Lieutenant Colonel Golconda looked at his men. They were hardly recognizable as the same army that had gone to Burma five years earlier. In retrospect, looking back on that Army he was embarrassed by their ingenuousness. Then, the Australian Army had been a colonial version of the old British Army, even down to the soup-plate helmet and old-fashioned khaki uniforms. Now the uniforms were jungle green and the helmets were the American pattern, though not that many of the boys wore them. Most preferred the floppy camouflaged bush hat known irreverently as the battle bonnet. They handled their weapons with casual ease and competence. They had become an army their enemies feared.
The Australian Army had found its new self in the Burmese jungle. Building on the foundations laid down at Gallipoli decades ago, it had been hardened by the sun and toughened by the wind. The Tea Long Range Recon Patrols had taught them to make friends with the jungle, to treat it with respect and to accept the gifts it offered.
After five years, the Australians looked on the jungle as home. Most of the troops half-believed the Tea stories about spirits who lived in the woods and lakes and who could be friendly or hostile according to how they were treated. Most of the troops half-jokingly, half seriously, left presents for the jungle spirits now and then, and a surprising number believed that doing so brought good luck. It wasn't true of course, the units were doing what good units always did, they were making their own luck.
The Australian Army had found more than itself, Golconda though, it had found its place. The numerical backbone of the Triple Alliance armies came from India, sheer numbers dictated that. The Indian regiments included the stately Sikhs whose bearing was the very epitome of military dignity and the cheerfully homicidal Ghurkas as well as dozens of others. The Teas had good kit and their troops were disconcertingly capable once they got off their lazy backsides and did something. The rest of the ASEAN troops, well, they needed a lot of work. The tiny Singapore detachment was OK, the Philippine troops were good material but they had so much to learn. Just like us, five years ago, whispered a little voice in Golconda's head. As for the rest? Better not to say anything.
The Australian Army had found its niche in special operations. They were good at it and were getting better all the time. At first there had been a few irregular forces, Popski's Private Army was one, the Darwin Light Horse had been another. They'd attracted the hard cases, the ones that were not the sort to thrive under normal regimental discipline. Good men all, very good men in some cases, and the PPA and DLH had given them the room they needed to develop.
The criticism was the usual one, that the special forces were bleeding off the men who would provide the vital leadership cadres for the regular units. That might have been true but it also became apparent that most of the Australian troopers were the sort who didn't thrive under normal regimental discipline. More and more of them "Ran off to join the Circus" as the Australian officers called it. Those that came back brought their experience and attitudes with them and they'd remade the regiments in their own image - and the regiments were much better for it. The Australian Army had become an Army of special forces units.
In Burma it had worked fine. The Indians had provided the main force units, the Teas had done the counter-insurgency work in the villages and towns and the growing number of Australian special forces groups had looked after the deep penetration, long-range patrolling and the covert offensive operations. If ever the Australian Army had to fight a regular war against a conventional opponent, they'd be in trouble but, as poor old Locock had known, if it ever got that far, Australia had lost anyway.
The new Australian Army was just what the country needed to keep its enemies at arm's length. And that's what they would be doing again, very soon. The word was already spreading around the Army that they had new places to go, new jungles to patrol. This time there would be a difference.
The leas vaunted expertise in counter-insurgency had shown to be less than effective in the latest flare-up. Bringing the local population onto your side was all very well where they were sane but when they irreversibly hated you because you didn't worship their god their way, it was a non-starter. What was left was hunting down the terrorists and killing them all. Then, the local nutters might still hate you but they'd been defanged.
"Battalion Sergeant Major. A word please."
BSM Shane had been sitting with a group of the men helping them orientate themselves to their new rifles. Now, he leapt to his feet with alacrity. In private, things were much more relaxed, every officer at each level knew his senior NCO was a partner, not a subordinate, but here, in front of the men, formality was the watchword, [{specially with newbies in the unit.
"Sergeant Major, we have about three months to get the men qualified on their new weapons and get the newbies indoctrinated into the way we do things. Then we're going back out again."
"Burma Sir?"
"No Sergeant Major, that's winding down, at least for the while. Unless the new government in Chipan really heat things up. We have a new jungle to play with. We're going to Mindanao in the Philippines."
Kirkuk, The Caliphate
They were called kessel. The whole town was being cut up into those small sections, armor seizing the streets and dominating the area by fire, preventing movement from one kessel to the next. Then, once each kessel was isolated, it was brought under assault. The infantry would close up, pinning down the occupants while the engineers got into position. Then, they'd finish the defenders off with blowtorch and screwdriver. That was what they called the combination of flamethrowers and satchel charges they would use to wipe out everybody inside the buildings. Then, when everybody was dead, they'd start on the next section.
It wasn't quite that easy of course. There were underground tunnels connecting the buildings so the engineers pumped those full of thickened Soman. The nerve gas would cling to the walls, turning the tunnels into a poisonous deathtrap that would last for years. Or they'd pump gasoline into the underground shelters then toss down a thermite grenade. Sometimes the explosions were quite spectacular and every so often there were a series of secondaries from fuel and munitions stored down there. But, step by step, building by building, the town and its inhabitants were being destroyed.
That was the idea. The town had been the headquarters of some group or other opposed to the Caliphate. Model had been told their name but didn't remember it. Pathists or Bathers, something like that. They'd been a socialist group that had tried to stage a coup about the time the Caliphate itself had seized power in Iraq. They'd gone underground, tried to fight a guerrilla war against Caliphate forces and, at first, had been quite successful.
The Caliphate's local forces were hardly more than tribal militias and they'd played by the old rules of tribal warfare. Despite its amorphous, contradictory and always mutually hostile nature, the generally ill-organized Caliphate could raise quite impressive numbers of tribal levies. The problem was they were ill-armed, ill-disciplined and capable of little more than the nighttime raiding of undefended camps. Faced with even marginally-competent troops, they were ineffective.
So, the Caliphate had called on Model's Janissaries to put down the revolt. They'd had enough experience in Russia fighting partisans and they knew the rules of partisan warfare as well as the Arabs had known those of tribal warfare. Lidice Rules.
First Rule. There are no rules. Here ends the Lidice Rules.
Kirkuk was the third town they'd destroyed. Behind Model's infantry were the Guardians of the Faith, once the Einsatzgruppen, who would kill off any inhabitants of the town that had survived of the infantry assault. That had lead to a minor, rather good-humored, dispute between the Guardians and the representatives of the Caliphate. The Guardians had wanted to burn the prisoners at the stake in the good old inquisition style; the mullahs sent by the Caliphate wanted them stoned in accordance with their traditions. They'd compromised, of course; the men had been burned, the women stoned. The only survivors had been babies less than a year old. They'd been sent back to Model's colony to be brought up as the next generation of Janissaries. After everybody was dead, the ruins of the town would be leveled and plowed under.