Expatriates (12 page)

“Believe in your cause. The stronger your belief, the stronger your motivation and perseverance will be. You must know it in your heart that it is a worthwhile cause and that you are fighting the good fight. Whether it is the need to contribute or the belief in a greater good, for your buddy, for the team or for your country, find a reason that keeps your fire burning. You will need this fire when the times get tough. It will help you through when you are physically exhausted and mentally broken and you can only see far enough to take the next step.”

—MSG Paul R. Howe, U.S. Army Retired, from
Leadership and Training for the Fight: A Few Thoughts on Leadership and Training from a Former Special Operations Soldier

L
iving in Tavares had at one time seemed isolated and relatively rural to the Altmillers. But after the Crunch, they felt uncomfortably close to Orlando. The more than two million people in the greater Orlando area were constantly on their minds. There were troubling reports of widespread looting in downtown Orlando, and then successively larger raids pushing out in waves to Winter Park and Alamonte Springs, and Oviedo. When word came of a 2,000-looter raid on Apopka, the town elders and police chiefs of Mount Dora, Tangerine, and Tavares held a joint meeting. It was agreed that they would send experienced military scouts to Apopka and beyond. They also alerted some traders with contacts near Orlando that there were rewards of up to ten ounces of silver for anyone with firm word of any planned looter gang movements. They would also set up and continuously man outposts on Highway 441. They made provisional plans to raise a large force of armed men to block and repel the expected raid.

Highway 441, also known as the Orange Blossom Trail, was a divided four-lane highway. It was the obvious avenue of approach, if looters from Orlando were going to come in force as they had in recent raids. On the Apopka raid, the looters had been preceded by a bulldozer that had been crudely upgraded with armored steel plates and periscopes. This bulldozer had easily smashed two intervening roadblocks, sending Apopka's defenders into a disorganized retreat. The looters spent two days in Apopka, looting, raping, and burning. They left very little of value.

Combining the intelligence derived from recently captured looters and information provided by the Mount Dora scouts, it became clear that the looter gang had plans to hit Tangerine and Mount Dora in about two weeks. A group of Afghanistan veterans and good ol' boys from Astor selected an ambush site on Highway 441 near Zellwood between Winfred Avenue and Ponkan Road. This stretch of the highway had a railroad track on a raised ballast bed on the west side of the road and some recently cleared fields to the east. The open ground was still dotted with stumps. The trees had been cut for firewood and there were plans to plant corn there once the stumps were removed.

They set up an obvious line of defense, blocking both directions of the highway with abandoned truck trailers that came from a now defunct CITGO fuel station and truck scale, immediately to the north, at the corner of Winfred Avenue. The owner of the station—a man from Georgia who had bought the company just before the Crunch—donated them willingly, once he learned that his property would be just
inside
of the defensive perimeter. The trailers were strongly attached to each other with three-quarter-inch steel cables and formed a “Lazy W” shaped chain that extended from the railroad tracks of the northwest side to the fuel station on the southeast side.

Based on updated intelligence, a large ambush was formulated by the mayors of Mount Dora and Tavares. Realizing that they'd need more men, the mayors asked for additional volunteers from Zellwood and the many smaller communities east and west of Tangerine, like Lane Park, Bay Ridge, and Plymouth Terrace. The message they spread was: “Adults in good walking shape are asked to bring their guns to Tangerine. Be there no later than four
P.M.
on Tuesday. Wear camouflage. Bring lots of water and enough food for overnight. Rifles preferred, but shotguns okay if you have buckshot or slugs. Bring at least eighty rounds per man. Bring a heavy coat for overnight outdoors.”

The ambush was in a classic L shape, with the roadblock forming the short leg of the L. The longer leg of the L was along the reverse side of the railroad track, which provided both concealment and cover for the ambushers. Some of the men with the heaviest weapons—mostly .308 and .30-06 rifles—were positioned behind the trailer roadblock, because it was anticipated that they would have the opportunity to fire enfilade down the length of the ambush kill zone.

By prior agreement, the ambushers gathered in Zellwood on the afternoon of January 21st. Jake Altmiller and Tomas Marichal arrived at three thirty after a seven-mile walk. Janelle and José were guarding the house and the store, which was temporarily closed. The men had been trickling in all afternoon from as far as twenty-five miles away. Most arrived on foot, but a surprising number came on bicycles.

Jake sized up the men and the handful of women. Nearly all of them wore camouflage, as requested, but this came in a dizzying assortment of military and civilian patterns. Jake, who had no military experience, wore a ripstop nylon Battle Dress Uniform (BDU) in the Woodland pattern. He had bought these a decade before at a St. Vincent DePaul thrift store. They'd cost him just twenty dollars for both the pants and the shirt. Janelle had removed the Air Force insignia with a seam ripper shortly after he brought them home. In the following years he had worn them for some duck hunting, but more frequently for painting, so they had copious spatters of dark brown deck stain, and forest green paint from his house trim. His jacket was an old faded olive drab Army M65, also from a thrift store. Jake also wore a MultiCam boonie hat—a more recent acquisition. The BDUs fit him well. Jake's weight was around 185 before the Crunch but had recently dropped to 175 pounds. He attributed this to being deprived of ice cream, which he used to have for dessert almost every evening.

Tomas, as a USMC vet, looked more regulation and strack with an entirely matching set of MARPAT digital “digiflage” camo utilities, and a matching boonie hat and field jacket. People like Tomas were so obviously prior service (belt buckle centered, bootlaces tucked in, and so forth) that there was no doubt whatsoever. Others, who wore odd assortments of camos and who had dangling bootlaces, clearly had no military experience. A few others were hard to pin down, at least at first glance. There was clearly a duck hunting crowd: They all wore civilian camouflage pattern clothes from head to toe. Not surprisingly, a lot of them carried shotguns rather than rifles.

It was fairly easy to distinguish between the Army veterans of various vintage, as their clothing and gear often told the tale of when they had served. Some of the oldest Army vets wore green fatigues or tiger stripe camouflage. These were Vietnam veterans—or at least Vietnam era wannabes.

Then there was the Woodland pattern, which could be spotted widely throughout the crowd. The specific pattern dated the men wearing it as having served from the late 1970s to the turn of the century. The print was so ubiquitous that the men wearing it nearly outnumbered all the other camo patterns combined.

Next were the Army Combat Uniform (ACU) wearers. This was a grayish digital camouflage pattern that had been worn in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia, coming home in the duffel bags of veterans who served up until 2012. The ACU pattern was generally disliked because it made the wearers look like gray blobs at a distance, and it was not an effective camo pattern in most environments.

Last were the MultiCam OCP wearers, who had served in Afghanistan and elsewhere in more recent years. Similarly, the Marine Corps and Air Force veterans wore uniforms that were telltale signs of their years of service.

Added to the mix was a strange assortment of camouflage that ranged from Swiss Alpenflage and British DPM to Rhodesian splinter pattern. Tomas had to name many of these patterns for Jake, who assumed that most of them had simply been bought as military surplus. But he had no idea whether the men who wore them were the genuine article—veterans of those nations—or just guys who liked to play paintball on weekends. He suspected that the latter was more often the case.

The briefing was to be held at just after six
P.M.
As men continued to arrive in large numbers before the appointed hour, everyone was asked to top off their canteens and Camelbaks from a pair of tan Florida National Guard water tank trailers parked nearby. The disorganized crowd that formed at the four brass toggle spigots on each of the Water Buffalo trailers was Jake's first indication of the wide range of experience in the assembled crowd. Clearly, some of these men had never even been in a Boy Scout troop. Seeing so much water get spilled on the ground and so many men milling around was frustrating. Tomas moaned. “What a goat rope. Whatever happened to the old ‘form two lines of two'?” The chaotic process took almost an hour. “Whoever organized this didn't think it through, and didn't think about security,” Tomas observed. “Just one crude explosive could disable a large percentage of the force. Pitiful.”

After the water trailers fiasco was over, Tom Martinson, the portly mayor of Tangerine, gave a speech. With some help, he climbed up in the back of a pickup truck bed. He pulled out a notepad and shouted, “Your attention, please.”

It took a while to get everyone quieted down. Reading from his notepad, he said, “I want to thank everyone for coming. As you know, some grievous wolves are on their way here. We all heard what they did to Apopka and we have to stop them from doing the same here. If we don't stop them, and stop them
hard
, then they'll just keep doing this in all directions throughout Central Florida.”

There were shouts of agreement from the crowd.

Martinson continued, “We now have solid intelligence that a large looter force has been assembling down on the Western Beltway next to Lake Marshall, northwest of Apopka. They plan on advancing toward Tangerine before daylight tomorrow. We've prepared an excellent ambush site near Zellwood and the looters are expected to pass by there as early as 0900. Now I'm not going to sugarcoat this: There is an
army
of them. But if we take them by surprise, the numbers won't matter. It'll be a turkey shoot.”

Then Martinson reached down with his hand to help up a Baptist church pastor into the pickup. The pastor said a brief prayer for safety. The word
Amen
was deeply echoed in the crowd.

Jake felt reassured, knowing he was surrounded by men of faith.

The pastor said, “God's Word in Psalms 37, verses 5 through 15, reassures us with this:

‘Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.

‘And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday.

‘Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.

‘Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.

‘For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth.

‘For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be.

‘But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.

‘The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth upon him with his teeth.

‘The Lord shall laugh at him: for he seeth that his day is coming.

‘The wicked have drawn out the sword, and have bent their bow, to cast down the poor and needy, and to slay such as be of upright conversation.

‘Their sword shall enter into their own heart, and their bows shall be broken.'

“May God bless and protect all y'all.”

Then the mayor stepped forward again and shouted, “We don't want any negligent discharges, so leave your chambers empty for now.” There was a loud clatter of guns being unloaded, with their muzzles pointed skyward. One shotgun went off in this process, which evoked scornful laughter and lots of derisive comments like “Nice!” and “Thanks for letting the whole county know!”

Martinson shouted, “
That's
what I was warning you about. We can't afford to have that happen down at the ambush. Leave your chambers
empty
until just before the order to fire. It just takes a moment. The element of surprise is crucial. I need you to now
quietly
route-march to the roadblock on Highway 441 with
no
use of flashlights. It is about four miles from here to the site near Zellwood.” He gestured to his right. “Take one of the sack lunches here only
if
you didn't pack enough chow for both dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow. You will receive further orders at the roadblock. God bless and protect you. Move out!”

There were four hundred paper sacks lined up five rows deep on the sidewalk. Jake observed that about three hundred fifty of these sack dinners were taken. He later learned that each sack contained a large hunk of soft bread, a four-ounce Ziploc bag of peanuts, and an orange. Tomas was disgusted that so many men had come so ill-prepared. “What a bunch of pogues,” he muttered. The perfunctory briefing also angered Tomas. He had expected a full-blown mission prep in standard “Op Order” format.

“There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”

—Cormac McCarthy, in Richard B. Woodward's “Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction,”
New York Times Magazine
, 1992

T
he ambushers walked to Zellwood by the light of a nearly full moon. Once there, most of them were directed down the grassy strip just west of the railroad tracks. They were asked to “stand on line with one hand raised, and rest it on the shoulder of the man next to you.” In the darkness and given their inexperience, it took forty minutes to get straightened out. This aggravated Tomas, who had become accustomed to being around well-trained Marines. Finally, after their interval was established, the order was passed: “Get down, facing the tracks.”

It was not until everyone was in position and three successive head counts were passed up the line that the planners knew their exact strength. There were 1,082 ambushers. On the long side of the L, the men were organized into groups of roughly one hundred, based on the interval of the telephone poles on the far side of the highway. They were told that a captain was assigned to command all of the men between each pair of poles.

Two reserve forces of two hundred men each were positioned in the woods at both tips of the L. Rather than providing blocking forces to prevent being outflanked as they had intended, in the end they provided massed firepower to cut down any of the looters who attempted to escape the ambush zone.

Given the wide variety of experience, lack of familiarity working together, and the sheer size of the ambush teams, the planners wisely decided to keep things simple. A static ambush was feasible, but any attempt at maneuvering these untrained men might result in confusion, panic, or even worse, a friendly-fire accident. Without a standard uniform, it would be difficult to distinguish friend from foe once units started to maneuver. A simple static ambush would be the safest plan.

Jake and Tomas rested prone in the “caterpillar” facing the railroad tracks. There were lots of whispered questions—mostly asking what was going on. After a few minutes, a man wearing a MultiCam uniform walked down the line to Jake and Tomas's section and introduced himself. Once every twenty feet, he repeated, “I'm your captain. I had a deployment in Iraq and three in Afghanistan, so trust me. We are going to kick some tail and take names tomorrow. Just get comfortable and keep very quiet. Further orders will follow.”

Jake and Tomas were among the best-armed men in the ambush. Jake had his LAR-8 while Tomas has his DPMS AR-10 rifle. They each had nine 20-round magazines of ammunition.

The two men were just an arm's width apart with their rucksacks positioned at their feet. In the moonlight he could see that there was a large monopole tower supporting a billboard sign off to their left, on the far side of the tracks. Highway 441 could not be seen, because of the raised railroad bed ahead of them.

The railroad bed had been elevated just a few months before the Crunch, as part of a regional railroad company upgrade designed to give the tracks better flood protection. This construction program was partly federally funded. It converted tracks that had heretofore been at just above street level and put them up on a five-foot-tall earthen berm that was topped by a thick layer of two-inch minus chert rock. The berm and ballast still looked freshly constructed.

They lay there quietly, with each man absorbed in his own thoughts. Jake fiddled with a chunk of chert rock that at some point had rolled down from the berm ahead of him. He started thinking about chiggers. Those biting insects were particularly fond of his flesh. He was glad it was January, and not June. Then his mind wandered to the song “Orange Blossom Special,” and he tried to recall the lyrics. The tune and the lyrics occupied his mind for several minutes, but his thoughts eventually returned to the upcoming ambush. He dreaded the prospect of deliberately taking lives.

Just after midnight, Jake asked Tomas in a whisper, “Does it bother you that some of these looters coming here in the morning from Orlando are going to be
Cubanos
?”

Tomas answered, “Naw. Look at who we got here alongside us: Every skin tone and accent of speech you can imagine. Whites, blacks, Cubans, and even some Seminole Indians. Same for the bad guys. But this
isn't
about skin color. It's about respect for life and property. We respect the right to safeguard life and property and they don't. Plain and simple. We want to live in peace and help each other out, but all they think about is taking, taking, taking. Orlando didn't get the nickname Whorlando for nothing. There are some really low-class thieving people there. And yeah, they do come in all colors.”

A young black man armed with a .30-30 Winchester lever gun on the other side of Tomas had overheard Tomas. He said, “Some of them may be black like me, but they're no-account
trash
.”

A few minutes later the man on Jake's left struck up a whispered conversation. He was wearing a camouflage jacket and a matching cap with a prominent Realtree company logo on the front. He appeared to be in his fifties. The man held a stainless steel Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle that had been wrapped with camouflage tape to reduce its glare. He also carried a M1911 Colt, .45 ACP—also stainless—in a Kydex hip holster. He whispered, “If we let these bastards get through, they're going to
decimate
Mount Dora and Tavares. They'll rape, they'll kill, they'll burn houses, and they'll loot everything. They'll even eat our dogs.”

“Yeah, I've heard how they operate,” Jake replied. “They're like the Mongol Horde, only better armed. Worst-case scenario is they come and then they
stay
and lord it over us for a few months. I guess you heard what happened when the looters from Miami moved up the coast from Boca Raton to Vero Beach. Like a swarm of locusts, and they
stayed
. I heard that they took some women as slaves and kept them chained up—with padlocked chains around their necks. They're absolutely barbaric.”

The man in the Realtree camo nodded. “All four of my grandparents and a bunch of my great-aunts and great-uncles died in the Holocaust. And my mother almost died of starvation before her camp was liberated by the British Army. She was in a camp called Neuengamme-Geilenberg, on the Elbe River. That's near Hamburg. She was still just a little kid when they broke open the camp gates in May of 1945. I grew up hearing her say, ‘Never again.' She gave me my first gun, a Remington .22 pump, for Christmas when I was eleven years old. Then she bought me an M1 carbine for my sixteenth birthday. My friends all thought that was pretty cool, that my mom liked guns.”

After a pause, he continued. “She'd often show me the tattoo on her left forearm. It was H-1938. By coincidence 1938 was the year she was born. She'd show me that tattoo and she'd say, ‘Never give up your guns. And never let them
take
you. Never!'”

Tomas chimed in. “Damned straight,
never
surrender. And never let
anyone
put you behind barbed wire. It's better to die on your feet, fighting, than to die on your knees, begging for mercy.”

The night was spent in nervous anticipation. Only ten percent of the ambushers slept. These were mostly the men who'd had the longest walks. Just a few of them snored, and for this they got poked in the ribs and cussed out. Throughout the night a few orders and reports were passed down the line in whispers, at odd intervals. Most of them made sense.

“No talking above a whisper.”

“No lights or smoking.”

“Quiet.”

“Looters are expected at ten
A.M
.”

“Resist the urge to peek over the berm.”

“You're a bunch of schoolgirls. Whispers only!”

The January night was chilly by Florida standards. A few of the men complained but were quickly chided. “Shut up. Deal with it. In another few hours you'll be complaining that you're too hot. So just shut up.” Jake had a heavy jacket and a pile cap. Tomas curled up in his poncho liner. He took pity on the young black man next to him, who had only a light jacket. He loaned him a Navy watch cap and a spare quilted field jacket liner that he normally kept bundled in his rucksack to use as a pillow when sleeping in the field.

—

T
he looter army was led by escaped convicts. They left the north end of Orlando before dawn, as expected. It was little more than a large, disorganized mob. They had no forward or flank scouting elements. They assumed that their superior numbers would overwhelm any defenders. They also had a false sense of security provided by the armored bulldozer, which they had used successfully twice before.

As they advanced, many of the looters sang chants, most of which were nonsensical. One of the largest groups was singing, “We gonna get some, get some, today.” The rest were variations of the same idea, the longest-running chant going, “Take some, take some, take some more. Get some, get some, get some more.”

The looters advanced in staggered clumps of twenty to fifty people rather than in proper fighting array. Their numbers were overwhelming. In all there were over four thousand armed male looters, plus a few hundred unarmed women and teenage boys. The latter had come along hoping to find loot or perhaps “pick up” weapons in the wake of a successful raid.

The looters were armed with a motley assortment of weapons that ranged from lever-action Winchesters and Marlins to pump-action shotguns of various brands and vintages, to a few AKs, ARs, FALs, HKs, and M1 carbines. Only a few of them carried spare magazines in proper ALICE or MOLLE pouches. They mostly wore civilian clothes in a wide range of colors, and baseball caps, visors, and straw sun hats. Nearly all of them carried rucksacks and backpacks that hung loosely—indicative that they planned to fill them with booty. Many of them pushed or pulled a variety of carts—again, mostly empty or holding empty gas cans—for their expected loot.

On average, the ambushers were armed better than the looters, with a higher ratio of battle rifles. There were a few exotic guns including several Steyr AUGs, a belt-fed Shrike .223, an HK G36 clone, and a SIG PE-57. Most of the ambushers carried at least a hundred spare cartridges or shotgun shells, which was twice the average carried by the looters. Despite the disadvantage of smaller numbers, they were better organized, and better disciplined. And most of them would also have the advantage of firing from behind the cover of two steel railroad tracks. History has always shown that although outnumbered, the advantage goes to the defender who is thinking of nothing else but holding the line so that the oncoming horde might not assail his family or homestead. They waited in the darkness. A few slept. Many of them prayed. All of them worried.