each person, each family decides for itself just how Retro it wants to go. There’s no set of rules, except that it must be before 1965 and must include the values if it is to count as Retroculture. Most people follow the simple rule of common sense.”

“The colonial period would interest me,” I said, “though as a Marine, I was told that bleeding was bad for the other guy, not good for me. I’m not sure I’d like depending on 18th century medicine.”

“Don’t worry, you wouldn’t have to,” Mr. Kraft replied. “We had our children vaccinated against polio, I assure you. We have no desire to bring back the tiny braces and little iron lungs. On the other hand, we don’t want modern medical technology to keep us alive when our natural life span is over, so we can waste away in some nursing home. When my time comes, I want the doctor to come to the house with his little black bag and give me some morphine to ease the passing, just as he would have done in the 1940s.”

“Good luck finding a doctor to make a house call these days,” I replied, wondering just how practical Retroculture was.

“We have such a doctor,” Mrs. Kraft said. “He’s in the Retroculture movement too. When one of us is sick, he comes to the house in his black Detroit Electric automobile from the 1920s.”

“You’re lucky to have a wife who goes along with all this,” I said to Mr. Kraft, thinking how most of my friends’ wives would have reacted to the idea of going back to the past.

“The good luck is mine more than his,” Mrs. Kraft replied. “These days, women are told they were oppressed and mistreated in the past, and that they will be happier if they can live in the business world, the world of men. That is another modern lie.”

“As a wife of the 1940s, I have my own sphere where I am in charge: this home, my family, and my community, where I do a great deal of volunteer work, as women did in the past. It is a more important sphere than the business world where Mr. Kraft works, because it is the sphere where babies grow into children and then into men and women. I, as the woman of the house, hold the future in my hands.”

“I agree with that,” Mr. Kraft said. “Unless women create good homes and raise the children right, those things go undone. They are not natural to men. We see all around us what kind of children come from homes where the wife is not a mother and homemaker. As Arnold Toynbee warned, our barbarians have come from within.”

“As far as all the nonsense about women being oppressed by being given charge of the home,” Mrs. Kraft added, “I find quite the opposite is true. Creating a good home is a greater challenge than most matters in the business world, and it allows more room for creativity. The home you are enjoying now is my achievement. How many women in business achieve so much? Or are so loved and honored for their achievement as I am by Mr. Kraft and our children?”

“That you are indeed, Mrs. Kraft,” Mr. Kraft replied.

They had a remarkable home life, as I could plainly see. It was the sort of home most people of my generation knew about only from books or plays or family memories. But it was exactly the kind of home we all wished we could live in—not just for the beautiful things, but for the warmth and contentment and absolute solidness I could feel radiating from every corner.

After an ample and excellent meal, Mr. Kraft and I adjourned to his den while Mrs. Kraft did the dishes. As he busied himself filling and lighting his pipe, I started to think. Maybe this was the answer to the puzzle I was facing of how the Christian Marines could explain what we were fighting for. In a broad sense, we knew the answer: a nation where the Ten Commandments ruled. But I knew our program, our goal, had to be developed beyond that to be understood by other people.

The danger facing us was falling into an ideology. Retroculture avoided that danger, because unlike an ideology it was not based on some abstract scheme of ideas. It was simply recovering what we used to have and used to be, which was the ultimate in concreteness. And we could know it would work, because we knew America had worked in the past. Logically, what worked once should work again.

“Just how many of you Retroculture people are there?” I asked Mr. Kraft.

“Tens of thousands,” he replied, “and growing fast. You don’t hear about us much in the general media, because we represent a rejection of everything it stands for. But we have our own magazines, books, clubs, and societies. We come in all varieties – there is even a group of non-Amish who live like the Amish, what they call, “plain.” There is growing talk of founding new towns where everyone would live in a certain time period and there would be nothing out of place for that time.”

“It kind of makes you wonder what a whole Retroculture country might be like,” I mused.

”It would be splendid, as America itself once was splendid, before the squalid sixties,” Kraft replied. “Remember, we had a country that worked.”

“That is hard to remember now,” I responded.

“But people do remember,” Kraft said. “Take a look at this—and it is from more than twenty years ago.”

He handed me a copy of a poll taken in 1992 by Lawrence Research for something called the Free Congress Foundation. It was a survey of people’s attitudes toward the past, and the findings were remarkable. 49% said life in the past was better than it is today; only 17% said it was worse. 59% said the nation’s leaders should be trying to take the country back toward the way it used to be. 61% thought life in the 1950s was better than in the 1990s. 47% said their grandparents’ lives were happier than their own – and the margin was 15% higher among blacks, whose grandparents had lived under segregation.

When given a menu of times and places in which they could choose to live, a typical suburb in 1950 came in first with 58%; in last place was Los Angeles in 1991. When asked for a second choice, the winner, with 32%, was a small town in 1900; modern LA again came in last.

56% of those polled had a favorable impression of the Victorian period. 45% said they saw signs of people and things turning back toward the past—and that it was a good thing.

“For America, that poll represents nothing less than a cultural revolution,” Mr. Kraft said. “From the days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony onward, Americans have been future focused. We have always believed that the future would be better than the present, and that the present was better than the past. We don’t believe that any more. We believe—in fact, we know, because unlike the future, the past is knowable—what we once had was better than what we have now. Caught as America is in an endless downward spiral of decline, decay, and degradation, we have no reason to hope for our future—unless that future can be a recovery of our past.”

“Thanks to a certain professor from Dartmouth College, I’ve read a bit about our past,” I said. “Not just America’s past, but the history of our Western culture. My impression is that through most of history, we were past-focused. We saw the past as a model we should try to recapture and emulate. Is what we’re seeing here a return to normality?”

“Yes,” Mr. Kraft responded. “Most of our culture’s great leaps forward have come from attempts to return to the past. The Renaissance is a good example. The Renaissance was an attempt to recover the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome. Of course, such efforts don’t exactly recreate the past; 15th century Florence was not the Roman Republic. But the attempt to recapture the classical past created a new synthesis that was brilliant—and that could never have been created by looking only to the future, which is, after all, a void.”

“Do you think an attempt to recapture our own past—Retroculture—could give us a renaissance?” I asked.

“Again, the answer is yes,” Kraft replied. “Retroculture is something solid, something real people can put their hands on and understand. Most people know how their grandparents or great grandparents lived. They know they were good people who lived decent, satisfying lives. They can grasp the fact that we can live that way again. Once they realize it is possible, once they realize that the saying, ‘You can’t go back,’ is a lie, it is something they want to do. And if they do it, as we have done it in this home, in our lives, they find it works.”

“One final question, if I may,” I said. “If some people were willing to fight for a country where Retroculture could flourish—not one where it was enforced by law, but where people could live Retro if they wanted to, without any hindrances from the government—would you be willing to help?”

“Of course,” Mr. Kraft replied. “At present, Retroculture can’t go much beyond home life, because all kinds of government regulations and regulators and lawyers come down on you if you try. As I said, some of us would like to create whole new towns and communities where everyone would live in a certain time. But we know the government would prevent that, because one or another of these ‘victims’ groups would protest.”

“Retroculture isn’t political,” he continued. “Retroculture is about escaping politics and government and all that nonsense. It’s about simply living a normal life, the kind of life Americans used to live. It seems to me that if we’re going to talk about a new country, that’s the kind of country we should want.”

I thought that summed it up pretty well. After drinking a glass of good Port and smoking a cigar to accompany Mr. Kraft’s pipe, I bid him good night and headed home through the April slush. Another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.

Chapter 11

The summer of 2017 marked the beginning of work. As Trooper Kelly had warned, building an organization proved to be anything but exciting. It was slow, it was dull, it was frustrating. I often felt like I was trying to drive a thousand blind geese through one tiny wicket. But slowly, the Christian Marine Corps grew.

The first thing I did was identify a small group of people I could turn to for advice. I knew better than to think I had all the answers, or all the questions, either. The questions were more important, at least at the start. As Sir Francis Bacon said some centuries back, if you start out with questions, you may end up with answers. But if you start out with answers, you will end up with questions.

The first and most important question was, what did we want to do? We knew the answer to that one: we wanted to take our country back. We wanted to take it back for our traditional, Western, Christian culture – in short; for the Ten Commandments.

We realized this was a tall order. We were living in a country where a teacher who posted the Ten Commandments on the wall of his classroom would be fired. (By 2016, in Massachusetts, he would also be fired if he did not put up a state-supplied poster titled “The Ten Commandments of Safe Sex.”)

But we also knew the cultural Marxists, seemingly so powerful, had reached what in war is called the “culminating point.” They were running out of gas. As they stuck their big noses into the business of more and more average people, they were building up a tremendous backlash. Our goal was to shape, strengthen, and guide that backlash.

That was itself a challenge, but one we thought we could manage, God willing. To further limit the task, we decided we would focus on New England.

The second question we faced was, how do we do it? Here too, we had an answer: by offering the other good people who had the same goal our expertise in war. We sought only to be advisors, never controllers – a true general staff.

The secret of success in the culture war would be “leaderless resistance,” where people worked independently but with efforts harmonized by shared objectives. The worst thing we could do was create some kind of formal, hierarchical organization. That would be easy for the other side to attack, it would demoralize our own troops by reducing them to pawns on someone else’s chessboard, and it would leave us dependent on one or a handful of brains when we could have many brains thinking and acting for us. Also, it would generate office politics as people within the organization struggled for power. I’d seen enough office politics in the Corps to last me the rest of my days.

Ultimately, the Christian Marines did not want to be about power. This, we recognized, was our biggest difference from all the other factions. We did not want power. We did not want a new country built around power, or struggles for power.

Power was itself an evil, maybe the greatest evil. Tolkien was right; the Ring of Power, which is power itself, cannot be used for good. That was another lesson we learned the hard way in the U.S.A. At one time, America had shunned power, refused power, at home and abroad. Those had been our happy days. Then the “Progressives” came along, who thought the power of government could be used for good. Eventually, they decided the power of government was good in itself – because they controlled it.

That’s how it always works: power looks good to whoever has it. But it isn’t. Our war was in a way the strangest war of all, a war to bury power, not to seize it.

Advisors – only – we would be. In the heat of battle, when someone had to decide and act, fast, we would do that. And our advice itself would be action, because it would counsel action. But in the end, our goal was to return to our plows, Cincinnati, not Caesars.

Only with these questions answered did we turn to the third (too many people started with this one): what kind of organization would we be?

First, we would start small. The old German motto was correct: “Better no officer than a bad officer.”

That meant we could not simply recruit former Marines. There were people from other services, and people who had never been in the military at all, whom we would want. And, truth be told, the number of Marines who really understood war was small. The Corps had put strong emphasis on studying war, beginning in the 1980s, but most Marine officers blew it off. Their focus was on looking good in the uniform and maxing the Physical Fitness Test, they read nothing beyond the sports page and their only talk was about trout fishing and getting promoted. To us, or to anyone, they were useless.

One of our great fears was that if actual fighting started, civilians who shared our values would turn to retired senior officers for leaders. Most of these guys, the colonels and generals, had never been soldiers. They were milicrats – military bureaucrats. In the old American military, once you made major, further promotion was based on how well you used your knee pads and lip balm, not military ability. If our side ended up led by milicrats, we would be defeated before the battles even began. We would be like the Whites in the Russian Civil War, who got all the old Tsarist generals as their leaders. The Reds got guys like Trotsky, who were serious students of war. We all knew who had won that one.

Because we would stay small, a few hundred men at most, we could avoid formal processes for recruiting. In fact, we avoided formal processes for everything, because the focus of any process becomes the process, not the product. We would accept new Christian Marines only by consensus, and we would consider candidates only on the basis of what they had done, not what they told us. We wanted to see actions, not words: articles or books published, speeches given in places where they counted, people mobilized, victories in free play military maneuvers (and later, as it turned out, in real combat), victories over the Establishment – results.

Das Wesentliche ist die Tat.

A final rule we adopted was one I insisted on, as only someone who has just learned something important himself can insist. Any Christian Marine had to know the canon of our culture. He had to undergo my “baptism by immersion” in the great books and ideas of Western civilization. We couldn’t hope to fight for that culture, and fight well for it, unless we knew what it was. A few of our recruits came to us with that knowledge – more accurately, that understanding. The rest had to start where I had started. That was true regardless of how well they understood war. An officer should never be a mere technician.

For the next couple years, as we slowly grew in numbers, we kept a low profile. We weren’t exactly a secret organization, but we didn’t put out any press releases, either. If we succeeded, people would know us by our works, which were all that counted. If we failed, better our failures remained obscure. In any case, Stabsofficiere haben keine Namen – general staff officers have no names.

Carefully, we built our cadre. New Christian Marines were recruited, and accepted, one by one. I spent a lot of time doing detective work. When our side won a battle in the culture war, like keeping pro-homosexual propaganda out of the schools, who had provided the leadership? That might be someone we wanted. When a Marine – or anyone – who had written knowledgeably about war moved to New England, he was potentially one of us. Where did he stand on the cultural issues? Were there other men who believed as we did in key positions in the state legislature, or the National Guard, or the state police? If so, they could be important to us.

Did we infiltrate the power structure in the New England state governments? Of course, wherever we could. In Massachusetts and lower New England, we didn’t get very far; the cultural Marxists were fully in charge there. But we gradually made some key friends in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Some of those friends became Christian Marines. Others just knew who we were and what we had to offer.

We also infiltrated the active-duty forces. Our goal was not to overthrow the United States government. We were never enemies of the old U.S. Constitution. But we knew that government and its Establishment were going to fall, of their own weight, corruption, ineptness, and disinterest in actually governing. We were looking, always, to the time after it fell. We wanted as many active duty Marines – and soldiers, sailors, and airmen – as we could get who would come to New England when it happened, and help us save something worthwhile from the wreckage.

By the first decade of the 21st century, the message that the U.S.A. was finished, that it was only a question of when it came apart, not whether, found many a receptive ear. Books like Martin van Creveld’s The Transformation of War had opened quite a few minds. Only the people in the capital, in Washington, could not see it coming. They were like the citizens of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, watching the rain come down in buckets but not thinking about the dam.

For us, in Maine, the dam started to crumble in the Fall of 2020.

Chapter 12

Anyone who wondered where we Mainiacs were coming from could find out by sitting down to a typical Maine dinner. Everything was boiled, and if the cook was feeling exuberant that night, it might be seasoned with salt and pepper. Then again, it might not.

Any people with food that bad had to be conservative. And we were, in the old sense of the word: we lived pretty much as Americans had lived all along, and we liked it that way.

The funny thing was, Maine kept electing liberals. The liberals’ crazy ideas didn’t seem to matter in Maine. They could talk on, as they were wont to do, about this or that group of “victims,” and Mainers could nod, because there weren’t any of those people Down East. They weren’t about to move in next door.

Then, in the Fall of 2020, they did.

The “they,” in this case, were the gays. They were our one home-grown minority.

As our culture began to fall apart, in the 1960s, the gays started “coming out.” This broke the old rule of “Don’t frighten the horses,” which had allowed mutual toleration. The rule meant that they were not open about their orientation, and we pretended not to notice it.

By the 2000s, they had become one of the cultural Marxists’ sacred “victims” groups, which meant they were encouraged to flaunt their vice and we were supposed to approve of it. This was justified in the name of “toleration,” but toleration and approval are different. You may tolerate things you don’t approve. I was willing to tolerate gays, but I would sooner have given my approval to an act involving three high yellow whores, a wading pool full of green Jello, and Flipper.

As usual, Maine had elected a liberal Governor, a former Senator named Snidely Hokem. He’d gotten tired of the Caligula’s court that was Washington, where he’d competed hard for the role of Incitatus’s hindquarters. But he still liked having his own backside kissed, so he figured being Governor might be about right for him.

To keep up his liberal standing, he had to find one of the “victims” groups and abase himself and the State of Maine before it. That was a challenge, since our winters kept out most “minorities” and our women had too much real work to do to be feminists.

The gays provided the perfect answer. So on September 23, 2020, The Honorable Snidely Hokem issued an executive order that each public school in Maine, including every elementary school, had to hire at least one homosexual guidance counselor. The order explained that this was necessary so “students with different sexual preferences would not feel excluded.” In order to determine who had what “sexual preference,” the gay counselors had to be given “unrestricted public and private access” to all the kids.

Suddenly, Mainers found their “luxury liberalism” had turned on them and bitten them, hard.

It takes a good bit to stir Yankees, but this did. The outrage was widespread. All over the state, parents came to PTA meetings and raised hell.

I expected Hokem to back down in the face of the voters’ wrath. After all, he was a politician. But he didn’t. Instead, he got on the television and gave a real stem-winder about how “we were all guilty of oppressing people who were really no different from ourselves.” Far from condemning them, “we should confront our own homophobia, which is a greater sin than any they might commit, not that what they do is sinful.” “Let us ask ourselves,” he concluded, “whether our children are not safer with these counselors than with the average Roman Catholic priest. After all, the sexually victimized have never led an Inquisition.”

I realized it was time for the Christian Marines to go into action. I read in the Bangor paper where the leaders of a number of grass-roots groups were meeting in Augusta, and I decided to join them. Mr. Kraft had the connections to get me in, which he was happy to do. As a student of war, he understood that most crises were also opportunities.

The meeting went as such meetings tend to go. It was full of good people who didn’t know what to do because they didn’t know how to operate outside the system.

Someone proposed a petition drive. Someone else raised the question, a petition to do what? And who would do it? There wasn’t much point in petitioning the state’s liberal establishment, which was no different from that in Washington, only smaller.

Others wanted to elect more conservatives to local school boards. But the boards, which knew where the public was coming from and had to run for re-election eventually, were already on our side, most of them. However, they had no authority to countermand a state directive.

Someone suggested, rightly, that we turn Hokem out at the next election. But that would be too late. The gays would be in the schools by then, and they’d go straight to court if a new governor moved to fire them.

I waited ‘til everyone had their say, then I got mine. “If we’re serious, there is a way to stop this, I think,” I said. “The schools need two things to operate: money and students. We can cut them off from both.” In war, a frequent route to victory is through the enemy’s logistics lines.

“How?” was the simultaneous question from a dozen different voices.

“By going on strike. Until the Governor’s order is rescinded, we will neither send our kids to public schools nor pay our property taxes,” I replied. The schools got most of their money from the local property tax, and tax bills were due soon. They’d be out of money in six weeks if a strike were widespread. That meant no pay for the teachers. We’d see whose side they were on once they had to choose between their ideology and their wallets.

People took a while to digest this. A voice finally said, “We’d be breaking the law.”

“That’s right,” I said. “It’s called civil disobedience. If you remember back to the civil rights movement, civil disobedience is something the liberals did a lot of.” At the moral level of war, it often disarms your enemy when you use his own tactics against him.

The chairman of the meeting, a local woman from a group called Fight for the Family, asked, “What do we do when they come to arrest us – and take our homes away for non-payment of taxes?”

“First, there’s strength in numbers,” I replied. “I think lots of State o’ Mainers are mad enough to join a strike. They can only arrest so many. They can’t go after half the population; they don’t have enough police, prosecutors or jail space, not to mention that they’d look like idiots.”

“Also, it takes time to seize someone’s house for not paying taxes,” I continued. “They have to give warnings, go through all kinds of legal procedures. We’d tie them up in their own knots, for once. And the schools would have dried up and blown away for lack of money by the time they got through all that.” War is a competition in time. If the enemy can’t react fast enough, his reaction does him no good.

I could tell the rest of the folks at the meeting liked the idea, the more they thought about it. So I sweetened the pill. “They may try to arrest a few people, to make examples of them and scare the rest,” I said. “So what we need are pledges to a strike fund. We’ll only ask for the money as we need it. We can build up pledges of a few million dollars, I’ll wager; plenty of people are mad enough to pledge. If they come after someone, the strike fund will give his family an income while he’s under arrest. It will also pay for his lawyer. If Hokem and his lackies see we’ve got millions of bucks to fight them with, they’ll be less eager to make any arrests.”

“If they do arrest us, we can turn that around on them.” I recognized the voice, though I couldn’t see the face from where I was in back. It was John Fitzgerald, a former Marine major who’d retired around Portland.

“Everyone who is arrested, for truancy or non-payment of taxes, should demand political prisoner status. If the state won’t grant it, then go on a hunger strike. If the person arrested can’t stand such a strike, one of us does it as a stand-in for them. At least half the Catholic priests in the state will volunteer for that duty, I can promise you.”

That was the kind of thinking I liked. I’d talk to John afterwards about the Christian Marines.

There was a good bit more discussion, but the momentum was our way. Finally Madam Chairman spoke. “It’s time for a vote. We can’t make a final decision here; we all need to go back to our people and get their reaction. But we need to decide if we’re in favor of it, ourselves. All in favor say ‘aye.'” The ayes were resounding.

“We meet again in one week. See if your folks are willing to go along. And we need them to sound out their neighbors. This will only work if we have numbers. This meeting is adjourned.”

The Christian Marines had done what we existed to do. We’d provided good advice. Now, we had to wait and see what would happen.

As always, the news of what the supposedly closed meeting had done leaked out. Because the media thought they had a “scoop,” they made the strike proposal their top story on every news program in the state.

The next day, school attendance was down 30%. That made the news too, which amplified the effect; the day after it was down 65%, then 85%. By the end of the week, the schools were empty.

A few towns had already sent out their property tax bills. Skowhegan was one. After a rally in front of the school, the folks there made a bonfire and burned the tax bills. That made good footage, which put it on the evening TV news all over the country.

In the small town of Waite, they didn’t. They didn’t have their tax bills yet, so they burned down the town hall instead.

At this point, it was clear the troops were out in front of their leaders. I realized that was a good thing. As long as everyone knows the objective, a unit on the attack does well if everyone advances as best he can. We didn’t want to rein our troops in; on the contrary, the challenge for the leaders was using the momentum to drive on even faster. So I called Mr. Kraft.

“How well do you know the lady who chaired the last meeting?” I asked.

“We have worked together before,” Kraft answered. “What would you like me to do?”

“Suggest she call a news conference tomorrow morning. At the news conference, she should announce a torchlight parade of all opponents to the governor’s plan in Augusta next Saturday night.”

“Why a torchlight parade?” Mr. Kraft asked.

“Because I don’t think the Governor will feel real comfortable about thousands of torches in the hands of our people in the state capital. Not after Waite. Most of those state office buildings are pretty flammable. Just to make sure Hokem gets the point, she should announce that the people of Waite have been invited to lead the parade.”

“Consider it done,” Mr. Kraft said. “I know the Fight for the Family people will love it.”

They did, and the news conference was big news the next day. By the end of that day, buses were being chartered and convoys organized all over the state.

One rule in war is to game the situation from the enemy ‘s standpoint. If I were Governor Hokem, what would I do? One thing, clearly, would be to mobilize the state police and the National Guard. That meant if Hokem tried to do so, and couldn’t, his situation would worsen. We’d be inside his cycle, as Colonel Boyd liked to say. And he’d start to come unglued.

I called Sam Briganti, who was a Christian Marine – a former intel Staff NCO – and a Maine State trooper.

“Sam,” I said, “I’ve got a mission for you. We need to box Hokem in, isolate him. I’m sure he’s going to turn to the State Police to protect his town from our march. I need you to prevent the cops from responding.”

“You’re right about the first part,” Sam replied. “All leaves have been canceled and we’re waiting for orders. It would really kick his ass if we didn’t turn up. I’ll have to think about how to do that – and not get caught.”

“Let me know if you can’t do it, or if you need help from any of the rest of us,” I replied. “Otherwise, I’ll trust you to make it happen.” Sam had a first-rate mind plus determination; I knew that was all the order he needed.

He didn’t fail us. The way he went about it showed a good understanding of war. Often, all it takes is some carefully injected ambiguity to force the enemy to abandon his plan. Sam put an anonymous message on the State Police online message board: “Blue flu Saturday.” He made sure a copy of it went to the Governor’s personal email.

Hokem knew what it meant. He emailed the head of the State Police. “Will your guys show Saturday or not?” he asked.

“You can always count on us, sir,” was the reply.

“How many of your men and women saw the ‘blue flu’ message?”

“Virtually all of them, sir. Every trooper has his own computer.”

“How many of them will go along with it?”

“We have no way of knowing, sir.”

“Then how can you say your cops will be there for me?”

“Because you can always count on us, sir.”

Hokem recognized an ass trying to cover itself. After all, he’d appointed the guy. A former Air Force general.

And we knew Hokem’s problem was growing, because we were also reading his email.

His back-up was the National Guard. But we had friends there too. The head of the unit in Bangor was one, so I went to see him and told him what we needed to do.

It seemed he’d already been giving thought to the problem. For some years, the Maine Guard had been trying to get the money for new trucks. They’d told the Governor the old ones just weren’t reliable any more. So who could he point the finger at if, at some critical moment, they just broke down?

His email went to every Guard unit in the state. “All, repeat all, trucks in 721st Engineers C-4. Impossible to meet any mobilization requirement. Please report status of your trucks.”

Mainers aren’t dummies, and I doubt there was a Guardsman in the state who wanted gays counseling his kids in elementary school. Suddenly, every National Guard truck in Maine just wouldn’t start. We made sure the Augusta newspaper heard of this interesting fact. The Governor read the paper.

At this point, the march was just three days away. Luckily for us, Hokem loved anything “high-tech.” His smartphone, which conveniently combined audio and video calling with all the privacy of a screen door, never left his sight. One of our guys was a former wirehead Master Sergeant who’d worked for the National Security Agency. It didn’t take him long before we were recording Hokem’s conversations and filming his meetings.

At precisely 2 PM, on October 3rd, 2020, Hokem convened his last staff meeting. He’d invited only his most trusted advisers, the people who had created him.

“Okay, guys, I’ve got just one question: how can you get me out of this one?” Hokem opened.

“At this point, frankly, I don’t know,” said his chief fundraiser. “Why in hell did you give that god-damned speech? It sounded like the most radical gay activist in the state wrote it for you.”

“That’s because the most radical gay activist in the state did write it for me. It came straight from Don Rexrod’s office.”

“Shit, he’s head of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Even most of the other gays don’t like those perverts,” said Hokem’s chief of staff, “Ms.” Virginia Teitelbaum. “Boss, if you’re dancing to his tune, you’ve got to tell us why.”

“Because Don and the rest of the gays have me by the balls, that’s why,” Hokem said. “Well, not that way, but you know what I mean.”

“No, we don’t know what you mean,” said Teitelbaum. “We can’t help you unless you tell us what the real problem is. You know what you’re doing is political suicide. Exactly why have you gotten so far in bed with these people?”

“Now cut it out,” Hokem yelled. “I’m not in bed with any gays. I’m perfectly normal. I’ve got a family, after all. Hell, if I weren’t normal I probably wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Come on, Snidely. We need to hear the whole story. Now.” The voice was that of Fred Farnsworth, the political boss who had found little Snidely Hokem years ago, working at his father’s town newspaper.

“OK, here it is,” Hokem said. “Years ago, back in the early 1990s when I was on the Senate Armed Services Committee, a bunch of us took a junket out to the Army’s training center at Ft. Irwin in the California desert. We figured that wouldn’t look like a junket to the folks back home, but the place was close to Vegas. We flew back each night to Caesar’s Palace, where we had the usual free suites. Anyway, a bunch of us got plastered at the bar and we spotted some really nice tail. I mean, they were gorgeous.”

“We figured, what the hell, we’re Senators, right? Who’s gonna make trouble for us? So we took them upstairs and started having some fun. Strangely, it was right where they held that Tailhook party.”

“I swear, none of us even suspected they were drag queens. By the time I figured out something was where it shouldn’t be, we were all in pretty deep. And the bitch, or whatever she, or he, was, was wired for sound. They had the whole goddamn thing on tape! The drag queens gave the tape to a bunch of gay political activists. So when our gay friends call, I listen,” Hokem concluded.

Now we had a tape of our own. By the next morning, it was all up on the internet.

With the governor’s office vacant and the ruling about the gay school counselors rescinded by a very nervous lieutenant governor, the torchlight parade was a festive occasion. During the parade, I spotted Mr. Kraft on a hotel balcony, wearing a smoking jacket and a fez, puffing on his pipe and quietly enjoying the spectacle. I looked him up shortly after the rally ended.

“Not a bad week’s work, if I do say so myself,” I opened.

“It’s a start,” he replied. By Maine standards, that was a high compliment.

“What do you think should be next on our agenda?” I asked.

“Understanding why we won,” he responded.

“Why did we win?” I inquired.

“Because we kept the fight within Maine. You call it ‘localizing the battlefield,’ I believe,” he said.

He was right on that. If the Feds had been involved, we would have been overpowered. They would have occupied Augusta with the 82nd Airborne. We wouldn’t have been able to get in the town.

“What can we do with that lesson?” I asked, continuing my game of 20 questions. It was a useful game if you were playing with someone who could think.

“The same group that started all this is meeting here this evening. They’re the folks you met with, when you came up with the battle plan that worked. Meet us here in my suite at ten o’clock and you’ll find out.”

I was there, and was somewhat surprised to find Mr. Kraft now chairing the meeting. It seems the rest of the folks had asked him to. They already knew what I was learning: in his Retroculture way, he was a first-rate strategist.

“Meeting is spelled ‘waste of time,’ in most cases,” he opened. “So we’ll keep this one short. We won this past week because the issue was decided by the people of Maine. If we can decide matters without Washington sticking its snout in, we’ll usually win.”

“There’s an idea I’d like to ask you to take back to your people, the folks in the groups you represent in this coalition. I call it the ‘Maine Idea.’ And it’s what I’ve just said. We want to decide matters for ourselves. We want to separate ourselves in every way we can from Washington and from the rest of the country. If they want to mess their lives up with all these modern notions, that’s up to them. But we want no part of it. We know the old ways were better, and we want to stick to them.”

“Our own government up here is rotten,” Mr. Kraft continued. “But we can do something about that. This business of putting gays in our elementary schools has awakened the people of this state. We can’t fix Washington. So the hell with Washington. The ‘Maine Idea’ is to shut Washington out.”

“How do we do that?” I asked. I liked the theory, but wondered how the mice could keep out an elephant.

“By being Moltkes, not Schlieffens,” he replied. “You understand what that means. Moltke did not try to foresee every event in a campaign and plan too much beforehand. He campaigned opportunistically. So must we.”

“The first step is to get the idea accepted. Ideas have consequences. When a majority of Mainers share the Maine Idea, opportunities will arise, as one did here in these past few weeks. I’m sure we will have some good Marine advice as to how to use those opportunities,” Mr. Kraft concluded.

When Kraft talked, other people listened. They would take the Maine Idea back to their members. And gradually, it would spread along our rocky shore and through our stone-fenced fields.

I waited until the others had filed out; I wanted to extend a private invitation to Mr. Kraft. “You know about our Christian Marine Corps,” I said. “You don’t have to be a former Marine to join. We’d like to have you. You’re general staff material if anyone up here is.”

“Thank you,” he replied. “You’re not the first person to think so. I am honored by the invitation. I have always thought well of Marines. I will be happy to work with the Christian Marines and assist you in any way I can. But I am not at liberty to join you. I wear a different uniform.”

I was intrigued by this answer, but Mr. Kraft’s tone did not suggest the subject was open for further discussion. So I thanked him for his offer of support, said we would be back to him for assistance, and bid him a good evening.

Which it certainly had been.

Chapter 13

The fate of Governor Hokem made it clear that, once Mainers thought about it, they were on the right side in the culture war. While the establishment in Maine remained liberal, it got pretty quiet about it. It was not looking forward to another test of strength with those of us who followed the old ways.

But we knew the feds would come in eventually. They always did. Our victory in Maine had not gone unnoticed in Washington. The forces of cultural Marxism were still dominant there, and they were looking for an opportunity to take us down.

Through the winter of 2020-2021 and into the spring, I worked to build the Christian Marines, and the Christian Marines worked to spread the Maine Idea. Most of the grass-roots groups had gone for the concept, and they were hitting the hustings to spread it around. It wasn’t really that hard; most folks already understood that all Washington did was take their money and spit in their face.

I knew the Maine Idea would not become real, however, until Maine had to fight for it. Even if we fought and lost, it would help. The fact that we dared fight the federal government would strengthen people’s desire for independence, as the Battle of Bunker Hill did in the first revolution. If we could fight and win – that would give the people of Maine hope that our dream of being free again might become real.

The challenge, and our opportunity, came in the early summer of 2021. The Democrats were back in power in Washington, and their slogan was “A Rainbow Over America.” For Maine, that translated into an announcement on June 22 by “Ms.” Lateesha Umbonga LaDrek, the Secretary of HUD, that her department had purchased two large apartment clusters in Bangor. The current rent-paying residents would be moved out, and 350 black federal prison parolees from out of state would be moved in. LaDrek said the purpose of this action was “to offer oppressed people of color a second chance by letting them serve as ambassadors of diversity to the people of Bangor, who were imprisoned in an all-white ghetto.”

Maine seethed. But after years of being told that they were evil “racists,” people felt morally unable to defend themselves. They dared not speak openly against the trashing of their community.

I knew we had to turn that around. The first step was for us Christian Marines to put our heads together. When we met at the Old Place on June 25th, I put the problem squarely. “I think Maine can stop this, if it will fight. But it has to know it’s in the right before it will fight,” I said. “You all know the problem. Any resistance to black scum, even by decent blacks, brings screams of moral outrage from the cultural Marxists. Most folks have been so conditioned by this crap they can’t stand up to it. They think they’re Hitler if they dare defend their – our – community. So we have to win the moral fight first. How can we do that?”

“First, let the feds win a partial victory,” said Major Fitzgerald from Portland. “Let them throw the current residents of those apartments out. They’ve given them only 30 days to vacate, and the TV news is playing that up. The feds look heartless, as they are when its a matter of white folks. Seeing all those people’s lives suddenly disrupted tells Mainers there’s something wrong here.”

“OK, that makes sense,” I replied. “Let the enemy overextend himself. But how do we keep them from moving the black scum in?”

“By moving someone else in first.” The speaker was one of our more unusual recruits, Father Dimitri, an Orthodox missionary from Russia. Russia was again a Christian nation, under a new Tsar, and she saw her mission as carrying the Word to the repaganized West. Father Dimitri was one of many Orthodox missionaries working in the States, and he was also a Russian Naval Infantry chaplain. Some of our former “spooks” had brought him in to the Christian Marines; they knew him, and I trusted them.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The enemy is presenting these black criminals as ‘the poor,’ so good people feel it’s wrong to oppose them,” said the priest. “Of course, with your liberal churches, no clergy tell them that Christianity historically has distinguished between the deserving poor, who are poor through no fault of their own, and the undeserving poor, whose poverty is caused by their own sins. Before the undeserving poor qualify for our charity, they must repent – they must change their ways. Otherwise, we are just helping them along the road to Hell.”

“As it happens, I know of some deserving poor who very much need this housing,” Father Dimitri continued. “Three weeks ago, a ship brought almost 400 Egyptian Christian refugees into Montreal. Throughout the Muslim world, Christians are being driven out or killed. These are good people who escaped only with their lives. They are survivors of one of the oldest Christian communities, dating to the earliest days to the Church. Why don’t we move them into these apartments before Washington can move in the orcs, then dare Washington to throw them out?”

“What are orcs?” Sergeant Danielov asked.

“The word is from Tolkien,” Father Dimitri replied. “He was one of the great Christian writers of the 20th century. In his Lord of the Rings, which is Christian analogy, orcs are soldiers of the Evil One. Those creatures your government wants to move in to Bangor are orcs, believe me.”

“How would we get your Egyptian Christians here?” I asked. “The Border Patrol would never let them in.”

“Don’t worry, we Russians are very good at smuggling things through northern forests,” said the priest, laughing.

“Illegal immigrants are among the liberals’ sacred ‘victim’ groups,” said Fitzgerald. “Usually that means trash from south of the border, but we can turn it around on them by bringing in good folks the same way. They’ll have to face their own arguments, used against them. That’s disarming.”

The more I heard, the better I liked Father Dimitri’s idea. In fighting merely to keep the orcs out – I’d read Tolkien, too – we were trying to beat something with nothing. That never works. His way, we would launch a pre-emptive strike, occupy the position, and make the feds try to re-take it.

I also knew that by giving refuge to these Egyptian Christians, Maine would be striking at least a small blow in the Third World War. That war had been under way since at least the 1980s. It was a war of militant, expansionist Islam against everybody else. The Islamics had been pushing out in every direction – north into Russia and Balkans and also into Western Europe (immigration can be a form of invasion); south down both African coasts, where the ancient Christian land of Ethiopia was besieged on every side; east into the Philippines (a Muslim Indonesian dagger was pointing at Australia as well); and also West. Since the l990s, Islam had become the fastest-growing religion in North America.

I knew we would have to fight the Islamics eventually, as we did. Of course, the North American Muslims were all for “toleration,” as the Koran commands when they are weak. Once they are strong enough, the message changes. The Koran puts it in a way that is hard to misunderstand; “Kill those who join other gods with God (i.e., believers in the Holy Trinity) wherever you shall find them, and seize them and slay them, and lay in wait for them with every kind of ambush.”

By accepting some Christian refugees from Islamic terror, we would put Maine on record as to which side we were on in this world war. And it would be hard to find people more civilized than Egyptians; they’d been at it for a good 5000 years. The Egyptian church even spoke Egyptian, the language of the pharaohs, not Arabic.

“Anyone have a better idea? If not, I say we go with it,” I concluded. No one did. “OK, that’s settled. Anyone who can help Father Dimitri smuggle the Egyptians in, see him after the meeting. The next question is, how will the feds counter, and what do we do about it?”

“We know how they will counter,” said Trooper Kelly, who’d come up from Massachusetts. “We know from Waco and Ruby Ridge and many other places that never made the papers. The federal government has militarized law enforcement. They’ll send in INS, federal marshals, probably FBI too, all in combat fatigues, with heavy firepower and armored vehicles. They’ll deport the Egyptians back to Egypt, where they’ll probably be killed as they come off the aircraft. They’ll move the orcs in, and arrest anyone who tries to stop them. And they’ll stay to make sure that if anyone objects to the black crime they’ll bring, they are arrested for violating their ‘civil rights.’ Bangor will find itself under foreign military occupation.”

“I agree,” I said. “That is what they’ll do. The question is, do we let them win that way, and count it a moral victory for our side, or do we try to stop ’em?”

We had to think about that one for a while. If we tried to stop them, it meant war – at the physical level as well as the moral.

After some talk, our Bangor CO, former Army captain Don Vanderburg, brought us to a decision. “We have two questions to answer: should we stop them if we can, and can we do it? As to the first, it’s clear to me,” Don said. “Of course. It’s my town, my home. And if the feds can rape Bangor this way, the Maine Idea will look hopeless. Most people will give it up. So I think we have to try to stop them.”

“I also think we can do it,” he continued. “They look like soldiers, but they’re not. They’re just civil servants in tree suits. Most of them have never studied war. They don’t know the terrain, while we do. Plus, we’ll have the support of the people, and they’ll be invaders. That support translates into all kinds of help, especially information.”

“We may be able to do this in a way where no blood is shed. Remember, these guys aren’t up for a fight. Most of them just want to make twenty and get out. They aren’t our enemies. Most of them share our values and will be privately hoping we win. It’s the people they work for who are our enemies. If we can avoid fighting them, they will try not to fight us.”

So we decided to resist.

The first part of the operation went according to plan. With some help from folks who knew the back roads, Father Dimitri got his Egyptians in. We hid them in local churches, then on July 23, one day after the apartment buildings were cleaned out, we moved them in.

By now, we had our prep down pat. We had friends in the media, including national media, forewarned and on the scene. We had a dozen clergy, led by the local Monsignor, out front of the buildings to explain what we were doing. The mayor and police chief of Bangor were on hand too, to explain that their city welcomed good people who were in need; it just didn’t want violent criminals. We made the evening TV news all across the country, and on the whole the coverage was favorable. We’d taken the moral high ground.

In Washington, an enraged President Cisneros held a news conference the next morning. After denouncing this “racist, insensitive, hurtful, and illegal action by people who want to hold back the future,” he announced that a convoy of federal law enforcement agents were on their way to Bangor “to uphold the lawful actions of this government and ensure that justice is done on behalf of Americans of color.” Forgetting that his lapel mic was still on, after he had gone backstage, he put it more directly: “I’ll show these white crackers who’s running this place now.”

Like everywhere in the old U.S.A., militias had been sprouting in Maine (most called themselves a neighborhood watch). Some were for nut cases, most were not. Most were made up of decent people who realized their country was falling apart, and when it fell completely the only security would be local security. They were preparing to provide that. The Christian Marines had ties with some of the more serious groups in Maine, and they were willing to work with us to fight the federal invasion.

Equally important, we had a great intel system: the cops. Most of the state police in Massachusetts and Maine and many local police were with us by this time; they realized our values were also their values. The feds needed the cops’ help, didn’t realize they’d been penetrated, and provided them the route the convoy would take. The Washington boys were so confident they did the obvious, coming right up I-95.

Our ambush site was near Newport, Maine, where I-95 crosses the marshes at the southern end of Lake Sebasticook on a long, low bridge. The State Cops told us the convoy would leave Boston about 5 AM on June 27, which would put it into Newport around 10 AM the same day. Forewarned, we’d moved our folks into position the night of the 26th.

We were prepared for a real fight, but it was not what we wanted. Dead feds would quickly be turned into martyrs by the media, and most of those guys were privately on our side. The challenge to the Christian Marines was to try to handle this so we won, but with nobody wounded or dead. As always, the physical level of war had to serve the moral level or it would work against us.

I was with an OP we had established just south and east of the bridge. Of course, we’d gone over the plan time and again. More important, everyone understood our objective: defeat them, but don’t hurt or kill them. The militias we worked with had the self-discipline to make sure their actions served that intent, even when events outran the plan (which they always did) and men had to improvise.

We had a radio in the OP tuned to the state police frequency, and the trooper out front of the convoy broadcast its position every five minutes. Officially, this was so the local cops could clear out the civilian traffic; the feds never thought to ask who else might be listening. Right on schedule, the convoy – a HUMMWV in the lead, then two Bradley Fighting Vehicles, two more HUMMWVs, seven five-ton trucks, and a final HUMMWV as tail-end Charlie – hit the south end of the bridge at 10:13 AM.

We had wired the end panels of the northbound bridge with explosives set for command detonation. From the OP, I could see the whole span, and once all the convoy was on it I hit the detonator. Both panels blew with a roar every fed could hear, even with the vehicles buttoned up.

Immediately, before the agents could figure out what was happening, I broke into their net. “This is the Maine militia,” I said in my best command voice. “We have cut the road before and behind you. You cannot move forward or back. We have every vehicle targeted with crew-served weapons, including .50 cals and 90 mm recoilless. If you open fire, you’re dead. Lay down your weapons and come out of the vehicles, slowly, one at a time.”

At the same instant, a company’s worth of infantry, militia and Christian Marines (general staff types also get to mix it up on occasion), were in their faces. We’d positioned them not at the ends of the bridge but under it, along its length (a modern light infantry defense works parallel to an enemy mech column, not across its head). They were equipped with grappling hooks and climbing ropes. As soon as they heard the end panels blow, they swung their grapples for the hand rails and rappelled up. They had weapons leveled at the drivers before the vehicles came to a stop.

This was the critical moment. We weren’t bluffing; we did have heavy weapons, and we would take the vehicles out if we had to. No one moved, or spoke. The whole thing took less than a minute, but time slowed down so it seemed like hours. Then, slowly, one of the Bradleys started training its turret to the right, as if to look for a target. “Shit,” I thought, “the dumb bastard is going to open up.”

A sixteen-year old kid from Rockland saved the day for us. He was on the Bradley’s left side. He saw the vehicle commander had popped his hatch to come up for a better look. With the agility you lose by the time you’re twenty, he was on the vehicle, and the commander got a face full of rifle butt before his head was all the way out. The kid, La Riviere, dropped two smoke and one CS grenades down the hatch, slammed it shut and sat on it, with his AK trained on the infantry hatches.

Two federal marshals came out of those hatches, saw the AK in their faces and gave up. The rest of the crew, choking and puking, came out the rear hatch with their hands in the air – the Italian salute, we used to call it. I was on my feet now, where our guys could see me, gesturing madly and screaming, “Get away from the vehicle!” As soon as our troops and the prisoners were behind the next vehicles in line, I slapped the 90 gunner in our OP on the shoulder and said, “Take that Bradley out.”

Like the Russian BMP, the Bradley was an explosion waiting to happen, a tin-clad rolling armor dump that any anti-tank weapon instantly turned into a Viking funeral for its crew. The 90 mm recoilless rifle round hit the ammo and it blew, the turret turning pinwheels in the sky until it plunged sizzling into the lake. The chassis was quickly reduced to a molten mass of metal and treads.

The Feds had seen enough at that point. As Trooper Kelly said, they weren’t soldiers. Like anyone in law enforcement, they knew they might get shot at, but a full-scale battle was a different matter. Plus, it had all happened so fast. Wrapped in the smell of real fear and fresh excrement, they crawled out of their vehicles and surrendered.

We brought our POWs, 83 federal marshals and INS agents (no FBI this time), and our own guys down from the bridge on ladders. We had three Bangor city school buses waiting on the parallel secondary road, and bundled everyone on board. The buses were as close as the feds would get to Bangor.

Before we pulled out, we took the opportunity to play some mind-games with the real enemy down in Washington. With a video cam rolling, we turned the .50 cals and 90 mms on the remaining, empty vehicles. The tape of exploding, burning military trucks, HUMMWVs and remaining Bradley, coupled with footage of the line of federal prisoners marching off with their hands behind their heads, went to all the networks. In 24 hours, the whole nation knew Maine had fought the federal government, and won.

Our challenge was to turn a tactical victory into a strategic one. Maine was with us; the Battle of Lake Sebasticook, as it was quickly known, made the Maine Idea real. The slogan appeared overnight on hand-lettered signs in yards, on bumper stickers, on banners hung from highway bridges. But we were nowhere near ready to defeat a full-scale federal invasion, and we knew one was coming.

Washington was still full of fight. President Cisneros, trying to position himself as a second Lincoln, vowed the Union would be preserved, at any cost. Never was the old rule of “first as tragedy, then as farce,” so applicable. He announced the 82nd Airborne was on its way to Bangor.

But we had an ancient and effective weapon with which to defend ourselves: hostages. As our militiamen returned to their homes all over Maine, many carried an unusual cargo in the trunk of their car: a trussed-up federal agent. Of course, the feds had specialized hostage-rescue units. But they didn’t have enough of them to hit sites all over Maine simultaneously, even if they could find where the agents were hidden.

On the 30th of June, we made the feds an offer, through an open letter to Cisneros printed in the Bangor paper. The key part read:

We have no desire or intention to harm anyone. We could easily have killed many, perhaps all the federal the agents who invaded our state. We have killed none of them, and all are now safe and well cared for. We look forward to returning them to their homes and families as soon as possible. We do not regard them as our enemies.

However, our first responsibility is to our own homes and families, which you now threaten. Therefore, we regret we have to say that we cannot guarantee the safety of the federal agents now in our custody if further federal forces enter Maine.

To underscore the point, we arranged for CNN to interview several militia units that were holding some of the prisoners. They allowed that if those paratroopers landed in Bangor, or the feds tried any rescue ops, the lot of their policeman would not be a happy one. One unit already had a noose hanging from a large oak tree. It was a bluff, but Washington couldn’t know that.

We had a few agents at Ft. Bragg, so we knew within hours that the airlift had been put on hold. Cisneros was waffling.

Meanwhile, the 250 black parolees who were to move into Bangor had been stuck in a couple of motels near Worcester, Massachusetts, waiting for the federal troops to clear their way in. The Justice Department’s lawyers had determined that, since they had been paroled, they could not be kept under guard. It seems a few of them got tired of waiting and decided to go have some fun. The date was July 4, 2021.

A summer day in New England is a true joy. That Fourth of July was especially nice. The temperature got up to 77 degrees, with low humidity, a gentle breeze out of the northwest and a few white, puffy, cotton-ball clouds, the kind that children like to see animal shapes in. Sister Mary Frances of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament had brought her Bible school pupils, grades two through five, to a small park on the bank of the West River. They had sandwiches and cookies, toys, a big American flag and sparklers to celebrate the day. Sister Mary Frances had planned to read them the story of the Ride of Paul Revere.

Thirteen of the parolees discovered them there just after lunch. By the time the police found them later in the day, the Sister and most of the children were lying where they had knelt to say the Rosary, praying for the protection that did not come in this life. She had been raped repeatedly before being strangled with the chain on her Crucifix. Perhaps she had bought the three surviving children the time they needed to crawl off into the woods and hide. A posse of state troopers and frantic parents found them there just after dusk.

The media might well have passed over the event in silence, at least outside Worcester; it didn’t fit their agenda. But “Ms.” LaDrek of HUD happened to be in Worcester that very weekend. She had come to open a new high-rise public housing development, modeled on St. Louis famed Pruett-Igoe. At her news conference, she said that the slaughter of Sister Mary Frances and her young charges “was nothing compared to what people of color had suffered in America since the white invaders first arrived. Maybe it would help the white people of Massachusetts have a better understanding of Black Rage. If so, it might be a positive experience for Worcester.”

The news conference had been carried live on most of the Worcester TV and radio stations. It concluded with Ms. LaDrek leading the new residents of the housing project into the commons room for a nice lunch. By 12:30, the courtyard in front of the project was filling with Worcester’s citizenry, and they weren’t in a celebratory mood. They were construction workers, housewives, good Catholics most of them, some coming straight from the noon mass at Blessed Sacrament. Their kids could have been the ones raped and butchered. In some cases, they were.

The priest from Blessed Sacrament himself, with some of the nuns, led the uninvited guests into the luncheon, chanting the Dies Irae. The distinguished Secretary of HUD tried to bolt out the back door, but one of the nuns, a sturdy Irish girl, tackled her. The swift, new elevator whisked LaDrek and a party of escorts to the top floor, where a window was knocked out. The Honorable Secretary of HUD followed the shards of glass down, to a hard and fatal landing in the front parking lot.

It’s almost uncanny; our Thirty Years War also started with a defenestration. This time, no angels (or manure piles, if you’re a Protestant) broke the fall.

A story like this couldn’t be hushed up. The nation was appalled, not by the assassination but by what had preceded it.

In Maine, we moved swiftly to take advantage of the public’s mood. The militias set up recruiting stations in every shopping center and on each town common. The slogan on a banner over each station read, “The Maine Idea – Defend Our Families.” Any male with a weapon could join. The lines ran a block or more long. Within 48 hours we had more than 100,000 men pledged to fight for our state.

In Washington, Cisneros knew he was beaten. The order went to the 82nd Airborne to stand down. Resorting to one of the city’s oldest tricks, Cisneros asked Congress to establish a “Blue Ribbon Panel” to investigate the whole affair. Announcing that “until the panel is appointed and has conducted its investigation, it would be inappropriate for me to comment further,” he crawled into the deepest hole he could find. The panel, everyone knew, would take years to complete its work, then issue a report that said nothing. That’s what “Blue Ribbon Panels” existed to do.

So we’d won. Some might say it wasn’t a good, clean victory on the field of battle. It wasn’t, but that isn’t how war works. War is politics, propaganda, fighting, maneuvering, luck, all boiled up in one big cauldron. This time, our side had bubbled up to the top.

At least we showed that victory doesn’t always belong to the bigger battalions.

Chapter 14

War is the extension of politics, and politics may also be an extension of war.

By 2022, the first shots of America’s Second Civil War were audible. This time, instead of a few cannon firing at Fort Sumter, its heralds were the popping of thousands of caps. Blacks shot whites because they were white, and Hispanics shot blacks because they were black. Whites usually still called the police to do their shooting for them, though the results seldom justified the cost of the phone call. Koreans and Jews got shot by everybody.

Right-to-lifers shot abortion doctors, who in turn relied on their needles and forceps to terminate potential future right-to-lifers. Farmers shot EPA agents, and the feds threw farmers into jails where they were homosexually raped. Once a week, somewhere in the country, the gays fire-bombed a church. Somewhere else, once a week, a bomb in a car or a briefcase took out a government office. Insurance companies would no longer sell life insurance to IRS employees.

Like real war in every place and every time, it wasn’t pretty. I hated it.

In Maine, our hope was to keep our distance, and increase it wherever we could. That was the Maine Idea, and after we had beaten the feds both on our home soil and in Vermont, most folks were enthusiastic about it.

I was pretty sure the whole political system would go down the drain sooner or later, and probably sooner. But in the mean time, we had to use it intelligently for whatever it could do for us.

The Maine Idea had attracted some folks who understood politics better than I did, and I was happy to let them take the lead. They weren’t politicians, just normal people who had done the grass-roots organizing that gave the Maine Idea its clout. An idea, even the best idea, seldom goes very far on its own. A good idea plus lots of people who will work for it leads to a different future.

I was happy to play a fly on the wall in the meetings where Bill Kraft and other grass-roots leaders put together the Maine First Party. They figured that if a political party based on the Maine Idea controlled the state legislature and the governor’s office, Maine would improve its chances of saving itself from the coming catastrophe.

They found ordinary people, good people, to run for office. They got candidates on the ballot for every office in the state. They made clear exactly what they were for: a Maine that stood as far apart from the rest of the country as it could get.

They also wanted a place where we could live the way State o’ Mainers had lived in times past. When some greasy reporter up from New York asked Bill Kraft what that meant, he replied with the words of the old Book of Common Prayer: we wanted to live a Godly, righteous, and sober life. To most people in Maine, that summed it up nicely.

The Maine First Party faced the Establishment, local and national, with its greatest nightmare: an anti-Establishment alternative the average person could vote for. And vote for it they did. In November of 2022, when all the votes were counted, the Maine First Party held every statewide office and had majorities of better than 80% in both houses of the legislature. The Republicans and the Democrats had been wiped off the state political map.

This victory at the ballot box was as important as any victory we ever won on the battlefield. It quickly led to Vermont First and New Hampshire First Parties in those states; as in Maine, they swept into power on a tidal wave of public support. The victories of the home state parties gave upper New England the chance for recovering our freedom when the time came, and laid the basis for the Northern Confederation.

In Massachusetts, the same effort failed. Too many citizens of that Commonwealth found their wealth in the common trough that was government, and they were afraid of losing their regular ration of swill. They paid for it, later.

I made certain every Christian Marine understood the relationship between war and politics, and politics and war. The actions we had fought, especially the Battle of Lake Sebasticook, made the Maine First victory possible. The victory of the Maine First Party in turn made it possible for us to fight for Maine’s freedom, and win. Each victory fed on the other. Neither was possible without the other. Neither had any meaning without the other.

Throughout history, some soldiers have argued that politics should stop when the shooting starts. What fools.

Chapter 16

By the third decade of the 21st century, the dissolution of the United States had reached the point where each year brought a new crisis. The crisis of 2023 began with the Persell Amendment to the Clean Air Act, a measure intended to prevent the smoking of tobacco.

I am not making this up. I know it sounds like satire, but it happened.

In the 1990s and 2000s, as the greatest country in the world turned itself into a cultural toxic waste dump, one of the great issues that absorbed the federal government’s attention was – tobacco smoke.

The government and the “health industry” that lived off the government whooped it up that tobacco smoke was second only to Xyclon B as the worst thing you could inhale. At first, they just tried to get smokers to quit. But like all bandwagons of the absurd, once their campaign got rolling it rolled over everybody. Soon, they were shrieking that just smelling the smoke from someone else’s pipe, cigar, or cigarette was enough to put you in the grave tomorrow, or by next week at the latest. They called it “second-hand smoke.”

Of course, you got far more crap in your lungs just walking past a bus, but that didn’t matter. Smoking was outlawed far and wide where anyone might smell the smoke. Smokers were literally driven out, into back alleys and onto loading docks for a furtive puff.

A reasonable man, or even woman, might have considered that people had been smoking for some centuries, yet by a miracle the human race had survived. Smokers and non-smokers had even managed to get along, quite nicely in most cases. The secret was etiquette. Good manners dictated that some places were for smoking and some were not, and that where the lines were uncertain, smokers asked the assembled company for permission before they indulged. Previous to the hysteria, permission was usually graciously given, and no one seemed the worse for it.

But by the early 2000s, anti-smoking militancy was the “cause” of the day. Avoiding tobacco smoke had become the equivalent of Fletcherizing – the 19th century movement that promised sparkling health and a Methuselah lifespan to anyone who chewed each bite of food one hundred times. Americans always were suckers for health crazes.

And politicians were always on the lookout for suckers. So when the Clean Air Act came up for renewal in 2023, Senator Whitman Persell (“Wimpy” to his friends), Democrat of California, saw a chance to score some points with the anti-tobacco harpies. He proposed an amendment whereby anyone who smelled tobacco smoke anywhere might sue any nearby smoker. The plaintiff did not have to prove that the smoker was smoking at the time; the fact that he or she was an admitted smoker was considered proof enough. The amendment encouraged triple damages for “pain and suffering.” With the enthusiastic backing of the Cisneros administration and the usual craven collapse by Congressional Republicans, the amendment was signed into law. The Health Nazis triumphantly proclaimed “the end of tobacco smoking in America.”

As the law intended, smokers found themselves hunted like rats. A smoker, placed under oath on the witness stand, had to admit smoking or be guilty of perjury. But if they admitted they smoked, they lost the suit, along with their life savings and most else they owned. Repairmen, neighbors, even family members would come into a smoker’s home and promptly file a lawsuit, which they won. If someone smelled smoke in someone else’s clothes, they sued and won. The Surgeon General even issued a pamphlet suggesting ways smokers could be trapped into revealing their filthy habit, and then sued. It was a virtual reign of terror, enforced by impoverishment.

But the result was not the end of tobacco smoking in America. The result was war. Smokers fought back.

It started about six months after the Persell Amendment took effect. In Pasadena, a little old lady had been sued by a Meals on Wheels deliverywoman who had spotted a telltale cigarette butt in her kitchen garbage. As usual, the smoker lost, and the court ordered her home seized and sold to pay the deliverywoman her winnings. In the final court session on the case, the little old lady pulled a Saturday Night Special out of her handbag and blew away the judge and the plaintiff.

She was shot down herself by a sheriff, but on her way to court she had sent a letter to the L.A. Times explaining her action. “I had nothing more to lose,” she wrote. “I would rather die quickly than be left on the street, penniless. And I won’t stop smoking. I was born and grew up in England, and I remember how, in 1940, when a Nazi invasion seemed certain, Churchill had posters printed up saying, ‘You Can Always Take One With You.’ So that is what I will try to do.”

Her story was picked up by the rest of the media, not in sympathy but to demonstrate how all smokers were dangerous extremists. However, smokers got a different message. “You Can Always Take One With You” posters appeared on walls and street signs. Other smokers who had lost everything, or feared they soon would, began shooting. They shot judges and lawyers. They shot the people who had sued them, or other members of the plaintiffs families. They shot government health personnel. One of them shot Senator Persell; regrettably, he survived. They all left the same message: “I had nothing more to lose.”

Up in Maine, our Maine First state government saw an opportunity. The Governor proposed, and the legislature adopted, a “Resolution of Nullification” that stated that hereafter, the Persell Amendment would not apply in Maine. Maine folks still had good manners, and we would handle tobacco smoke the old way, as a matter of etiquette.

The feds understood quite well what nullification meant for them; that battle had gone the other way in the 1830s, and the long-ago victory was still an important part of their power. They went to the Supreme Court and Maine was overruled.

But our Governor, John C. Adams, stuck to his guns – or rather, our guns. He wrote to the President and told him the Nullification Ordinance still stood, and that whatever a federal court might rule, no monies based on a Persell Amendment judgment would be paid in Maine. If Washington didn’t like it, they could try to send in federal agents again. We Christian Marines made it clear we were not averse to another meeting like the one at Lake Sebasticook, and the state militia raised on the occasion was still available.

Under normal circumstances, Cisneros probably would have sent in federal agents, or troops. But the federal government was by this time caught up in a real crisis, and it didn’t have much attention to spare to the tobacco question. Once it was clear we had successfully nullified Persell, Vermont and New Hampshire did the same, as did the states of the deep South. Elsewhere, smokers kept shooting.

The smokers’ defiance had showed the power of leaderless resistance. In former wars and revolutions, effective, sustained resistance required leadership and organization. Without a Continental Congress or a Jacobin Directorate or a Bolshevik Party to guide and direct and order, action could not be sustained. Now, in the 21st century, the Internet supplied “virtual organization” by allowing the actions of one to inspire others, and the actions of those others to instruct and animate more. From the standpoint of the government, it was a nightmare; the rebellions (there were soon many) had no head that could be cut off, no junta or central committee or official spokesmen who could be arrested or assassinated. The ubiquity of the Internet meant it could not be silenced, and it could not discipline itself to pass over stories that people wanted to see. For good and for ill, the Internet was the sorcerer’s apprentice.

Now pardon me, if you’ll be so gracious, while I light a fresh cigar.

Chapter 17

The crisis that occupied the feds’ attention while Maine reestablished the doctrine of Nullification was one that usually comes in the last days of ancient regimes. The currency was collapsing.

In October of 2018, a Big Mac cost $5.95. By October of 2023, it cost $99. For $150, you also got a small order of fries and a Coke.

The warning signs had been flashing for many years, but everyone in Washington ignored them. As late as the year 2000, the federal government had showed it could balance the budget. But for politicians, doing so had no payoff. The Republicans wanted tax cuts and the Democrats wanted more spending. So they cut a deal where each party would get what it wanted, and we would just borrow the money to pay for it all.

Through the 2000s and 2010s, the deficits soared, as did the national debt and the international trade deficit. Washington ignored all three. Then, in response to the financial panic of 2008, the Federal Reserve bank began printing money. Actually, it no longer had to print it. It could just enter a few keystrokes on a computer and presto!, trillions of dollars came into being. No one considered that something created so easily couldn’t be worth much.

Wall Street got even richer from all the phony money, but the real economy, where real people had to try to get jobs, remained in the tank. That kept down inflation, for a while.

The first people to realize that dollars had become green confetti were foreigners. Starting in the mid-teens, the dollar began to lose its position as the world’s reserve currency. Gold came back into its own as the only real money, at least internationally. The dollar’s role as reserve currency had given the American economy a huge subsidy. When it lost that subsidy, it tanked.

The Federal Reserve responded by creating dollars even faster, by the tens of trillions. All they knew how to do, when a bubble burst, was generate more liquidity to create yet another bubble.

But this time, the bubble was the dollar itself. When that bubble burst, beginning here at home in 2019, creating more dollars made the problem worse. But since that is all the Fed knew how to do, that is what it did.

By 2023, the Fed was creating dollars by the quadrillions. By March of 2024, that Big Mac cost $500,000. By July, it cost $50 million. Financial Weimar had followed cultural Weimar. The middle class was wiped out.

***

In Washington, Republicans and Democrats pointed fingers at each other, each hoping to ride the wave of middle class fury into long-term power. The public remembered that both parties had voted for the policies that brought the dollar down to where it took ten million to buy a single Mexican peso. That meant the political system offered no hope of a solution.

Revolutions and civil wars are the suicide of states. Men and women commit suicide when they are convinced their problems are overwhelming and there is no other way out. Nations rise in revolution or divide in civil war in response to the same conviction: continuation of the status quo is intolerable, and nothing but the death of the state offers any hope of escape from it.

The Federal government’s destruction of the dollar, and with it every American’s way of life, solidified the public against it. Not only solidified – radicalized. Afterwards, most Americans felt continued rule by such a government was unbearable. They did not yet know how to escape from under it. But they were ready to embrace any possibility. Including suicide.

***

The government’s response to the economic catastrophe it had created only deepened the public’s alienation. First, Congress indexed its own salaries and those of government employees. That meant their salaries went up week-by-week to keep up with the inflation. The rest of us were left to live as best we could on incomes that fell steadily, in terms of what they would buy.

We weren’t the first country to experience hyperinflation, and while everybody’s savings were gone for good, it was possible to stabilize the currency by the usual tough measures: stop printing more money, drastically cut government spending, run a budget surplus, and so on. The Feds refused to do any of it. It would have meant cutting off the parasites, the welfare queens, Wall Street bankers, government contractors, and all the rest. Those folks were the politicians’ base. The Fed kept on inventing money.

People tried to cope in the usual ways, by buying gold, hoarding foreign currencies, bartering, etc.

The government’s next response was to make ownership of gold illegal. If you already owned some, you had to sell it to the government at a fixed price – for paper dollars that in one day were worth half as much as when you got them, a day later a fourth as much, and so on. By this time, people were using $100 bills for toilet paper. It was cheaper than buying the real thing. Maybe that’s what economists mean by a “soft currency.”

Then, the feds ordered everyone to turn in all their foreign money as well. Banks were commanded to convert all foreign currency into dollars and send the renminbi and yen and pesos to Washington. By a secret government order, on December 7, 2024, the banks opened all safety deposit boxes and confiscated any precious metals and foreign money found in them. The rightful owners were not compensated, but fined.

Finally, Washington tried to outlaw barter as well. That was hopeless, but they tried. President Cisneros proposed and Congress (with a Republican majority, but in times of crisis the Establishment knows how to stick together) passed a law requiring all citizens to show receipts for any new goods in their possession. Failure to do so resulted in immediate confiscation, plus fines. Enforcement was given over to the IRS, on the reasonable grounds that it had always presumed guilt unless innocence could be proven by documentation. Armed teams of IRS agents would burst into a home, demanding receipts for anything they thought looked new. They still went through the motions of getting a warrant, but “probable cause” included the fact that the family was not starving. If they had food, they were presumed to have bought it. If they had no receipts for it, the food was confiscated too. And they were fined for having it.

Down east, we suffered along with the rest as our money turned into litter. But the Christian Marines’ notion that most crises were also opportunities had caught on. Just before Christmas, 2024, I got a letter from Bill Kraft asking if I would join him and a few others in a meeting with Governor Adams on December 27.

I went, though going wasn’t easy. Like most people in Maine, I had food and wood for heat, but gasoline was $1.5 billion a gallon by December, so my truck was up on blocks in the barn. I hiked down to Pittsfield, where I got a train for Augusta. We’d gotten passenger trains running again and, like most retro things, found we liked them. The one I rode was pulled by a steam engine converted to burn wood, of which we had plenty, so the fares were affordable.

There were about twenty people at the meeting, most of whom I more or less knew. They were the folks, up from the grass roots, who had put the Maine First Party together. I wasn’t sure what I would have to add to a political gathering, but I knew I’d learn a few things.

The governor began by saying something a lot of Mainiacs had been thinking. “Gentlemen, we’ve let this whole thing go too far already. Maine has shown it can act independently of Washington. The inflation problem has stymied us, because the currency is controlled from Washington. But we have to be able to think our way around that – and then do something. We cannot get peoples’ savings back, but there must be a way we can give them a currency that doesn’t lose value faster than it can be printed. I called you here to get your ideas on how we might do that.”

“Why don’t we just print our own money?” asked a fellow from Skowhegan.

“We’ve thought of that,” the governor replied. “We’re willing to do it; I don’t care whether Washington likes it or not. The problem is, what do we back it with? The ‘full faith and credit’ of a government, even our government, doesn’t mean anything any more. Our economists tell me any paper currency we issue will quickly lose value, the same as the dollar has.”

Bill Kraft spoke up. “As usual, history shows us the way to handle this. In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of other countries, faced the same problem. They solved it, and we can solve it by doing what they did.”

“What did they do?” Governor Adams asked.

“They established a new currency,” Kraft replied. “But to maintain its value, they only issued as much of it as they could back with foreign currency or gold. To guarantee that, they gave all authority to issue the new money to an independent Currency Board. The government could not give an order to run the presses. Once people understood that, they came to trust the new money. And it held its value.”

“Where do we get the gold or foreign currency to back our new money?” the Governor responded.

“We seize and sell or lease abroad all the federal assets in Maine that might be worth something,” said a fellow I didn’t know. He turned out to be Steve Ducen, an economist who had worked in Washington as long as he could take it, then fled up here. He had a prosperous apple farm near Lewiston now. “Start with the national parks; Japanese hotels will lease them in a heartbeat and put in golf courses. They’ll bring in Japanese tourists by the planeload, and we’ll feed ’em all the raw lobster they can eat.”

“Asia is booming, and we can cash in on that,” he continued. “American antiques are all the rage among wealthy Chinese. Maine has plenty, and we can make more. I’m already selling more than half my apples in Japan, Korea, and Singapore. With some clever marketing, we could sell potatoes, maple syrup, you name it. People who eat dogs and sea cucumbers will eat anything.”

“We don’t need to look just to Maine folks for foreign currency,” added John Rushton, President of the First Bank of Portland. “We can allow any American citizen to set up a gold or foreign currency account in a Maine bank. They bring their dollars up here, sell them for whatever they’ll bring in foreign currency, and set up an account. And, if they export, instead of having the feds turn the payments they get from abroad into worthless dollars, they can have them paid right into one of our banks. They can withdraw either the foreign money, or ours, as they choose.”

This sounded good to me, but I saw one question no one had addressed. So I asked it. “How do you keep the feds from getting into these accounts electronically and sucking the foreign money out?”

Bill Kraft had the answer – a perfect Retroculture answer. “There won’t be any electronic records,” he said. “Remember, we had banks long before we had computers. We just go back to doing it manually, with passbooks and account ledgers and the like. We run these accounts just the way they would have been handled in 1950 – or 1850, for that matter. In effect, we just pull the plug.”

I had to admit that was the ultimate electronic security system.

***

We did it. Maine began issuing Pine Tree Dollars in March, 2025. We soon got the kind of prices people remembered from before the U.S. dollar began its long slide. A loaf of bread again cost 15 cents. A pound of hamburger cost 20 cents. Gas stayed expensive at over $50 per gallon; we had no Maine oil. But horse feed was cheap because we grew our own.

Within six months, Pine Tree Dollars were in demand throughout the United States. Foreign currency flooded into Maine from the rest of the country, most of which was exchanged for Pine Tree Dollars. Within Maine, prices were stable, for the first time anyone could remember.

Washington was unhappy, of course, but it was now too weakened morally to dare any serious countermoves. Beyond denouncing us all once again as “racists, sexists, and classists,” the only action the Feds took was to order the U.S. Customs Service on Maine’s borders with Quebec and New Brunswick (both now independent) to seize all Pine Tree Dollars as well as gold and foreign currency held by people trying to cross.

Bill Kraft asked me if the Christian Marines could help out on this one. I said I thought we could. I had preached all along that we had to wait for the Federal Government to fall of its own weight. Now, it was down for the count. It would thrash around on the mat for a while, but I knew it would never get on its feet again. So we could be bolder.

On July 2, 2025, a mixed force of Maine Guard and Christian Marines arrived at the border crossings and rounded up the Customs officers. We gave them a choice. They could join the new Maine Customs Service and follow Maine laws, or stay with the feds and get shipped south. Most lived in Maine and were happy to join us. They despised Washington as much as any of us.

Just thirteen Customs agents said they wanted to remain with the feds. We took them down to Augusta, where on July 4, in festive fashion, they were paraded in their U.S. Customs Service Uniforms. We then bent them over, cut the seat out of their trousers, painted their backsides red and bundled them all into a boxcar with waybills for Washington, D.C. As their train pulled out of the station, the Governor led the crowd in a rousing toast to Maine, a sound dollar, and liberty.

Chapter 18

In September of 2025, little Suzy La Montaigne, age seven, came home from her elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana, with a headache and sniffles. Three days later she was dead. Ten days later, so were all but three of her classmates and her teacher. A week after that, only a handful of the students in her school were still alive, and people of all ages were dropping dead on the streets of the community her school served.

When scientists first began fooling around with genetic engineering in their labs, real conservatives warned there would be consequences. When man plays God, bad things happen. But companies perceived that money could be made, so genetic engineering took off. It quickly permeated the food supply. As the technology continued to be developed, word of how to do it spread. Unlike nuclear weapons, genetically engineered diseases did not require much in the way of facilities to develop. Kids could do it in the basement – and soon some were.

No one ever figured out whether N’Orleans flu, as it came to be known, happened as an accident of genetic engineering or was deliberately created as a weapon of war. If it were the latter, we never determined who used it on the American South, or why.

People did figure out, fast, that N’Orleans flu spread easily, like other flu, but it had a mortality rate of about 80%.

The Plague was back. Contrary to what Americans had been taught, the Middle Ages were a highly successful society. What brought them down was disease. Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Dead. It’s an old rhyme about the Plague. You still hear children sing it, not knowing what it means. When N’Orleans flu hit, they found out. In response, people did the only thing they could. They panicked.

***

To understand the Great Panic of 2025, you have to realize that by that time, no one trusted any American institution. The hyper-inflation had destroyed what little remained of the federal government’s legitimacy. The media was equally mistrusted. People had figured out what it called “news” had been reduced to another form of entertainment. The culturally Marxist academics and mainstream clergy were taken seriously only by each other.

The average American’s life was dominated by one emotion: fear. He feared crime, he feared for his job, he feared the government, he feared for his children, and, most of all, he feared the future. His fears were realistic. They reflected the reality that pressed in on him from every side.

So when this new fear arose, the fear of plague, of a new Black Death lurking in every bus and elevator, shopping mall and office building, he panicked. The Establishment tried to reassure him, to deny the evidence, to damn those who had warned about genetic engineering as “Luddites.” But it was all lies and he knew it. He knew the Establishment lied about everything.

People simply fled. They gathered up their children and ran for the country. It was the only reasonable response, the only possible response. It didn’t work, because the country soon filled up with people, which is what other people were trying to avoid. So they fled further. Woods and fields became gypsy camps. Like the gypsies, when they needed food or clothing or weapons, they stole them. Their money wasn’t worth anything anyway.

The woods were pretty in autumn that year; the East had one of its most spectacular seasons for color, the maples decked in brilliant oranges and scarlets. Soon, there were less attractive sights under the trees.

At first, the country people welcomed and helped the refugees. Rural areas were still largely Christian. People there helped each other, and felt it their duty to do the same for the newcomers. But too often, the city people brought their ways with them – crime, drugs, noise, and dirt – as well as N’Orleans flu. The rural folk caught the scent of fear, and feared themselves. Soon, militias were being organized in church basements, and bends in country roads became the settings for ambushes. The red and yellow leaves, dying, offered themselves as cheerful shrouds for human dead; no one would bury the bodies for fear of contamination. The carrion-eaters had a feast that winter.

The panic was finally suppressed in 2026 by two old Russian generals, General January and General February. The winter was a harsh one almost everywhere. Just another sign of climate change, the experts said. As the snow fell and the mercury plunged, people started walking home. The risk of a rapid death by disease seemed preferable to a slow and agonizing death by starving and freezing, or murder. By Spring, the country people had their woods and fields to themselves again. However, they did not disband their militias.

Citizens demanded that the government do something, now that they couldn’t run away. And government did. It got a ruling from the Supreme Court that said people with disease were “disabled,” so that any preventive measures like a quarantine would be illegal discrimination. No one was surprised. And they all knew there was nothing they could do about it.

***

In Maine, of course, things were different. The government in Washington was merely a polite fiction for us, and we paid as little attention to its Supreme Court as to a headline in a supermarket tabloid. We moved promptly to protect public health.

Anyone who showed early symptoms of N’Orleans flu was quarantined, along with all other members of their household. We had very few cases because we also put controls on entry into Maine. The lack of motor traffic due to the price of gas meant most people coming in came by train, and there weren’t many of them; the American tourist was an extinct animal. All trains had to stop while passengers got a quick blood test; those who didn’t pass were put on the next train back. The airports and the Interstates had a similar rule; the rest of the roads we closed. Washington squawked, of course, but we didn’t bother to reply. Vermont and New Hampshire soon joined us, which reopened the border roads. The deep South states also adopted a policy of quarantine; they too were starting to act in concert.

The fact that we learned early how to control our borders and who and what crossed them was central to our survival. As the 21st century moved on and the world was engulfed by wars, every surviving state had to shut their borders down tight. Anyone who had the slightest laxness in border controls was quickly hit by a genetically engineered disease. Those growing parts of the world where the state had disintegrated were depopulated.

It’s funny how all the “experts” in the early 21st century were predicting a future of “globalism” and “international economy,” where people and goods moved freely throughout the world. The reality is, it now takes two years to get a European visa, and when you get there, you face two weeks of medical tests at your own expense followed by six weeks of quarantine even if you pass. And that’s if you’re coming from another state. If you’re from someplace where the state has disappeared, you can’t go there. Illegal immigrants are shot on site.

Chapter 19

The next two years, 2026 to 2027, were the last of the American Republic. In Maine, we were effectively running our own show. We still sent tax money to Washington, but those taxes were paid in U.S. dollars, not Pine Tree Dollars, so they didn’t mean much to us. In effect, we just shipped some green paper south for recycling.

In Augusta, Governor Adams and the Maine First Party put through a change to our state constitution. It required that every major issue be put to the people of Maine in a referendum, and it also allowed Maine citizens to put on the ballot any issue for which they could get 5000 signatures. That gave the government back to the people, where it had originally come from. It also meant that whenever government did something, it had a majority of Maine folk with it.

The Maine First Party in addition set a rule that it would only consider an issue in the legislature if a majority of Maine towns said they couldn’t deal with it in town meetings. That moved most decisions back to the local level, where they belonged.

We were all poor, but thanks to the Pine Tree Dollar, we weren’t getting poorer. We ate a lot of cabbage and potatoes – the Eastern European diet – and we huddled around the wood stove in winter, but we didn’t starve or freeze. As we had hoped, Asian firms lined up to bid for leases on what had been the national parks in Maine, and the foreign tourists came – and spent. Our economy began to revive.

We knew we had one serious, long-term problem: energy. The only oil in Maine is that left over from frying fish, and our gas was a product of Boston baked beans. Bio-diesel or ethanol wasn’t a solution, given our poor soil, which we needed for potatoes anyway. But electricity was.

In a referendum on March 11, 2026, 83% of the people of Maine voted to open negotiations with the independent Crown provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on damming the Bay of Fundy. With the strongest tides in the world, the Bay of Fundy offered a vast reservoir of power which could turn electric turbines. Both of the former Canadian provinces were agreeable; they were also desperately short of energy, along with almost everything else, now that the rest of Canada was no longer there to subsidize them.

Of course, none of us could afford to build such a vast engineering work. But private industry could. We offered the concession on a build-and-operate basis, with a 99-year monopoly on selling the power. On February 28, 2027, the State of Maine, with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, signed an agreement with the Great Wall Construction and Power Company, a Chinese consortium. Work began that Spring, on a project that would take thirteen years before the first electricity flowed. In the meantime, we would continue to burn wood in our stoves and locomotives (we started building steam locomotives again, at the old Boston & Maine Railroad shops in Waterville) and see our way around the barn with a tin lantern, as our ancestors had.

We even told a good New England joke on ourselves. What did Yankees use for light before they had candles? Electricity.

Thanks in part to our poverty, we began to rediscover real life. Family took on renewed importance. If people were to survive, they had to look after each other, and the family is where that starts. Family members still on the farm sent food to those in town. The kids working in the Asian-owned resorts sent money back to the old folks on the farm. Families set up new businesses to make the basic tools we needed again; plows and buggies proved more useful than computers.

Real life has always meant working, not waiting to be entertained, and there wasn’t much time for entertainment when fields were waiting to be cleared, plowed, sown, and reaped. That was healthy and good. So was the kind of work we did as we returned to the soil and the sea. Dirt is what used to flow from the video screen, not what you run through your fingers as you decide when to plant or water. Maine’s cold sea was cleansing to her sons who turned to it again, in wooden boats propelled by sails or oars, seeking the cod that were once again essential to our survival.

With automobiles stopped for lack of gas, the people who lived nearby took on new importance. What had been mere places again became communities. Families helped other families, trading skills; one could farm, another could teach, a third could saw and hammer. As in the Great Depression of the 1930s, the local doctor took his fee in vegetables and eggs.

Life had gotten harder, but somehow also cleaner. We didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of the Recovery.

Up in Hartland, still at the Old Place, I worked the farm. Now, there was no EPA to tell me I couldn’t plant, and the town needed whatever I could grow. A neighbor was breeding work horses, solid, gentle Belgians, and I got a team from him. I built a wagon, and, with the help of our local blacksmith, a plow, and went to work clearing stones and planting. It was nothing fancy, just corn, potatoes, and cabbage, but it fed the folks working in the tannery, who in turn made leather we could sell overseas.

***

To my regret, it proved too soon for me to play Cincinnatus. In October, 2026, after the harvesting was done, Governor Adams called. Would I venture the trip to Augusta again? He and a few other folks needed some help thinking about Maine’s future, and felt the Christian Marines had a role to play in that. Of course, I said I’d go. At least this time I could drive a wagon to the train in Pittsfield instead of walking.

We met on October 28, in the governor’s living room. He understood that informal meetings usually get more done than formal ones. Besides the governor and myself, the gathering included General Sam Corcoran, who was the Adjutant General of the Maine Guard, a few of his unit commanders, and some leaders from the various militias around the state.

Governor Adams made sure we each had a bottle of hard cider lying easy to hand, to lubricate the flow of ideas. Then, his back to the fire and his meerschaum pipe in his hand, he explained why he had called us together.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I do not know what the future has in hold for the United States of America, but I cannot believe it is happy. We have already seen things that, merely twenty years ago, would have been unimaginable to most citizens. Through our own efforts, we in Maine have escaped the worst of it, so far.”

“But we have already had to defend ourselves with force,” he continued. “We must presume we shall have to do so again. As I see it, that means Maine needs an army. I have asked you here today to begin the process of creating one.”

“Of course, I realize we have some military units,” the Governor went on. “We have the Guard and Reserve units of the U.S. armed forces. We have our militias. And, not least, we have the Christian Marine Corps. But I wonder if these separate units constitute a real military – the kind Maine will need if she has to fight a war?”

General Corcoran replied first. “Governor, as you know, the Guard’s first loyalty is to Maine, now. We swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, but Washington abandoned that Constitution long ago. It abandoned it when the Supreme Court began finding things in it that just aren’t there, like a “right” to an abortion. It abandoned it when Congressmen became professional politicians instead of the citizen legislators the Founders envisioned. It abandoned it when the Executive branch bent the powers of government to force political correctness down everyone’s throat.”

“Above all, the government in Washington abandoned the Constitution when it deliberately misread it to rule God out of public life. The Founding Fathers committed the nation’s future to God. I have no doubt that if those men could come back now and see what the federal government has become, they would say it is the very opposite of everything they intended.”

“I think there is an easy solution to your problem,” he continued. “Just turn the Maine Guard into our army. Let us take over these militias and other groups here. We’ll teach them how to be real soldiers – to salute, march and drill, to wear the uniform right. I’ll give you a better-looking army than anybody else has got, I promise you that.”

At this point I realized we were on the verge of making a big mistake. It was time to speak up. “General,” I said, “I appreciate your loyalty to Maine and to what we all believe in. But quite frankly, Maine needs a fighting army for what is coming, not a parade-ground army. Remember the Sukhomlinov Effect: the army with the best looking uniforms always loses.”

“What would you recommend?” Governor Adams asked.

“I agree we should bring all our units together – militias, Guard, Christian Marines, whoever is willing to fight for Maine,” I replied. “But forget about uniforms and drills. The first thing we need is training. Real training is free-play training, where you go against someone who can do whatever he wants to defeat you. That’s the only way to train for real war. Do it with paint guns, BB guns, and eventually live fire.”

“Live fire force-on-force training? You’re nuts,” the AG replied.

“Other countries have done it, and do it today,” I shot back. “Go train with the Chileans some time. They do it. They learned it from the Germans. The rule is, ‘Offset your aim.’ It works, if you trust your troops. And if we want an army for modern war, the first rule has to be, trust your troops.”

“That’s only the beginning,” I continued. “We need all promotions to flow from exercise results: winners get promoted, losers don’t. Otherwise we’ll end up with leaders whose best ability is kissing ass. I saw enough of that in the Corps to last me a lifetime.”

“We need to reward initiative, not obedience: everyone, at every rank, must be expected to take initiative to get the result the situation demands. Discipline is key, but the modern battlefield requires self discipline, not imposed discipline. Armies of automatons lose.”

“We need soldiers who love their weapons, not soldiers who are afraid of their weapons, like those in most U.S. units. We need leaders who love making decisions and taking responsibility. We need to reward people who take initiative, even when it doesn’t work, instead of those who do nothing in order to avoid mistakes. We need units that can move, shoot and fight fast – faster than any enemy, because in war, speed and time are everything.”

“Pardon me, but just where did you learn all this stuff?” the AG asked. “I know you were a Marine captain, but I can tell you Army captains don’t think this way. Frankly, it’s new to me too.”

“There were a bunch of us pushing this way of thinking and fighting in the Marine Corps,” I replied. “We called it ‘maneuver warfare’ or Third Generation war. Historically, it is the German way of war – or the Israeli way, if you prefer. The Israelis got it from the Germans, though they don’t like to talk about that.”

“What you and your men learned in the U.S. Army, general, is the French way of war, Second Generation: focused inward on process instead of outward on results, prizing obedience over initiative, centralizing decision-making, and seeking strength through brute force instead of through speed and tempo. When the French and German styles of war clashed in 1940, the French army went down to defeat in just 43 days. It had more tanks than the Germans, so the cause wasn’t equipment. The reason was doctrine: the way each side thought about war.”

“It seems to me you have a point,” Governor Adams said. “What you are describing as the German army is also the way the most successful corporations have learned to do business: lots of initiative at every level, always trying something new, moving fast and focusing on the customer. Are you saying that Maine’s army needs to be like silicon valley instead of General Motors?”

“That’s right,” I responded. “The American armed services follow the old industrial model: Henry Ford’s production line. Instead, we need to be military entrepreneurs. The tie-in with military doctrine is direct. Around 1990, the Marine Corps put out a field manual on maneuver warfare called FMFM-1, Warfighting. Somebody else slapped a new cover on it and put it out as a guide for businessmen – without changing a word in the text.”

“Well, before I became Governor of this state, I was in the business of making paper,” Adams said. “We learned to run the paper mill just the way you describe running a military, and we beat the pants off our competition. I think if a small state like Maine is to have an army that can win, it needs to go at it the same way.”

“As I said, it’s all new to me,” the AG allowed. “But I do know that Maine cannot afford the equipment or the logistics I was taught to depend on. So I guess we have to do something different. Captain, can you show us how?”

“Sir, it isn’t just me,” I replied. “All Christian Marines understand maneuver warfare. Plus, the Jaeger or ‘Hunter’ tactics infantrymen use in maneuver warfare will be natural to most of your Guardsmen. After all, most of them are hunters. I’m sure some of your officers and NCOs have studied the Germans on their own. I can’t do it for you, but together, I know we can make this work with Maine soldiers.”

“Captain, it seems to me the man who understands this new way of war best ought to lead us into it,” Governor Adams said. “I am prepared to offer you the command of Maine’s forces if you will accept it.”

“Thank you, Governor, I am honored,” I replied. “But I think General Corcoran should be the commander. I would suggest that I serve instead as Chief of the Maine General Staff. In that role, I would advise General Corcoran, as other members of the General Staff would advise commanders of other Maine units. We would also establish a central office of the General Staff here in Augusta to do contingency planning. But we would not replace the commanders the units now have – that goes for leaders of our Maine militia units as well.”

“Is that agreeable to everyone?” the Governor asked.

It was. I knew the militia leaders would appreciate not being bumped downward in units they had created. And the AG’s dignity was intact. The meeting had shown he was open to new ideas, though he wasn’t likely to come up with them himself. That’s OK, I thought: I can play Max Hoffman to his Hindenburg.

“That settles it, then,” Governor Adams said. “That’s the kind of meeting I like, short and decisive. I trust you’ll also be available to advise me, Captain Rumford – or should we make you a general now?”

“Captain is enough for me, Governor,” I replied. “In the German Army, authority went with position, not with rank. I think that’s a good way to do it. It keeps people from thinking too much about getting promoted.”

“Fine. General Corcoran, I trust you will be accepting of the captain’s advice?”

“Yes, sir. It’s clear he knows a lot of stuff I don’t. I just want to serve Maine as best I can,” the AG replied.

“Was er rath, musst du tuun.” Where had I heard that before? Oh yes, it was what the Kaiser had said in August of 1914 when he introduced the Crown Prince to his General Staff officer. “What he advises, you must do.”

The next day, I traded my hotel room for a boarding house in Augusta. It was clear I’d be spending the winter there, working with the Guard to integrate the militia units into our new armed forces and getting the training program going. Of course, we already had our Maine General Staff: the Christian Marines.

We didn’t announce any of this, not yet. No reason to give Washington something else to howl about. By the time they found out, we’d be more than ready for them – or anything else that might come our way as the old U.S.A. dissolved.

For the melting pot had become the refinery. The United States boiled and bubbled and flared with fear and loathing: black against Hispanic against white, woman against man, gay against straight, neo-pagan against Christian, enviro-freak against corporation, worker against boss, west against east. It cracked and separated along every line imaginable, and some not.

Ex uno, Plura. Thank you, multiculturalism. See you in Hell.