James Philip
Ask Not of Your Country
To the reader: firstly, thank you for reading this book; and secondly, please remember that this is a work of fiction. I made it up in my own head. None of the characters in ‘Ask Not of Your Country’ — Book 4 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series — are based on real people I know of, or have ever met. Nor do the specific events I describe in ‘Ask Not of Your Country’ — Book 4 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series — have, to my knowledge, any basis in real events I know to have taken place. Any resemblance to real life people or events is, therefore, unintended and entirely coincidental.
The ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series’ is an alternative history of the modern world and because of this real historical characters are referenced and in some cases their words and actions form significant parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing if these real, historical figures would have spoken thus, or acted in the ways I depict them acting. Any word I place in the mouth of a real historical figure, and any action which I attribute to them on or after 27th October 1962 never actually happened. As I always say in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it up in my own head.
‘America… goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and… her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own… she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication… ’
‘Some day when I become a general, I want people to know that I’m serious.’
‘History is the autobiography of a madman.’
Chapter 1
The suburb of Waukesha lay astride the Fox River some seventeen miles west of Lake Michigan. On a clear night the lights of nearby Milwaukee used to light up the eastern horizon but for the last three days the smoke from the fires of the state’s largest city had lain upon it like a death shroud. From Milwaukee on the coastal plain the land rose to over seven hundred feet as it climbed towards the old spa town. Since the Second World War the elders of the County had watched the urban sprawl of the city approaching, year on year, from the relative safety of the heights south of Interstate 94. But now an unimaginably worse fate than being — at some stage in the future — enveloped by the suburbs of the great city was about to befall their community.
Twenty-nine year old Major H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. had heard many tall — and not so tall stories — about what happened when a civilian population took things into its own hands and in a panic, fled. He had studied the campaigns of long dead generals and the minutiae of the wars of the twentieth century but never believed, not for a minute, that he would ever see the things he had seen in the last few days on American soil. The entire population of Waukesha, some thirty thousand men, women, children, the old, the infirm and babes in arms was on the move west. The roads out of town were choked with vehicles and the inevitable looting and fire-starting had begun.
Late in the afternoon it had begun to rain again as it had done off and on for most of the last week. The summer heat had been sultry, oppressive, threatening, and now great tridents of lightning stabbed down into the fields and woods and great crashing crescendos of thunder rolled across the hills. Broken down cars and trucks and little knots of people unwilling to leave exhausted or sick loved ones behind, huddled beneath blankets and tarpaulins along the roadside. The exodus from Waukesha and the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Milwaukee had merged along Interstate 94 into an endless, cold, soaking wet procession of unrelieved misery.
The tragedy unfolding west of Lake Michigan was of truly Biblical proportions. In its suddenness and its magnitude no other description began to paint a picture of the awfulness of what was happening in a part of America…
However, a soldier could not afford the luxury of dwelling on the proportions of the catastrophe unfolding around him. His job was to deal with what was in front of him; to obey his orders and to do his duty.
Soldiering was all about remembering the main thing.
Schwarzkopf had left over half his men with his vehicles, a score of Jeeps, half-tracks and trucks, and eleven M113 armored personnel carriers to follow him to Waukesha at their best pace and gone ahead on foot with one hundred and fifteen men. He hated the idea of dividing the fighting strength of his two hundred and fifty strong company but he had been given a job to do and he was not about to get that job done sitting in a traffic jam ten miles the wrong side of town.
Dusk was falling fast as he and his men spread out into the eerily empty centre of Waukesha.
The town had the look and feel of an old East Coast community; hardly surprising since the area had initially been settled by New England farmers from Connecticut, Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts in the years after the end of the Black Hawk War and the opening of the Erie Canal. Those first settlers had brought with them the muscular brands of Christianity which had sustained them back East, and throughout their treks across the American north. In the nineteenth century nearby springs had enabled entrepreneurs to promote Waukesha as the ‘Saratoga of the West’. Such was the past of this place; as to what its future held nobody could tell. East and south of the state capital Madison, less than seventy miles away elements of two units, troopers from the 106th Airborne and grunts from the 3rd Marines were digging in. Meanwhile Schwarzkopf’s reinforced Reconnaissance Company ‘A’ of the 132nd Infantry Combat Group of the Wisconsin National Guard had been pushed forward to ‘find out what the Hell is going on over towards Milwaukee!’
Schwarzkopf’s orders were specific; the refugees were not his problem and he had not been sent to Waukesha to engage ‘the enemy’ in a major engagement, his job was to access the situation and to fall back on Madison.
Schwarzkopf and his radioman retreated beneath the colonnaded portico of the town hall to get out of the rain.
“This is Top Dog!” Boomed the voice of Lieutenant Colonel Harvey Grabowski, Schwarzkopf’s commanding officer. “What have you got for me Little Bear?”
There was nothing remotely ‘little’ about Norman Schwarzkopf, he was six foot three inches tall and even after a month ‘up country’ on the ‘Chicago Front’ he weighed in, athletically, at around two hundred and thirty pounds. When he picked up an M-16 assault rifle it disappeared into his paw-like hands like a toy and he hefted a sixty pound kit bag over his shoulder as if it was filled with fresh air.