Expatriates (6 page)

As a serving army officer, Caleb was rarely at home in Darwin, but he and Chuck continued their friendship via e-mail and Skype. For months on end, they had wide-ranging debates on everything from politics to the peculiarities of the ballistics of various .303 British cartridge loadings. One of their longest-lasting e-mail debates concerned the multiple voting scheme proposed by Nevil Shute in his novel
In
the Wet
. Caleb liked Shute's “seven vote” scheme, while Chuck proposed having only one vote per citizen, but making land ownership, an IQ test, and/or military service prerequisites to voting rights. As an Australian Republican Movement (ARM) member, Caleb suggested that anyone with a title of nobility who received a welfare payment should be excluded, which started another round of debate. Caleb and Chuck became good friends, politely sparring over these issues.

“Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli
.
”
(Loosely translated: “According to the capabilities of their readers, books have their destinies.”)

—Terentianus Maurus,
De Litteris, Syllabis, et Metris

C
huck Nolan and Caleb Burroughs were both news junkies and watched world events closely. When it became apparent that another global credit crisis like 2008 was approaching, they began sending each other permalink URLs for articles from news websites like DrudgeReport.com and WorldNetDaily.com. Links from these sites led them to “hard money” investing websites like TheDailyReckoning.com, ZeroHedge.com, SovereignMan.com, and GaryNorth.com. Investment websites then provided entrée to a plethora of Austrian economics, libertarian, and survivalist sites.

Four months into this shared web wandering, Caleb declared in one of his e-mails,
“I've taken the Red Pill, bro. I can now see that the mainstream media has been feeding us horse by-products. We need to get
ready
. There's a storm coming.”

Chuck sent a reply.
“I concur. It looks like it's going to hit the fan in less than two years, and possibly much sooner. We need to get smart on bartering, gardening, self-sufficiency, commo, advanced first aid, the whole works. Suggestions?”

“I vote that we start out with resources out there that are free for the picking. I can download hundreds of military manuals as PDFs. There are also thousands of free books on the Internet. We should download those and put them on redundant memory sticks. The cost of storage media like thumb drives has gotten ridiculously low. I just saw an ad for a sixteen
giga
byte stick for just twenty-two AUD. That's about the same price as a sixteen megabyte stick was just a few years ago! Just one stick could fit many
hundreds
of books and manuals, especially if they are compressed.”

Chuck responded,
“Okay, you start with military manuals, while I gather civilian books. We make two copies of each, plus copies on our laptops, and then mail the redundant copy sticks to each other.”

Forty-eight hours later, Caleb wrote back,
“Great idea. I started out with more than forty Aussie army manuals. I also have access to an Australian Defence Force mirror website of the American military database site called Army Knowledge Online (AKO). It is a treasure trove of information.

“Here are the manuals I was able to download just this evening:

Survival and Evasion, FM 21-76-1

USMC Survival Manual, MCRP 3-02F

Camouflage, FM 5-20

Camouflage of Vehicles, FM 5-20B

Field Hygiene and Sanitation, FM 21-10

Improvised Explosive Devices or IEDs, TM 31-210

Infantry Rifle Platoon-Squad, FM 7-8

Ranger Handbook, SH 21-76

Survivability, FM 5-103

NBC Protection, FM 3-4

NBC Decontamination, FM 3-5

Special Forces Unconventional Warfare, TC 18-01

M16 and M16A1 Rifles Operator's Manual, TM 9-1005-249-10

Sniper Training, FM 23-10 å

USMC Sniping, MCWP 3-15.3

Counter Guerilla Operations

Jungle Operations

Long Range Surveillance Unit Operations

Military Mountaineering, FM 3-97.61

Special Forces Use of Pack Animals, FM 3-05.213 (FM 31-27)

Claymore Mine, FM 23-23

Obstacles, Mines, Demolitions, FM 90-10

Ordnance and Explosives Response

Ranger Unit Operations, FM 7-85

USMC Scouting and Patrolling, MCWP 3-11

Military First Aid Manual, FM 4-25-11

US Army Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) Correspondence Course


NATO Emergency War Surgery

Combat Lifesaver Home Study Course


Special Operations Forces Medical Handbook (2001)—Note: there is a newer edition, but it isn't in the online free libraries and it is
beaucoup
expensive. 


Have you had the chance to search for civvie books?”

Later that evening, Chuck sent an answer:
“You betcha. I already downloaded the LDS Preparedness Manual from the Mormon Church and went to the Hesperian Foundation website and downloaded ‘Where There Is No Doctor' by David Werner and ‘Where There Is No Dentist' by Murray Dickson. I also found mention of sites where I can download the following, gratis, and will do so over the course of the next few evenings:

Survival and Austere Medicine: An Introduction

Ship Captain's Medical Guide

Medical Drugs and Equipment for the Team Physician 


Journal of Special Operations Medicine 


“I also read a recommendation that I get physical copies of these books:

Wilderness Medicine, 5th Edition, by Paul S. Auerbach

2012 Nurse's Drug Handbook

Ditch Medicine: Advanced Field Procedures for Emergencies by Hugh Coffee

Medicine for the Outdoors by Paul Auerbach

The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy

Primary Surgery: Volume 1: Non-Trauma by Maurice King

Primary Surgery: Volume 2: Trauma by Maurice King

The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy 2012 Edited by David Gilbert

Tactical Medicine Essentials by E. John Wipfler

Wilderness Medicine, Beyond First Aid, 5th Edition by William W. Forgey

Wilderness 911 by Eric Weiss

Wounds and Lacerations: Emergency Care and Closure by Alexander T. Trott, MD

The Doom and Bloom Survival Medicine Handbook by Joe Alton, MD and Amy Alton

“Buying all those could blow my budget, especially if I have to order them from book companies in the States. I'll have to be selective about what I buy. That last one by Joe Alton of ‘Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy' fame is a real prepper medical book written by a real deal prepper MD. From fish hooks to frostbite, surgery to stockpiling medications—it's all in there. I will let you know what else I find. OBTW, over the next few evenings, I plan to dig into the following:

“Project Gutenberg: 33,000 free public domain e-books! But be advised that some books there are way out of date, so they
do not
follow modern fire safety, lab/chemical safety, and machinery safety standards.

The Australian Small Farm Permaculture and Sustainable Living website has lots of free e-books.

E-Books Directory

Steve's Pages: Another gold mine!
Thousands
of free firearms manuals and military manuals. At a minimum, we should be sure to download the exploded diagrams and the user manuals for each of our guns.

“I think AKO has only current manuals, so you might check GlobalSecurity.com. They have lots of free military manuals (text only).

“And a civilian site called PR68.com has lots of links for U.S. military FMs and TMs—especially radio manuals.

“Oh, and Wikipedia has some links to PDFs of U.S. military manuals. For advice on stocking up, I downloaded a copy of ‘The Alpha Strategy' by John Pugsley.
And for some good Christian doctrine and Bible study, the Institute for Christian Economics site, established by Dr. Gary North, has lots of free books. I'll be getting a lot of those.

“I'm also considering buying the forty-two-year compendium of
The Mother Earth News
on CD-ROM. Ditto for the compendium of
Backwoods Home
magazine. Both are American ‘back to the land' magazines with a wealth of info on self-sufficiency.

“I just had another idea. How about all of those instructional videos (outdoor survival, gardening, shooting schools, etc.) on YouTube? I found a website called YouTube Downloader that has free software, so we can SAVE those videos onto our hard drives or to memory sticks. Way cool.”

The following week, Chuck e-mailed Caleb:
“Just when I thought we had assembled a fairly complete library, I found out that there are a couple of websites that offer ALL of Wikipedia on DVD. There are a couple of options. The skinny version is text only, but the fat one has all the photos and illustrations. This might be a good idea for something to add to our library.”

Caleb replied:
“ Yes, but consider: When they do the Wikipedia download, they had to take a
snapshot
of the site contents. At any given time, especially Saturday evenings when college students have been drinking, some of those pages are being vandalized. So just consider that the Idi Amin Wikipedia bio page we get on DVD might say, ‘General Idi A. Meany, Notorious Egg Sucker, President of Bananaland . . .' ”

“All politicians will allow, and most philosophers, that reasons of state may, in particular emergencies, dispense with the rules of justice, and invalidate any treaty or alliance, where the strict observance of it would be prejudicial, in a considerable degree, to either of the contracting parties. But nothing less than the most extreme necessity, it is confessed, can justify individuals in a breach of promise, or an invasion of the properties of others.”

—David Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
, 1777

S
oekirnan Assegaf was excited to get his first command, even if it was one of the smallest ships in the Indonesian Navy. His most recent assignment had been as a weapons officer aboard the large patrol boat KRI
Tenggiri.
(The ship had formerly been called the
Ardent
when it was in service with the Royal Australian Navy.) Much of that time had been spent cruising the Strait of Malacca. It had only been three months since Assegaf had been advanced in rank from
Letnan Satu
(first lieutenant) to
Kapten
(captain). Unlike most of his contemporaries, who were receiving logistics and staff officer assignments, he was getting his own ship.

The bad news for Assegaf was that his new home port would be at Manado on Sulawesi island. This port was considered the gateway to the Celebes Sea. It was 675 miles from Surabaya and more than 1,000 miles from his family's home in Jakarta. He would have only one or two leaves each year, and undoubtedly his transport to Jakarta would be on slow and noisy C-235 or C-295 combination cargo and passenger logistics flights, with several island-hopping stops along the way.

Assegaf's new assignment was to command KRI
Sadarin.
Depending on the perspective of who saw it,
Sadarin
could be described as either a large boat or a small ship. It was fifty-one feet long and displaced twenty-three tons when fully fueled. It was in the Hawker de Havilland
Carpenteria
class, powered by a pair of MTU diesels. These engines produced 1,360 horsepower and gave
Sadarin
a top speed of twenty-nine knots. The boat had been built in 1977, but since then it had been re-engined twice—most recently in 2010.

With its standard fuel tanks,
Sadarin
had a range of 950 miles at eighteen knots. A typical patrol was five days, but the frequent picket duty patrols were an agonizing fourteen days. Living for such a long stretch of time in cramped quarters and subsisting on plain, uninteresting rations often led to short tempers. Stowing extra fuel in 45-liter bladders strapped down in spare berths, extra water in crates on deck and extra provisions in every available space made the small ship seem even smaller.

The crew of
Sadarin
was normally ten, but for picket duty the crew had just eight men, and three of them weren't even sailors. They were
otaks
(“brains”) that had been detailed from Tentara Nasional Indonesia Angkatan Udara—the Indonesian Air Force. These three men had no other duty than to stare at air-surface radar screens around the clock.

Assegaf loved the power and agility of his boat. He became famous for shouting in English the command, “Ludicrous Speed,” a quote from one of his favorite American comedy films. Seldom content with cruising
Sadarin
at the nominal fuel-conserving sixteen knots, he often came back into port dangerously low on fuel. Behind his back, Assegaf's men called him either Speed Racer or Kapten Ludicrous.

In 2002, Indonesia had been forced to cede the islands of Ligitan and Sipadan (near eastern Borneo) to Malaysia by order of the International Court of Justice. This made the entire Indonesian military machine obsessed with defending their territory and exclusive waters. In particular, the Indonesian Navy had closely watched the oil-producing Ambalat region of the Celebes Sea since 2002. The frequent patrols of
Sadarin
were just one small part of that increased vigilance.

Even before he was given command of
Sadarin
, Soekirnan Assegaf had earned a reputation for being impulsive and stern in handing out reprimands to subordinates. But he was also fairly sensitive to the needs of his men while on long patrols. Unlike most other skippers of patrol boats, he encouraged his men to fish once they were well away from the port of Manado. The fresh fish supplemented their usual diet of yams, breadfruit, rice, sago, kangkung (water spinach), dried fish, krupuk crackers, canned chicken, and canned mutton.

Assegaf also allowed movies and music to be played on board, often piping songs from MP3 players directly into the ship's speakerphone system. Both when he was a naval cadet and later in his career, he spent an inordinate portion of his pay on movies for his collection. Many of these were pirated copies that he bought on the back streets of Surabaya for only twenty thousand rupiah apiece or about two dollars each. Some of the more recently released films were muddy duplicates that had actually been surreptitiously videotaped inside Jakarta movie theaters, so occasionally they'd see the silhouette of a head popping up at the bottom of the screen, or the conversation of obnoxious movie patrons would be mixed in with the movie's dialogue. On board
Sadarin
, almost every night at sea was movie night, and there was seldom a repeat. The exception was usually Maria Ozawa movies.

Assegaf's penchant for American movies did not go unnoticed by his superiors. Without his knowledge, he was placed on a watch list by Indonesian Naval Intelligence. His personnel file was flagged by one of the more devout Muslims on the counterintelligence staff at his base headquarters. Even though Assegaf was loyal to the Jakarta government, some of his personal habits were flagged as “suspicious.” Members of his crew were questioned at intervals about his behavior, his religious practices, his preferences in entertainment, any foreign contacts, and whether or not he had made any comments about the Jakarta government, or about Indonesia's role in the expansion campaign in the Philippines.

There was an unspoken division and preference within the Indonesian military that viewed “seculars” with suspicion, and gave promotion and assignment preference to devout Muslims. In the last few years before the global Crunch began, rapid promotion blatantly went to those who were outwardly devout carpet bowers. Indonesia's secular constitution was sharply eroded, most noticeably starting in 2003 when
Sharia
law was recognized in Aceh province. This process started to spread in the early 2010s, and by the time of the Crunch, it went into high gear. The increasingly muzzled Indonesian press at first called this Acehinization but later more discreetly called it “moderation of morals” or “return to devout values.”

Acehinization flew in the face of the nation's tradition of Pancasila state ideology, which had asserted that Indonesia would recognize multiple religions but be
secularly
governed. Most recently, under legislation spearheaded by the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and the Justice Welfare Party (PKS), kissing in public had been banned, as well as “lascivious clothing.” To some clerics, the new dress code was interpreted as head-to-toe coverage for women, even in Indonesia's sweltering climate. All of these steps were heralded as “defense against Western decadence.”

The PKS, which was directly patterned after the Muslim Brotherhood, began to assert more and more control over all the branches of the Indonesian military. Non-Muslims were increasingly marginalized and sometimes targeted for malicious rumors, “morals investigations,” and negative efficiency reports.

Indonesia's population of 225 million included 197 million Muslims. Kapten Assegaf was one of the many who were “Muslim in name only.” In the eyes of the new Acehinated Navy, his stance was not career enhancing. In the new Indonesia, the radical imams had slowly been putting a theocracy in place for more than a decade. Most of Assegaf's contemporaries saw it as inevitable. Some of the more radicalized ones who were PKS members actually embraced the change. The dissenting “decadent” minority started derisively calling the fundamentalists the Jerks of Java.

In the early 2000s, the Laskar Jihad, led by Ja'far Umar Thalib was in the media spotlight. These jihadis
were directly influenced by modern Saudi Wahhabism. After a couple of years, Laskar Jihad appeared to die out. In actuality, it went underground, burrowing into many government ministries in Indonesia and Malaysia. The jihadis eventually gained control of every branch of government, including the armed forces. The culmination came with the seating of the new president, just before the Crunch. His green lapel pin told the world that the radical Islamists controlled every apparatus of the government, from top to bottom. The
Reformasi
(Reformation) era had ended and the
Sarip
era—the era of the theocrats—had begun. They had completed their silent coup with little more than whispers of dissent in the heavily state-controlled press.

The Crunch was the final blow for the Indonesian moderates. The radical fundamentalists that dominated under the new president pointed to the economic collapse as an “aha” moment and proof that “Western decadence” and non-Islamic banking practices had been what precipitated the collapse. This cemented their power and marked a radical shift in their foreign policy. From then on, open jihad became their byword.

Indonesia and Malaysia had experienced a simmering conflict since the end of hostilities in 1966. But as time went on, the tensions lessened, and they became regular trading partners. As the Crunch set in, this bilateral trade grew increasingly more important, as global trade collapsed.

Several things worked synergistically to unite Indonesia and Malaysia: The new presidents of both countries were distant cousins and both were strident Wahhabists. Just before the Crunch, Indonesia had assisted Malaysia both in earthquake relief and in setting up desalinization plants during a drought. Then came the “fairy-tale romance” between the son of the Indonesian president and the daughter of the Malaysian president, which culminated in a marriage that was played up intensely by the mass media in both countries, much like British royal weddings. Ironically, the conservative clerics, who had ordered the removal of the mushy soap operas from Indonesian television, left a vacuum that was partly filled by media coverage of the romance and marriage.

As Caleb Burroughs heard all this on the BBC broadcasts, he thought about how his mates over in Afghanistan would go on high alert when the word
wedding
was listed in the intel officer's portion of the commander's brief.
Wedding
was almost always a code word for a jihadi
attack. It seemed a cruel irony to have it actually touted as such in the media.
Life imitates art
, he thought to himself.

Shortly after the much-publicized wedding, a variation on the Austrian
anchsluss
occurred in Malaysia wherein it quickly became a puppet state of Indonesia. The state-controlled mass media in both countries tried to put a positive spin on the takeover, calling it the
perkawinan
(marriage) of the two countries.

The kingdom of Brunei also made special concessions that effectively put Indonesian theocrats in control of the country. Remarkably, these changes in Malaysia and Brunei all took place without a shot being fired. These
anschslusse
were the ideal outcome for Indonesia because they needed
all
of their available military power for their planned invasion of the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and Australia. They could not have spared the manpower that otherwise would have been needed to occupy Malaysia and Brunei.

The Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN) soon transferred most of their large ships to the Indonesian Navy at nominal cost. These included their recently launched guided missile destroyer (KD
Sabah
), two frigates, two corvettes, three nearly new landing craft, sixteen
Ligan
class new generation fast attack craft, two 37-meter Fast Troop Vessels (FTV), as well as the majority of their replenishment ships and military transport ships.

Meanwhile, the sultan of Brunei “gifted” Indonesia his navy's four 41-meter
Ijhtihad
class fast patrol boats and all three of his 80-meter
Darausalam
class multipurpose patrol vessels, complete with missiles and helicopters. All of these Bruneian ships were only a few years old and had been built to be state of the art. With all this talk of jihad, the Sultan felt obliged to donate the ships. To do anything less might have triggered a fundamentalist uprising in Brunei.

Ironically, the Indonesian government, which under previous leadership had spoken out so forcefully against the Jamaah Islamiyah militants and the Bali bombing, would less than two decades later be espousing many of the same fundamentalist Islamic goals, and building their own time bombs.

—

A
few years before the Crunch, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard had urged schoolchildren to prepare for the “Asian Century” by learning Asian languages. Little did she know that Bahasa Indonesia would become the most important language to learn because Indonesia culture would soon be forcefully injected into Australian life.

It was no great surprise when China invaded Taiwan. They'd been itching to do so for decades. But Indonesia's next moves had not been fully anticipated by Australia's strategic analysts. What the analysts overlooked was the full significance of the loss of American military power in the Pacific region. Without the American presence, many nations in East Asia felt emboldened.

Australia signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970 and ratified it in 1973. But even before then, they were dependent on America's military might to assure peace in the Pacific region. Now the Americans were gone. All around the eastern periphery of Asia, alliances were shifting. The posturing and saber-rattling began. Borders were stretched. Old territorial disputes reemerged. Ethnic minorities were sent packing. Darkness was falling on the Pacific.