John Ringo by The Last Centurion

Author:The Last Centurion
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2008-07-31T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Cross that Strait When We Come to It

Nobody knew how it had leaked out. I guess we did too good a job. Some Fobbit SOB just had to send it to some friend on the Internet and then it had all gone bad. It had one of the highest hit counts on record on YouTube (which was back up). I tried to figure out if there was some way we could get residuals, given that we'd sweated blood for it. And were about to sweat more.

But that wasn't the problem.

Was all that force necessary?

They destroyed how much equipment?

Why was the equipment still there? Hadn't all the troops come home?

Why did we still have troops in Iran?

Are we still going to have to fight terrorists as well as the flu? Isn't it time for peace to have a chance?

Where had the Ghurkas come from?

Britain had sent an official query asking how an American unit had come to be in command of their troops. So had Nepal but that one took longer to be noticed. Except, as far as either knew, they weren't missing any Ghurkas. But they had on the right uniforms. They were even wearing kukris. (I told you there was some strange shit in that place. Hell, there were cavalry sabers and saddles and . . . You wouldn't believe the list. I wish I could have kept it but there was no fucking way.)

Congressional investigation. Congressional fucking investigation.

Except for one problem.

Witness A would be me. And I was in fucking Iran.

They wanted to video-conference me in.

It ended up with the Army Chief of Staff explaining. On national TV. Bet he loved that.

"By order of the President, we had over fourteen 'support and maintain' detachments scattered in as many countries around the world. Six were evacuated when the security situation reached critical. And in all six cases the equipment on site had to be destroyed or fall into the hands of the enemies of the United States. As of this date, there are two units responding, including the unit under the authority of Bandit Six. The other six units have all been lost. Two we do not know what happened to them. They simply stopped responding to requests for update. The other four are confirmed by reports at the time and satellite imagery to have been overrun. Total lost military personnel over one thousand, making it the highest KIA/MIA single action operational loss since the Vietnam War! One of them destroyed some or all of the material under their control. That was Bandit Six and he was under orders to do so rather than have it fall into the hands of enemies of the United States.

"I've been watching my men being overrun one by one sitting on material that has exactly no value to the United States under the current world conditions and you want me to explain why a captain and one company, a hundred and sixty troops, had to destroy the material in the face of

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