Emerald-Hammer

“Certified to NIJ level IV” it says on the inside of the slice-of-bread sized plate that’s supposed to prevent my inner organs from being splashed across our designated patrol route. Not that I can actually read it, I’m icon-literate like the rest of the home-schoolers in my fire-team, but I can’t read. No point wasting an education on a no-mark Gnome when you can can teach them just enough to function at their jobs. The picture of a heart one side of the plate, and a bullet on the other makes it fairly obvious which way round it goes.

I’m no flag-waving Nazi - like the IndyMedia calls me;  I’m just a guy who wanted something a little better, somebody who tried to dream a little. I dreamt of freedom of choice, funny how dreams can so easily turn into nightmares.

My issue gear awaits me as a climb out of the base showers, threadbare BDU’s from the last century, worn and washed dozens of times, their camouflage patterns faded now, all the better to fade into the dusty dawn outside. I’m a National Guardsman, about to patrol the border of the greatest and most bankrupt democracy on the face of the planet. Not that I know what democracy means, my parent’s signed away my proxy vote when I was sixteen, I think they got twenty extra channels of daytime “stories” for it.

We’re patrolling the great divide today, between the second world country that America has become and the third world shanty towns just over the border. Truth be told, there isn’t much difference really, but the ruling white elite don’t like the gomers coming over the Rio Grande all by themselves, they’d rather have them shipped into to the prestigious gardener academies or educated at private maid schools. Rio Grande is something of a misnomer too, since we cut off the flow of it and the Colorado to ensure water security for the nation.

The rest of the squad are from similar backgrounds to me, poor uneducated, some of them are serving out sentences for disorder misdemeanours, others are here looking to be sponsored for their high school equivalency courses. We’re the lowest of the low.

Except of course for the people we’re out patrolling for, illegal immigrants, terrorists, child kidnappers, satanists, drug mules, liberals. Whatever TNN’s bogeyman of the day is. We’re here to stop them getting over the line in the sand drawn by President Bush II’s “Great Wall of Texas”, when our father’s voluntarily deployed here as part of the original volunteer National Guard I bet they didn’t think there’d still be a guard presence here thirty years later.

But then I don’t supposed they’d have predicted the selling of voting rights, the Corporate Security Force Bill, the suspension of Habeus Corpus, or any of the other changes that have left us where we are now.

When we were all assembled, the LT led is in mandatory prayer, and we left the barracks.