I wrote this in high school, I believe in roughly 2007. It concerns what would happen if in 2009 the new US President decides to honor America's anti-genocide obligations and protect the people of Darfur, Sudan by military force. It is vaguely Tom Clancy in style, but not as well written. I am posting this partly for its literary value, partly in honor of the victims of ISIL in the middle east who so desperately need the true air power of the great democratic powers to protect them, and partly because I can't seem to continue my other timelines right now. I will be posting the chapters as they were written without any substantial edits, so there will likely be errors, but the sentiments are all there nonetheless.
I find it interesting that as a perhaps overeager teenage boy who wanted the US to bomb Omar al Bashir's forces I researched military hardware to see how feasible this could be, largely ignoring the political issues associated with this. I later went to college, studied abroad in west Africa for a semester where I had my views on universal morality and human decency cemented by the welcoming people I met and lived with there, and took all sorts of classes on myriad international affairs topics. One would think I would become more 'realistic' in my assessments of the world, and in many ways I have. My educated response to mass atrocities and genocide is still the same now as it was then, however. Bomb the bastards until they issue their unconditional surrender or have no further military capabilities.
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Operation Good Samaritan
Prologue
Refugee Camp, Darfur, Sudan October 3rd, 2009
Timothy Jones was one of many international aid workers is Darfur. Yesterday, he had helped unload crates of foodstuffs from a privately owned Boeing 777 freighter. What the residents of the camp, in addition to the majority of the aid workers, did not know, was that four of the crates contained between them twenty M4 rifles, 6,000 rounds of ammunition, sixty 40mm grenades, and twenty sets of night vision goggles and secure radios. Timothy Jones was a member of an unorthodox international aid organization. He and nineteen others had been stationed in this particular refugee camp as protectors for the nearly 700 refugees living in it. Organizations such as Red Cross, World Vision, and UNICEF did not allow its volunteers to carry weapons, let alone military assault weapons. In Timothy’s mind, this was because many people accepted that the situation in Darfur could be bettered by humanitarian relief, but still felt that using force was unwarranted. For them, even wounding a member of the Janjaweed (an organization financed by and working for the Sudanese government) to protect innocent civilians was wrong.
When various national governments had refused to commit military resources to actually ensure a peaceful resolution to the genocide in Darfur, many people banded together to resolve it themselves. Timothy Jones, or Commander Jones, as his men knew him, was in charge of the first Peace Brigade unit sent undercover to Darfur. Heavily modified, privately owned Unmanned Air Vehicles patrolled the skies overhead, bristling with cameras and surveillance equipment. They were operated off of a vessel in the Red Sea that was allegedly doing marine biology research. The operators on the Valiant were also part of this organization. When the UAVs detected what appeared to be preparations for another large-scale attack on a refugee camp, they advised their headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia to mobilize the first unit early.
That was four days earlier. Commander Jones was confident that his unit would be able to surprise the Janjaweed when they attacked, but was not sure they had enough firepower. If waiting another two months had been an option, they would have been accompanied by an additional thirty-five Peace Brigade soldiers, as well as mortars, heavy machine guns, and two UH-60 Blackhawk gun ships, armed with 2.75 inch rockets and two .50 caliber machine guns. As it was, every available soldier and piece of equipment had been sent.
As he walked toward his tent early in the evening, he noticed a glint in the distance. Calmly, as he had done twice that day already, he put his thumb on the face of his watch and spoke aloud the words, “Possible threat.” This had the effect of the other nineteen Peace Brigade soldiers hearing in one of their ears the words that ordered them to go to one of two tents with cached weapons. Instantly, they stopped what they were doing and calmly but swiftly walked to these tents. When they arrived, they picked of a set of “optional equipment”, and proceeded to the perimeter of the camp. The weapons were thoughtfully encased in plywood boxes with a red cross embossed on one side. This prevented the residents of the camp from realizing who the Peace Brigade people really were. When Commander Jones saw the cloud of dust rising from where he had seen the glint of sunlight, he again pressed his thumb on his watch and spoke aloud, “Situation?” and uncovered his watch.
In his ear he heard the words, “Valid threat, repeat, valid threat. Authorization Foxtrot-Oscar-Oscar-Lima. Execute. Execute. Execute.” Startled, the Peace Brigade Commander again pressed his thumb to his watch and yelled, “SANDSTORM! SANDSTORM! SANDSTORM!” As one, the twenty Peace Brigade soldiers threw the lids off of the plywood cases donned their night vision goggles, put their ammo/ grenade vests on, and grasped their assault rifles. The startled refugees and aid workers started to panic, and some screamed. The Peace Brigade soldiers ignored this and began sprinting to their assigned posts. In their ears, they heard information via the Valiant that originated from one of the UAVs. According to its cameras, the Janjaweed were divided among three pickup trucks, one ancient army truck, and eleven horses. Altogether, there were nearly sixty of them.
The crew of the Valiant was frantically trying to ready one of the UAVs for a sortie nearly five hours ahead of schedule. When the onboard computer has ready, with the mission profile programmed in, and it had been fueled and readied for takeoff, the UAV was fired off the bow of the modified research vessel by a steam catapult similar to those found on full-blown aircraft carriers. As it slowly climbed to its optimum altitude of 25,000 feet, its single propeller ran flat out to move the small drone through the air at 140 knots.
Commander Jones knew that this little bar fight was likely to be over before the second UAV arrived on scene, but it had to be sent in case the first was neutralized. Do to their being based on a small ship that could barely launch them as they were, the UAVs could not be armed with weapons such as hellfire missiles or cluster bombs that would make them two heavy to “shoot” off with the catapult. Still, Commander Jones knew that he had to do what he could, with or without air support. Such being the case, he knew that each pair of PB soldiers would have one grenade launcher between them. Although grenade launchers were not as nice as mortars or gun ships, they still provided decent firepower. The first burst of gunfire, probably from an AK-47, was silenced by one of these. Nearly everyone in the camp was screaming. As the Peace Brigade soldiers engaged the Janjaweed militiamen, Commander Jones knew that if they failed, at least five hundred innocent civilians would be raped and/ or murdered. As predicted, the Janjaweed were not expecting such organized resistance form ex-military personnel. They sheer enormity of the Janjaweed force’s firepower and numbers slowly but surely pushed back the PB soldiers. Already, just three minutes into the fighting, forty-seven civilians and four PB soldiers had been killed.
The tide turned, however, when three PBs simultaneously fired grenades, destroying the three pickups, and neutralizing a half of the remaining enemy force. Superior training, doctrine, and equipment can trump even superiority in numbers. As quickly as it had begun, it was over. The Janjaweed forces retreated, chased by 5.56mm rounds and 40mm grenades. The total casualties from the battle were more than one hundred civilians dead, nine PB soldiers dead, and thirty-four Janjaweed militiamen dead. As horrible as the outcome of the battle was, the surviving Peace Brigadiers knew that more than four times as many people would have been killed without them.
October 4th, 2009
In the morning, Commander Jones was approached by one of the aid workers. “I am with UNICEF. My name is Marie Beauregard. I want to thank you for what you and your followers did. If you are American Special Forces, please give my thanks to the U.S. government.” Commander Jones fought the urge to yell out that he was not in the U.S. military, and that the previous administration did not want to commit the necessary forces to securing peace in the region. Instead, he smiled and said, “You are welcome for our services. However, we are not part of the U.S. military, or for that matter, any country’s military. As much as my organization and I would like the U.S. military to help, they haven’t, and probably won’t anytime soon. If they did, the Peace Brigade would not be needed.” He paused to close his eyes and again ask himself why so many people had died. When he opened them, Marie was crying, tears streaming down her face. She began screaming about how unfair and evil it was for unarmed civilians to be attacked and brutally murdered. Timothy empathized with her loss of her close friend and fellow aid worker. He vowed that the injustice in Darfur would end, one way or another. After helping Marie to the UNICEF tent, Timothy gathered the remaining ten Peace Brigadiers under his command and informed them that Headquarters had decided to pull them back to the Valiant until reinforcements could be sent. A surplus Marine Corps Super Stallion transport helicopter arrived later in the day to convey them to the research vessel, landing sixty yards outside the camp.
The pilot was the daughter of a prominent US senator. When Rachael Summer’s father had introduced a bill that provided for military intervention in Darfur two years ago, she had been out of college for a few years, and was volunteering with the American Red Cross. At the time, she was not speaking with her father, because she felt using force to solve the “issue” in Darfur was wrong. That all changed seven weeks into her visit to Darfur: she had witnessed the murder of seventeen children, and barely escaped with her life. After the American Red Cross ignored her plea that armed guards accompany the relief efforts, she joined the Peace Brigade. When she joined, the organization could barely afford the plane tickets to send teams of three or four protectors to one or two of the refugee camps. In April, 2009, the Peace Brigade had received an anonymous donation of 8 billion dollars. This had gone towards purchasing state of the art equipment, most prominently the UAVs and support ship. While the governments of the world argued about who was responsible for ending the genocide, the Peace Brigade had built itself into a force that had equipment personnel that rivaled that of a Marine Battalion. Even so, it was woefully inadequate when it came to truly protecting the refugees in Darfur and restoring peace, and what happened next indicated.
As the Sea Knight helicopter lifted off the desert sand and began its flight to the Red Sea and the Valiant, a Nanchang A-5 Fantan fighter bomber of the Sudanese Air Force buzzed overhead and released a fuel air explosive bomb. When the device was about one hundred meters above the ground, it released a cloud of fuel vapor. A detonator then ignited the fuel, creating a fireball and shockwave that obliterated the refugee camp and left six hundred and ninety four people dead. The A-5 then looped around and fired a burst of 23mm cannon fire at the rising helicopter. In the Super Stallion, Rachael fought the controls to bring the damaged craft back to stable flight. Unfortunately, the fuel air explosive bomb and the cannon fire had shattered the windows and glass dials in the cockpit. This left the Super Stallion in danger of crashing, which it did. The nose of the helicopter slammed into the sand of the desert floor, and the passengers of the craft were saved by their restraints. Commander Jones quickly ordered everyone to get out of the helicopter, which turned out to be a good idea, because the fuel tanks erupted in a fireball four minutes later. As the sun crept toward the Horizon, the small band of Peace Brigadiers struck out across the desert in the direct of the nearest refugee camp. They would be required to travel a distance of thirty-two miles. The aid workers had become like those they helped: helpless refugees. The difference was, they were furious at what had happened, and most of them were armed.
After traveling roughly five miles, the group stopped so that Commander Jones could report in to Headquarters via satellite phone. He knew the Valiant could not risk sending its other Super Stallion rescue them without protection from the fighters now patrolling overhead. After putting the phone away, he donned his backpack and led the group on a long walk through the night.
I find it interesting that as a perhaps overeager teenage boy who wanted the US to bomb Omar al Bashir's forces I researched military hardware to see how feasible this could be, largely ignoring the political issues associated with this. I later went to college, studied abroad in west Africa for a semester where I had my views on universal morality and human decency cemented by the welcoming people I met and lived with there, and took all sorts of classes on myriad international affairs topics. One would think I would become more 'realistic' in my assessments of the world, and in many ways I have. My educated response to mass atrocities and genocide is still the same now as it was then, however. Bomb the bastards until they issue their unconditional surrender or have no further military capabilities.
---
Operation Good Samaritan
Prologue
Refugee Camp, Darfur, Sudan October 3rd, 2009
Timothy Jones was one of many international aid workers is Darfur. Yesterday, he had helped unload crates of foodstuffs from a privately owned Boeing 777 freighter. What the residents of the camp, in addition to the majority of the aid workers, did not know, was that four of the crates contained between them twenty M4 rifles, 6,000 rounds of ammunition, sixty 40mm grenades, and twenty sets of night vision goggles and secure radios. Timothy Jones was a member of an unorthodox international aid organization. He and nineteen others had been stationed in this particular refugee camp as protectors for the nearly 700 refugees living in it. Organizations such as Red Cross, World Vision, and UNICEF did not allow its volunteers to carry weapons, let alone military assault weapons. In Timothy’s mind, this was because many people accepted that the situation in Darfur could be bettered by humanitarian relief, but still felt that using force was unwarranted. For them, even wounding a member of the Janjaweed (an organization financed by and working for the Sudanese government) to protect innocent civilians was wrong.
When various national governments had refused to commit military resources to actually ensure a peaceful resolution to the genocide in Darfur, many people banded together to resolve it themselves. Timothy Jones, or Commander Jones, as his men knew him, was in charge of the first Peace Brigade unit sent undercover to Darfur. Heavily modified, privately owned Unmanned Air Vehicles patrolled the skies overhead, bristling with cameras and surveillance equipment. They were operated off of a vessel in the Red Sea that was allegedly doing marine biology research. The operators on the Valiant were also part of this organization. When the UAVs detected what appeared to be preparations for another large-scale attack on a refugee camp, they advised their headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia to mobilize the first unit early.
That was four days earlier. Commander Jones was confident that his unit would be able to surprise the Janjaweed when they attacked, but was not sure they had enough firepower. If waiting another two months had been an option, they would have been accompanied by an additional thirty-five Peace Brigade soldiers, as well as mortars, heavy machine guns, and two UH-60 Blackhawk gun ships, armed with 2.75 inch rockets and two .50 caliber machine guns. As it was, every available soldier and piece of equipment had been sent.
As he walked toward his tent early in the evening, he noticed a glint in the distance. Calmly, as he had done twice that day already, he put his thumb on the face of his watch and spoke aloud the words, “Possible threat.” This had the effect of the other nineteen Peace Brigade soldiers hearing in one of their ears the words that ordered them to go to one of two tents with cached weapons. Instantly, they stopped what they were doing and calmly but swiftly walked to these tents. When they arrived, they picked of a set of “optional equipment”, and proceeded to the perimeter of the camp. The weapons were thoughtfully encased in plywood boxes with a red cross embossed on one side. This prevented the residents of the camp from realizing who the Peace Brigade people really were. When Commander Jones saw the cloud of dust rising from where he had seen the glint of sunlight, he again pressed his thumb on his watch and spoke aloud, “Situation?” and uncovered his watch.
In his ear he heard the words, “Valid threat, repeat, valid threat. Authorization Foxtrot-Oscar-Oscar-Lima. Execute. Execute. Execute.” Startled, the Peace Brigade Commander again pressed his thumb to his watch and yelled, “SANDSTORM! SANDSTORM! SANDSTORM!” As one, the twenty Peace Brigade soldiers threw the lids off of the plywood cases donned their night vision goggles, put their ammo/ grenade vests on, and grasped their assault rifles. The startled refugees and aid workers started to panic, and some screamed. The Peace Brigade soldiers ignored this and began sprinting to their assigned posts. In their ears, they heard information via the Valiant that originated from one of the UAVs. According to its cameras, the Janjaweed were divided among three pickup trucks, one ancient army truck, and eleven horses. Altogether, there were nearly sixty of them.
The crew of the Valiant was frantically trying to ready one of the UAVs for a sortie nearly five hours ahead of schedule. When the onboard computer has ready, with the mission profile programmed in, and it had been fueled and readied for takeoff, the UAV was fired off the bow of the modified research vessel by a steam catapult similar to those found on full-blown aircraft carriers. As it slowly climbed to its optimum altitude of 25,000 feet, its single propeller ran flat out to move the small drone through the air at 140 knots.
Commander Jones knew that this little bar fight was likely to be over before the second UAV arrived on scene, but it had to be sent in case the first was neutralized. Do to their being based on a small ship that could barely launch them as they were, the UAVs could not be armed with weapons such as hellfire missiles or cluster bombs that would make them two heavy to “shoot” off with the catapult. Still, Commander Jones knew that he had to do what he could, with or without air support. Such being the case, he knew that each pair of PB soldiers would have one grenade launcher between them. Although grenade launchers were not as nice as mortars or gun ships, they still provided decent firepower. The first burst of gunfire, probably from an AK-47, was silenced by one of these. Nearly everyone in the camp was screaming. As the Peace Brigade soldiers engaged the Janjaweed militiamen, Commander Jones knew that if they failed, at least five hundred innocent civilians would be raped and/ or murdered. As predicted, the Janjaweed were not expecting such organized resistance form ex-military personnel. They sheer enormity of the Janjaweed force’s firepower and numbers slowly but surely pushed back the PB soldiers. Already, just three minutes into the fighting, forty-seven civilians and four PB soldiers had been killed.
The tide turned, however, when three PBs simultaneously fired grenades, destroying the three pickups, and neutralizing a half of the remaining enemy force. Superior training, doctrine, and equipment can trump even superiority in numbers. As quickly as it had begun, it was over. The Janjaweed forces retreated, chased by 5.56mm rounds and 40mm grenades. The total casualties from the battle were more than one hundred civilians dead, nine PB soldiers dead, and thirty-four Janjaweed militiamen dead. As horrible as the outcome of the battle was, the surviving Peace Brigadiers knew that more than four times as many people would have been killed without them.
October 4th, 2009
In the morning, Commander Jones was approached by one of the aid workers. “I am with UNICEF. My name is Marie Beauregard. I want to thank you for what you and your followers did. If you are American Special Forces, please give my thanks to the U.S. government.” Commander Jones fought the urge to yell out that he was not in the U.S. military, and that the previous administration did not want to commit the necessary forces to securing peace in the region. Instead, he smiled and said, “You are welcome for our services. However, we are not part of the U.S. military, or for that matter, any country’s military. As much as my organization and I would like the U.S. military to help, they haven’t, and probably won’t anytime soon. If they did, the Peace Brigade would not be needed.” He paused to close his eyes and again ask himself why so many people had died. When he opened them, Marie was crying, tears streaming down her face. She began screaming about how unfair and evil it was for unarmed civilians to be attacked and brutally murdered. Timothy empathized with her loss of her close friend and fellow aid worker. He vowed that the injustice in Darfur would end, one way or another. After helping Marie to the UNICEF tent, Timothy gathered the remaining ten Peace Brigadiers under his command and informed them that Headquarters had decided to pull them back to the Valiant until reinforcements could be sent. A surplus Marine Corps Super Stallion transport helicopter arrived later in the day to convey them to the research vessel, landing sixty yards outside the camp.
The pilot was the daughter of a prominent US senator. When Rachael Summer’s father had introduced a bill that provided for military intervention in Darfur two years ago, she had been out of college for a few years, and was volunteering with the American Red Cross. At the time, she was not speaking with her father, because she felt using force to solve the “issue” in Darfur was wrong. That all changed seven weeks into her visit to Darfur: she had witnessed the murder of seventeen children, and barely escaped with her life. After the American Red Cross ignored her plea that armed guards accompany the relief efforts, she joined the Peace Brigade. When she joined, the organization could barely afford the plane tickets to send teams of three or four protectors to one or two of the refugee camps. In April, 2009, the Peace Brigade had received an anonymous donation of 8 billion dollars. This had gone towards purchasing state of the art equipment, most prominently the UAVs and support ship. While the governments of the world argued about who was responsible for ending the genocide, the Peace Brigade had built itself into a force that had equipment personnel that rivaled that of a Marine Battalion. Even so, it was woefully inadequate when it came to truly protecting the refugees in Darfur and restoring peace, and what happened next indicated.
As the Sea Knight helicopter lifted off the desert sand and began its flight to the Red Sea and the Valiant, a Nanchang A-5 Fantan fighter bomber of the Sudanese Air Force buzzed overhead and released a fuel air explosive bomb. When the device was about one hundred meters above the ground, it released a cloud of fuel vapor. A detonator then ignited the fuel, creating a fireball and shockwave that obliterated the refugee camp and left six hundred and ninety four people dead. The A-5 then looped around and fired a burst of 23mm cannon fire at the rising helicopter. In the Super Stallion, Rachael fought the controls to bring the damaged craft back to stable flight. Unfortunately, the fuel air explosive bomb and the cannon fire had shattered the windows and glass dials in the cockpit. This left the Super Stallion in danger of crashing, which it did. The nose of the helicopter slammed into the sand of the desert floor, and the passengers of the craft were saved by their restraints. Commander Jones quickly ordered everyone to get out of the helicopter, which turned out to be a good idea, because the fuel tanks erupted in a fireball four minutes later. As the sun crept toward the Horizon, the small band of Peace Brigadiers struck out across the desert in the direct of the nearest refugee camp. They would be required to travel a distance of thirty-two miles. The aid workers had become like those they helped: helpless refugees. The difference was, they were furious at what had happened, and most of them were armed.
After traveling roughly five miles, the group stopped so that Commander Jones could report in to Headquarters via satellite phone. He knew the Valiant could not risk sending its other Super Stallion rescue them without protection from the fighters now patrolling overhead. After putting the phone away, he donned his backpack and led the group on a long walk through the night.