Fiction Week

By Walker D. Mills

February 8, 2040.
Senate Chamber, United States Capitol Building.

Chairman: Madam Commandant, we have asked for you to come here today to testify about the role the Marine Corps played in the Pacific War. As you are well aware, the future of the Marine Corps is now in question and we wanted you to justify for us the Corps’ continued existence as a separate entity in the Department of Defense. We will start with five minutes of questions from the junior Senator from Wisconsin.

Senator: General, do you feel that the service was prepared to meet the challenges of conflict?

CMC: First, thank you for the question and for inviting me here today. The attacks on Taiwan and Okinawa caught us in the middle of a transformation – a shift from decades of counter-insurgency warfare to great power competition. When the war broke out we were making changes to facilitate the operationalization of our concept Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations and acquiring new systems to better address the emerging threats of China and Russia. We had also begun to realign our education programs more closely with the Navy, adding a maritime focus.

Senator: General – how long have you been, as you put it “in transformation”? Secretary of Defense Mattis declared that the military was transitioning to great power competition in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. That was two decades ago.

CMC: Yes – well, the thing is, after the release of the 2018 NDS it took us a further five years to write new concepts. And then another five years to realign our acquisition priorities. After we realigned our priorities it took five more years to design and prototype our news systems, and we’d only just begun to field them operationally when the war broke out. Likewise – between a comprehensive curriculum review and redesign it took over a decade to shift our professional education and training away from a counter-insurgency focus and back to peer-competition.

Senator: So, you’re telling me, after twenty years you are still transitioning?

CMC: Yes – but it hasn’t been in a vacuum. We’ve had Marines engaged all over the world advising foreign forces, and conducting counter-narcotics and humanitarian missions. In fact we’re very proud of that. We have significantly expanded our humanitarian and disaster relief capability in the last several years and have been deploying our Marine Special Operators and Marine Advising Regiment almost non-stop. We have teams still operating in Africa and in the Middle East.

Senator: General, do you remember what the mission of the Marine Corps is?

CMC: The mission of the Marine Corps?

Senator: Yes, according to Title 10, United States Code.

I’ll read it for you, in case you have forgotten.

“The Marine Corps shall be organized, trained, and equipped to provide fleet marine forces of combined arms, together with supporting air components, for service with the fleet in the seizure or defense of advanced naval bases and for the conduct of such land operations as may be essential to the prosecution of a naval campaign.”

General, would you say that the seizure or defense of advanced naval bases in support of a naval campaign was the primary focus of the Marine Corps before the China Sea Conflict? How do foreign internal defense missions in central Africa and the Middle East, or counter-narcotics missions in South America support the prosecution of naval campaigns?

CMC: Yes sir, but I would add that Title 10 also says that we are responsible for “whatever other duties the president may direct.” We are staying relevant to the nation – we call ourselves the “First to Fight,” meaning we execute what operations come our way instead of waiting on the sidelines for operations specific to our mission.  

Senator: Let me continue. I’ll read the sentence after that.

“However, these additional duties may not detract from or interfere with the operations for which the Marine Corps is primarily organized.”

With that mission in mind, General, was the Marine Corps ready for the Pacific War?

CMC: Ready – I was actually hoping you would ask about readiness. Our readiness prior to the outbreak of the war was actually higher than it has ever been in our history. And that is readiness across all categories, Senator – maintenance, medical, dental, annual training– it was all green across the board. We were almost 100 percent deployable across the board. As an example, in I MEF, we didn’t have a single Class 4 dental Marine or Sailor. For III MEF, we were deployable across the board – no issues whatsoever and –

Senator: General, I mean what specifically had the Corps done to get ready for a great power conflict in the Pacific – with training, acquisitions, concept development or anything else related to warfighting?

CMC: We invested heavily in training before the war and sent Marines through multiple iterations of combined arms training at our Marine Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms, California. As for acquisition we were watching a lot of Army and Navy programs closely – we don’t have as much money as the other services and so we can’t afford to go off and do things on our own as much. So, we were following the Army’s Long-Range Precision Fires, Future Vertical Lift, and their Future Attack Reconnaissance Helicopter programs, as well as the Navy’s mine-countermeasures and unmanned surface vehicle programs. But we didn’t have the money to fund these things ourselves.

Senator: General, in that same time period, the Marine Corps acquired over a hundred new CH-53Ks. You bought hundreds of amphibious combat vehicles and thousands of joint-light tactical vehicles. In the mid-2000s, you developed, fielded, and then scrapped your Expeditionary Fire Support System in only a few years, along with ammo and vehicles instead of purchasing existing Army systems. The Corps clearly had money to invest in unique capabilities but lacked the prescience to invest in the right capabilities.

Furthermore, why is it that your service’s most comprehensive training was conducted in the Mojave Desert – amongst terrain completely different from anywhere in the Pacific and hundreds of miles from the ocean?

CMC: To be honest sir, those programs are really holdovers from my predecessors, as was our training – I can’t bear full responsibility for that. When you start these programs you have to see them through. Back when we were fighting Afghanistan, we needed heavy lift helicopters to operate at high altitudes in desert climates. That’s also why we bought the joint-light tactical vehicle. And the amphibious combat vehicle was a much-needed replacement for our legacy vehicles. We needed something that can carry Marines from ship-to-shore and move them to the objective. We trained in the desert because it was easier than training on the coast.  It was also cheaper.

Senator: So, if I understand correctly, the Marine Corps acquired over 200 of the most expensive helicopters ever built to meet operational requirements from a war that ended in 2020 and to address terrain limitations that simply do not exist in the Pacific? And furthermore, despite the directive to increase lethality across the force, they are essentially unarmed?

Next, at the same time as we were trying to lighten the force and improve our capability to host air-mobile, forward-refueling points you replaced the mainstay tactical vehicle with one that is both significantly larger, heavier, and has less room inside. All to protect those Marines against a threat that we have not seen in the Pacific theater?

And finally, we invested in a new vehicle for ship-to-shore movement under fire after multiple Secretaries of Defense have questioned the relevance of forcible entry operations?

CMC: We made the best decisions we could with the information we had at the time.

Senator: General, you made no decisions. Under your tenure and the tenure of your predecessors, the utility of the Marine Corps withered. The Corps repeatedly invested in capabilities that were no longer relevant and legacy projects. Simultaneously, hard questions about the fundamental role of the force were ignored and unanswered. The Marine Corps shoehorned their own idea of what they should be and what they could provide into the Joint Force.

You went to war with lethal squads that were stuck in their barracks. You went to war with amphibious vehicles but without the amphibious shipping to put them on – the new L-Class ships don’t even have well decks for them to launch from. Your only contribution to the Pacific War was a few squadrons of F-35s, but limited by their short takeoff capability, they had to carry less fuel and ammunition than their Air Force and Navy cousins. You did not have the weapons, training, or concepts to defend our allies, or even yourselves. Marines were forced to fire cannon artillery at Chinese ships and landing craft because they had nothing else.

Despite the high levels of readiness you briefed, the Marine Corps was not ready for war. You were not even able to fulfill the basic mission of defending and seizing advanced bases. Therefore, I see no reason for there to be a Marine Corps.

I yield my time.

Walker D. Mills is a Marine Corps infantry officer currently serving as an exchange officer with the Colombian Marine Corps. This short story is inspired by his experiences being deployed to the Western Pacific. He has previously written fiction for the Center for International Maritime Security and as part of the Krulak Center’s Destination Unknown Project and Marine Corps Post Mortem.

Featured Image: “Landing” by Charles E.J. Downing via Artstation

Fiction Week

By Mike Barretta

It seemed as if we were always waiting. My mother, sister, and I would wait on crowded piers or on endless acres of tarmac waiting for the assault ships to shift colors or the auxiliary power units on the C-17s to wind down. Off the brow or down the ramp, they would come and the crowd would cheer. Flags would wave. They all looked the same, weary and whip-cord thin, weighted down with monstrous packs and mixed emotions. They were just as frightened as we were.

            At home, my mother kept him safe, giving him time to adjust away from the punctuated terror, crushing discomfort, and camaraderie of war. His eyes searched for things that were new or out of place. He would sit on the back deck that overlooked the saltmarsh. His face would crease with worry and anticipation – visibly uncomfortable in the stillness of his alien home. My mother would play Johnny Mathis, his favorite, and he would smile and lean back into the chair.

            War has a way of focusing the mind. There are no bills to pay, report cards to worry about, or lawns to mow. There is just the war, a singular consuming imperative, and it takes a long while to adjust to the trivialities of real life. His last homecoming was different than the rest. Of course, this war was different than the ones before. My mother knew this and gave him space. When she thought him ready, she would let us go to him.

            “Are you okay, dad?”

            He would nod. “Yea, yea, of course, get up here,” he would say.

            I would crawl up, competing for space with my older sister.

            “Ah, good thing. This dumb Marine was just about to float away. Thanks for holding me down.”

            I grabbed his hand and held it up, splaying his fingers, segregating the nub of his pinky finger from the rest. It was a point of embarrassment to him to receive a medal for so small a thing as a pinky finger, but he more than made up for it with the broken ribs, burst lung, and fractured skull from the overpressure of an IED explosion that accompanied it. His tattooed  dosimeter, a half-inch dot on the underside of his wrist, displayed a cautious yellow.

            I ran my hand across the nub of his finger. The scar tissue was oddly smooth. “Gross,” I said. “Did it hurt?”

            “You bet it hurt,” he replied.

            My sister and I would lean back into his warmth and count the dragonflies. Hundreds of them crossed the evening light, capturing mosquitos on-the-wing over ribbons of silver water. He propped his feet on the railing, offering his toes as resting spots for the dragonflies. When they landed, we called them by name. Banded Demoiselle, Brown Hawker, Ruddy Darter, Four-Spotted Chaser, Globe-Skimmer.

He knew them all.

*****************

            My older sister joined the Marine Corps against his wishes. He never said what he wanted, but I imagine he desired what every father hopes for his daughter – to marry a man that would love her as he did. Still, he was never so proud of anything as to when he pinned her Naval Aviator wings on her at NAS Whiting Field. In that moment, I wished I was her, a brand new Second Lieutenant on stage with her father, a First Sergeant with a Navy Cross. She took up the family business as if there was no real choice in the matter. Some families just serve.  

            She flew Ospreys, the ones armed with Hellfires and 20mm guns. While executing a fire support mission, her ship and another had collided, meshing blades and shattering the rotors. Both tiltrotors had gone down in a fifth-generation war that pitted formless brutality against hyper-technology. The investigation was lost to the expediencies of war. Who cares whether it was her or the other that had turned the wrong way. For the dead, there were no more lessons to be learned.

            My mother couldn’t accept the flag…couldn’t touch it. The honor guard handed it to my father and he clutched it to his chest in a raptor’s claw, whitening his knuckles, holding so hard that he pierced his palm with a thumbnail and blood ran down his wrist as if he was squeezing it from the national ensign.

            I was nineteen when Meghan died. I don’t remember exactly how I felt. It seems so distant and remote. I do remember my parents fighting after Meghan’s funeral. My father’s need for solitude clashed violently with my mother’s need for contact. Ugly silence gave way to pointless accusations.

            “You’re not the only one!” My mother screamed. “You’re not the only one. You don’t get to be special in how you feel. If it wasn’t for you and the damn Marines, we would….we would still have her.”

            “She was my daughter,” said my father.

            “My daughter too. She was mine. All your damn oohrah.”

            My mother retreated to the bedroom and left him to lean on the deck railing 

            “Dad?  You okay?”

            “Hey,” he said. He wiped his eyes. “Yea, I’m okay.”

            “Are you sure?”

            He looked to the ground. “No,” his voice cracked

            I hugged him, pulling him close. Dangling medals and the gold buttons pressed into my chest. Meghan’s death did to him what no war could. It made him smaller. No grief can compare to a mother who has lost a son to a war, except perhaps, for a father that has lost a daughter.

            My mother joined us and we held on to each other, afraid to let go lest we all float away.

            Whippoorwills called and fireflies merged with the stars. My father was home. My sister was not. Soon, I would leave.

*****************

            Days after my sister’s funeral, my father came to me in the early morning. “I have something for you.” 

            I followed him to the shop behind the house. The shop was his retreat. He made flag display cases and presentation displays to honor careers. He also made wooden boxes, some so small that only a single engagement ring could fit inside, some large enough to be considered furniture. He called all his boxes hope chests and he gave them away to friends and family. I remember one Christmas all of our presents were in boxes he had made. I loved the smell of freshly cut wood and carefully oiled tools.   

            “Up there. Pull it down,” he said.

            From the rafters, above lengths of oak and cedar, I pulled down a rolled carpet wrapped in heavy brown paper. I set it on the floor. My father knelt and untied the twine that bound the carpet. He unrolled the carpet across the shop’s wood floor and smoothed out the wrinkles. Morning light caressed the carpet’s silk threads. It was beautiful and I wondered why he kept it wrapped in paper, hidden from everyone.

            “In Iran, I bought a carpet,” he said. “We were in a mountain village, far enough away that we could relax our radiological gear. I had tea with the owner. He needed money to escape into Turkey before the wind carried fallout to his village.”  He sank to his knees and bent over, supporting himself with his hands. He placed his face against the carpet and breathed deep. “It smells like Iran.” He swept his hand across the carpet and a shimmering silken wave of light flowed across the threads. “The carpet is done in the tree of life pattern.” he said softly. “Come here.”  He lifted a hand and grabbed my sleeve, pulling me down. “Just watch.”

            The carpet was hypnotic in its beauty.

            “Dad, I…”

            “No. Just watch a little bit,” he said.

            The magnificent tree swayed in a spring-perfumed breeze. Jeweled birds darted amongst the myriad delicate branches, nesting and feeding. Animals crowded the base of the tree. Glorious flowers budded and bloomed. Insect buzz, amphibian croak, and bird song filled the shop. The flowers faded and the tree bore fruit that ripened and fell to the ground. Striped tigers, fierce lions, and immense bears dragged down leaping deer and sprinting antelope. A pair of lovers danced into view. The leaves fell and nourished the soil for the cycle to start over.

            “Sometimes, when I dream, I see the burned woman,” said my father. “She has no hair. She turns her head back and forth to see because her eyes are flash-blinded from the detonations. She carries something that looks like a burned doll. She asks for help and I do so. I shoot her. But there are more like her, and we can’t help everyone. There aren’t enough bullets. We don’t have enough bullets to help everyone.”

            “I’m sorry, dad,” I said.

            “Can you see it?” he asked.

            I leaned forward and studied the carpet, trying to see what my father saw.

            “That leaf is wrong. All of the leaves have five points except that one.”  I pointed at a leaf on lower branch. “It has four, someone made a mistake.” 

            “No, what you see as a mistake is wisdom,” said my father. “Perfection is the province of God and therefore unattainable. That’s what the rug means. Nothing is perfect.” He teased the threads of the four-pointed leaf with his maimed hand. He spread his hand over the different leaf. “It’s just like me,” he said. “All you can do is try.”      

            “Who made it?”

            “The owner’s wife started the rug. His daughter finished it for her dowry. The groom’s family demanded more and when it couldn’t be paid, her in-laws burned her to death with cooking oil. The mother died from grief. The father murdered the groom’s family and reclaimed the carpet.” 

            “Damn, dad, that’s a terrible story.”

            “I know. It makes me wonder how something so beautiful can be connected to something so terrible. I come out here sometimes after I dream of the burned woman and I just unroll it and…I don’t know, just look at it. Sometimes, I just need to. Do you understand?”

            “I think so.”

*****************

            I come from a family of service and sacrifice, but I did not join the Marine Corps like my father and sister. I joined the U.S. Navy and deployed on board the USNS Samaritan, the world’s largest hospital ship and the U.S Navy’s contribution to the Multi-National Humanitarian Expeditionary Force. Once construction is finished, her sister ships, the Savior and Salvation will fill out the rotation. There are parts of the world that are horrifying for their level of human suffering. For the disaffected and disenfranchised, misery is a powerful recruiting tool and that is what we seek to undermine. For my part, I fly logistics and medical evacuations in a MH-70 helicopter. I fight on a different front than my father and sister.

When I had finished flight training, my father pinned Meghan’s wings on my chest.    

            On the side of my ship, an artistically inclined mechanic painted an image of my sister dressed out in one of the old-style green flight suits. Behind her, an Osprey soars amongst sunlit clouds. The whole image blends into the tactical gray paint. The pin up is a bit sexier than the reference photo I gave the mech. Her smile is edged with seduction and a bit inappropriate for a helicopter deployed to a hospital ship, but the mechanic captured something in her eyes that is all her, so the painting stays.

*****************

            I have a daughter, her name is Meghan, and she told me she wants to be a Marine like her grandfather.

            “Don’t ask me where she got that idea from. I didn’t fill her head with such nonsense,” said my father. Softer, he added, “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

            He spent a lot of time with her, practically living in my house while I deployed. He said it was to help my wife out, but it was really because he was lonely since mom died and the chemotherapy treatments from the war cancers were wearing him down. He was still lean and Marine, but a lot slower than he used to be. Sometimes he forgets things, but never the things he wanted, or needed, to forget. When he visits, he unpacks a photo of himself and mom standing at the top of Oahu’s famous Haiku stairs trail. He proposed to her at the summit, and another hiker took the picture. Their arms are wrapped around each other. Her left hand with her engagement ring rests on his chest. Hawaiian rain forest, softened by cloud frame them. He would place it so he could see it while lying down. At night he would press his fingertips to his lips and touch mom’s photo.

            He did the same with Meghan’s photo. She is standing in front of her Osprey, her blue eyes visible above the dark aviator glasses held at the end of her nose with fingertips. Her hair is a windblown tangle behind her. She looks fierce and feminine and all Marine.

*****************

            When my father last visited, my daughter took him by the hand and led him down to the end of the boat dock to watch the mullet jump in the evening light.     

            “Do you know why you love me so much?” she asked.

            “You tell me,” he said.

            “Because we are so much alike,” said my daughter.

            “Yes, we are,” he replied.

            I fear the day when I find out exactly how much alike they are.

            My wife set the outside table. The air was soft and cool and a breeze kept the mosquitos at bay. Dragons and damsels coursed across the sky on blurred wings. The outside thermometer read 68 degrees Fahrenheit and the dosimeter showed green. When my father and daughter returned from their adventure at the end of the pier, we sat and ate.

            “I have some news for all of you,” said my wife.

*****************

            I named my son William Victor, after my father. One halcyon morning, I saw that he had taken the small flat-bottomed skiff we used for fishing. He never came back. Deep in the salt marsh at the end of a labyrinth of narrow waterways, there is a small island. Upon that island is a giant oak. The tree of life spans the 100-foot long island with its immense branches. He left a note and all it said was, “I’m sorry. I love you.” 

            Twenty veterans a day commit suicide in the United States and that rate has been consistent since 2017. The only answer I can offer is that sometimes the war kills you years later. War is like the ocean. If steeped in it long enough, it becomes part of you.

            When I need to, I stand barefoot upon the tree of life and cry for my father who came home broken, my mother who held him together as long as she could, and my sister who never returned. I think of the mother and bride toiling for years to craft something pointlessly beautiful. I think of the blind burned woman who haunted my father’s dreams. I pray they are in each other’s good company.

            In my study, the morning light slants through the windowpanes and illuminates the carpet, and I can hear the rustle of leaves and the flutter of wings. I can feel the soft grass beneath my feet. The lovers embrace beneath the tree of life, and I feel better.

Mike Barretta is a retired naval aviator who works for a major defense contractor. He holds a masters degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Strategic Planning and International Negotiations and a Masters degree in English (creative writing) from the University of West Florida. His stories have appeared in Apex, Redstone, New Scientist, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and various anthologies including the Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide, War Stories, and The Year’s Best Military Sci-fi and Space Opera.

Featured Image: “Bounty Hunters Chase” by Etienne Beaulieu via Artstation

By Dmitry Filipoff

This week CIMSEC will be featuring fictional short stories submitted in response to our call for articles. Authors will explore national security topics through fiction and present compelling narratives. We thank these authors for their excellent stories. 

“The Tree of Life” by Mike Barretta
“From Sea to Sky” by David Alman
“No Decision” by Walker Mills
“Dreams, Nightmares, and Talking Tigers” by Griffin Cannon
“Lifeblood” by Evan D’Alessandro
“At the Moral Level” by MAJ Ian Brown, USMC
“Screaming Justice” by Rob Carter
“Shatner” by MAJ Brian Kerg, USMC
“Scratch One UpDown” by Chris “Junior” Cannon
“Blue Death” by Chris Rawley
“Plum Blossom” by Austin Reid
“Operation Tripolitan” by Jared Samuelson

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.

Featured Image: “Teleportation Missile Frigate” by Mark Li via Artstation