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Rhine watched the wind carry away the cigarette smoke as he stood atop the M1128 Stryker armored vehicle. Below the cliff top they occupied, the highway was clogged with cars and people slowly making their way forward. The only change of pace from the monotonous flow was when every couple minutes a vehicle that had run out of gas was pushed off to the side of the road. Rhine took another drag of the cigarette and stretched the kinks out of his neck.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow would you like to be stuck down in that mess?\u201d he asked the vehicle\u2019s commander standing in the hatch to his left.<\/p>\n
\u201cIve got eight big ass wheels baby, we don\u2019t need roads like those poor bastards. Matter of fact I have only got this thing stuck one time. We were outside Mosul and pulled off to the side of the road. It was a stupid move. There was a sewage ditch right next to the road and we slide right in. I basically parked us in an Iraqi toilet\u201d the commander said shaking his head.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo what you\u2019re saying is\u2026..this thing is basically a piece of shit?\u201d Rhine quipped.<\/p>\n
Both men laughed at the joke but abruptly cut the laughter off as they heard the sound of something scraping along the side of the Stryker. Rhine\u2019s pistol was in his hands immediately and he moved to peer over the side of the vehicle.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow the hell did you climb up there sir?\u201d Moreno said as he looked up at the men and then at the Stryker as if afraid he would grab something expensive and it would snap right off.<\/p>\n
Rhine holstered his pistol and gave the best answer he could think of.\u201d Think \u201cjungle gym\u201d and start climbing\u201d.<\/p>\n
Moreno clumsily made his way up the side of the Stryker till he was standing next to Rhine, waving his hand to shoo away a cloud of cigarette smoke.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know you smoked\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t. Hate the damn disgusting things\u201d Rhine replied \u201cTonight I just needed something and since whiskey is a \u201cno-no\u201d on duty, this is what I found\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s on your mind? I can see that brain of yours spinning\u201d Moreno asked, having learned to read his friend\u2019s moods like the back of his hand.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis whole thing is just insanity brother. This is gonna be bad man; real bad. As a military and a nation, we are up against the ropes. Think about it, never in our history have we ever had our asses kicked like this. I mean hell, we have just given up whole swaths of the country. Entire states just abandoned; it is unheard of. Every day we just fall back further and sacrifice more land. Our biggest cities, our capital, all just deserted. Never; not in the darkest days of WWII or any other war have we ever been invaded and pushed off mainland soil to this extent\u201d<\/p>\n
A few seconds of silence greeted Rhine as Moreno digested his words.<\/p>\n
Finally Moreno broke the silence \u201c Well get it back, all of it, we just gotta get out stuff together, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s not what im talking about\u201d Rhine replied, \u201cAmericans have never witnessed this kind of war. They have never been forced from their homes with only the things they can carry on their backs. They have never been forced to march in columns to relocation camps. The only thing they knew about being a refugee was what they saw on television or read in books. The internment camps during WWII were a joke compared to this. These people have absolutely no idea what to do, what to expect, or how to survive. Things are gonna get ugly, real ugly. I\u2019m not talking a couple days without water, power, and food like Katrina bad. That was more of a joke then the internment camps compared to this. I mean things are going to get downright medieval out there. The veneer of civilized society is paper thin man. People at their core are animals and when you take away all the neat laws and pretty structures of life they are going to resort back to that animal instinct. They are going to steal from their neighbors and murder each other over nothing more than a single mouthful of food. Life isn\u2019t just going to be cheap, it is going to worth next to nothing. Americans are going to slit each other\u2019s throats just to live to see the next day. It will be chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rhine shook his head in frustration and flicked the cigarette onto the ground.<\/p>\n
\u201c Absolute and pure anarchy. \u201c<\/p>\n
Below them the staccato sound of gunfire and muzzle flashes that erupted amongst the refugees seemed to agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rhine watched the wind carry away the cigarette smoke as he stood atop the M1128 Stryker armored vehicle. Below the cliff top they occupied, the highway was clogged with cars and people slowly making their way forward. The only change of pace from the monotonous flow was when every couple minutes a vehicle that had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":924,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-unedited-drafts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pemv8-F3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zyracuse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zyracuse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zyracuse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zyracuse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/924"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zyracuse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2545"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/zyracuse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2553,"href":"https:\/\/zyracuse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545\/revisions\/2553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zyracuse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zyracuse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zyracuse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}