GENERAL STRIKE a free novella for direct action purpose

AMERICAN GENERALS ON STRIKE AGAINST THE FOREVER WAR.

This is not going to make economic sense for me.  GENERAL STRIKE is a 17,000 word novella that no magazine would dare publish and if you read it, you'll probably understand why, the very same reason why I self published it on Amazon, $7.00 for paperback, $5.00 because I believed it had to be read now.  Unsurprisingly, it hasn't exactly been a best seller.

So I've just undercut myself and not only dropped the Amazon prices to $3.58 for the paperback, the lowest price Amazon allows and at which I get no royalty at all and $2.99 for the ebook which is also the Amazon minimum.  Not only that, I'm cutting even that by posting the whole novella on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE for free.

Why am I doing such a thing? Call it patriotism, call it direct action, call it putting my money where my mouth is, call it because I believe that current actions by Donald Trump re Iran among other things, make it  necessary.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union before it fragmented, proclaimed that he was going to do a terrible thing to the United States, he was going to deprive America of an enemy.  But now that unfortunate lack of an enemy militarity puissant enough to shore up the ever-growing American military budget has pretty much solved the problem of the disappearance of the Soviet Union by nominating the Russian Federation as the heir of the evil Communist Empire and Vladimir Putin as the reincarnation of Joe Stalin. And now Donald Trump has found an even better one in Iran.

What does this have to do with the news of the present let alone with a literature of the future like science fiction?

In a single word, which I have had to coin here because there did not exist a succinct one word name for a complex phenomenon gookification.

Warning to the excessively political correct: you are now about to read a list of very politically uncorrect words, which I am about to write, because it is necessary,  not because I approve of them, but precisely because I thoroughly detest them.

In no particular historical order: Limeys Redcoats

Redskins

Krauts

Spics

Wops

Nips

Chinks

Slopes

Gooks

What do all these words mean? What do they have in common?

Who do you think you’re kidding?

Not even yourself.

These, and worse, much worse, are “nicknames,” or if you want to get constipationally cute about it, epithets that Americans have slung onto wartime (declared or not) enemies.

Gookification.

Why, you might well ask, or anyway I have at least been starting to ask myself, is such gookification necessary and indeed perhaps even inevitable?

It has all too often been said as approval that some other human endeavor is “the moral equivalent of war.”

This of course is utter and utterly invidious bullshit.

There is only one moral equivalent of war.

Mass murder.

War consists of killing lots of individual human beings by other individual human beings who would otherwise be denounced, arrested, charged, and convicted as murderers.  Even the fancy collective international crime of so-called “crime against humanity” is bullshit, necessary bullshit maybe, but evasion of the real truth, namely that each and every individual victim who has been killed by the action or command of another individual human being has for sure from their own individual point of view been murdered.  Any so called “crime against humanity” is not a collective crime against a collective victim.  It is a mass collection of individual crimes against individual victims.

Of course it is.  Once it is pointed out, it is glaringly obvious. 

Unavoidably obvious.

Or not.  War requires a means of allowing soldiers to avoid this glaringly obvious.

Gookification of the enemy.

Soldiers have to kill people.  If they were doing it in other than a wartime context they would be guilty of murder.  Not only found guilty of murder by courts of law but worse, unless they were psychopaths and didn’t have one, by their own consciences.

Am I a true-blue extreme pacifist?

No I am not.

Are most soldiers moral monsters?

No they are not.

Some wars are even morally necessary, many murders of individuals must be committed by many individuals in order to prevent more and perhaps worse crimes against many more individual human beings. But no military can raise an army to wage a war with  an army consisting mainly of indifferent murderers of individual human beings. Which is why any war--chauvinistic, religious, whatever--requires gookification of the enemy. The enemy must not be perceived as a fellow fully human being whose slaying is an act of murder.

But there are soldiers, mostly military officers, who are, or at least ultimately become, truly and fully morally conscious solders who accept this personal guilt  for committing an evil deed on a personal level to prevent or redress a greater evil. 

By my lights this  is the ultimate moral heroism.  And by their lights they are entitled to deem themselves men and women of honor.  Military honor. But when they find themselves no longer able to believe that the evil they are committing is in the service of defeating a greater evil what then does military honor require?

Obey the orders of the American chain of command up to and ultimately including the President who ever or whatever that may be whether you they are morally honorable or not  because your military oath as an American officer requires it or do what your personal jimminycricket tells you?

GENERAL STRIKE is the story of a Three Star General who reluctantly finds himself finally facing this existential conundrum.

       

   

                               GENERAL STRIKE

                                          by Norman Spinrad

 

This  Pearson Thanksgiving family gathering was  the best of times and the worst of times as far as General Albert Pearson was concerned, and how could it not be? He was the first person to achieve any  rank past captain for longer than the clan could remember in a family whose military tradition went back three, or arguably four, generations of mostly sergeants and assorted grunts.

  The best of times because Albert had a promotion up to Lieutenant General to announce, but the worst of times because the third star went with an assignment as Eastern Central Asia Theater Commander.

Time was that a fourth star went with the ECAT Command, AKA the Forever War, AKA the Meatgrinder.  But decades of this backwater theater composed of  fragmented local miniwars that would never end, had turned the post into a four star career graveyard that no one wanted.  So now it was foisted on two stars generals who were promoted to three stars, given a pat on the back, and given to understand that winning this permanent war was not expected, just make sure the situation remains nominal until you retire with your fat upgrade to full four star general.

Albert could have refused the assignment and retired on a two star pension, which would have been  all because the Pentagon would not at all be amused, to the point where the customary retirement upgrade would not be forthcoming. 

 Besides which,  two failed marriages had left him with no life except the Army. Even his position as Pearson Pate Familias was due to his lordly rank as The General and nothing else. No offsprings, middle aged; without his Army rank, his family rank would be little higher than that of his black sheep older brother Rex. 

Well that would be an exaggeration. Even an early retired major general would have more Pearson respect than the president of a failing union in the Land of the Lost, AKA the Rust Belt, AKA Nowhereland, where Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and bordering environs suffered from unemployment, poverty, and the so-called gig economy together, though without even any concept of solidarity; anti-union right-to-work-states, as they were once called back when there was more than temp work to be fought for.

General Pearson knew damn well that both the Pentagon Powers That Be and the extended Pearson Family had him boxed in.  In addition, there was the matter of  military honor, which Albert still managed to take seriously, and it would be dishonorable cowardice to refuse this order even though it meant career suicide to accept it.  The Pentagon would just screw someone else and the family would never understand.

Who knows, he might win the Forever War, get a fourth star, even a fifth one, and run for President like George Washington who had won the American Revolution or Dwight Eisenhower who had had the luck to be Commander in  Chief when World War II was definitively won.  

In  the Mediterranean Theater, where the Command covered the Middle East and North Africa, and there were meaningful  political turf and economic skirmishes to be won or lost via American-led proxies against those of Iran, Turkey, Arabia, even Russia, there were wars, or police actions, whatever those who did the calling wanted to call them, that the Powers That Be wanted to be over and won.

Unlike the Meatgrinder, which was an otherwise pointless military and political backwater to keep the Defense Budget Cash Cow moola flowing for the Pentagon and the civilian Defense Department and the rest of what Ike himself had called the Military Industrial Complex.

Getting cynical, Albert?  But anyone who had been in the field in the ECAT like Albert  knew the score as paid for by the grunts in the Capital Intensive Army.  Keep a flow of dead and maimed grunts modest enough to keep out of the forefront of the voters' consciousness and use the Forever War to goose Congress into keeping the tanks and drones and bombers and robots and whatever DARPA came up with next flowing through the Meatgrinder and ballooning the military expense account with the best and most expensive toys that the boys could dream up to buy.

The Pearson Family Thanksgiving Feast had been put on for eight years by Big Bobby Pearson who had retired honorably as a sergeant after 20 years in the Quartermaster Corps and made himself the richest Pearson by better-you-don't-ask.  

He would rent an entire restaurant somewhere deep in the Land of the Lost boonies where it would be relatively cheap to hire the kitchen and service crew to lay down a Thanksgiving production. Turkey, stuffings, candied sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, cranberry jelly, cranberry pie, pumpkin pie, peacan pie, apple pie; the traditional Hollywood Trailer Trash works. Washed down by beer, a whiskey and cider punch, soda for the kids, bourbon fore and aft, and bad wine for those who wanted to be pretentious metrosexuals..

A couple of platoons' worth of Pearsons trooped in and took seats, at most half of whom Albert Pearson could remember and name, but all of whom of course remembered The General.  As usual, Big Bobby sat at one end of the long table and General Pearson at the other.  Which was the head and which the tail was a matter of opinion that no one wanted to get into.

As per ritual, Big Bobby said the traditional grace for the minority of true traditional Christians, then raised his traditional glass of beer shot with whiskey, every one else lifted their own preferred poison, and everyone drank to the silent toast.

Albert had told Big Bobby the news in private but he hadn't yet pinned the third stars on the epaulets of his uniform.  "I believe our Major General has an announcement to make," Big Bobby declared fatuously.

This was Albert's cue to stand up and produce his new three-star Lieutenant General insignia and hand them to Bobby's wife Laura to do the honors.  

"I am pleased to tell you that I have been promoted to Lieutenant General," Albert only half-lied to hearty applause. 

 After all who wouldn't be pleased to get another star, and it would be churlish to rain on the family parade which had been taking pride in his every promotion since he made full colonel and became the highest ranked Pearson in the family history.

But what would he say about his new and detestable command, if anything?  East Central Asia Theater Command would sound magnificent to his proud family who were innocent of the dirty Pentagon dealings behind this glorious dead-end order, and the applause and atta boys would sound sarcastic only to him, forcing him to grin and bear it.  

Well, just the facts ma'am, he decided, which would avoid having to lie. 

"I have been ordered to take command of the East Central Asia Theater, which embraces all our valiant troops, aircraft, drones and robots east of Arabia and west of Japan and above the equator."

This was greeted by even more applause, morphing into clinking of glasses, proud toasts, and elated down-the-hatch pandemonium.  

Which morphed into some kind of scuffling at the far end of the table, where a man Albert seemed to remember but from where and whose name he had forgotten, bulled his way past what looked like a Pearson football defensive line. His hair was gray and balding, but he was still what you would call burly, his face was flushed a furious red, and he was clearly enraged.

 But he was also openly crying.

"I just found out my son was blown to smithereens while you were announcing your promotion, General Pearson," he shouted, staring at Albert with eyes like bloodshot lasers. "You don't remember Carl, do you, Albert?"

Albert could only look back unflinchingly but blankly because he didn't.

"You damn well should, Uncle Albert!  You got him into West Point!"

Oh shit! Now Albert did remember.

General Albert Pearson had always been parsimonious in his letters of recommendation to the Point and had never been so crass as to lay one on a member of the Pearson clan, which in any case would be too flagrant not to be counterproductive. 

But Carl Pearson had been something special. 

Everything about the boy was ordinary and borderline except his patriotic and martial passion. He had graduated in the middle of his high school class. His IQ was right in the middle of the bell-shaped curve. He had just barely made the football team but he was no college level athlete.

But he adored and worshiped his General Uncle Albert.  Albert was his role model.  He didn't just want to be an Army officer more than anything else in his life, he didn't want anything else in his life, period.   He would have done anything to get into West Point.

As long as it was not dishonorable. 

"Forgive me for this, Uncle Albert, I know it's not really fair to take such advantage, but I just don't have any alternative," he had told him shamefacedly. "I'm, well, nothing special, and I know it. I'm not an outstanding student, I'd never make a college football team, and I'll understand if you would find it dishonorable to do it, and if you don't, I'll join the Army as a private not a cadet, I mean all I want to do with my life is serve my country as you have, but...but..."

"But what, Carl?"

"But I need a recommendation from General Albert Pearson to have any chance of getting into West Point, and...and I'm sorry, but...but there you have it..."

And he did. 

Carl had had him and he did it.

"Don't sell yourself so short, Carl," he had told him.  "So you're not an academic genius or a star athlete, but if I were your father, I couldn't be more proud of my son."

Carl had just about managed to hold back his tears as did Albert,

How could he refuse such a good and honorable kid who was touchingly apologetic and ashamed to appeal to the Uncle Albert he adored and worshiped yet willing to do even that to achieve victory if that was what it took? Didn't this kid really did have something that would make him a fine officer. 

Or  at least Albert  managed to tell himself at the time.

It probably wasn't really not that important, coming from a mere Brigadier General,  but there was a queasy spot in Uncle Albert's belly trying to tell him that if he had crowed like as rooster and just maybe got the kid what he wanted, he was in some way  morally responsible for his death.

Go away, Albert Pearson told his jiminy cricket. All the way up through the ranks,officers had to give orders that got soldiers killed, even orders that you knew would get them killed. Squad level, Platoon level, Division Level, now even Theater  Level Command, that was part of the job, the only difference was the increasing numbers.

So why did Albert feel such a shadow of responsibility for  this one death out of what must be thousands of grunts by now and destined or condemned to be many more just because he knew, admired, and well, loved this one? 

"Leave him alone!" General Pearson ordered the Pearson boys trying to shove Carl's grieving father out the door  before he could shout anything more at him. "Sit him down! Get him another drink! Make it a strong one."

Albert stared straight at him. Carl's father looked back at him. Something that was no longer anger passed between them,

"I'm sorry", General Albert Pearson told him entirely sincerely.  "You've lost a son that you loved. And so have I."

                                                    #

General Pearson didn't smoke  tobacco or grass, but his brother smoked both rolled together in the same disgusting cigarettes, and while he had escaped the Land of the Lost via West Point and become a general and Rex had escaped via Columbia University and ended up as the president of a doomed union, and although though Albert had never wanted to be anything like Rex and vise versa there was a strong brotherly bond between them.  

Albert was an Army general and Rex was President of the Union of Temporary Workers, so despite their wide political differences they were both commanders of something, so they could be down and dirty realists to each other as they couldn't be to anyone else down the chains of their very different commands.

So after the feast was over,  Albert dragged Rex outside to sit on the restaurant's loading dock steps on the excuse  that the brothers were going out for a smoke, which Rex made true by lighting up his carcinogenic stinker.

"Why you taking one little ol' death among thousands, Al?" he said. "Just because you knew this kid personally?"

"That's not enough?"

"There's something else too, isn't there Bro? Something bigger. Something...political."

"Everything is political to you, isn't it Rex?"

"Fuckin' A it is, General Pearson. And everything political is personal."

"Touche, Mr. Union President, you know damned well that these three stars are my ticket to command of the Meatgrinder with my only orders from above being to take my dead-end turn to keep the machine going at an acceptable rate of casualties."

"Conscience? The General has been infected by a moral venereal disease?" Rex held out his cigarette. "Quick Al, you need a good drag of cynicism."

Albert waved it away, as of course Rex knew he would.  Actually Rex was the least cynical person Albert had ever known, which was why he felt compelled to wear the mask of a hard-boiled cynic and speak accordingly.  

The Union of Temporary Workers was an ultimately futile attempt to unionize people who weren't even  wage or salary workers. So-called independent contractors, rent-a-cops, rent-a-truckdrivers, rent-an-assembly line of temporary dirt cheap grunts with no legal wage slave rights or protections. What the Brits called captives of the "Gig Economy" as if they were jazz musicians and not what union organizers once called scabs, grunts paid as little as possible to break strikes of legal unionized workers.

So a union of scabs was a  paradox and therefore a lost cause from the git-go and it wasn't as if Rex didn't know it. He knew it all too well, though he wouldn't admit it to anyone but Albert.

"These poor bastards aren't anyone's enemies, they're the universal victims," Rex had told Albert angrily more than once, all too much more than once.  "No one needs a union more than they do!"

"But the minute they join they get replaced by cheaper hirelings from the temp agencies and if they join your union, they get canned and replaced. There's a bottomless supply of economic grunts."

Rex of course knew that, knew his war was inherently unwinnable. "You at least of all people should get it, Al," was his admirable answer.  "You're a soldier, Bro, you're an officer, you're a fuckin' General!  You ever turned tail and crept away from  a battle you knew needed to be won just because you couldn't see how to win it? And sent in your troops anyway?"

And of course Rex was right. Ever since he had been a lieutenant in Afghanistan he had ordered troops into battles that would likely get some or all of them killed for no other reason save that he was ordered to give such orders from the next level of the chain of  command and so on  all the way up the ladder to the Pentagon. There was no other way to run an Army.

"But this time, Rex, the buck is going to stop with me. As  commander of  ECAT  my orders are going to be to keep the Meatgrinder running optimally. And how I do it is on me this time,"

"The thing of it is, Albert, I believe that my losing battle is a moral necessity and you don't believe yours is.."

Rex was not a brother to mince words. General Pearson cringed, and to Rex he could admit it.

"If Carl had died in honorable combat for a cause that made sense, that's the price you may have to pay for your country when you choose to be a solider, as  Carl would tell you.  As Carl told me, which convinced me that he could become the officer he wanted to be.  I've never had a problem with that--

"--before."

"Before. But now I'm going to be in command of a theater  where the war has been going on so long that it's long since become its own raison d'etre. My order is not to win it, they don't want it to be won, my order is to keep it running nominally.  Everyone above major  knows that by now."

"Your army is being betrayed. And  East Central Asia Theater Commander or not, your order is not to do anything about it."

"So maybe you're right, Rex, maybe I do need a shot of cynicism."

Rex proffered his smoke once again, obviously not expecting Albert to take it, which he didn't.  "You don't need a shot of cynicism, Al, far from it. You need to get your head straight on who the enemy really is."

"Who the enemy really is?  There isn't any  the enemy in ECAT,  just more little enemy warlords than anyone can even count fighting each other one day, allied for the week with their former enemies until next Tuesday, no real governments.  What is sometimes known as a cluster-fuck, and the only thing any of these tribes ever agree upon is that we are the universal enemy."

"But you do have an enemy, Bro. Not warlords disincorporated. Not the military chain of command. Not where the buck stops. Where the buck starts." 

"Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex," General Pearson groaned. It wasn't as if Rex hadn't said this before, hadn't thoroughly beaten this dead horse.

"By now, there's probably not even a they any more,  just a mindless and soulless algorithm running on automatic. The Army isn't being betrayed by a them, it's being betrayed by an it."

"And there's nothing we can do about it. We obey the order of the machine or the Meatgrinder eats us."

"I didn't say that," Rex said in his best rabble-rouser voice. "One must at least try  throw a monkey wrench into the machine."

"Now is the time for a futile gesture, as the Irish Republican Army used to say?"

"When isn't it? You never know if you don't give it your best. Ain't that what your Army calls honor, mon General?"

"My brother the Communist revolutionary...."

"Fuck Communism!  If there's a perfect enemy of any union that's it!  Unions and  corporations need each other whether they like it or not, which they don't.  The last thing any union wants is to destroy where the money that pays its members comes from.  It take two to tango. Right now, capital rules and a union like mine is in the shits. They need a bunch of kicks in the balls."

"Strikes."

"Which don't really work anymore for a union like mine trying to strike company by company. We represent some of their temp workers, but they can always rent more.  Which is why convincing workers that we can do anything for them is such a ball-buster."

Rex sighed, took a deep drag. "You know what keeps me going, Al?"

"What keeps you going, Rex?"

"A what if, Bro.  What if the AFL-CIO leadership hadn't chickened out when Ronald Reagan broke the Air Traffic Controllers' Union? When the fuckin' Gipper got away with that, the union movement started going downhill big time fast. There were big networks of unions in those days, they could've stopped it but they didn't have the cojones to do it."

"Do what?"

"Use their nuclear weapon, General Pearson. Call strikes of everything everywhere. Airports, trains, factories, mines, buses, trucks, schools, fire departments, everything that was unionized.  Shut it all down! It would've saved the Air Traffic Controllers Union. It would've been a long time before anyone thought they could get away with union busting like that again. The union movement wouldn't be the pathetic ghost of itself that it is now. We could've won if our leadership wasn't so chicken shit about trying something that might turn out to be a futile gesture."

"What are you trying to tell me, Rex?"

"What's fuckin' obvious, Bro, or damn well should be. You can never win if you never try."

"That's supposed to be a lesson about honor to a general who already understands?"

"I'd hope just a little wake-up call, Al.  You know what they called what should've happened but didn't?"

"What is something like that called, Rex?" Albert said, knowing it was a straight line set-up for a punchline.

Rex laughed a bitter laugh.  "Think about it, it,  Bro. The union's nuclear weapon is called a General Strike."

                                        #

Had Rex done it deliberately?

 Knowing his brother, Albert knew damn well that he must have, maybe not pre-planned, but Rex Pearson was a union leader with no one above him in that chain of command, meaning he would often have to make up strategy on his feet, adapting to targets of opportunity. . 

Rex was regarded as a black sheep in the Pearson clan, which prided itself as a family of military patriots whose sons and daughters could do nothing more noble than serving their country in the military. Rex, who had chosen Columbia over West Point, and union leadership over military service, was generally regarded as something less than a true patriot, maybe even a commie.

But the brother that Albert knew was his own sort of patriot, no lefty peacenik military-hating pacifist, but a general in his own kind of war, loyal to his chosen cause, and therefore no less an American patriot at least as he saw it.

Telling him the story of how the top union command  hadn't had the balls to call a strike that would have faced down Reagan and prevented the destruction of one of their units and thereby saved the union movement itself was surely meant to plant a seed of something in Albert's mind.

Albert Pearson knew that his brother was a cunning speaker, and that he had told that story as lead to the punchline--what they had failed to do was call a "General Strike"--and it was pointed squarely at General Pearson.

But what could  it mean? What had Rex been trying to foment?

His three stars allowed Albert to call up a "Supersonic Brass Wagon" for the flight to DC, as those who didn't have the brass to do so called these first-class aerial General limos, which made for a short flight, but still long enough for General Pearson to try to consider what Rex had told him in military terms.

Which was that the failing by the top union command to call a General Strike was a violation of the Powell Doctrine. Which among other wisdoms, was that you should have a precise definition of your goal and attack the adversary with all the power at your disposal as immediately as possible, cease fire when you had achieved it, and, if possible, chez Sun Tzu, leave your enemy a back door to retreat through.

But of course the Meatgrinder Forever War was just about the perfect opposite of Colin Powell's Doctrine.  There was no definition of a goal that could be called victory, there was no coherent overall enemy to defeat, and no way to use America's hegemonic military power effectively against that which didn't exist, and not even a back door for the American Army to retreat through.

The elected civilian government, or at least the Military Industrial Complex, had betrayed its own Army and now Albert had been ordered to command that betrayal. 

Was that what Rex was rubbing his nose in? But General Pearson knew that already.  And he knew that the pact between the elected civilian goverment and America's military required that the civilian government set the policy goals and commanded the Army to do its part to achieve them, to follow those orders whether you liked them or not.

This of course had resulted in catastrophes like Viet Nam, but it had also prevented anything like an attempted military coup for about three centuries.  Surely this was wise.  Surely this was something to be proud of.  Surely breach of this compact could hardly be patriotic.  

But the Military Industrial Complex that he was going to serve front and center was not merely violating the Powell Doctrine, it was breaking the other side of the moral concordat between civil power and the Army.  Which was not to order the American Army into battle without goals it could morally support and certainly not without an end-game definition of victory. Not to feed any of its troops into an endlessly static Meatgrinder. 

Surely that was moral betrayal if not actual treason.  Surely it was therefore dishonorable evil.

Was that was what Rex had been trying to tell him?  But Albert Pearson had already known that. Did Rex really think he had to rub his nose in it?  In the service of what? To make the moral paradox more painfully plain? To turn him into some kind of would be military coup fomentor?

But that was ridiculous.  He would never do such a thing even if he could, which he couldn't. 

A General Strike? 

What on Earth could Rex think that could be?  A strike by generals?  In Rex's own terms, wouldn't that be like a strike against its own corporation by the its board of directors, and equally paradoxical and therefore impossible?  

                                             #

Albert Pearson had never liked the Pentagon.  What was there to like?  Five-sided rings connected by lateral corridors, the building seemed to have been designed by an architectural sadist for soldiers to get lost in.  The inside joke was that if the 9-11 jihadists had bought uniforms at an Army-Navy store and infiltrated the building instead of hijacking an airliner and trying to blow it up, they would still be running around the maze like rats because no one could find them and they couldn't find a way out.

Like just about anyone who would rise beyond full colonel, Albert had spent his time there, as a combat captain in Kashmir who had earned his promotion to flunky as a major in the Pentagon.  

What he had learned there was that while the Joint Chiefs were officially Staff , and were therefore  not the pinnacle of the Chain of Command whose official job was not to give operational commands to battlefield commanders, in practice they now converted policy given to them from the Defense Department civilians into orders for Theater Commanders.

As a line captain promoted to major in the Pentagon and wanting to get back to where the action was as a lieutenant colonel, Albert at first looked down at  generals who had risen to the top within the Pentagon, a common viewpoint of lower line officers doing there time there as flunkies. But by the time he had graduated to lieutenant colonel, he understood that they were a necessary interface between the civilian government and the military; political generals like Eisenhower and Powell, and the Army of a democratic republic had better have them. 

Which did not mean that Albert Pearson had ever wanted to be one of them. He was a line general, policy was decided by the civilian government, in the best of worlds intelligently advised by intelligent Joint Chiefs of Staff, who gave theater commanders such as himself their orders in terms of what they were commanded to accomplish, not how or why.

Now however, Rex, or the death of Carl, or both, had fractured this blissfully simple moral innocence.  He could no longer kid himself that decades of the Meatgrinder hadn't broken down the honor of civilian policy and that of the Army by ordering it to fight a Forever War that not only had no goal of victory but that the Military Industrial Complex wanted to continue indefinitely.

This just as General Pearson was about to be given his final briefing and orders by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to achieve just that as Theater Commander of the Meatbgrinder . 

Four full Generals and a full Admiral. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Commandant, and Chairperson. Ultimate Brass incarnate. All of whom had been once been battlefield commanders wouldn't be here. But now by definition the Ultimate Political Brass.

Albert had never set foot, let alone sat down, in the inner sanctum of the Joint Chiefs, so having no expectations, he was neither impressed nor disappointed. Something like a corporate boardroom redone by Hollywood.  One entire wall was a single video screen that could be broken into separate visions or not. The other walls were walnut planking tastefully decked out with oil paintings of historic battles and historical military figures.  The floor was rich burgundy carpeting. There was a fancy coffee machine.  Nothing alcoholic in evidence.

Nor had Albert ever been in the combined presence of the five officers in full dress uniforms like his own seated around the table. Indeed the only one he had met long enough to speak with was the Army Chief of Staff Curt Blaylock, and that was only briefly when he had been given his second star. The other four he only knew by their official records. Admiral Nancy Weller was the second female Chief of  Staff of the Navy. General Mose Merrywether was Chief of Staff of the Air Force. 

General Todd Klein was current  Commandant of the Marines, replacing the famous  General Margaret Ramirez, now Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,  who had famously been the first female everything--first Marine four-star, then the first female Marine Commandant, and now the pinnacle of the Pentagon pecking order. 

As such, it was General Ramirez who opened the proceeding, and as something of a media personality, did the lioness' share of the talking.

"This is the realtime situation of the Central Asia Command--"

"Which will be continuously provided and updated by the drones and sats of Space and Orbital command," General Merrywether said as the screen went live.

"A full satellite image of ECAT, as you can see," said the Chairperson, interrupting the interruption.  

What Albert saw was a photographically perfect image of the turf of his new command.

"With instant vocal command of overlay choices," added General Merrywether.

"Like this," said General Blaylock, "Ground troop deployment."

Blue blots like spilled ink appeared all over the satellite image.

"Areas of full American control... Current operations.."

Red borders surrounded all the blue blots, a dozen or so of which were slowly extruding amorphous tentacles like so many amoebas.

"Identify units,"  ordered General Klein.

They  raised Marine or Army logos with unit numbers.

 "Very impressive," Albert admitted. 

"Full access to this AI network will be available on your Pelican well as on your Command Dreadnaught--"

"My what?"

General Pearson had heard all about the John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who hadn't?  The one, the only Dreadnaught, by far the most powerful and most expensive single weapon of warfare ever built.  A huge submarine-capable drone and Pelican carrier with a landing deck that could launch them from the deep down, surface to retrieve them, close the shell, submerge again, and come up from the deep without warning somewhere else. A top secret electromagnetic field surrounding it from Russian or Chinese supersonic torpedoes, an aerial umbrella of its own anti-everything drones if needed, and its own armed orbital satellites.

Nothing the Chinese or the Russians or the Indians had could match it, let alone secondary powers like Iran or Arabia. Obviously nuke capable though no one was about to try to find out. The ultimate Doomsday Dreadnaught.  Lurking in the Eastern Mediterranean or the Arabian Sea, the American checkmate as needed anywhere in the bloated Med Theater where the biggest game was played by Big Three proxies.

"You're giving me command of the JFK?" General Pearson exclaimed in total befuddlement. "But I'm not Navy and--"

"Negative," Admiral Weller told him. "Your Command Dreadnaught will not be the John Fitzgerald Kennedy but the Arnold Schwarzenegger nor will you be its operational captain."

"This is a joint Navy, Army, and Marine operation, something of an experiment," General Ramirez told him. "A Navy captain, Marine Pelicans, and your mobile headquarters as Eastern Central Asia Theater Commander."

"It's a new Dreadnaught iteration," Admiral Weller told him.  "The JFK is capable of being remotely controlled, and this Dreadnaught is also be fully capable of that, but the Arnie will allow you to see all and control all from on board, even submerged."

"Why haven't I ever heard of this before?" Albert Pearson asked, realizing it was a stupid question.

"We've kept it secret so that we can announce it as a successful fait accompli," Admiral Weller told him."

Right, and of course it had nothing to do with how they had managed to weasel the total cost in individual service tranches through Congress.

"This is a pilot project," Ramirez told him. "A cooperative experiment."

"A Navy dreadnaught with full AI that will do anything you order it to do, from which you  can issue direct orders to any unit under your command down to the platoon sergeant level," said the Army Chief of Staff. "And complete access to all you have seen here today."

"The future of the American Navy," said Admiral Weller. "A dreadnaught in every theater of command--"

"With every theater commander operating directly from it," said the Army Chief of Staff.

"Proof of a new era of cross-service cooperation," said the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"If it succeeds," Albert foolishly blurted.

"Failure is not an option," he was told.

"I m honored and overwhelmed," Albert replied. What else could he say, since both were true?

"This concludes  your briefing, General Pearson," Admiral Ramirez said just a shade louder than anyone else but enough to be definitive. "Unless you have further questions, I will elucidate your Rules of Engagement.."

"By all means do, M'am," said Albert.  So much for the toys, now for the down and dirty, not that he didn't already know what they were going to be, and surely the Joint Chiefs knew that he knew. This was going to be something like the ritual formal changing of the guards.

Or was it?

"Political map," the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

The screen changed.  Or rather the overlays.  The satellite image of the East Central Asia Theater didn't change, but now the geography was overlayed with colored identified terrains, dozens of them, like the oil paints on a particular messy artist's pallet.

"Thousand time realtime motion from 2001 to the present."

The terrain never changed, but the colored overlays grew and shrank, rubbed each other, bit off chunks of each other, devoured each other, puked out each other, writhed and fought each other like a tank of eels and octopuses.

"Last thirty years one hundred realtime motion, then freeze."

The writhing mess slowed down like spilled honey, molasses, motor oil, melting butter, then froze.

"You will note that the situation in ECAT  has been stabilized for  decades," Ramirez told Albert.  "While the turfs held by the various national governments, jihadi terrorists, tribal warlords,drug mafias, and so forth vary continually, as do which ones we regard as enemies, proxies, regional or allied national governments, in order to retain overall dynamic stability in our favor."

The Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff regarded General Pearson with a cold neutrality that seemed to Albert to be a mask containing a deeper emotion.  "You do understand that this is political policy and therefore something none of us can challenge whether we like it or not."

"And you don't?" General Pearson blurted.

General Ramirez glanced coldly around the table. The other Joint Chiefs looked back at her with the stone faces of Easter Island statues. "No comment," she said. "Any other questions, General Pearson?"

Albert had only one question in his mind to ask, but he didn't ask it, for if he did, he wouldn't like the answer even if it was an honest one.  Especially if it was an honest one. Which was, what with all this cutting edge electronic briefing wizardry, was there not the least mention mention of casualty figures?

"Nothing more that I need to know," he said all too truthfully, nothing that would be counterproductive.

"Your orders then, or more specifically your singular order, General Pearson, is to maintain this nominality," the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told him. "You do understand what the...required rules of engagement are?"

"Defend the dynamic status quo," said Albert. "And that is all?"

General Ramirez curled her upper lip just enough close to her nose to sour her expression.

"No comment," she said.

"None needed," Albert told her.

                                                      #

Time was, Albert Pearson would ride with the grunts back from the States to the battlegrounds, as some officers did as gesture of solidarity, but by the time he made major he understood that this was fatuous, and even much more so as  a general, so he flew from DC to Marseilles in a Brass Wagon, where he took a Pelican to the Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

The Pelican was no Brass Wagon and not just a tactical troop carrier,  but a kick-ass combat ground support aircraft. Its distant daddy was the Ospry, a swing-wing prop-job, take off and land like a chopper, swing the prop-carrying wings horizontal, and fly like a plane. Far from ideal as either, but favored by the Marines because it could convey platoons of them to the battlefield and get them out of there toute suite  when called upon to do so.

The Pelican was the modern version. Bigger, jet propelled horizontally and therefore much faster, taking off and landing vertically with rocket pods like a like a space ship. The Marines were still first come, but there were various Army and Navy versions. Close ground support versions with gatlings, mini-drones, laser cannon, and so forth. Ambulances, ambulances, ammunition trucks, tactical troop mobility versions.

Being the Theater Commander, Albert was ferried to the Arnold Schwarzenegger by the high security version.   A max-armored floor with ground facing laser cannon.  Laser cannon on the roof.  A mini-drone cloud above. A dedicated sat above that providing  a wide circle of coverage. 

As along as it stayed out of major battles it was maybe the safest place on the planet.  Nevertheless, because this Pelican was officially a Marine version, it was also equipped with aggressive weapons in case of targets of opportunity.

Like any soldier who had ever been on a battlefield, Albert Pearson was fond of Pelicans, how could you not be? These babies took you to the front, lifted you back and out, provided overwhelming close air support--guardian angels when called upon, battlefront demons on your side when needed.

There was something about arriving in such a down and dirty combat craft that raised Albert's spirit, even though there was no one in this Pelican but himself and pro forma pilot and gunner, the very smell inside evoked the spirit of camaraderie with the grunts in the days when he was with them in the drops as a lieutenant or a captain.

The Arnold Schwarzenegger was something else again.  

It surfaced  well south of the Paki coast like an enormous but featureless metal whale, the shell opened up to reveal the landing pad, the Pelican landed and the shell closed again, though the Dreadnaught did not submerge. Albert debarked into a huge metal hangar fit to hold a dozen dirigibles. The atmosphere smelled of metal, air conditioning and electronic ozone.

General Pearson disliked it immediately.  He was a soldier not a sailor and the only difference between the Arnie  and the submarine he had once been shown was size.

He was greeted by his staff or crew--it was hard to say which they were--the Navy captain, the Airforce gunner, the Army cook, the Marine electronics officer, and their subordinates, less than two dozen men and women in all.

After the ceremonial saluting, General Pearson was given the grand tour of his mobile Theater Command HQ. The Captain showed him the bridge, which consisted of 360 degree screens, a couple of chairs, a computer complex, with no windows.  The ordinance control room and electronics was more of the same.

The captain and the cook then presented the officers' mess, a large crescent with tables and chairs for no more than a dozen diners facing away from the service pantry behind it, the furniture and the walls done up in redwood, the ceiling, such as it was, the closed metal shell of the huge submarine itself.

When the captain saw Albert's unhappy frown, she smiled, and said "Open sez me," and the shell opened to a clear blue sky with only a few fleecy white clouds moving slowly across it and the prow of the Arnie slicing twin trails of foam through the waters.

This brightened Albert's spirit a bit , and he had to admit that his personal quarters were military grand lux fit indeed for a three star or even four star general.  An actual cabin atop the deck fore of the landing pad, with a closed bedroom and full bath and a large salon which could be either open to the sky when the shell was open and the weather was balmy or closed below an awning when it the shell was closed.

After a Jacuzzi bath and shower, Albert felt better, and changed into full dress for lunch with Captain Ella Diangelo.  A Navy captain was a higher rank than an Army captain, more like a Colonel if you were a commander of one of the world's only two Dreadnaughts and up on the stairway to Admiral. 

To which Captain Diangelo intended to ascend ASAP.

"We play this game right, Albert if I may, and we are the pets of the Pentagon. We screw up, and we end up shit's creek," she told him.

Captain Diangelo wore her gray hair proudly and was coming on her twentieth year in the Navy, and wanted to celebrate her next birthday as an Admiral, and she made no bones about it. "You're in line for a fourth star no sweat, but  I have to become an Admiral now or never."

"If I may, Ella, I have no intention of screwing up. You should be aware that my orders are to preserve the status quo.  Which theater commanders in all over the planet  seem to be able to do nominaly with no sweat."

"There are a half dozen or so Army Theater Commanders, General Pearson, but only two Dreadnaught Captains, and they're watching us with sat coverage and political microscopes. We make this look good, they give every Theater Commander their Dreadnaught.  There's trillions of Defense dollars riding on us and both our asses.  Do you get the message, Albert? 

"Five by five, Ella. Multiplied by five."

"Good," she told him, "and now let's have your first look at your throne."

"My throne?"

"From which you see all and command all."

"You forgot to award  me tell all, Ella."

"Not our job, but don't worry, they know when we are nominal, they know when we're behind the curve."

"So be nominal for goodness' sakes."

"You know as well as I do, General Pearson, that goodness has nothing to do with our trade, which is killing people or making them sufficiently afraid of us so that we won't have to."                   

General Albert Pearson had nothing to say to that.

                                          #

Albert Pearson was not exactly surprised that his "throne room" was a  strictly functional stripped down clone of that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. No wooden walls or oval conference table and chairs, a state of the ergonomic art command chair instead, two sergeants doing something or other with electronic gear  but the same wall screen, obviously what really mattered, though it was not running anything at. the moment.

"Sergeant Milligan, give General Pearson the rundown," Captain Diangelo ordered. 

"Full realtime sat image," said Sergeant Milligan, and the screen wall put up the satellite image of the entire Central Asia Command. "Simple verbal commands will do it, sir.  Don't have to be very specific, either, this AI is one interation higher than what they've got on the JFK."

"Give it a try, General Pearson," Captain Diangelo suggested.

Albert shrugged. "Ground troop deployment," he said, and as in the Pentagon, amorphous blue blots were overlaid on the sat image.

"Current operations."

The blue blots extruded their slow motion tentacles.

"Identify units."

The blue blots raised Army or Marine logos with unit numbers.

"Got it," said Albert.

"If I may, Sir, watch this," said Sergeant Milligan 

Albert nodded.

"Split screen, company level."

The screen split into a mulititude of squares, each one with a unit ID.  "From the Arnie, you can receive reports and give orders to each and every unit under your command down to platoon level.  Want to give the two-way a try?"

"I think not now," said Albert, "I get the picture, but I'm hardly ready to give anyone orders just now, and as for realtime reports--"

"Don't worry about that," Captain Diangelo told him. "You can receive and command every unit directly from here, but you do have to sleep sometime, after all, so the one in the Pentagon is monitoring our AI stream 24/7 just in case can back you up if needed. "

This did not exactly comfort General Pearson. "And override me too?"

"I have not been briefed on that," admitted Ella Diangelo. "No need to know."

"I'm beginning to get the big picture," Albert told her, "and I'm not so sure I like it."

"You have not been ordered to like it, Albert," she told him, "so liking it is optional. Following orders, of course, is not."

                                                             #

General Peaerson's first move as Theater Commander was to introduce himself to his immediate subordinates on the Brigadier level via the video screen . It would make no sense to give them new orders before he was briefed on the existing picture. There were four of them, together commanding about a hundred thousand troops, though not equally.

"Afghanistan," the  PGA, sometimes known as the Piss Gross Asshole, was the area that had once more or less been "Pakistan" and "Afghanistan" once upon a time when these nation states had more or less existed, was one of the two most active areas, the other being the "Big P" the Big Peninsula, the territory including what had been Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Viet Nam, and other odds and ends, where some of these former nation states still partly existed from time to time and was if anything more unstable. 

Secondarily, were "Islandia" and "Sealand." "Islandia" was mainly Indonesia, a vast archipelago of hundreds of islands large and small where within that the most chaotic action was on both banks of the numerous ship channels  infested with pirate gangs and mini-states on both sides. Sealand was everything else left over, the main battlefields being the Philippine islands and the jungles of Papua New Guinea.

Not very informative on the briefing end, since there really were no  big picture to be had even on the brigadier level. 

General Gallion's troops in the PGA were scattered around in company level enclaves all over his area ta, king turf here, withdrawing there, allying with rebels, temporary would-be mini-states, changing sides constantly, and succeeding in just keeping the pot boiling.

 The Big P was more of the same tactually except General Murphy's troops were positioned more at the constantly changing borders of the nation states that generally existed more of the time than not, trying to remain strategically neutral one way or another, allying with assorted rebel uprisings when the semi-stable states seemed to be getting to big for their britches.

General Carmine's forces in Islandia were strung out in companies or even smaller groups on both sides of the squeeze points on the banks of the winding channels between the Indonesian islands keeping the abundant pirates out of the water and away from the heavy commercial ship traffic.

General Frankenstein's forces in Sealand were widely scattered around islands in the broad Pacific, the hot spots being in Papua New Guinea, Borneo, and the Philippines.

The long and short of it was that ECAT indeed deserved its reputation as the backwater Meatgrinder, a career dead-end for three-starred generals such as himself and an assignment for brigadier generals whose modest goal was to do their stints and retire with two star pensions.

Previous orders from the previous Theater commanders had been as vague as possible, amounting to nothing more than keeping things "nominal", all the way down the chain of command to the platoon level.  Shit, it was said, went downhill in the chain of command, and here it did too, all the way down to grunt level where it morphed into fodder for the Meatgrinder.

And, Albert realized, so was he. What he had been handed was fractal chaos. He had been hamstrung quite deliberately with this dead end Theater Command. He couldn't think of any coherent strategies or orders that would do anything but further fuck things up. But as long as he kept this chaos stabilized at this so-called "nominal" level he'd be all right, Jack.  He could stay within the Arnie indefinitely and invulnerably far away from any real battle playing the war game on his Commander video screen in return for a four star pension.

When he complained of this to Ella Diangelo, she told him not to worry about it. 

"You haven't been ordered to change anything, now have you?  As someone once said, we're not here to create chaos, our job is to preserve chaos.  We do that, the Defense Department gets the trillions of appropriation dollars to build a dozen or more Dreadnaughts, I become an admiral, and you retire as a full general.  What's not to like about that?"

It had been more than a decade since Albert Pearson had been in harm's way, not that he missed crouching under fire or personally seeing soldiers under his command die, but there was something, well, dishonorable about this set up.  Unmanly, womanly, unmilitary, even immoral, he might say to Rex if to nobody else.

And he knew that Rex would tell him that there were pawns getting killed in this game just to keep it going.  Real live ones like Carl Pearson, or rather dead soldiers like him, in a Meatgrinder Forever War that had long since become its own causus belli.  

How many men and women had died?  How many maimed? In all the decades of the Meatgrinder? In the last year?  In the average year? 

Albert shamefacedly realized that he himself had never even tried to find out.  But when he did, when he asked the Genie in the Screen, there were  no replies  except a blue screen with white lettering telling  him "No need to know."  When he ordered his brigadiers to give him their local figures, he was told that these were regularly uploaded directly to the Pentagon, then erased from their offline data bases, and likewise blocked.

"It's a machine running on automatic," Rex had told him. "The Army isn't being betrayed by a them, it's being betrayed by an it."

And here he was, with his three stars and bucking for four, sitting safely on his ass in this deluxe cage, for all the real world out there in the scattered fields of battle like the videogame player he had become.  

Well Harry Truman had had a sign on his Presidential desk announcing that "The buck stops here." General Albert Pearson was not the President of the United States or Harry Truman but it seemed to him that any officer who did not command and live by that unspoken oath was no true or moral officer.  He believed he had always commanded like that, and maybe by his lights he had, but Carl Pearson's death had shown a more brutal personal light on his thick skin, Rex had stuck the nail in his flesh, and now this stonewalling of casualty figures had hammered it down.

Ella Diangelo was a naval officer and captain of her ship, period.  But General Albert Pearson was an Army officer and a soldier and the Arnie was not his responsibility and only his cage if he allowed it to be.  Being Commander of the theaters of battle from afar was one thing, accepting the human results before giving any orders that would get soldiers killed was something else again. 

It might not be a rule of engagement but it wasn't disobeying any order either. Time to get personal, he told himself silently, but if Rex had been there he would have said it aloud. 

Not an order, but a duty.  

The buck stops here.

                                                              #

"You can't do that, Albert," Ella told him.

"Of course I can," he told her. "I'm the Theater Commander, remember?"

"I mean it's too dangerous."

"Come on, Ella, there's nothing out there that can bring down a Pelican, now is there?"

 General Pearson had never made much of the Army-Navy game, but now he found himself understanding the traditional superiority with which soldiers looked down on sailors for the last century or so.  A sea captain of a ship like the Arnie was never really in personal harm's way but the Army bottom line was that that was what made a soldier a solider.

"Well then at least take back up."

"Why Captain Diangelo, I didn't think you cared..."

"If the first Theater Commander commanding from a Dreadnaught, namely my ship, gets killed and maybe kills the whole trillion dollar program with him, you think I'm about to make Admiral?"

General Pearson's plan was to bring the Arnie up to the PGA coast, take a Pelican to General Gallion's Command post, see what was up in person there, while Captain Diangelo took the Arnie to the coast off Burma, refuel his Pelican there, and check out the Big P, then do likewise with Islandia and Sealand.

"A piece of cake," he told Ella. "Two weeks max."

"I've never heard of a theater commander doing anything like it."

"Because no theater commander has operated from a mobile headquarters aboard a Dreadnaught before, which is really the main point of this...experiment, now isn't it?"

She had no answer to that, but in the end, just to make her feel better, Albert ordered up two more Pelicans and the three Pelicans, with his at point and the others as lower flight wingmen, took off for the PGA, and the Arnie retreated under water.

As a lieutenant and a captain Albert had had two turns in PGA, and from the air, nothing much seemed to have changed, scattered towns and mostly half-ruined cities and unhealthy drying up small farms on what had been Pakistan, across the mountains something similar in what had been Afghanistan with the inclusion of vast fields of opium poppies now in brilliant red bloom

Charlie Gallion's HQ was in the biggest rundown former grand hotel in Kabul, a rundown former capital of a former nation state, more or less safely surrounded by more or less a full third of Brigadier Gallion's troops, more or less doing nothing.

"The rest of them are trying to keep the various opium gangster warlords from trying to enlarge each other's turf at the expense of each other and screwing up the only viable trade in the Piss Gross Asshole by degrading their own damn crops in the process and making the economy even worse or from time to time reminding the various would-be caliphs that we won't tolerate any getting together to reform mini-states, as if they could ever stop slaughtering each other."

"Plus Ça Change, Plus La Meme Chose," Albert muttered sourly, if not with the same cynicism.

"Care to take the not so grand tour? " General Gallion offered diffidently.

"Been here, done that twice," Albert told him.

                                               # 

Brigadier Bob Murphy and the Big Pee were something else again. General Murphy didn't have a Dreadnaught for an HQ, at le4ast not yet, but he did move around, from Bangkok to Ho Chi Min City to Phinom Pehn to Khuala Lumpur and back again. 

Younger than Gallion, if not by numerical age, Murphy, if not quite gung-ho, at least had some enthusiasm, if not for the mission he was presently stuck with, but for trying to do enough to get himself positively known and a ticket to the Med or African Theaters where the real action was and out of the Meatgrinder.

"All of the real cities here are capitals of nothing in particular, more or less safe depending on when, and where  there's a temporary siege by some temporary would-be tin-pot local dictator, easy enough to chase his half-assed army back into the boonies and swamps and deltas from whence they came with a company-level force, but send something like that in very far after them, and you find out why you're in the Meatgrinder," Murphy told Albert.

He at least cared enough to put up a sat map of the territory under his command on a small video screen.

"No national border overlays?" Albert commented.

"No national borders," General Murphy told him. "What you see, is what I've got, General Pearson. The Mekong Delta, swamplands, jungles, isolated cities, forested plains, zillions of little villages whose inhabitants detest any would-be nation builders, each other, and of course first and foremost us. Nothing of any consequence we can't annihilate from the air, nothing that can harm us in our enclaves, really, but send a company after the bad guys, namely all of them, and they get chewed to bits before you can even get them out like pigs in a piranha pond."

"Chaotic stability," Albert said, fully as sourly as Gallion, and knowing it, but more angry than cynically."

"Situation nominal," General Murphy all but snarled. And then, seeing Albert's surprise, "Oh yeah, some of us out here in the Meatgrinder have heard that bullshit.  I've got to thank you for dragging your ass out here, General Pearson, no other Theater Commander ever has. You seem like the real deal, but what are your orders, what are you gonna do about it?"

"I'll let you know when I figure it out," Albert had to tell him.

"Lots of luck, General Pearson," told him. "And I really mean it."

And he actually saluted.

And Albert, shamefacedly, saluted him back.

                                                  #

"That thing you arrived on is a Dreadnaught, isn't it General Pearson ?" said Brigadier Alice Carmine  as her own Pelican took off from her land based HQ outside Jakarta.

 "No need to know. No comment."

"Right, Albert, it surfaces like the JFK, it's as big as the JFK, it launches Pelicans like the JFK,  but it's not a Dreadnaught."

Albert laughed. "I didn't say that, Alice."

"No...need to know, no comment. But  I thought the JFK was the only one we had.  Surely they wouldn't have pulled the JFK out of the Med just for little ol' me..."

"I didn't say that either," Albert told her as the Pelican banked east towards the maze of small islands and narrow winding channels. 

Alice Carmine wasn't particularly attractive as a women, but the Army had long since gotten over regarding that  as relevant in judging an officer, and there was some kind of quick bond between him and General Carmine.  She struck him as his kind of officer, indeed somehow perhaps more his kind of officer than what he had was being forced to become.

He shrugged.  "I suppose that I can tell you that it's a second currently secret Dreadnaught, and if you pray to the gods of the Senate Armed Service Budget Subcommittee, who knows, you just might have one in the future."

"I was only kidding," she told him. "Actually a Dreadnaught would be pretty useless here, maybe worse than useless. The mission here is to try to protect the commercial traffic from the hordes of pirates infesting both sides of every narrow channel by keeping them as far back from the banks as we can manage, a job for an army, not a navy. The channels are way too shallow for such a boat to submerge, mostly too  narrow for it to even navigate at anything but a crawl, so it would just be an old fashioned aircraft carrier, a very clumsy, expensive, and sitting duck target. Not to mention even much more expensive, right? " 

"Nevertheless you might someday find yourself commanding from one whether you like it or not."

"You are, and you don't, right?"

"No comment.  No need to know.  At least not yet."

Even from on high, you didn't have to be an admiral instead of a general  not have to be told that any boat bigger than your average rich man's yacht would be not only useless here but in fact a tempting target.  The channels might not be exactly teeming with freighters, let alone tourist ships, but there were little empty waters. Worse still from an Army general's point of view, long stretches of shoreline, particularly around curves slowing down the traffic, were heavily wooded, or jungle, almost right down to the waterline.

General Carmine had her pilot bring the Pelican low enough to make out platoon size encampments on both shores of a channel as it followed it snake-dancing around its curves and narrows.  At the speed the Pelican was flying, Albert could see that they were spread out far too thinly, tens of kilometers between them."

"I don't get it, your troops seem to be sitting ducks too.  Why in hell so far apart?"

"Because this lost cause mission is hell, Albert.  To do it right, I'd need two or three divisions, and even then lots of luck, these channels have been infested with pirates for as long as humans learned to swim. It's like trying to win the world-wide forever war against rats and cockroaches."

"Well then why don't you  bomb the woods and jungles back a few kilometers? I can get you more more Pelicans if you need them, or call in Air Force carpet bombing."

"Don't I wish! Those woods and jungles are full of villages and huts, the pirates have always seen to that, as Mao put it, swimming in the sea of the people, and-- Oh shit!"

The Pelican had rounded a sharp curve narrowing the channel, where below a container ship had been forced to slow down, and there was a battle going on in the jungle fringing the left bank. From the air, Albert could hear rapid automatic crackle and dull explosion, see quick puffs of smoke, but everything was going on within the jungle and all he could make out were burning trees, swishing undergrowth, and the hint of heavily outnumbered soldiers in a tight Roman-style defensive square surrounded by unruly but well-armed pirates.

"Open the channel!" General Carmine shouted to her pilot. "Pull back!" she ordered to the soldiers below via bullhorn.   "Withdraw! Out of the way!"

Below, the soldiers broke their defensive square and backed away towards the channel bank behind a wall of everything they had, carrying and dragging their casualties with them.

"You know what to do!" she ordered "Do it!"

She didn't have to, the Pelican was already descending to a high hover over the enemy, automatic weapon fire harmlessly pinging off its heavily-armored bottom. Lasers burned away foliage, gattling canon blasted down, mini-drones hovered above the fleeing pirates. It lasted only moments and then there was silence.

"Bring her down!" Alice Carmine ordered.

That order too was superfluous. The Pelican was already landing precariously on the narrow lip of the forest crushing itself a landing pad with its sheer weight and what was left of the platoon was running or staggering to meet it.

"Come on!" Brigadier Carmine ordered her superior as the ramp to the belly of the Pelican lowered, grabbing Albert by the arm, descending from the cockpit and dragging him with her.

Soldiers, some of them bleeding from wounds but at least able to climb aboard by themselves, did so. Two others were trying to carry unconscious, perhaps dead or dying, comrades up the ramp and not making it.  Without thought, Albert and Alice took one by the shoulders and legs, carried him aboard, went back and got the other.

"All aboard!" Alice shouted. "Out of here!"

"Not yet," Albert countermanded, nodding to a corpse on the ground. He could tell he or she was dead because everything below the neck and above the belt was blood and gore. "We don't leave any fallen behind!"

"Fuckin' A!" said Alice and he and she carried the blood dripping dead soldier aboard by the feet and shoulders. 

And the ramp withdrew, the Pelican took off, and two generals sat together in the cockpit panting with Adrenalin in blood-soaked uniforms.

Two fellow soldiers.

"I told you this lost mission was hell, now didn't I?" Brigadier Alice Carmine said.

"Been there, done that, all too often, Lieutenant General Albert Pearson," told her.

But while that might not have been far, far away, it was very long ago. A long time since he had been forced to remember. 

"As an old peace-nick song said," Albert reminded himself and Alice, "there but for fortune went you and I. You and I."

                                             #

General Pearson had been on his way to Manila, the capital of the Philippines and the location of General Herbert Falkenstein's HQ, a civilized metropolis in a coherent nation state, but after what had happened in Indonesia, he wanted to really reconnect with the down and dirty grunt level, which was what he had told General Falkenstein, and Herb Falkenstein had seemed actually eager to accommodate.

"Meet me in Port Moresby then, that's the so-called capital of so-called Papua New Guinea," Falkenstein told Albert, "it doesn't get any downer or dirtier than that."

On the way, Albert checked out Falkenstein's official record, and there was something, well, mysterious in the way it ended.

Herbert Falkenstein had graduated from West Point near  the top of his class and sent to the PGA where he proved to be a good ground level lieutenant. Next assignment was out to the Eastern Central Asia Theater, which was more or less standard. He made captain in  moving around Islandia, major in Borneo, and then lieutenant colonel  in Papua New Guinea, which had gained him a sweet assignment as a teacher at the Point, after which the official folder became murky. 

Less than a year at West Point for some apparently classified reason, full colonel at the Pentagon, then right back to Islandia as commander, a Brigadier General like the other three area commanders, but unlike them, for four years already and still counting.

From the air, Port Moresby and environs looked like any anonymously small-sized would-be metropolitan capital of nowhere in particular, a concrete, glass, and aluminum blotch on a point of land, a pimple on the vast greenery that enveloped most of the island behind it. It had its own civilian airport, but Albert's Pelican, as per instruction, landed on the pad of the Army base further inland, where Falkenstein's Pelican had already landed.

The base consisted of  barracks, assorted warehouses, two canteens, garages, a small hospital, an electrified fence isolating it from the jungle surrounding it, and half a dozen other Pelicans idle on the ground. 

Herb Falkenstein awaited him on the tarmac. "Welcome to the ass end of nowhere, from one point of view, and the perfect example of what we shouldn't be doing from another," he told Albert.

Brigadier General Falkenstein was and looked a decade older than Lieutenant General Pearson, which seemed odd given their respective ranks and seemed to confirm that he had done something that kept him in the Pentagon's doghouse.

"Before you greet the troops, or visa versa, best to see what they're up against, if that's okay with you, General Pearson," told Albert right after the salutations before Albert's own Pelican. Albert shrugged in agreement. "Best in my Pelican with a pilot who at least is as familiar with the landscape out there as it can get."

They climbed into the Pelican and took off, over the fence, low over jungle where fields and mines and some kinds of factories had been brutally carved out of the greenery, then higher toward the interior, where there was nothing to be seen below but an endless sea of featureless jungle.

Higher and higher, as the Pelican spiraled deeper and deeper inward, over jungle covered valleys between jungle-chocked mountains, not a town, or a village, nothing but jungle to be seen from horizon to horizon.

"I don't get it," Albert finally said in sheer stupefied boredom. "What are you trying to show me? There's nothing and no one down there."

"Wrong, General Pearson, invisible from the air, but there are people down there, small tribes of a few score people each maybe, but  some say hundreds of tribes, not even speaking common languages. Been there maybe since time began, or maybe time didn't begin for them until what we are pleased to call civilization showed up uninvited. Gatherers and hunters, mostly, some of them cannibals, some of them headhunters, some of them still at it."

"Cannibals? Headhunters?"

"Oh yeah, but it was all contained and for ritual reasons. Little ritual battles with token casualties strictly for coup. Kidnappings. Vendettas. Heads shrunken and dried as ritual totems."

"Was?"

"Was fought with spears and maybe bows and arrows. But now they can trade shrunken heads to collectors for guns and ammunition. Such are the benefits of civilized market economies to innocent peoples."

"Uncivilized savages."

"From a certain point of view, namely ours. "No nation states so no large scale armies slaughtering each other with state-of the-art weapons for ideologies and turf, , no full-scale attempts to override each other's cultures, no divine rights of kings or dictators or electorates or chairmen of the boards. Savages maybe. Not civilized like us. I think they probably regard us as demons without souls, if they even have such a concept. Certainly as not really fully human by their cultural standards."

"So you just leave them alone?"

"Don't I wish!" said Falkenstein. "This is my fourth year as the Commander of Islands, and every previous Theater Commander had given me the same order, and you will too, won't you, General Pearson?"

"Will I?"

"Keep them back in the outback. Defend the so-called civilized enclaves when they try to attack us with the guns they've bought with shrunken heads. Go in there and try to stop the heads-for-guns economy. Let them keep killing each other low scale as they always have, indeed encourage it so they don't get any ideas of  coming together and form anything like armies or rebel groups."

"So you do it with Pelicans?"

"Take another look down there, General Pearson," Falkenstein told Albert, "you will notice that it's a fucking jungle. From the air we can't even find targets, so the best we can do with Pelicans is blast landing pads, send in heavily armed platoons to take acceptable casualty rates to show the flag and keep the natives from becoming too uppity."

"Condition nominal," scowled Albert. 

He chewed it over like a cow chewing cud, or rather the bad-tasting crud spitting out the other end of this Meatgrinder. For sure he had been given the same order and rules of engagement by the Pentagon, but for sure even then, like any general who had served his time as a line officer in the East Central Asian Theater, he had already known that there was nothing to be gained in this theater but blood, crud, and dead soldiers.

ECAT mostly was decomposed of bits and pieces of half-baked gangster turfs and half-assed rump so-called governments trying to chew their way across each other's non-existent borders.

Condition nominal.

This whole mess had begun when George W. Bush had been forced to attack the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, after which he had declared "We don't do nation building," and then contradicted himself and tried. 

We're not here to do nation building, as Rex would no doubt put it, we're here to destroy nation building. 

"Can I ask you a question, General Falkenstein? Albert asked after the Pelican had landed and they were about to debark.

"Of course," said Falkenstein, "you're my superior officer, aren't you?"

"This one is personal, you don't have to answer if you don't want to. Man to man. Why did they kick you out of West Point after only half a year and exile you out here in the Meatgrinder?"

Herbert Falkenstein laughed half bitterly, half sarcastically, or so it seemed. 

"As you might imagine, seeing as how I was teaching something like Military History 101, I was something of what they call a military intellectual, which is not a compliment unless your are one, and I wrote what I thought was just a little pamphlet as teaching material but which pissed off the wrong political generals.  So they decided that I might be polluting the vital bodily fluids of the cadets, promoted me to colonel doing nothing at the Pentagon and then gave me a star and exiled me out here permanently."

"I'd like to read that pamphlet."

"You can't. They classified it and threw all the copies into the virtual tree chipper."

"Brief me, then."

"Is that an order?"

"Does it have to be?"

Falkenstein laughed. "Watch out," he said, "less this pollute your bodily fluids and turn you into a military intellectual. Or worse, a political general."

"I'm a big boy, Herb," Albert told him, "I can handle it, and you've never met my big brother."

"The long and short of it Al, is that people want to live with who they want to live with."

"Duh?"

"By people I mean peoples. Folks who speak the same language, like the same sort of food, music, stories, artwork, worship the same gods if they worship any at all, laugh at the same kind of jokes, and don't want to be corralled together into the arbitrary fences and borders of absolutely sovereign nation states invented by European colonialists for their own convenience. That's what's been going on in the Med Theater since the fucking Crusades, what when on in Europe since  the Roman Empire, what's still going on in Africa, that's inevitable cultural reality like it or not, that's what keeps the real Forever War going."

"And the Pentagon didn't like you teaching that to innocent cadets..."

Herb Falkenstein laughed. "See, didn't I warn you, you're turning into a political general already."

                                                            #

After  showing himself to Falkenstein's grunts and letting the poor kids show themselves to him, General Albert Pearson flew back to the Arnie coldly fuming, and wouldn't talk to anyone back there including Captain Diangelo before locking himself in his quarters to try to digest what he had learned, or rather to be honest to himself about it, to digest  what he had known all along.

Which was that the grunts were just kids who mostly could land no better-paying job or no job at all, sons and daughters of poverty with few other choices.  Some of them, like many of the Pearson kids who enlisted, really were convinced that they were patriots serving their country, but more of them than not came from no military tradition and cynically looked down on those who did.

Either way, fodder for the Meatgrinder, a term they had probably invented decades back.  Who wouldn't, watching your comrades die and risking your own lives as in any other war, but in one which had lost even a bullshit idealist goal before you were even born, mercenaries who didn't even know what that really meant, and had nothing to fight for but their paychecks.

Ask them what they thought they were fighting for, what you got was either blank stares as if you were from Mars or a political general from the Pentagon or bullshit platitudes about god, country, and the American Way, which they didn't understand even well enough to believe, conning the brass general with what they thought he wanted to hear.

What were they really fighting for besides the paycheck? Nothing really, until they found themselves in the muck and mire and terror of retail battle with bullets flying and troop carriers blowing up in their faces and corpses all over the place and friends and comrades dying all round.

Then, like grunts all the way back into prehistory, they fought in fear and fury to avenge their dead and dying and save their own asses by killing those motherfuckers out to kill them, no questions asked, no righteous answers needed. 

Was there any other way to run an Army on the battlefield level?

If there was, General Albert Pearson didn't know.

But Rex Pearson's brother at least had to try to find out.  He needed to talk it out, it couldn't be with any of his Brigadiers, not even Falkenstein, and certainly not Ella Diangelo. He could see no other choice, it might be dangerous, but he had to talk to his big brother.

Every general was given his own personal phone triple chain-coded to his retina, fingerprint, and DNA sample, and made untappable by some quantum magic called entanglement so that it could only be used to talk to another such device. Which of course was supposed to be only back in the Pentagon.

Civilians were of course not legally allowed to possess such devices, but make anything illegal and you create a black market, and a union president like Rex ought to be able to get one by buying it from some high level black market source one way or another. So Albert called his brother, and told him to get one ASAP, and nothing else until he did.

It took Rex almost two days, while Albert sweated it out, but Rex finally managed to do it. "Mission accomplished, Bro.  But this better be good, it's cost the union treasury...huh me...half a year's salary."

"Life and death, Rex, honor and morality, obedience and conscience, that good enough for you?" Albert told his brother. "And if I can come out of it with my general's salary or pension instead of a court martial, I'll pay you back."

"Don't worry, Al," Rex told him. "I can sell this phone for what I paid for it to you-better-not-ask, and believe me I don't want to hold this red-hot potato for any longer than this conversation, and even that as quickly as you can make it."

"Just the facts m'am as some ancient tv detective used to say," Albert told him and gave Rex the supersonic briefing.

"I don't get it, Al, there's nothing in what you've just told me that's treasonous or illegal and certainly not top secret, I mean there still are newspapers, news sites, magazines, and social webs sites, where you can  read all about it."

"That's not it, Rex. It's what you once told me about throwing a monkey wrench into the Meatgrinder. I believe you also said something about a time for a futile gesture.  About having to fight a battle that you know you'll probably lose because no one else is gonna do it."

"And now you want me to tell you to do it?"

Albert shrugged. He couldn't really tell Rex why because he didn't exactly know why himself except that his jiminy cricket was screeching the demand in his ear and giving him a headache.  "Negative Mr. Union President. I want you to tell me how to do it."

There was a long loud silence.

"But I already told you Bro. I didn't really know what I was really talking about but I did say it."

"Said what?"

"A General Strike."

"Now you mean--"

"The plural, General Pearson.  A strike by Generals."

"You can't be serious, Rex....Can you?"   

"You're a general, and I'm a union leader, right?  As a general, you understand what a nuclear option is, now don't you?"

"Of course, not necessarily using a nuclear weapon, but using the maximum power at your command when you have no other alternative. Not just a military term, but a political one too."

"Right, Bro. Well actually a union really has only one power--"

"A strike..."

"A general strike, General Pearson. The Air Traffic Controllers Union struck by themselves, but they were up against the government of the United States all by themselves and they lost big time, and so did the union movement itself when Reagan showed he could isolate and destroy a union.  But if the leadership of the AFL-CIO had had the balls to call a general strike, and shut down the whole country..."

"A revolution..."

"Nah, not an armed revolution, or even a political one, just a strike, and perfectly legal."

Albert thought he was beginning to get it.  A strike by a union meant persuading thousands or even millions of people to strike, the leadership had to call a vote and win it.  There was no chain of command. But an army was run by a chain of command. There was no other way to run an army. The field officers and noncoms ordered the grunts, following orders of the next level up the chain of command, who got their orders from the area commanders, who got their orders from the theater commander, and in this case that was him.

The buck didn't end with him, it started with him, like it or not. 

Which Albert didn't.

Or hadn't.

Until now.

If you considered a general as a worker, what was really his job?

To give orders to the rank below him and obey the orders of the rank above him.

So how could a general strike without disobeying orders?

Well the only order he had been given by the Pentagon was don't make waves, don't give any orders that would disturb the status quo. 

What if he obeyed it literally?

Don't give any orders that would disturb the status quo?

So don't give any orders at all.

Except one. He could order the generals below him not to issue any orders either, and so forth all the way down to the sergeants and their grunts. Defend yourselves and do nothing else. Wouldn't that throw a monkey wrench into the Meatgrinder?

A general strike.

"A  Generals' General strike!" he cried. "And I can start it all by myself with a single order!"

"You sound like like the cat who's about to catch the canary."

"Vice versa," Albert told his Machiavellian big brother. "Thanks to you, the canary has just figured out how to bell the cat."

                                                 #

Albert managed to eat a late supper and then spent a fitful few hours working out his tactics as opposed to his strategy before managing to fall asleep.  

He wouldn't be legally breaking any order given to him, so they couldn't court marshall him. If they removed him from command of the East Central Asia Theater, it would put the whole Dreadnaught experiment in political danger as a failure. The Generals' Strike was true to the Powell Doctrine, he would be committing his nuclear option, win or lose to this mission, as a proper  general should.

But the wisdom of the Powell Doctrine also said never go to battle without a clear definition of victory,  and what was that?  Total victory would mean closing down the pointless East Central Asia Theater Meatgrinder completely immediately and that didn't seem possible, that was the long-term strategic goal, but minimizing the casualties was a tactical goal that at least seemed attainable as a realistic definition of victory, and that at least was enough to let him sleep.

Late the next morning as he was getting getting up from breakfast and on his way to the Throne Room, a nervous Captain Ella Diangelo intercepted him. "What happened to you out there, Albert?" she demanded. "What are you up to?"

"Giving my first order," Albert told her, "and maybe my last."

"Which is?"

"No need for you to know, Ella," he told her as they entered the command center and he ordered the sergeants to leave. "And  if you leave now, you can honestly tell the Pentagon you didn't know beforehand."

"What are you talking about, what kind of officer do you think I am, General Pearson?" she snapped at him. "What kind of woman do you think I am, Albert?"

And she stood her ground as he called up a split screen connection with his four Brigadier area  commanders. "I will now give you the only two orders I will issue until further notice," he told them.

On the split screen the four of them appeared to be glancing uneasily at each other, but actually via video they were all eyeing Albert apprehensively.

"My first order is that all of you are ordered to order your company commanders to collect weekly casualty figures, hard copy them to chips and send them to you by courier before uploading them to the Pentagon, and likewise, you will send the combined results to me in the same manner weekly."

Ella Diangelo squealed "What the fuck are you doing?"

There were a certain number of "say whats?" and "hush?" from the generals but Falkenstein and possibly Murphy seemed to be staring at him knowingly and perhaps approvingly.

General Pearson smiled half sarcastically at them. "And if you find that order peculiar, try this on for size," he told his subordinate generals. "This is the last order you will get from me until further notice and you will obey it unless countermanded by an authority higher than me, and don't hold your breaths waiting."

He paused dramatically.  "I order all of you not to issue any operational orders to your immediate  subordinates except not to issue any orders either, and so forth all the way down to the sergeants and their grunts. All units are ordered to hold their ground, defend themselves, and do nothing else until further notice."

"What the hell is this?" Ella demanded. "What on Earth are you trying to accomplish?"

Only General Falkenstein did not seem pole-axed, indeed seemed to be smiling at him knowingly. "A political general," he said. "I warned you this might happen."

"As my brother Rex would put it, as indeed he did put it to me, we are going to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of the Meatgrinder," Albert told them.  "This is what he would call a General Strike.  If you are not with us, you will be allowed to resign without negative consequences from me. Those who are not against us are with us and will obey this order. This is what I call a Generals' General Strike."

One by one the officers' images on the screen raised their right arms to salute their agreement, Gallion and Murphy uncertainly, Falkenstein smartly.  Only Alice Carmine hesitated.

"What am I suppose to do, Albert?" she demanded. "Let the fucking pirates run wild on the ship channels?"

General Pearson realized he hadn't considered this. But he was moving fast on his feet. "Remove all your foot soldiers from the channel banks. Institute continuous Pelican patrols, if you need more, I will provide them. Blast and bomb anything that begins to move out of the woods towards the shores to smithereens. This is a generals' strike, but we are still generals, soldiers, not pacifists."

"Right on General Pearson!" Alice cried and saluted. "I'm with you, Albert!"

Only then, when all his generals were holding their arms in salutes did Albert return them.

                                            #

For four months Albert was silently stonewalled by the Pentagon and indeed by himself, since trying to make the Generals Strike public would be a political move that would at best get him removed or at worst even court marshaled.  This was a battle that would be won or lost within the Army, against political adversaries maybe but  not against an external enemy, and it would seem both he and the Joint Chiefs wanted to keep it that way.

Captain Ellen Diangelo kept her distance, and Albert couldn't blame her.  What  her personal feelings were really didn't matter, if the Arnie experiment failed, she could kiss her promotion to Admiral goodbye.

The only good news, indeed the only news at all, was that the casualty figures were dropping like stones since the General Strike started. The Pentagon knew this, General Pearson's brigadiers knew it, their subordinates knew it, and their subordinates more or less knew it, even the grunts knew at least that they were being kept from looking for trouble that wasn't looking for them, if not how or why.

His brigadiers kept their virtual distance too, nor could Albert blame them either. Shit rolled down the chain of command, and he could well understand that nobody wanted to be standing too close to General Albert Pearson when the inevitable hit the fan.

When it did, it came as an order to come back to the Pentagon for a "meeting" with the Joint Chiefs, and to make it clear that they were not amused he was not favored with what should have been a Brass Wagon for the flight to DC  but constrained to fly all the way to Washington on one of his own Pelicans all by himself without any staff or even a hot meal.

Nor was he allowed a decent interval to recover from the time zone change but summoned to the Pentagon meeting 10:35 the very next day.  Same room, same Joint Chiefs of Staff, but staring at him coldly like something under a microscope. 

But Albert didn't feel like a bug, not even like a subordinate put on the carpet. He had started this battle and this was the end game, a political battle maybe, so be it, but like the line officer he had been, he knew how to pump up the old battlefield adrenaline when the time came to play it.  As Rex had put it, you might lose, but you can never win if you don't try.

There was no saluting, no niceties. "Shall we cut to the chase?" was the first thing Chairperson Ramirez said to open the meeting, and it was not spoken as a question. "We will assume that you know that we know all that you know. No objection?"

"None. I know that you know that the casualty figures in the East Central Asia Theater have been dropping fast these last four months."

"Perhaps you expect you have been summoned to this meeting to be awarded a medal?" Ramirez  said in a tone of not quite withering sarcasm.

"Not really," Albert replied dryly. "But of course I would accept any commendation you might feel was appropriate." A bit of his own sarcasm to let them know that you weren't intimidated was good tactics even if you were.  Especially if you were. Assuming the ground in question was good strategy.  Good political generalship

"Cut the crap, Pearson," ordered the Army Chief of Staff. "You know damn well this meeting is about,  your so-called General Strike."

"I assumed as much, of course, and so I am fully prepared to give you all a complete briefing." More of the same only more so.

"I told you to cut the crap, Albert," General Blaylock told him. "All we want to know is when and how it will end."

Meaning they didn't. Perhaps that was why they had said nothing for four months. "You're my immediate superior," Albert told him. "So in theory, that's up to you."

"What do you mean by that?" said Blaylock. And it did seem like a seriously interested  question. 

"I mean you can order me to...to..."  General Pearson shrugged and paused theatrically. "To do what? Order me to order an end to the strike? Or  replace me with someone who will?  But either way, you'd have to issue a specific order to the Commander of ECAT to issue specific orders to his or her Brigadiers to issue specific orders all the way down the chain of command to the platoon noncoms.  Would you like to tell me how you're going to word that to the press?" Albert shrugged again. "Don't ask me how to do it."

"So far no civilian even knows that there is a Generals Strike, Albert. We can classify it as secret and no one will know it ever happened."

"Even the Secretary of Defense?  Even the President?"

"Enough of this!" said General Ramirez. "The bottom line, Pearson.  What did you want to accomplish with this strike in the first place?"

"I thought you'd never ask," said Albert.

"No you didn't."

Always have a clear definition of victory.

"Optimally, close down the Meatgrinder and bring the grunts home."

"Get real," Admiral Weller told him. "You know that can't happen."

"I said optimally, Admiral Weller. I know that's not going to happen." General Pearson stared directly at the Navy Chief of Staff, determined to stare her down. "And of course I know why."

A long silence as Nancy Weller stared back.

"Do I really have to tell you, Admiral Weller?" Albert finally said.

"Give it a try."

"Much too much riding on the status quo, isn't there? Trillions of dollars for the Navy budget riding on the  Arnold Schwarzenegger being unveiled as a success--"

"Not just the Navy," interrupted Blaylock. "A mobile dreadnaught headquarters for every Army theater commander--"

"Whether they like it or not," said Albert.

"And you don't?"

"No need to know," General Pearson said deliberately fatuously. "Not yet."

To his surprise, Albert realized he was actually getting to enjoy playing political general. They might have four stars to his three, but he was taking command. They didn't realize it yet, but he did believe he had the Army and the Navy on his hook, and thanks to their own trillion dollar bait. Rex would love this.

"So what is your real bottom line, General Pearson?" asked General Ramirez, and now she seemed genuinely interested, maybe even a little fascinated. Certainly more respectful.

"We simply allow the strike to continue indefinitely and many lives are saved."

"You know that's not an option," insisted the Navy Chief of Staff. "It would kill the Dreadnaught program."

"Not if the Arnie is announced as a triumph and my order is  rebranded as policy."

"Policy?" Ramirez said quite softly and leaning forward.  "Whose policy?"

"That's on your level, Madam Chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not mine. In a way, not even yours if you want to kick up to the higher level."

"What level?"

"The political level above the military level. We do strategy, the elected government does policy. That's the way it's always been, isn't it?"

"And always should be," General Ramirz said softly. "You do have a...policy suggestion to pass along...upstairs to the Secretary of Defense? To the Congress?   To the President.?"

"Affirmative," Albert told her. "And I would not object if you and the collective Joint Chiefs champion it as your own. If it goes, you all get the credit. If it doesn't, you were just passing along my suggestion."

"Can't hurt to at least listen," Admiral Ramerez said  now openly hopeful. All the other Chiefs of Staff except Admiral Weller nodded their approval.

"We all know what the Meatgrinder is really for, don't we?   The Defense Department budget. Keeping troops on the ground to protect with goodies like Pelicans, dreadnaughts, drones, robots, the ever-evolving ever more expensive top of the line weaponry--"

"Which is why we can't just shut it down," said Blaylock.

"But all it's accomplished politically is to break up where was largely more or less nation states into tribes, religions, warlord turfs, whatever, permanently at each others' throats and using an American Army and American blood to keep it that way."

"You think we like that?" snapped Ramirez.

"It's policy, isn't it?. You could call it an order. You don't have to like an order, you just have to obey it.".

"You think we don't know that?" Ramirez told him. "You really think we like it?"

"We're not moral monsters even if you think we are," said Admiral Weller.

"I don't believe that, Admiral Weller, you're all just obeying orders from your superiors. Liking them is not a military requirement.

"You gonna tell us you've got a way out?" said General Blaylock. 

""The Generals Strike hasn't been made public yet, and it doesn't ever have to be, and it won't be if my order to stand down in the Meatgrinder quietly becomes..."

"Nominal!" said Ramirez.  

"Policy," General Blaylock said softly. He too seemed to be getting it.

"The new status quo," Albert told them.."Civilian government policy. The same lives get saved, the Navy and the Army get their dreadnoughts, Ella Diangelo gets her promotion to Admiral, a trade that helps all ballclubs. Those who go along, get along."

"Any objection to giving it a try? asked the Chairperson.

Not even Admiral Weller dissented.

You may lose, but you can never win if you don't try.

"And what do you get out of it, Albert?" asked General Blaylock.

General Albert Pearson had already thought about it. Have a clear definition of victory. Cease fire when you have achieved it. Leave the enemy a back door to retreat through. But in this case there was no enemy and the backdoor was the victor's exit if he chose to take it.

And Albert Pearson had already decided. He did not smoke, he did not take drugs, he didn't overdo it with drink, he had never considered himself an addictive personality.  But becoming a political general, which he had just become, like it or not, which he didn't, seemed to be all too addictive. Falkenstein had warned him of this. Ironically? Or dead serious?

"My fourth star to jack up my pension when I quietly finish my current mission and retire," Albert told him.

"That's all?" Curt Blaylock said. "I'll be retiring about then, and you've just proven you'd make one hell of an Army Chief of Staff."  He looked around at the other Chiefs of Staff who nodded their approval.

"And I won't be sitting in this seat forever, General Pearson," said the current Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"Think about it, Albert," General Blaylock said.

But Albert Pearson had thought about it. He had thought about what he had always thought about political generals.  He thought about what he had thought about the Pentagon when he had done his required duty there.  

He thought about what Rex would say and how he would say it.

And he knew what he would say and how he would say it.

"Thanks but no thanks," said General Albert Pearson.

He turned to lock eyes with General Todd Klein, the Marine Corps Commandant, who had never spoken. Klein would be sure to know the Marine Hymn down to each note and word.

"First to fight-" sang Albert.

"For right and freedom..." General Klein chanted.

"And to keep our honor clean..."

 "I'll appreciate that fourth star when I retire, said Lieutenant  General Albert Pearson, but I prefer to keep my honor clean."

      end