The Retreat by Gordon Ballantyne

Author:Gordon Ballantyne [Ballantyne, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2021-06-07T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The National Guard troops were slowly being infiltrated into the Retreat and the General quickly learned that his troops needed an orientation and mini boot camp upon their arrival before being integrated into the Retreat squads. Duncan thought it was unfair and cheating the soldiers of their initiation education but it stopped the General’s troops from feeling humiliated right out of the gate by a bunch of civilians. The US Army trained its personnel to a standard set of minimum requirements during basic training that each recruit must achieve but every recruit quickly learns that the spit, polish and iron clad discipline gets thrown out the window during a deployment and every recruit and officer gets assigned specific duties to be performed to a specific set of guidelines. The Retreat follows a credo more like the US Marines where every Marine is first and foremost a rifleman. There are no mess cooks, motor pool officers or supply clerks at the Retreat and most of all there is no paperwork so therefore there is no support staff and chair warming brigade. Once the General’s troops, including the General, had met the Retreat’s standards of expert in marksmanship, hand to hand combat and woodcraft, only then were they considered operational and became fully integrated into their Retreat squads. The troop officers were having a harder time adapting than the non-commissioned ranks; non-commissioned personnel were used to a certain level of what they call chicken shit but officers tended more to the “I don’t need to know that, I’m an officer,” as if receiving a degree and a commission bestowed on them some form of better wisdom and judgement. Officers give orders and non-commissioned personnel take them. It was also an unwritten rule in the US military that officers do not do manual labor like laundry and KP duty. The General always nodded, smiled and promptly issued judgement on the spot and that judgement usually involved loss of rank; there were many Majors running around now wearing Second Lieutenant’s silver bars. Once the squads were integrated, then the troopers moved in with their Retreat counterpart’s housing and performed their regular jobs with them; everything from planting greenhouses to mucking out cow poop. The Retreat always had a third of their top tier squads in the field while a third was on standby and a third was on a regular work schedule, it was a weekly turn of people into the field. Even the command squads took their weekly time in the bush; the Retreat command squad looked at it as a blessing while the troopers looked at it as work. There is no such thing as idle time at the Retreat except during Sunday services. The troopers quickly learned the rules of the Retreat after learning the price of a bottle of scotch, while they also learned the value of keeping a bottle versus drinking a bottle. One Corporal had a few nips of his recently acquired bottle and made the mistake of whistling at a neighboring teenage girl who was hanging laundry next door.

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