Grant’s main job was to set the tone of the ReconComm, as it became known, and to recruit good people to work on it. He had a flood of volunteers for the ReconComm, many of them Patriot lawyers. Most of them had done tax protestor and other liberty work before the Collapse. It wasn’t hard to determine who was a real pre-Collapse Patriot and who was just saying they were for the sake of career advancement. Since there were so few Patriot lawyers before the Collapse, Grant knew most of them. He had about two dozen of them and about two hundred investigators. They were all volunteers who didn’t get paid. They did receive meals and a place to stay.
Grant didn’t actually decide cases—there were too many for one person to do—but he read all the reports his staff produced. Instead of deciding cases, he was the driving force behind the ReconComm. He was basically going out and giving speeches about the reason why reconciliation was important. He was there to show people that a real person—a fair and decent person—was the “face” of the ReconComm. It helped that Grant was a “war hero” (although he didn’t think so). The 17th Irregulars quickly became famous, not for pure military feats—the regular military units did all the hard work—but because they were a largely a bunch of regular civilians who did some important things, especially in the first few hours of the attack on Olympia. The stories about Olympia were exaggerated, as were the stories that Grant had single-handedly turned Pierce Point into a paradise, but the Patriots needed heroes so the population would believe in them. Grant was happy to oblige and it made it easier for him to accomplish what he wanted to accomplish, which was reconciliation.
Grant viewed every speech he gave, every group he talked to, and every small article he wrote for the new independent newspapers as an opportunity to go out and persuade people about reconciliation.
Most people were initially skeptical about why they should forgive and forget when Limas had done terrible things. Grant was good at explaining this. He got lots of practice.
There were still small pockets of Lima insurgents. Grant was a big, fat juicy target, so the Team was there to protect him. He had to stop carrying his AR and kit everywhere because it wouldn’t send the right message if he had those. If the war was over and this guy is telling everyone to forgive and forget, why does he have a rifle and full kit? Grant still wore his pistol and extra magazines, though. He had to protect himself at all times. He continued to wear “contractor” clothes as they became known. His 5.11 pants, “hillbilly slippers,” earth-tone shirts and jackets.
The Team also wore contractor clothes and, like just about all soldiers and police, had beards. Like the beards, the knit caps became part of the Team’s “look” during that winter.
Grant didn’t want to wear a business suit which would send a message to people that Grant was a technocrat or a politician. And Grant needed people to believe the “war hero” stories in order for him to have credibility with them so they would be open to reconciliation. Grant wearing contractor clothes reinforced the impression that he was an irregular unit citizen-soldier. Besides, Grant didn’t have any suits, and if he did, they wouldn’t fit anyway, given all the weight he’d lost.
On this particular day, Grant and the Team were going on a long trip. Across the mountain pass—Highway 12, the only one open because the main pass, I-90, went through Seattle and was Lima-held—to Yakima in eastern Washington. A trip that took four hours before the Collapse now took a whole day. There was a lot of traffic clogged up the one open mountain pass, and lots of precautions for staying out of an ambush. There weren’t too many because the Limas were very weak in New Washington, but there was always that threat. Grant and the Team had a military Humvee in front of them and behind them during this trip.
On the rides, Grant would read hundreds of pages of reports and recommendations on pardons or prosecutions for various people. He signed off on them. He couldn’t possibly know the details of all the cases. He had to rely on his commission staff. These reports were chock full of interesting stories.
Chapter 323
Reports and Letters
From all the reports he was reading, a pattern was emerging. There were two kinds of Limas: involuntary and voluntary. The involuntary ones, which were the vast majority of them, were people “just doing their job.” They were government employees or government contractors and their business was doing what government wanted. And before the Collapse, government was the majority of the business in the state, so the majority of people did business in some way with the government.
The involuntary Limas weren’t angels. They profited—handsomely, in most cases—from the government. Leading up to the Collapse, they got things that were taken from other people. Whether it was tax money or property seized, or whether it was a competing business that was regulated out of existence, these people got things that were taken from other people. It was that simple.
The theft accelerated during the Collapse. The involuntary Limas were the ones with big fat FCards and gas. They had the power to potentially put their neighbors in jail with one “report” to the authorities. Some of them abused this power, but many did not. Most abused this power a little but usually, they would say, only to take care of their families.
“I didn’t have a choice” they would say. That might be true, or at least partially true, in most cases.
The involuntary Limas would be pardoned. There were several reasons for this. First, and most disturbing, was because it would be impossible to execute them all. Not that killing them all was what anyone wanted—except some hardcore “retributionist” Patriots as they became known. But, with the limited resources the New Washington government had, there weren’t enough firing squads or jails for all the involuntary Limas. Most of the pre-Collapse economy was tied to government. Most people had done business in some way with government. Grant remembered that for a while, he too, was a government employee at the State Auditor’s Office. He technically “profited” from government, too. Should people like him be killed? There were just too many involuntary Limas to do anything about.
Second, mass killings and revenge was exactly what Grant was there to prevent. In fact, Grant spent most of his time fighting the retributionists. Not physically, although he and the Team were expecting a retributionist para group to try to take him out, but politically. There were retributionist legislators and even a few judges. Politics was helping Grant, though. While most average citizens hated the Limas and wouldn’t mind if they all died, they were so tired of war and hunger and dying that they wanted it to stop. They wanted the economy to get back on its feet and for life to quit being so damned hard. Therefore, there was little political support for the retributionists. Especially if the ReconComm was being fair and punishing the truly bad people, which was Grant’s job.
The third reason for not killing all the Limas was that the economy needed these people. The majority of educated people were Limas, if not active ones, then Lima sympathizers in the past. This was because, once again, most of the economy was government. The well-educated Limas were the white-collar people who ran things. The managers. They were managing and running things that didn’t need to be run like a giant government. However, they were the ones who would be necessary to make things run smoothly in the new economy where a former government manager wouldn’t have a new government job, but he or she might be a great manager for a manufacturing plant that wanted to open.