“The Fool’s Errand”

***Author’s note: Here is a small fiction project I have been working on for fun. I will post portions of the story during 2018, so stay tuned. Below is part one.***

Chapter one: The Deserter’s Dying Declaration

Tim Meyer woke up an hour before the late winter sun’s first rays. Fifty miles, he thought. Just fifty miles.

Almost every morning the thought woke him. He and the other men in the militia finally obtained the information they needed. They had the answer. Finally, he thought, at long last we have it. Now the fifty miles. After months of pain and agony, they might end the fighting. Stop this awful bloodshed, he thought.

Tim kissed his sleeping wife and left the bedroom. Opening a door to the outside, he retrieved a jug from the snow filled with frozen coffee. Throwing another log into the stove, he warmed the coffee and drank it.

No cream like . . . before, he thought, but still: hot coffee. In between sips, he thought of the other guys in the militia. Does it wake them up early too? he wondered. Does the fifty miles consume them? And, for the thousandth time he asked himself, how can we beat it?

Moments later, he swallowed the last of his first coffee and poured another. Peering out the window, he noted four new inches of snow. Four inches was not too much before the invasion. Not even enough to keep kids home from school. But now there were no plows. No salt. Hardly even any gas. Four inches of snow changed everything for a day or two.

Before, he thought to himself again, even the word seems odd now.

Caught up on his chores and without any militia duties for the day, Tim rinsed the coffee cup using water from a pail and threw the grimy water into the snow. Saving septic space sure is glorious, he joked with himself. He and his wife used the toilet for bowel movements only. Without running water, they melted snow to fill the toilet’s tank. Good thing we aren’t on city plumbing, he thought.

Many others in the area were not so lucky. Their sewage pipes stopped running long ago. In the Fall, Meyer dug a latrine about 25 yards from the house to use when the septic tank filled, but for now they could at least go to the bathroom from the warmth of their own home. Remembering it was Thursday, he thought, I’d have killed for a Thursday off before. Now I’d kill to have it all back how it was. A Thursday at the office would be great right about now.

He wrote a note.

Babe,

On a walk. I’ll be back by lunch.

-Tim

Tim had different sets of clothes to wear for different levels of the cold. Two sets of gloves and a face mask when below zero. An extra scarf when the wind was blowing. He checked the young couple’s battery-powered thermometer and geared up according to the temperature: five degrees Fahrenheit.

Donning his five degree clothing, he started walking. Five steps into the walk, he paused and looked east. Through the pine trees surrounding the property, the sun’s first sliver crested the horizon, illuminating the eastern sky orange. Sunrises never ceased to amaze him. How could they be so beautiful? he stood on his front stoop and wondered. A massive orb of heat and flames almost one hundred million miles away can do this? How?

He closed his eyes and pictured the best sunrise of his life. His wife and he, on a vacation with her family to Hawaii, made a decision to never adjust to the time zone changes on the trip. There for a week, they went to bed each night at 8:30 p.m. and woke up at 5:00 a.m. They were on the west side of Maui and sat on the beach each morning as the sun rose behind them. The rising sun lit up the ocean in front of them and the three other islands of the archipelago they could see from the beach. For six mornings straight, they watched young humpback whales jump and soar through the air before crashing back into the ocean.

On the seventh and final morning, the pair grabbed the rental car and drove north around Maui’s coastal road. In the dark with only their phones for light sources, they walked to the northernmost point they could find. Rough seas smashed against the craggy, volcanic shoreline. As the sun peaked up, they noticed a hole in the volcanic rock that formed a blowhole. The bigger waves that crashed into the island built up pressure in the blowhole. The more pressure, the higher water shot into the air from the blowhole. On this rough morning, massive, rolling waves caused fifty foot geysers. As the sun rose, the orange and yellow background made a serene backdrop to the geyser. He had never been more in love with his wife than in that moment. He thought of that now. He longed for a life like that.

But that was before. Now, survival mattered. But the sunrise this day hit him in a similar way. A cold, clear Minnesota sunrise. Different from a Maui sunrise, but similar. Different realities, same planet. He shook the Hawaii memories from his head. Focus on the here and now, he scolded himself, no dreaming.

He looked up at the sky. Outside of those orange clouds, the sky looked clear to the west. But clear, sunny days do not bring warmth in this country, and another cold, March morning in Minnesota began.

Even before he was off his driveway, his mind was working. Realizing he was already deep in thought just seconds into the walk, he thought of his dad. “When you need to think,” his dad had always said, “walk.”

Dad, he almost whispered, I’m trying to get the grid coordinates to you, he thought. Just hold on, and we’ll figure out a way to get them to you.

Before the invasion, Tim’s walks were famous among the town’s residents. “Hi Tim,” they would shout to him as they raked their leaves, shoveled their driveways, or loaded their kids into their cars for school.

“Have a good one,” he would call back. He walked at least three miles a day. The walks were such a mainstay in the city that the local paper had even done a story on his walking: Meyer walks a thousand miles in 2018. The reporter had joined him on one of his walks. After the first mile, he had not spoken. She asked, “What do you do on the walks?”

“I think,” he responded.

“Don’t you get bored?” she asked.

“Never,” he said. After the second mile, she told Tim to go on without her and called her husband for a ride. The article was nice, but the reporter missed the whole point of his walks. Twenty-two clipped-out copies arrived at the Meyers’ home over the next few weeks. Friends and family sent him the article, some even circled the line “Meyer does not read, listen to podcasts or music. No, he ‘thinks.’ In hundreds of hours of walking over one thousand miles this year, Meyer has had a lot of time to think.”

“Completely missed the point,” Meyer complained to his wife. But he had played the good soldier to the town by thanking everyone and laughing at the “a lot of time to think” jokes.

Post-invasion, the walks continued because they had to; walking was wired into Meyer’s DNA. Since the fighting started, and instead of walking through the downtown city streets like before, he trudged through the woods so no scout helicopters could spot him. On occasion, a helicopter would swoop down and kill random males walking in the open. But that was not the norm. One unarmed person out walking was too small a target for a helicopter to risk attacking at a low altitude. Visible rifles, on the other hand, meant death. No rifle and the pilots most likely would not take the time to kill you. So Meyer continued his walks. Now clandestine, he walked with only a sidearm and stayed in the treeline. He knew the area well and would not be spotted.

Tim Meyer walked and walked. He lifted his knees high so his feet could clear the snowpack. As his hips grew sore, his mind came alive.

He thought of his men. Good men, he told himself, brave. Meyer was a sergeant in charge of around 12 militiamen. And his men–the precise number varied with the men’s wives’ childbirths, injuries, deaths, and other survival-related needs around their homes–were solid, dependable men. Guys like the ones he grew up with. They fought the Invaders well.

Meyer’s squad was part of the Valleymen militia. The Valleymen split off from the Three Rivers Militia six months earlier. The Minnesota militia split its forces–not a normal strategic decision–in an effort to harass the Invaders into bogging down before winter set in. The remaining Three Rivers forces headed off to a town called Marine on St. Croix. The Valleymen split off 45 miles west to a town called Buffalo before heading south and east towards a river city called Chaska. The plan worked, but the Invaders’ presence in the area between the militias was impregnable. Four months had elapsed with no communication between the militia’s two branches.

There–the Valleymen in Chaska and the Three Rivers men in Marine on St. Croix–each branch of the militia waited. Two Marine Corps regiments coalesced in Burnsville to the Invaders’ south. The Marines blocked the Invaders’ planned route south, while the militias harassed them to the east and southwest.

Months of violent and costly fighting followed. Both sides dug in, and standstill ensued. There were near daily skirmishes, and the militias–fighting on their home turf–gained on the Invaders. All along the east and southwest of the Invaders’ flanks, attacks, kidnappings of individual Invaders, snipers, and improvised explosives chewed away at the Invaders’ superior numbers.

And so it was that March morning. The lack of communication between the militias had been an inconvenience up to February, but it caused no real strategic problems. The fact was, there had been no real reason to communicate. “You harass from the southwest, and we will harass from the east.” The men knew from their veterans’ time in Afghanistan and Iraq that this sort of decentralized harassing insurgency worked well.

In February, though, the inability to communicate increased in importance. Wild news flew in from refugees and travelers: Minnesota was the critical point of the war. The Invaders had moved their control and leadership nodes there, and the American people would rally there in the spring. The militias and Marines just needed to survive the winter and hold the Invaders in place. Spring was a few long months away.

In early February, a Canadian battalion had sacrificed itself in Fargo, North Dakota in an attempt to link up with the Three Rivers militia. The Canadians marched right into an Invaders scout regiment shoring up the Invaders’ rear and scouting for food. The word trickled to the Valleymen: wholesale slaughter.

But then, like the April warmup and May snowmelt the Americans looked forward to with hope, a miracle. A “deserter” from the regiment–a man from Winnipeg–showed up at the Valleymen’s headquarters 18 days after the regiment’s defeat. Unable to reach the Three Rivers Militia, he diverted to the Valleymen.

Tim Meyer was there when the man entered militia headquarters. He remembered the incident well. The man entered Chaska where, by dumb luck, there were no Invader patrols operating right then. Some young boys in the militia intercepted the man. The man’s uniform was in tatters. He was emaciated. It was clear he had eaten nothing in the nearly three weeks since the defeat. He could not speak and was near death. Arriving in the Valleymen’s camp, he collapsed. They wrapped the man in blankets and fed him their scraps, but the Valleymen had no real remorse for this man. Deserters disgraced themselves, even if this one had walked 250 miles to their town during the harsh winter.

Two days after the deserter showed up, he had regained some strength, but his prospects for survival were poor. Under intense questioning and borderline torture, his stories did not jibe. Word spread to the militiamen that the deserter was, in fact, a deserter. At their weekly council, the Valleymen sat around a bonfire and talked about the man.

“He ought to be hung,” said one.

“I dunno, it seems he’s been tortured enough on that walk,” said another.

“He’s right,” said a third. “Guy lost six toes and three fingers from frostbite. That’s enough for me. He’ll probably die anyways.”

A squad leader chimed in, “10-1 vote in my squad. Hang him. Sure the guy’s suffered, but we have to make it so others are afraid to desert.” The men spoke and debated. After a few minutes, their leader, Colonel Larry Arneson, spoke.

“Alright, men. I’ve heard enough.” Everyone was quiet immediately. “Here’s the deal,” he started. Not a man for too many words, he had already spoke more in these two-and-a-half sentences than most men around the fire had ever heard from him. “The deserter is a Canadian regular, not a spy. I cannot decree him dead without a trial. But he is an ally, so technically I have jurisdiction over him. Let’s convene a courtmartial to determine the man’s fate. I want a verdict by tomorrow at noon,” he said with finality. “And besides, he may not live until then, anyways, so let’s move on to more important topics.” The men nodded. A trial was the right thing to do. The Valleymen moved on with their agenda.

Tim felt a sense of calmness enter his body. Their leadership was strong. Arneson was a close business associate and friend of his father’s before the invasion. Having such a man as their colonel warmed his heart. Ruthless, but fair, he remembered thinking.

But the leadership had made a mistake in labeling the man a likely deserter so early in his interrogations. Indeed, had the Valleymen known the information their captive held, they would have sprinted to him, fed him, clothed him, and nurtured him back to health, so important was the information.

The next day just before noon, the deserter stood with a noose around his neck. He looked pitiful. His condition deteriorated overnight, and medical treatment that day would have only prolonged his inevitable death. The colonel approached the court as one of his captains–a lawyer before the invasion–read from a sheet of paper with his own scrawled writing on it. The colonel only heard the last part of the captain’s decree.

“. . . do hereby do sentence you to death,” the captain read, “on this day, March the Fourth.” “May God have mercy on your soul,” the captain cried out. He thrust the paper work in front of the colonel. “Sign here, sir,” he instructed Colonel Arneson. The old man signed, and the captain turned to the condemned man. “Do you have any final words?”

“I do,” said the deserter struggled.

“Proceed,” said the captain.

The condemned man gulped and, with his hands bound behind his back, tried to adjust the noose as best he could using his shoulders and neck. “May I make a request?” he asked.

“You may,” said the captain, “but it is our custom to only allow the condemned to speak. Should your request prove to be the slightest bit out of line, we will deny it and put you to death post haste.”

“Very well,” the man in the noose said, “I have been patted down, strip-searched, and patted down again-and-again,” he said. Each word seemed to take every bit of his energy. “I see that your colonel has arrived like I hoped he would. I am no threat to him or any of you. I make but one small request: may I have a word alone with your colonel?”

The men milling about laughed. “No, you may not,” the captain started, but before he could finish, the Colonel patted him on the shoulder.

“I believe this man, despite his guilty verdict for desertion, rates a short chat with the ranking officer of his executioners,” said the colonel. Colonel Arneson approached the man. The militamen whispered among their ranks. Their colonel was a good man, they said to each other as they looked on with admiration. Respectable, but willing to get his hands dirty when needed–all while maintaining the decency that was so far gone since the invasion.

As the entire Valleymen militia watched, the colonel walked towards the man, brushed aside the militiamen frantically patting down the condemned man for fear of some sort of hidden weapon, and nodded to the deserter. The deserter fell to his knees and the noose tightened. Tim Meyer remembered thinking that any longer and the man would die of his own accord and no hanging would be necessary. The deserter had no energy left and sat on his knees with his head slung forward. The colonel lifted the man up and propped him up. “Go ahead,” the colonel said to the dissenter. The man gathered his composure and whispered to the colonel.

The militia looked on while the man spoke into the colonel’s ear. Meyer noticed a change in the colonel’s body language. Arneson’s eyes lit up, and he encouraged the man to speak. Summoning every bit of energy in his body, the condemned man spoke fast. A full twenty seconds later, the colonel hugged the man and asked for a knife. A confused man ran the colonel a knife. The colonel cut the man loose.

“Get a doctor,” the colonel shouted as the man collapsed onto the colonel. The colonel checked the man’s pule. Seeing the man was dead, the colonel relinquished the man and grabbed a notebook and pen. He wrote as fast as he could ignoring the commotion around him.

“Sir,” the captain said after a few seconds, “sir, he’s dead. What’s going on?”

“I know. Forget the doctor. Have a squad from Litchfield’s company spun up for a patrol,” he said jotting down a series of numbers onto the notebook, “we might have just broken the war open.”

Tim remembered the whole incident as he walked. He considered the details and fallout. He was four miles from home and exhausted, the fresh snow made the walking difficult. He rested by a mostly frozen creek that maintained a small trickle despite the bitter cold. He stared at the creek and remembered following that very creek down the river bluff and into the Minnesota River as a boy. He remembered bowhunting there as a teen. And he remembered seeing deer following the creek down to the river. He thought of the deer.  Then he thought of a snowflake, falling to the ground. Melting in the spring. The former snowflake, now a droplet of water, riding the small, nameless creek into the Minnesota River. The drop of water traveling down the Minnesota River and into the Mississippi River. Maybe to the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe as drinking water in some small town along the Mississippi.

He thought of the snowflake’s journey. And his mind lit up. An idea. It could work, he told himself. His heart raced. Risky, but it would work, he knew. He knew the answer. He knew how to get the grid coordinates to the Three River Militia. He knew how to end the war.

After sitting there at that spot for a minute, he set out for home. With each step, his determination grew. His plan would work. But a new feeling, sadness, bubbled to the surface. His plan would bring great pain to his family. He could see the future: they would drive the Invaders out.

Chapter two: Excerpt from historian Shawn Anderson’s book Hindsight 2020: A Post-Minnesota Victory History of The Bloody War of 2020

Nine bloody months before the incident in Chaska, Minnesota so memorialized in popular culture as the war’s turning point that it has its own colloquial name–“The Deserter’s Dying Declaration,” the Invaders sprinted south and west across the east coast. An unprepared nation mounted little defense. New York City fell. Philadelphia. A shocked nation watched on their televisions as their country’s main cities fell. The government fled Washington D.C. The Invaders wrecked the power grid. Americans televisions stopped working. Only some radio stations broadcasted. Atlanta fell.

The Invaders took the entire eastern half of the country by surprise. Refugees tried to outrun the Invader and stormed west. Millions unable to move quicker than the Invaders got stuck behind their lines. Millions died in the Invaders’ clean-up operations to the rear of their advanced units.

Finally, the Marine Corps’ Fourth Marine Division held strong at Baton Rouge and Memphis. This division–a reserve unit–recalled all its Marines the day the Invaders crossed into the United States. The Marines mounted their defense. This was the first organized resistance the Invaders faced. Instead of fighting the Fourth Marine Division, the Invaders concentrated their forces and sprung to the north. Meanwhile, tens of millions of refugees on the eastern seaboard subsisted on leftover canned food. Starvation set in.

A feint at Cape Girardeau had diverted much of the US military (“they won’t go north and deal with the winters” the experts had said). Tens of thousands of American military men from all the branches descended on the the medium-sized Missouri town. There was no American government apparatus to order the military. The President, vice president, and speaker of the house were all dead or captured. The President pro tempore of the Senate was alive and in Salt Lake City. He asserted that he was the rightful head of the United States and ordered the military to surrender in an effort to garner favorable terms from the Invaders.

Instead of surrendering, the United States military ignored his calls for surrender and enforced martial law. That remaining of the federal courts cried foul, but the military ignored their rulings. The American military bet on the decisive battle occurring at Cape Girardeau. And its public rallied. They provided near endless supplies. They jailed the President pro tempore of the Senate and heeded the generals’ orders.

But the Invaders went right on by Cape Girardeau, continuing north.

They next attempted to cross the Mississippi at St. Louis and failed miserably. Most of what remained of the United States Army was in St. Louis. On the eve of the battle, the generals gave up on Chicago and withdrew the First Marine Division in a race down I-55 to St. Louis. The generals had been hit hard politically, but it had paid off as the military held the line at St. Louis. Licking their wounds after the St. Louis defeat, the Invaders recognized that Chicago was an “open city” pulled back and sprinted straight to Chicago, coming forth in frightful numbers. Chicago braced for a costly fight. Many fled the city. Those who remained were the victims of unspeakable pillaging.

The United States lost its Third City, but the move kept the Invaders east of the Mississippi. The Invaders took Milwaukee in a sweep and then sprinted northwest towards Minnesota. They hoped to take Minneapolis-St. Paul and then cruise back down Interstate 35 to Kansas City. They planned to take Kansas City and choke off the First Marine Division at St. Louis by controlling Chicago, Milwaukee, the Twin Cities, and Kansas City before choking off the Marines over the winter. They assumed that after St. Louis, the only remaining fights would be Dallas and Houston. California and the West would fall after.

Instead, resistance in Minnesota had been brutal. The Invaders moved north from Milwaukee to secure Duluth’s port as their main supply depot. Two Marine regiments from FirstMarDiv split off from St. Louis and sprinted north, back-filled by Missouri National Guard units. The Marines needed to fortify Duluth, using Superior–the greatest and most violent of the Great Lakes–as a natural barrier to the north to prevent the Invaders from taking Duluth and attacking the Twin Cities from the north.

The ensuing battle was expensive in both lives and materials. In the end, the Invaders decimated both Marine regiments. But the regiments returned the favor and held Duluth after some help from Canadian reinforcements arrived from Calgary and Winnipeg.

The common belief among the remaining American public–and its tenuous government–was that there would be battles throughout the winter along Interstate 35 in Kansas City and Oklahoma City. All sides agreed there would be massive battles in the Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio area. Should the Americans lose, the Invaders could speed past Denver, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake and attack California by spring. And California was fighting its own mini state Civil War. The anti-war faction and the “Pragmatists” as they called themselves, were attacking military bases in California in an effort to curry favor with the Invaders after their eventual win. After California fell, the US would be vanquished.

Fighting to take Duluth was the Invaders’ biggest error. Had they simply attacked the Twin Cities after Milwaukee, they would taken the cities and begun their march south. But for reasons unbeknownst at the time, the Invaders over emphasized Duluth’s importance. The Invaders bogged down there in the face of harsh fighting. This gave the Americans valuable time to mount their Minnesota defense and attempt to hold out until the cold winter set in. Chicago’s ports would have provided sufficient supply depots to the Invaders–especially considering that Lake Superior froze during cold winters and Duluth’s ports were usually unreachable by boat for months at a time.

Recognizing too late they could not pass through Duluth and seemingly finally aware of the city’s unimportance to their goals, the Invaders withdrew and attacked the Twin Cities. But their foray to Duluth cost them precious time and allowed the Americans to regroup. St. Paul fell fast. Minneapolis (bolstered by those who escaped St. Paul) lasted longer. Two regiments of Marines congregated in Burnsville, blocking the Invaders’ path south. With the Marines to the south and the militias pinching them from the southwest and east, the Invaders’ historical offensive bogged down. They had technically crossed the Mississippi but only by a few miles. Winter descended. And like both Napoleon and Hitler, the Invaders’ overconfidence in the face of a brutal winter spelled defeat.

The great sacrifice and heroism of Americans at all these above-mentioned battles is not the subject of this story. Many other accounts detail anecdotal stories of heroism and sacrifice. This book covers only the military and political maneuvers that resulted in the Invaders’ ultimate defeat stemming from the Americans exploiting their victory in Minnesota’s Three Rivers region.