Victoria: Chapter 13

The fate of Governor Hokem made it clear that, once Mainers thought about it, they were on the right side in the culture war. While the establishment in Maine remained liberal, it got pretty quiet about it. It was not looking forward to another test of strength with those of us who followed the old ways.But we knew the feds would come in eventually. They always did. Our victory in Maine had not gone unnoticed in Washington. The forces of cultural Marxism were still dominant there, and they were looking for an opportunity to take us down.Through the winter of 2020-2021 and into the spring, I worked to build the Christian Marines, and the Christian Marines worked to spread the Maine Idea. Most of the grass-roots groups had gone for the concept, and they were hitting the hustings to spread it around. It wasn't really that hard; most folks already understood that all Washington did was take their money and spit in their face.I knew the Maine Idea would not become real, however, until Maine had to fight for it. Even if we fought and lost, it would help. The fact that we dared fight the federal government would strengthen people's desire for independence, as the Battle of Bunker Hill did in the first revolution. If we could fight and win – that would give the people of Maine hope that our dream of being free again might become real.The challenge, and our opportunity, came in the early summer of 2021. The Democrats were back in power in Washington, and their slogan was "A Rainbow Over America." For Maine, that translated into an announcement on June 22 by "Ms." Lateesha Umbonga LaDrek, the Secretary of HUD, that her department had purchased two large apartment clusters in Bangor. The current rent-paying residents would be moved out, and 350 black federal prison parolees from out of state would be moved in. LaDrek said the purpose of this action was "to offer oppressed people of color a second chance by letting them serve as ambassadors of diversity to the people of Bangor, who were imprisoned in an all-white ghetto."Maine seethed. But after years of being told that they were evil "racists," people felt morally unable to defend themselves. They dared not speak openly against the trashing of their community.I knew we had to turn that around. The first step was for us Christian Marines to put our heads together. When we met at the Old Place on June 25th, I put the problem squarely. "I think Maine can stop this, if it will fight. But it has to know it's in the right before it will fight," I said. "You all know the problem. Any resistance to black scum, even by decent blacks, brings screams of moral outrage from the cultural Marxists. Most folks have been so conditioned by this crap they can't stand up to it. They think they're Hitler if they dare defend their – our – community. So we have to win the moral fight first. How can we do that?""First, let the feds win a partial victory," said Major Fitzgerald from Portland. "Let them throw the current residents of those apartments out. They've given them only 30 days to vacate, and the TV news is playing that up. The feds look heartless, as they are when its a matter of white folks. Seeing all those people's lives suddenly disrupted tells Mainers there's something wrong here.""OK, that makes sense," I replied. "Let the enemy overextend himself. But how do we keep them from moving the black scum in?""By moving someone else in first." The speaker was one of our more unusual recruits, Father Dimitri, an Orthodox missionary from Russia. Russia was again a Christian nation, under a new Tsar, and she saw her mission as carrying the Word to the repaganized West. Father Dimitri was one of many Orthodox missionaries working in the States, and he was also a Russian Naval Infantry chaplain. Some of our former "spooks" had brought him in to the Christian Marines; they knew him, and I trusted them."What do you mean?" I asked."The enemy is presenting these black criminals as ‘the poor,’ so good people feel it's wrong to oppose them," said the priest. "Of course, with your liberal churches, no clergy tell them that Christianity historically has distinguished between the deserving poor, who are poor through no fault of their own, and the undeserving poor, whose poverty is caused by their own sins. Before the undeserving poor qualify for our charity, they must repent – they must change their ways. Otherwise, we are just helping them along the road to Hell.""As it happens, I know of some deserving poor who very much need this housing," Father Dimitri continued. "Three weeks ago, a ship brought almost 400 Egyptian Christian refugees into Montreal. Throughout the Muslim world, Christians are being driven out or killed. These are good people who escaped only with their lives. They are survivors of one of the oldest Christian communities, dating to the earliest days to the Church. Why don't we move them into these apartments before Washington can move in the orcs, then dare Washington to throw them out?"“What are orcs?” Sergeant Danielov asked.“The word is from Tolkien,” Father Dimitri replied. “He was one of the great Christian writers of the 20th century. In his Lord of the Rings, which is Christian analogy, orcs are soldiers of the Evil One. Those creatures your government wants to move in to Bangor are orcs, believe me.”"How would we get your Egyptian Christians here?" I asked. "The Border Patrol would never let them in.""Don't worry, we Russians are very good at smuggling things through northern forests," said the priest, laughing."Illegal immigrants are among the liberals' sacred ‘victim’ groups,” said Fitzgerald. "Usually that means trash from south of the border, but we can turn it around on them by bringing in good folks the same way. They'll have to face their own arguments, used against them. That's disarming."The more I heard, the better I liked Father Dimitri's idea. In fighting merely to keep the orcs out – I'd read Tolkien, too – we were trying to beat something with nothing. That never works. His way, we would launch a pre-emptive strike, occupy the position, and make the feds try to re-take it.I also knew that by giving refuge to these Egyptian Christians, Maine would be striking at least a small blow in the Third World War. That war had been under way since at least the 1980s. It was a war of militant, expansionist Islam against everybody else. The Islamics had been pushing out in every direction – north into Russia and Balkans and also into Western Europe (immigration can be a form of invasion); south down both African coasts, where the ancient Christian land of Ethiopia was besieged on every side; east into the Philippines (a Muslim Indonesian dagger was pointing at Australia as well); and also West. Since the l990s, Islam had become the fastest-growing religion in North America.I knew we would have to fight the Islamics eventually, as we did. Of course, the North American Muslims were all for "toleration," as the Koran commands when they are weak. Once they are strong enough, the message changes. The Koran puts it in a way that is hard to misunderstand; "Kill those who join other gods with God (i.e., believers in the Holy Trinity) wherever you shall find them, and seize them and slay them, and lay in wait for them with every kind of ambush."By accepting some Christian refugees from Islamic terror, we would put Maine on record as to which side we were on in this world war. And it would be hard to find people more civilized than Egyptians; they'd been at it for a good 5000 years. The Egyptian church even spoke Egyptian, the language of the pharaohs, not Arabic."Anyone have a better idea? If not, I say we go with it," I concluded. No one did. "OK, that's settled. Anyone who can help Father Dimitri smuggle the Egyptians in, see him after the meeting. The next question is, how will the feds counter, and what do we do about it?""We know how they will counter," said Trooper Kelly, who'd come up from Massachusetts. "We know from Waco and Ruby Ridge and many other places that never made the papers. The federal government has militarized law enforcement. They'll send in INS, federal marshals, probably FBI too, all in combat fatigues, with heavy firepower and armored vehicles. They'll deport the Egyptians back to Egypt, where they'll probably be killed as they come off the aircraft. They'll move the orcs in, and arrest anyone who tries to stop them. And they'll stay to make sure that if anyone objects to the black crime they'll bring, they are arrested for violating their ‘civil rights.’ Bangor will find itself under foreign military occupation.""I agree," I said. "That is what they'll do. The question is, do we let them win that way, and count it a moral victory for our side, or do we try to stop 'em?"We had to think about that one for a while. If we tried to stop them, it meant war – at the physical level as well as the moral.After some talk, our Bangor CO, former Army captain Don Vanderburg, brought us to a decision. "We have two questions to answer: should we stop them if we can, and can we do it? As to the first, it's clear to me," Don said. "Of course. It's my town, my home. And if the feds can rape Bangor this way, the Maine Idea will look hopeless. Most people will give it up. So I think we have to try to stop them.""I also think we can do it," he continued. "They look like soldiers, but they're not. They're just civil servants in tree suits. Most of them have never studied war. They don't know the terrain, while we do. Plus, we'll have the support of the people, and they'll be invaders. That support translates into all kinds of help, especially information.""We may be able to do this in a way where no blood is shed. Remember, these guys aren't up for a fight. Most of them just want to make twenty and get out. They aren't our enemies. Most of them share our values and will be privately hoping we win. It's the people they work for who are our enemies. If we can avoid fighting them, they will try not to fight us."So we decided to resist.The first part of the operation went according to plan. With some help from folks who knew the back roads, Father Dimitri got his Egyptians in. We hid them in local churches, then on July 23, one day after the apartment buildings were cleaned out, we moved them in.By now, we had our prep down pat. We had friends in the media, including national media, forewarned and on the scene. We had a dozen clergy, led by the local Monsignor, out front of the buildings to explain what we were doing. The mayor and police chief of Bangor were on hand too, to explain that their city welcomed good people who were in need; it just didn't want violent criminals. We made the evening TV news all across the country, and on the whole the coverage was favorable. We'd taken the moral high ground.In Washington, an enraged President Cisneros held a news conference the next morning. After denouncing this "racist, insensitive, hurtful, and illegal action by people who want to hold back the future," he announced that a convoy of federal law enforcement agents were on their way to Bangor "to uphold the lawful actions of this government and ensure that justice is done on behalf of Americans of color." Forgetting that his lapel mic was still on, after he had gone backstage, he put it more directly: "I'll show these white crackers who's running this place now.”Like everywhere in the old U.S.A., militias had been sprouting in Maine (most called themselves a neighborhood watch). Some were for nut cases, most were not. Most were made up of decent people who realized their country was falling apart, and when it fell completely the only security would be local security. They were preparing to provide that. The Christian Marines had ties with some of the more serious groups in Maine, and they were willing to work with us to fight the federal invasion.Equally important, we had a great intel system: the cops. Most of the state police in Massachusetts and Maine and many local police were with us by this time; they realized our values were also their values. The feds needed the cops’ help, didn't realize they'd been penetrated, and provided them the route the convoy would take. The Washington boys were so confident they did the obvious, coming right up I-95.Our ambush site was near Newport, Maine, where I-95 crosses the marshes at the southern end of Lake Sebasticook on a long, low bridge. The State Cops told us the convoy would leave Boston about 5 AM on June 27, which would put it into Newport around 10 AM the same day. Forewarned, we'd moved our folks into position the night of the 26th.We were prepared for a real fight, but it was not what we wanted. Dead feds would quickly be turned into martyrs by the media, and most of those guys were privately on our side. The challenge to the Christian Marines was to try to handle this so we won, but with nobody wounded or dead. As always, the physical level of war had to serve the moral level or it would work against us.I was with an OP we had established just south and east of the bridge. Of course, we'd gone over the plan time and again. More important, everyone understood our objective: defeat them, but don't hurt or kill them. The militias we worked with had the self-discipline to make sure their actions served that intent, even when events outran the plan (which they always did) and men had to improvise.We had a radio in the OP tuned to the state police frequency, and the trooper out front of the convoy broadcast its position every five minutes. Officially, this was so the local cops could clear out the civilian traffic; the feds never thought to ask who else might be listening. Right on schedule, the convoy – a HUMMWV in the lead, then two Bradley Fighting Vehicles, two more HUMMWVs, seven five-ton trucks, and a final HUMMWV as tail-end Charlie – hit the south end of the bridge at 10:13 AM.We had wired the end panels of the northbound bridge with explosives set for command detonation. From the OP, I could see the whole span, and once all the convoy was on it I hit the detonator. Both panels blew with a roar every fed could hear, even with the vehicles buttoned up.Immediately, before the agents could figure out what was happening, I broke into their net. "This is the Maine militia," I said in my best command voice. "We have cut the road before and behind you. You cannot move forward or back. We have every vehicle targeted with crew-served weapons, including .50 cals and 90 mm recoilless. If you open fire, you're dead. Lay down your weapons and come out of the vehicles, slowly, one at a time."At the same instant, a company's worth of infantry, militia and Christian Marines (general staff types also get to mix it up on occasion), were in their faces. We'd positioned them not at the ends of the bridge but under it, along its length (a modern light infantry defense works parallel to an enemy mech column, not across its head). They were equipped with grappling hooks and climbing ropes. As soon as they heard the end panels blow, they swung their grapples for the hand rails and rappelled up. They had weapons leveled at the drivers before the vehicles came to a stop.This was the critical moment. We weren't bluffing; we did have heavy weapons, and we would take the vehicles out if we had to. No one moved, or spoke. The whole thing took less than a minute, but time slowed down so it seemed like hours. Then, slowly, one of the Bradleys started training its turret to the right, as if to look for a target. "Shit," I thought, "the dumb bastard is going to open up."A sixteen-year old kid from Rockland saved the day for us. He was on the Bradley's left side. He saw the vehicle commander had popped his hatch to come up for a better look. With the agility you lose by the time you're twenty, he was on the vehicle, and the commander got a face full of rifle butt before his head was all the way out. The kid, La Riviere, dropped two smoke and one CS grenades down the hatch, slammed it shut and sat on it, with his AK trained on the infantry hatches.Two federal marshals came out of those hatches, saw the AK in their faces and gave up. The rest of the crew, choking and puking, came out the rear hatch with their hands in the air – the Italian salute, we used to call it. I was on my feet now, where our guys could see me, gesturing madly and screaming, "Get away from the vehicle!" As soon as our troops and the prisoners were behind the next vehicles in line, I slapped the 90 gunner in our OP on the shoulder and said, "Take that Bradley out."Like the Russian BMP, the Bradley was an explosion waiting to happen, a tin-clad rolling armor dump that any anti-tank weapon instantly turned into a Viking funeral for its crew. The 90 mm recoilless rifle round hit the ammo and it blew, the turret turning pinwheels in the sky until it plunged sizzling into the lake. The chassis was quickly reduced to a molten mass of metal and treads.The Feds had seen enough at that point. As Trooper Kelly said, they weren't soldiers. Like anyone in law enforcement, they knew they might get shot at, but a full-scale battle was a different matter. Plus, it had all happened so fast. Wrapped in the smell of real fear and fresh excrement, they crawled out of their vehicles and surrendered.We brought our POWs, 83 federal marshals and INS agents (no FBI this time), and our own guys down from the bridge on ladders. We had three Bangor city school buses waiting on the parallel secondary road, and bundled everyone on board. The buses were as close as the feds would get to Bangor.Before we pulled out, we took the opportunity to play some mind-games with the real enemy down in Washington. With a video cam rolling, we turned the .50 cals and 90 mms on the remaining, empty vehicles. The tape of exploding, burning military trucks, HUMMWVs and remaining Bradley, coupled with footage of the line of federal prisoners marching off with their hands behind their heads, went to all the networks. In 24 hours, the whole nation knew Maine had fought the federal government, and won.Our challenge was to turn a tactical victory into a strategic one. Maine was with us; the Battle of Lake Sebasticook, as it was quickly known, made the Maine Idea real. The slogan appeared overnight on hand-lettered signs in yards, on bumper stickers, on banners hung from highway bridges. But we were nowhere near ready to defeat a full-scale federal invasion, and we knew one was coming.Washington was still full of fight. President Cisneros, trying to position himself as a second Lincoln, vowed the Union would be preserved, at any cost. Never was the old rule of "first as tragedy, then as farce," so applicable. He announced the 82nd Airborne was on its way to Bangor.But we had an ancient and effective weapon with which to defend ourselves: hostages. As our militiamen returned to their homes all over Maine, many carried an unusual cargo in the trunk of their car: a trussed-up federal agent. Of course, the feds had specialized hostage-rescue units. But they didn't have enough of them to hit sites all over Maine simultaneously, even if they could find where the agents were hidden.On the 30th of June, we made the feds an offer, through an open letter to Cisneros printed in the Bangor paper. The key part read:We have no desire or intention to harm anyone. We could easily have killed many, perhaps all the federal the agents who invaded our state. We have killed none of them, and all are now safe and well cared for. We look forward to returning them to their homes and families as soon as possible. We do not regard them as our enemies.However, our first responsibility is to our own homes and families, which you now threaten. Therefore, we regret we have to say that we cannot guarantee the safety of the federal agents now in our custody if further federal forces enter Maine.To underscore the point, we arranged for CNN to interview several militia units that were holding some of the prisoners. They allowed that if those paratroopers landed in Bangor, or the feds tried any rescue ops, the lot of their policeman would not be a happy one. One unit already had a noose hanging from a large oak tree. It was a bluff, but Washington couldn't know that.We had a few agents at Ft. Bragg, so we knew within hours that the airlift had been put on hold. Cisneros was waffling.Meanwhile, the 250 black parolees who were to move into Bangor had been stuck in a couple of motels near Worcester, Massachusetts, waiting for the federal troops to clear their way in. The Justice Department's lawyers had determined that, since they had been paroled, they could not be kept under guard. It seems a few of them got tired of waiting and decided to go have some fun. The date was July 4, 2021.A summer day in New England is a true joy. That Fourth of July was especially nice. The temperature got up to 77 degrees, with low humidity, a gentle breeze out of the northwest and a few white, puffy, cotton-ball clouds, the kind that children like to see animal shapes in. Sister Mary Frances of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament had brought her Bible school pupils, grades two through five, to a small park on the bank of the West River. They had sandwiches and cookies, toys, a big American flag and sparklers to celebrate the day. Sister Mary Frances had planned to read them the story of the Ride of Paul Revere.Thirteen of the parolees discovered them there just after lunch. By the time the police found them later in the day, the Sister and most of the children were lying where they had knelt to say the Rosary, praying for the protection that did not come in this life. She had been raped repeatedly before being strangled with the chain on her Crucifix. Perhaps she had bought the three surviving children the time they needed to crawl off into the woods and hide. A posse of state troopers and frantic parents found them there just after dusk.The media might well have passed over the event in silence, at least outside Worcester; it didn't fit their agenda. But "Ms." LaDrek of HUD happened to be in Worcester that very weekend. She had come to open a new high-rise public housing development, modeled on St. Louis famed Pruett-Igoe. At her news conference, she said that the slaughter of Sister Mary Frances and her young charges "was nothing compared to what people of color had suffered in America since the white invaders first arrived. Maybe it would help the white people of Massachusetts have a better understanding of Black Rage. If so, it might be a positive experience for Worcester."The news conference had been carried live on most of the Worcester TV and radio stations. It concluded with Ms. LaDrek leading the new residents of the housing project into the commons room for a nice lunch. By 12:30, the courtyard in front of the project was filling with Worcester's citizenry, and they weren't in a celebratory mood. They were construction workers, housewives, good Catholics most of them, some coming straight from the noon mass at Blessed Sacrament. Their kids could have been the ones raped and butchered. In some cases, they were.The priest from Blessed Sacrament himself, with some of the nuns, led the uninvited guests into the luncheon, chanting the Dies Irae. The distinguished Secretary of HUD tried to bolt out the back door, but one of the nuns, a sturdy Irish girl, tackled her. The swift, new elevator whisked LaDrek and a party of escorts to the top floor, where a window was knocked out. The Honorable Secretary of HUD followed the shards of glass down, to a hard and fatal landing in the front parking lot.It's almost uncanny; our Thirty Years War also started with a defenestration. This time, no angels (or manure piles, if you're a Protestant) broke the fall.A story like this couldn't be hushed up. The nation was appalled, not by the assassination but by what had preceded it.In Maine, we moved swiftly to take advantage of the public's mood. The militias set up recruiting stations in every shopping center and on each town common. The slogan on a banner over each station read, "The Maine Idea – Defend Our Families." Any male with a weapon could join. The lines ran a block or more long. Within 48 hours we had more than 100,000 men pledged to fight for our state.In Washington, Cisneros knew he was beaten. The order went to the 82nd Airborne to stand down. Resorting to one of the city's oldest tricks, Cisneros asked Congress to establish a "Blue Ribbon Panel" to investigate the whole affair. Announcing that "until the panel is appointed and has conducted its investigation, it would be inappropriate for me to comment further," he crawled into the deepest hole he could find. The panel, everyone knew, would take years to complete its work, then issue a report that said nothing. That's what "Blue Ribbon Panels" existed to do.So we'd won. Some might say it wasn't a good, clean victory on the field of battle. It wasn't, but that isn't how war works. War is politics, propaganda, fighting, maneuvering, luck, all boiled up in one big cauldron. This time, our side had bubbled up to the top.At least we showed that victory doesn't always belong to the bigger battalions.