regretted not taking more classes before the Crunch. He realized that he needed to get some training in a hurry, or he’d have a short life expectancy as a resistance fighter. So, at Adrian’s suggestion, Ben sought the help of Peter Moeller, a retired neighbor who was a Vietnam veteran and longtime competitive shooter. With mostly dry practice and some .22 rimfire training in his basement, Ben became a much more competent shooter. Under Moeller’s tutelage, Ben also learned the basics of combat fieldcraft, first-aid for gunshot wounds, and land navigation. Ben began running, stretching, and calisthenics every morning. He also read and reread every book that he could find on guerrilla warfare.
Diving into Adrian’s book collection, as well as Moeller’s, Ben read a variety of books that ranged from texts like
Through Adrian, Ben was put in touch with a resistance group that was being formed locally to conduct arson and sabotage. They called themselves the Matchmakers.
By prearrangement, Ben first met the sabotage group’s recruiter at a local bar. Initially, Ben was enthusiastic about the Matchmakers’ plans, but this turned to disappointment as the group endlessly built incendiaries, trained, and practiced. But their few operations were against relatively soft targets of no significance.
The Matchmakers met sporadically after-hours at a Nashville dye plant. From the outset, Ben was not impressed with their organizational structure or their operational security (OPSEC). He thought they talked too openly of their plans and that the group was too large. With eighteen members, the resistance group’s size would have been more appropriate for more overt guerrilla warfare, rather than just the sabotage that they planned. In Ben’s estimation, sabotage teams should have no more than five members, and just a three-member team was ideal. He eventually convinced the unit to break into three smaller cells. Eventually, Ben left the Matchmakers after concluding that they were long on talk, and short on action.
Now physically fit and better trained, Ben moved out of Adrian’s house and joined a seven-man raiding team, with members mainly from Crossville. They called themselves the Cantrell Company, in honor of Charles Cantrell, a Tennessee-born Medal of Honor recipient in the Spanish-American War. Here, Ben got his first taste of combat, in a series of raids and ambushes, most within thirty miles of Crossville. Ben developed a reputation as a daring fighter willing to take risks. Eventually, he became the team’s most frequent point man. He developed a specialty in sentry removal. Eventually Ben was recruited out of the Cantrell Company to join the Old Man’s reconnaissance team.
While he was first with the Matchmakers, Ben learned how to make thermite, which later proved to be a valuable skill. In addition to using some of it himself to weld shut artillery breech blocks, Ben passed along his thermite mixing knowledge to four other independent resistance groups.
The Resistance was impossible for the ProvGov to isolate and defeat because it was essentially leaderless. Anyone who tried to establish himself as a “spokesman” or “commander” was quickly and quietly told to shut up or shut down. Instead of a formal hierarchy, decentralized cells, led by subject matter experts, characterized the Resistance. This gave each resistance group a distinct personality and modus operandi. They numbered anywhere from lone wolves to teams of about thirty. Typically, however, most teams or cells were made up of three to ten people. Each team had a specialty, such as demolition, arson, vehicular sabotage, thermiting, reconnaissance, logistics, couriering, sniping, or assassination.
The beauty of leaderless resistance was that the small cells were difficult to identify, locate, or penetrate. This frustrated the Hutchings government, which had hoped for a quick solution to the guerrilla war. The lack of a hierarchical structure made it impossible to neutralize the groups. For years, the U.S. Army had emphasized social network analysis and organizational-level analysis, as taught in the joint Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The FM 3-24 doctrine and elaborate matrixes and time-event charts were of no value when resistance was leaderless and fought primarily by small cells that intentionally set no patterns.
As part of their subterfuge, many of the resistance groups had fictitious leaders. Often they had elaborate mythologies that were sometimes so believable that they had ProvGov agents busy for weeks, chasing ghosts. For example, in Arizona, the myth of “Conrad Peters” was developed, based on the name of a real-life individual from Scottsdale who had actually left the country to do missionary work in Mexico just before the Crunch. But according to the mythology, “Peters” led a group that hid out in the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix. In New Mexico, “The Paulson Project” supposedly had a secret arms factory in Albuquerque. There was none. In Texas, to supplement three genuine companies there were nine ghost companies of Republic of Texas militia that spread tales of fictitious troop movements throughout the state and even across the Mexican border. In Wyoming, “Colonel Reed” reputedly led the Free State Irregulars. In Utah, there were regular sightings of the enigmatic “Roger Williams,” who supposedly led four sabotage teams. None of these individuals ever existed. Closer to the seat of the ProvGov, the Alvin York “Brigade” was in actuality just sixteen men and women.
Actions by other groups operating from a distance were often attributed to the fictitious groups, to sidetrack pursuing ProvGov agents and maneuver units. GPS coordinates of disused camps deep inside BLM and National Forest lands were often leaked, just to get the ProvGov to go investigate. Sometimes, these ruses would include raids on lightly manned garrisons, after their units were confirmed to have departed in search of the phantoms.
Waterville, Vermont
August, the Second Year
A tip from a confidential informant had pinpointed the house as the hideout of a resistance cell. Arriving before dawn, a French forward observer team in civilian clothes carried a tripod-mounted AN/PED-1 lightweight laser designator rangefinder (LLDR) to a hilltop. They had it set up just as the daylight was broadening and they could make out the house below. Looking through the LLDR, the team leader thumbed the designator’s laser beam on and walked the pip on top of the house that matched the GPS coordinates, distance from the hilltop, and the description from his briefing the previous evening. He locked down the LLDR’s manual adjustments and gave the tripod a couple of slight test bumps, and was satisfied that the pip hadn’t moved. “
The French
Less than a minute later, he heard the reply, “Shot, over.”
Then, far in the distance, he heard a single bark of an artillery piece. He carefully kept the laser pip centered on top of the center of the house. Without glancing away from the LLDR’s eyepiece, he pressed his handset and said, “Shot, out.”
Out of habit, he started counting the time of flight in seconds in French. He saw a bright flash, as a 155millimeter artillery shell detonated in the house. Then, after a brief lag—caused by the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound—he heard the distinctive roar of the artillery shell detonating, and the sound echoed up and down the valley.
Releasing the trigger on the designator and again keying his radio handset, he said, “Splash, over.”
Dogs at a dozen nearby homes began a cacophony of howling and barking. A car alarm near the target house began warbling, no doubt set off by the shell’s concussion.
The fire control center replied, “Splash, out.”
The Frenchman took one last look through the scope and saw that what was left of the house was now engulfed in flames. He gave a thin smile and reported, “Target destroyed. End of mission. Packing up here. Will RTB in approximately thirty-five mikes. Out.”
His two security men were French privates. They wore blue jeans, Land’s End jackets, baseball caps, and sunglasses. They were both armed with
