Bacco's War

[Gloval]

[Urbem Rex, Palace Courtyard]

"...and so, in recognition of his creativity and initiative, First Corporal-Major Suhaym Zogby Bacco of the Legio Vigilum shall be promoted to Senior Chief Corporal-Major. I also bless him with the honor of Knightship for his brave actions, which should be the model that every enlisted man strives to follow. Senior Chief Corporal-Major Bacco, please step forward." King Gloval steps back from the podium, drawing his sabre as Bacco, in full dress uniform, steps forward and kneels before the king. With a tap on each shoulder with the sword, Gloval speaks, "Rise, Sir Bacco of Terre Regius."

The assembled soldiers applaud on cue as Bacco stands up, and the band starts to play. The King would go on to make another speech over how this was a monumental day for race relations, with a soldier of mixed heritage becoming a knight of the crown. Bacco didn't pay much attention to the speech himself, and felt very out of place over the next few days of dignified events and private parties. He was just starting to get used to it when it ended abruptly with a summoning to the Governor-General's office in the city of Siliana.

[Siliana, Terre Regius, The Dorsal]

The car ride had been hot and tense; Bacco's freshly starched dress-uniform sticking to his skin and making the lack of AC in the pickup all the more noticeable. Glancing through the rear window, several men in full combat uniform sat in the bed. There wasn't much conversation, which made the relatively short two-hour drive seem longer as well. The car stopped in the middle of the city, if it could be called that. Farms, hills and mountains were all he could see besides the still under-construction Governor's manor and military outpost. Double checking his orders, Bacco walks up to the building and knocks on the door, which a servant in a white suit answers.
"...Who may I say is calling?"
"Senior Chief Corporal-Major Bacco, I was, um, summoned. Legio Vigilum matters."
After a 10 minute wait, he's let inside, and led to a second floor balcony, where a rather fat man in a formal uniform was lounging and drinking iced tea. Bacco steps up and stands at attention.
"No need for that Sir Bacco, take a seat."
"Err...yes sir."
"Now, tell me what you see out there."
"...Farms sir. I see farms."
The General sits up and looks over, "That is where you're wrong, out there are two kinds of people, commoners and rebels, and they look exactly the same. I have heard that you get results, the radio has been abuzz with your name for the last week. It took quite a bit of personal capital to get them to send you out here to the middle of nowhere." Continuing from his movement to sit up, the General stands and walks over to the railing, "I have lost a third of the policemen allotted to me, and that makes the King's Office fairly...unhappy. And if they're unhappy, that means I'm unhappy, because it means that political officers arrive and start investigations. I have more important things to do than skirmish with rebels, so I'm delegating to you. Your room is on the first floor of the manor, inside you'll find your official orders as well as a temporary lease of command. Until this problem is dealt with you are a Marshal, and you have all of the resources I have to solve this problem. I don't care about the details, just get it done."
Bacco pauses, things were simply too odd recently. He just does his job and suddenly he's knighted, promoted, wined and dined...and now he was just given charge of the security of an entire Governorate. "Thank you sir...I'll get to work as soon as possible."
The General simply waves Bacco off, and the Major-turned-Marshal heads to his quarters, wondering just how in over his head he must be.

OOC: Closed RP between me and Tidy Bowl Man. He's RPing the rebels w/ my permission.

Edited September 18, 2012 by Gloval

[Captain Enema]

"They take our lands, they take our money, and they will take our lives. WE MUST FIGHT!" A local leader shouts as he does his best to whip the citizens of his village into a proper fighting frenzy. Years of watching governments come and go have left this man angry and disenfranchised. He wants his piece of the pie and he plans on taking it by force if necessary. The young men of his village quietly begin digging up buried caches of arms left in the wake of so many nations that have died and lost control of their stockpiles over the years. Once they've armed themselves the leader orders them to carefully begin approaching other local villages and to carefully keep their weapons out of sight.

Young girls are sent disguised as students, old men as wandering merchants, and older women as nurses with orders to investigate the local communities for support. Communications are limited as the villagers are reduced to the outdated land lines and the pay phones that feed them. They aren't oblivious to the idea that these pay phones are probably monitored or will be monitored as well. These problems have been faced before as other men are called up to lend the use of their shortwave radios and as they disguise messages within the broadcasts they make, messages for the spies sent out, and messages for the small groups of young men who are armed and ready to fight.

[Gloval]

[Siliana, Governor's Manor]

76 men, and he was the 76th...that was all Bacco had to cover 4,631 square kilometers. That was about 308 kilometers of patrol area per squad, if he tried to cover everywhere at once. Sighing, he turns his attention over to the reports he had gotten from the Quarter Master. He had already read through them twice, but he still couldn't believe it; only 5 squads had proper combat gear, the rest just had their rifles and dress uniforms. Shoving these papers aside, he pulls over a map of the region, "Well...I've got to start somewhere. Siliana is in our hands, but how about...."
Waving his hand about over the map, a finger outstretched, he picks a random 'city', "Gaâfour. Okay then...I'll read up on Gaâfour and head over there with a squad or two...see if I can't get them to play nice."

The next day, Bacco and two squads (both in dress uniform as the Governor-General had 'requested' that properly equiped squads remain at the Siliana garrison,) headed out in pickup trucks, one with a .50 caliber machine gun attached to a mount on the rear. Most of them were exactly like Bacco when he first joined; young and stupid, men who had simply seen the Legio Vigilum as a steady paycheck or a source of order. The squad leaders were a bit more experienced; not in terms of real combat, but simply in that they had basic officer training in terms of assigned reading and being taught how to drill their men. Right before they left, Bacco had given them some brief advice, "I haven't seen much more fighting than you all, the LV handled things fairly fast in the city. So I'll keep it simple, if we get shot at...get behind cover, find your squad mates, and make sure you shoot back at the right person. I don't want to piss these people off."

With that, they were on the road to Gaâfour.

[Captain Enema]

On the road to Gaâfour there was a man with seven wives. Each wife has seven sacks. Each sack had seven cats. Each cat was understandbly irate about being in a bag with six other cats on a hot day in Northern Africa. The man, walking alone as his wives were tormenting the some total of some huge number of cats elsewhere, was walking with a small handheld transmitter towards the major city of Siliana. His orders were simple, go towards the city, radio back information. He was picked for the job due to his experience in the military, or specifically Legion.

The Legion had trained him as a recon platoon leader and when Legion had collapsed he had returned to his sleepy little corner of Northern Africa to procreate and watch his wives do odd things with cats. The village elders, well aware of his odd matrimonial situation, wouldn't be entirely put out of shape should the former recon platoon leader get ran over by a tank given his shattering of local customs. It's one thing to follow the word of the prophet and have four wives, but seven? Besides, some of the elders are vaguely sure the man's wives might have something to do with a rash of missing cat reports that have plagued the village.

While the elders dealt with missing cats and spreading the word of the slowly growing rebellion, the man plodded towards siliana, the young men were busy going into hiding in various hides around the countryside, and other members of the local communities were beginning to make contact with each other through various means. Raising the green cresent of holy rebellion isn't at all like using email to spread viagra spam. Somethings just take a bit of time and while the word was gathering speed, it was going to be a fair bit longer before things really got cooking.

[Gloval]

The man would see the two pickup trucks, government flags strapped down over the hoods and filled with soldiers, speeding down the road towards Gaâfour. They were gone just as fast as they came, leaving just a trail of dust. Bacco himself didn't notice the man on the road, they had crossed plenty of people taking their goods to the regional capital on the road, and a single guy with a radio wasn't something that was going to stand out.

Fairly soon they'd arrive in the city of Gaâfour, and the two trucks pull over next to a group of older men sitting together at a coffee house; because if he wanted to get anything done, talking with a government-appointed bureaucrat who had just gotten there probably was the wrong way to go about it. Looking back at the soldiers, he speaks in Italian, "Stay in the trucks, I want us to look professional. Let me do the talking."
Stepping out of the car and leaving his rifle behind, he puts on a smile and walks up, speaking in the Tunisian blend of Arabic, "Excuse me gentlemen, My name is Suhaym Bacco. I'm sorry to interrupt whatever you were doing, but I was wondering if you could point me in the direction of the community leader." He reaches out to shake their hands.

OOC: Found a neat website that goes into smaller cultural details than Wikipedia; What can I say, I personally know very little of foreign cultures. <__<
http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/tunisia-country-profile.html

Edited September 24, 2012 by Gloval

[Gloval]

Over the course of several weeks, Bacco had made significant progress, convincing many of the bureaucrats sent to the towns and villages to let the local populace (especially tribal leaders) back into the decision making process. Technically it was all unofficial, but Bacco had high hopes, high enough that he had sent back a long, detailed report explaining how he was solving the problem directly to the King's Office. He had been in enough meetings with the local Governor-General that he knew he had to go over the man's head to get anything done.

Re-enforcement had been swift as well, with a full two brigades now under his command, along with a few armored trucks to replace the pickups. His job was quickly turning to escorting construction crews and making deals with Berber groups.