Trent Reedy - Divided We Fall

“At least I won’t be alone,” I said to myself. Somehow I felt better about my decision, knowing so many others had chosen the same.

Most of them are in lockstep with the governor. As they should be! Everybody should be supporting the heroes of the Idaho National Guard and Governor Montaine as they take a long-overdue stand against federal tyranny!

The show cut out to silence for a moment. Had the Fed shut him down? What about free speech? Then some music played, followed by an announcer.

This is an ABC News special report: Live from Washington, here’s Chris McCormick.

A different voice came on.

Moments ago, Vice President Aaron Henke officially announced his resignation. He has become only the third vice president in American history to ever resign from that post. In a brief statement to the press, Mr. Henke said he, quote, “refused to take any further part in one of the most dangerous situations in American history.” End quote. There is no word yet on who President Rodriguez will appoint as the new vice president, but a White House spokesman says that the president is spending a great deal of time and thought on the issue and hopes to have a selection before the end of the day. The reaction from—

I switched the radio off and drove on in silence. Everyone I talked to and everyone on the news had a different take on the standoff. Now the vice president, like Lieutenant McFee, was getting out of it. Not for the first time, I wished I could too.

The next four weeks of Army life were good for one reason. Most of the time, we were cut off from the news. The little news we did get went around the ranks quickly. That Laura Griffith woman became the next vice president. Some of the guys were worried about that because she’d been demanding the Fed get tough with Idaho, but we soon got word that President Rodriguez and Governor Montaine were videoconferencing to work out a possible compromise — something about tinkering with the stupid ID card law. Montaine sent a message to all of us, promising that he wouldn’t agree to any deal that would allow Idaho Guardsmen to be punished for the shootings at Boise, or for their service in the Idaho Guard during the standoff. I hoped the talks would work so we could end this and all go home.

We also heard that enough pissed-off Idaho voters had signed a petition that the state would have to have a recall vote on November 2. If Montaine lost, he would be out of office and the lieutenant governor would take over. I didn’t know who that was, but I did know that we were screwed without Montaine. If he was removed from office, the Fed would come in here and arrest every soldier who had been at Boise or refused to obey the president’s activation call. Sergeant Kemp was real into politics, and he said he didn’t think the recall effort would work, because not only would the majority of special election voters have to agree to recall the governor, but the recall votes had to exceed the number of votes for Montaine when he was first voted into office. He’d won in a landslide, and a lot of the Montaine haters had left the state after the blockade started. Still, it was one more big political thing to worry about.

It seemed all the more important as Fed soldiers set up their own checkpoint across the state line from our wire obstacle. They dug in their own fighting positions and gouged a big anti-vehicle trench in the road. A large dirt berm behind the ditch made it impossible to drive through and would provide cover for Fed troops.

My team’s job was to stand guard at the position Luchen and I had started building weeks before. Shortly after I showed up to duty, we stacked more rocks to build the west wall up higher. Then we pressed mud into the cracks between the rocks to harden up the barrier. After that we used some of the wood from the trees that we’d brought down to put on a log roof. More mud sealed up the gaps and mostly kept the rain out. Mostly. It didn’t keep out the cold, though, and the temperature dropped further the deeper we got into October.

There were four soldiers in our team, and we pulled guard duty in pairs, twelve hours on, twelve hours off. At least one of the two soldiers on duty needed to be awake at all times. Me and Sergeant Kemp got stuck with the night shift, and twelve hours is a long time to be awake through the night, so we took turns staying up to keep watch. Still, even with our ever-present thermal cloaks, it was tough sleeping out on that cold cliff, and boring sitting through the night watching the Washington border through our night vision glasses, shivering and waiting for the sun to come up over Silver Mountain.

The only major duty we had besides sitting there and staying awake was weapons maintenance. Every time the shift changed, the guys coming on had to remove the 7.62 ammo from the M240 Bravo machine gun, strip the weapon down, clean the parts, put it back together again, and then perform a functions check to make sure it would fire if needed. After that, we had to do the same to our M4 rifles. The whole process took over an hour if we did it right, but after a while our team came to the agreement that the 240 only needed to be taken apart and cleaned once a day. We alternated that duty.

We also killed time cleaning our personal weapons, which the Idaho Guard allowed us to carry. They weren’t strict with how often we performed personal weapons maintenance, but they did tell us we had to do it at least once a week. A lot of guys cleaned their weapons more often than that because they liked to get them out and show them off. Specialist Danning had his own Barrett 82A1.50-caliber rifle. The rounds for that sucker were each about five and a half inches long, and he had two ten-round magazines, plus a wicked scope. The whole setup had to have cost him way over ten grand. Me, I was good with my standard-issue M4 and my dad’s nine mil.

Staff Sergeant Meyers hadn’t reported for duty, meaning he had either stayed home or sold us out and joined the Feds. Our new staff sergeant was named Shane Donshel. They’d tried promoting Kemp, but he refused, saying he preferred to stay with his team. That was lucky for me. He was in charge, but he was also one of us. Best of all, Sergeant Kemp allowed me to bend the rules on using comms on the line so that I could call my mother.

She was getting along okay, staying in the guest bedroom of a nurse she’d met at the conference, but she was rapidly using up all the vacation days she’d saved for several years. She worried that if she couldn’t get back to the clinic soon, they’d have to let her go, and then we’d be in serious financial trouble, as we had a mortgage, car payment, and other bills that had to be paid. I was getting paid from the Idaho Guard — real silver coins with a picture of Idaho on one side and a Revolutionary War soldier on the other — and we had some income from the shop, but a PFC didn’t make much, and with gas supplies cut off, people weren’t having work done on their cars.

I could hear the shadow creeping into Mom’s voice more and more as time went on.

“I can’t take it, Danny,” she said one night. “I want to go home. You don’t understand. I need to go home.”

“Mom, you’re fine where you are. I know you’d rather be—”

“I’ve heard rumors that the Army doesn’t have every part of the border completely guarded, so people can sneak across into Idaho. Maybe I could do that, Danny. I used to do a lot of hiking when I was younger, and if I try it before the snow comes, it might not be that hard.”