General Sam Nicholson casts a line from the dock of his prewar home along McIntosh Lake. This scene would be rather peaceful with the gentle calls of Orioles and the light breeze wafting through the cedars. But I can’t stop gesticulating to dodge oncoming horseflies. My guest doesn’t seem to notice.

“What do I know, and who needs to know it?” That was the question every officer in the Corps. learns to ask himself every day. Doesn’t matter if its a green lieutenant, or an old buzzard like me. That was the question I asked myself every day, from the minute I was nominated to be Commandant.

The Joint Chiefs, and the officer corps as a whole had been hollowed out over the last four years. Our best people fired or pressured into retirement by an administration that demanded loyalty to the President above everything else. What started as a shameful nuisance had turned into malignant fucking tumor on America’s warriors.

You knew that 90% of the people around you, including the Chairman himself, were good people just trying to do their duty. But now you had to always be on the lookout for brownnosing snots, be they NCOs or other Generals, who might rat you out for doing your job, regardless of all the political bullshit.

[He stops and lifts his fishing rod. Nothing happens. He lowers it and continues.]

“What do I know, and who needs to know it?” With each day at that job, it seemed the former grew and the latter contracted. When you needed to talk to somebody, you made sure it was closed doors and face to face.

Then how did the Joint Chiefs begin coordinating with the Vice President and Congress?

Lafyette Park. After that little bit of drama, the White House HEAVILY siloed the military, and that included us. It had been weeks since the Chairman had been invited to speak with the President, but after that, no more meetings at the White House at all.

We’d get memos, maybe half the time they followed proper protocols. If it was important, like orders to hit something, a threat assessment, a briefing the National Security Advisor or SecDef would speak to the Chairman directly. But communication pretty much dried up to nothing for the better part of a year.

I guess the VP was in the same boat, suddenly cut out of the loop. He burst into the Chairman’s office one day, incensed. I wasn’t there for that meeting, but what was relayed to me was that the VP wanted to be regularly consulted by the JSC from there on out. He even formed a “Deputy National Security Council” at the Naval Observatory. It wasn’t a perfect, or even good solution, but at the very least we were communicating with someone who was both lucid and constitutionally empowered.

The Speaker was another matter. The Chiefs couldn’t communicate openly with Congress, so they came up with an arrangement in which they’ll call us to classified committee hearings. We’d brief them, members of both parties, basically giving them the same brief the President should have gotten, then afterward we’d join the Chairman in his office, and the Speaker would join us for a private chat. Usually the VP was looped in on, what we hoped, was still a secure line from his office.

[He stops to reel in. Pulling a tackle box out of his vest and begins to change out the fly on his line.]

As we got closer to inauguration, meetings with the VP grew rarer. The last time he joined us on the Hill, day before January 3rd, he looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He demanded we provide him security, and exfiltrate himself out of the capital. “They’re gonna kill me!” He was hysterical. The Chairman and the Speaker did their best to calm him down, and he spilled the beans about the plan for another putsch.

By the time we left, the plan was for Congress to hold their swearing-in ceremony in Philadelphia, while the VP would spend the day visiting troops at Andrews before being flown out of town.

The goal was to ensure that Congress and the VP would not be under physical threat during the transition. They had more than enough members for a voting quorum in either chamber, so any stragglers in DC would have no actual power. Simple.

But the Vice President didn’t make it out.

We still don’t know what really happened. As far as we could tell neither he nor his wife ever left their residence. Nobody’s ever found the bodies. They found their limousine in a warehouse in Raleigh two years after the war. Best guess is that it was a Secret Service hit. Damn Praetorians.

While we tried to find the Vice President, we began redeploying units closer to DC and the Congressional leadership kept trying to negotiate with those glorified squatters in the Capital.

Really? Even after everything...

Even after those fence sitters in Congress had to be escorted out of the Capital when they tried negotiating, even after suffering casualties in their escape, and even after the pretender government formed the NDF the civilian leaders still thought they could negotiate a peaceful transfer of power. They actually thought the worst-case scenario would be what we thought was a foregone conclusion: an incursion to retake the capital.

The Speaker’s office managed to get through to the White House once, maybe 10 days before the inauguration. They ended up talking to a 25 year old kid who was serving as the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

What was your, by which I mean the military leadership’s reaction to the NDF?

We were worried, but not about a conventional war, no one was. We were worried about another 20 years of COIN operations, only this time on our own soil. If we could have done our jobs the last 4 years, analyze the situation, use all that brain power we’d normally have at our disposal.

[He waves the thought away.]

This war, like every war, was the result of a failure of intelligence. We didn’t know how far gone the civilian population, the state and local leaders, or the veterans actually were.

Consolidating all the cops, State Defense Forces, National Guard units, and federal enforcement agencies into a single National Defense. Sounded scary, but we were confident that it would be a fairly small minority who’d break their oaths.

That’s what we saw with our people. The armed forces had, maybe, a 10% defection rate, and that’s if you include reservists. And the defectors were almost always new enlistees that signed up from the MAGA movement, not experienced soldiers. Their officer corps was made up largely of police chiefs, senior agency directors, and rejects and retirees from the military. These were men who’d been drummed out of the service, or retired because they were subpar soldiers nobody wanted to promote.

Their “Supreme Commander” had washed out of the DIA years ago, after repeated incidents of insubordination and a career spent riding a desk. Most action he saw was through a set of binoculars on Grenada.

Yeah, they were a second rate military, and in those early days they were a disorganized mess. What really worried the Chairman, what worried me was all the equipment they were taking. Whoop!

[His reel begins to rapidly spin and he raises his rod to set the hook]

Fish on! Gimmie a minute to land ‘em!

[The old general fights the fish for almost 5 minutes before finally netting the large brown trout. I take a picture for him, and much to my relief we finally escape the bugs by going indoors. As the general cuts and cleans his catch he resumes his tale.]

Their first wave of equipment came from the arsenals of Federal agencies, and a fair bit of that was modern equipment transferred over just in the last couple of years. Then came what they could secure from National Guard units and State Defense Forces in the Red States. The White House and the Governors had been coordinating well before J3 to keep those bases empty for their goons to just march in.

Then there’s what they got from police departments. By federalizing the local law enforcement agencies, the pretender government gave themselves access to equipment and vehicles transferred from the armed forces over the last 40 years via the Law Enforcement Support Office or LESO. This included old Humvees, MRAPs, helicopters, in some cases even Armored Personnel Carriers. The primary small arms from this haul were the AR-15 style rifle and 9mm semi-automatic pistols, either automatics or semi-automatics with hastily manufactured bump-stocks.

What about when they started capturing Federal instillations?

When they hit Red River, that was the first time I started to really worry. RRAD was Army Depot just outside of Texarkana, mostly for sustaining and maintaining Humvees, 5-ton trucks, and MRAPs. But, they also had a few hundred Bradleys, ASVs, and even mobile rocket artillery platforms like the MLRS and HIMARS.

Did the soldiers at the base resist?

Army Depots were almost entirely staffed by civilians, either direct employees or government contractors. Base security was pretty light, especially after being gutted by years of that slow moving purge. The enemy took Red River with minimal resistance. They even managed to keep on most of the civilian workforce.

The threat wasn’t just material. Everyday we were trying to maintain command and control, to stress to base commanders all the way down to enlistees that the orders coming from the White House were not legitimate, and to secure their facilities until after inauguration. But every day, sometimes multiple times a day, we’d get reports of another armory falling into enemy hands. Sometimes there’d be orders to stand down from the White House, sometimes from a governor. I know of a few instances where some civilian contractor just opened the gates and let them on through.

And every time one of these armories fell, that was more ammunition, more small arms, machine guns, grenades, mortars, mines, trucks, tanks and even combat aircraft being seized by the enemy. After a week of that the Chairman had all of us join him to brief the House and Senate leadership. We reiterated that the Vice President should be presumed dead, the President incapacitated and treated as a hostage. Ergo the Speaker should invoke the 25th Amendment, assume the role of Acting President, and invoke the Insurrection Act to arrest control of the situation. He stressed that every second we delay threatened disaster.

They debated for hours, a few of the geriatric members who’d been in charge before the last midterms thought we were overreacting. A few tried to hold up the vote until they could get guarantees that they would face primary challengers in the next election. Fucking craven ass…

[He takes a deep breath.]

The Speaker took the oath a couple days after our briefing with the President-elect at her side to make sure there were no doubts about legitimacy. She federalized the National Guard, and stressed that all personnel must adhere to the proper chain of command, and disregard all statements made from governors or, “the President’s family.” They didn’t want to assign any more legitimacy to the other side than a statement of familiar relationship.

I’m proud to say that every unit followed the orders of the Acting President. There were defections, but those were individual cases of soldiers going AWOL. Arsenals and bases around the country got long overdue additional security, and National Guard units in Red States were called up and put on alert. Although, given how many of their bases had been seized already, we had to move a lot of them to depots and armories or even to active duty bases. Still, we stopped the bleeding.

Still, its not like any of that equipment really mattered for DC. They had maybe 10,000 troops in the capital, and most of them were dealing with civil unrest. We’d moved 50,000 troops into area since J3, not including National Guard units that were already there. The combined force entered the city just before dawn, engaged rebel forces at the bridgeheads and secured the Capital before nightfall.

Unfortunately, the one thing we didn’t have were active air defenses, otherwise we would have just shot down the bastards trying to skip down by air. The civilian leadership thought it best if we gave them an opportunity to just slip away, thinking they might try to escape to one of the former Russian republics. That, and the very real fear that we’d create a martyr.

Once we had the Capital the Acting President, the President-elect, and the Chairman issued joint statements demanding the NDF surrender their weapons and equipment. They even put forward lawsuits to the Red States that had “misappropriated Federal property.”

Did they actually think that would work?

I dunno. The civilian leadership had our threat assessment, our first Domestic Security Review in years that wasn’t politically skewed, they knew what we knew. That DSR stated that if the First Family fled the country, the NDF would likely splinter into dozens of far-right terrorist cells. We thought we could round up the bulk of them after maybe a couple years of fighting, mostly just because they didn’t have any organized logistics.

We assumed there’d be a retaliatory attack on or about the inauguration, most likely against one of our more lightly defended targets. I can tell you this, we put a lot of time and effort into making sure our nuclear, chemical, and biological stockpiles were well defended. We didn’t want a repeat of what was happening in Russia.

Nobody expected an attack like the one at Scott Air Force Base?

It got one paragraph in our brief to the government. Its a matter of public record, but the long and short of it was that we believed a more conventional conflict would be far more devastating, and was far less likely to occur because there was no possibility for victory. That DSR painted a sober picture of the situation, outlining the strengths and weaknesses of each side, including economic data, troop readiness assessments, and estimates of how much territory could be held with the present level of force. The bottom line was that our side overwhelmingly outmatched theirs. The last line of that paragraph was, “for these reasons, we believe the prospect of a conventional civil conflict is unlikely.”

Most historians debate the cause of the NDF's early successes, attributing it to their tactics, radicalization, infiltration on federal arsenals and military of bases, understaffing of said bases, or knowledge held by former US military officers in their ranks. But the truth is that the NDF, and that government won those early victories with one thing: audacity.

Audacity brought their regime to power, and blinded us to the threat they posed until it was too late.