Shepardsport Pirate Radio

Even before Roy and I became engaged, I had some awareness of what being a Navy officer’s wife entailed. Of course a good bit of it was dated, from reading about the early astronauts and their families, along with a ton of historical fiction set in World War II. So by the time we got married and headed off to Pensacola for his flight training, a lot of the stuff I read about was ancient history. No, I didn’t need calling cards, for the simple reason that formal visits were ancient history. I had some business cards made up when I started looking for freelance assignments, and those worked just fine for what few meet and greets we had down there.

When he got shuffled off into the reserves and put into an airlift squadron, I didn’t think a whole lot about it. He already had his civilian pilot’s license, and it wasn’t that hard to get the necessary jet endorsements to get a job flying for a civilian cargo carrier. In fact, what Roy was flying for them was fundamentally the same airframe, just without the military gear and with corporate livery instead of camo.

Except then the Energy Wars started and his unit got activated. Suddenly I got tossed into a very different situation than what I’d experienced in those last halcyon days of peace. Being based right outside Washington DC had been neat in peacetime, especially going to visit the museums and historic buildings that I’d seen so briefly during the 4H Citizenship Focus course the summer before my last year of high school.

Now we were all too aware that we were in a war zone, that the national capital would be a primary target. Which meant that the military community suddenly became a much larger part of my life.

Sure, I’d met the wife of Roy’s commanding officer when he first reported to his new duty station, so I knew she was an older woman and came from a multi-generation Navy family. But as long as his unit was still on the “one weekend a month and two weeks a year” program, it was pretty much a formality. I saw her a few times at family events for the squadron, but otherwise I had my own life, working for a local silkscreening shop.

Everything changed when Roy’s squadron got their orders to the Middle East. Suddenly I was pulled into the whole officers’ wives’ club thing far more deeply than even at Pensacola. So fast I nearly drowned at first under the rush of expectations.

I do want to make one thing clear: Mrs. Holtz never “wore her husband’s rank” or otherwise usurped authority that was not hers. But she most definitely expected all of use to do our part, and had no qualms about calling us at any hour of the day with a request (which was in effect a command) to go help the family of another member of the unit. There’s the typical “take a casserole over to so-and-so’s house” request, but she’d picked up that I’m an artist, so she didn’t send me a lot of them. My cooking wasn’t bad, but she had enough other women for that job. Instead, I got called on to set up for all the parties. A lot of birthday parties, especially for the younger kids, but we also had parties for the whole squadron’s dependents, especially on holidays.

And she instituted a system of meetings, where we all came over to her house every week to go over things. It wasn’t quite the level of the tea parties and bridge parties I’d read about, with everyone in gloves and those cute little hats you see in the old pictures. We’d dress up a little, but a lot of us wore slacks rather than skirts.

But we were all very definitely aware that we were part of the home front, of the tail that supported our forces on the fighting fronts. It wasn’t just how we’d always start every meeting with the Pledge and the “Star Spangled Banner,” and end them with “God Bless America.” There was an awareness that’s hard to describe, that you really have to experience.

—– Lily Correy, Memories of the Energy Wars, unpublished memoir.

There’s a lot of ruin in a nation. Adam Smith, the father of modern free-market theory, is said to have responded with this remark when told that General Burgoyne surrendering at Saratoga (one of the early acts of the American Revolutionary War) would be the ruin of the UK.

As it turned out, the UK not only survived the loss of her North American colonies, but went on to build a second colonial empire that would last into the twentieth century. She would fight two world wars, stand against incredible odds when it seemed all hope was lost, and even in her diminished state after decolonization would remain a desirable destination for both tourists and immigrants well into the twenty-first century.

The diablovirus pandemic of the mid twenty-first century became a demonstration of just how much ruin nations could absorb before coming apart. To be sure, many began cracking almost as soon as the first outbreaks reached their major population centers. Politicians fled the capitals in favor of the major cities of wealthier nations, where they hoped to be protected against infection. Other wealthy people fled to estates in the countryside, and without leadership, the populace began to fracture along the lines of tribe and clan.

In many cases, these countries were never really “nations” in any practical sense of the world. Their territories had often been drawn as so many lines on a map by colonial powers who had decided an enemy’s territory should be broken up, or it behooved them to shed their own colonial empires which had become both economic and political liabilities. As a result, there was no real polity corresponding to the territory, and often as not these paper countries combined warring factions while dividing previously existing communities. Most often they were held together by force, often by one or another strongman who typically favored his own people at the expense of rival groups. Without the threat of the force of arms to keep the various factions cooperative, these countries soon fractured. They were the ones with the empty villages, the ones where power generation failed quickly, even in the cities.

Where civil society had deeper roots, people pulled together instead of apart. Although many pundits worried about how several decades of immigration from the former colonies might have diluted Britannia’s spirit of keep calm and carry on, by and large people in the UK behaved in ways that their forebears of the Blitz would have been proud of. There were some defectors, some opportunists, particularly in certain neighborhoods of the larger cities in which integration with the larger society was weak. But for the most part, neighbors found ways to help one another while minimizing interpersonal contact. Critical workers continued to go to work, even when it involved exposing themselves to contagion.

We see similar stories across northern Europe, and in Japan and South Korea. All of these are relatively small countries with a cohesive national culture and deep traditions, to the point of being insular. They’re the sort of countries where the grandchildren of someone who brought home a foreign bride are often regarded as at least partly alien to the culture.

However, this cannot be taken to imply that only nations of a blood-and-soil tradition are able to maintain social cohesion under this level of stress, because we also see the pull-together response in the US and many of the other English-speaking nations that are the product of extensive immigration. In fact, we can often see down to the neighborhood level where we have cohesive communities and where civil society has broken down, just by looking at which areas pulled together and which devolved into warlordism.

But as the situation progressed, even cohesive communities could do only so much in the face of increasing shortages of the resources that make modern technological life possible. When trucks could not bring in essential supplies of food and fuel because there simply were not enough truckers to drive them, situations became truly desperate. This was particularly true in regions that were heavily dependent upon fuel oil for electrical generation, and thus for the maintenance of water and sewage treatment facilities, all of which are critical for keeping a modern city running.

Even so, in some areas we see people with knowledge and skills stepping forward, jury-rigging solutions to problems as they emerge and hobbling things forward, while in others people simply give up and resign themselves to enduring the privations…

—- JN Sorensen, A Study in Social Cohesion Under Emergency Conditions, (Doctoral dissertation), Kennedy University Tycho, Carpenter Point, 2044.