THE SPOILS OF WAR by Pete Brown. petebrownuk @ yahoo.com
Read all of Pete's stories in groups.yahoo.com/group/petebrownseroticstories
(note: I Googled a couple of chapters of a story called "The Second Civil War" that inspired me to write this. If anyone has the entire story, please send it along!)
Part 1
My folks wanted me to go to college, of course, just like my two elder brothers had. Although we were not all that well off, dad had always scrupulously saved into college funds for all of us, and provided I worked in the vacations and so on, it would have been possible - if my grades weren't good enough for MIT, there would certainly have done well enough so that I didn't have to go to the local community college.
But I'd always been a real jock at High School, and having lived all my life in the same small town in Maine, I wanted a bit of excitement, some adventure, some chance travel, and to use my body. Again, I was good, but not good enough for professional football, not tall enough for professional basketball, and so on.
I saw this advert on TV saying about how they needed guys to serve the good old USA in the forces, so I decided to apply. I had a long talk with the recruiting sergeant in the office in the local town, and he talked me out of the things I'd at first thought of - not the air force, as unless you fly, you're a nobody. Not the navy, as it was constantly being cut back and there was no real long term future.
So it was the army - a real growth service, as we increasingly policed all the little dog fights all over the planet.... Or, considering that I looked really fit and tough, perhaps I should try for the marines.
The selections tests were really tough, and most of the guys were a bit older than me having "failed" to get the jobs they wanted or thought they deserved. But I battled on, and was accepted. You can read elsewhere about how bad boot camp really is: rightly so, I think, looking back on it - you need something to be a "gate keeper" to stop the real dead beats from even applying, and then to weed out those who just can't hack it. Look, it's tough; you're cold, wet, shouted at, bullied (yes, it does go on), half starved, and absolutely worn out every day. But at the end of it you're really strong - not just your body that's a lot tougher than it was before you started, but your whole personality. You survived basic training, so you can survive anything after that. That's why marines always look so cocky and proud when you see them in the streets - they know they're far and away superior to ordinary men, who just couldn't go through that and come out the other side.
I spent the next six years so busy fighting and staying alive that I didn't really notice what was going on at home, and I surely did travel - those little "incidents" in South America, Asia, Europe.... But I was in the service, and it looked after me, and to a certain extent it didn't matter where I was: I was kitted out, housed, fed, had great buddies to socialise with in the off duty hours, there was lots of sport, the PX to bring me home comforts wherever I was, my medical bills were all paid and I had the best care money could buy. And I was even saving, too, as there generally wasn't much to spend my cash on, and all the foreign service allowances and combat payments really mounted up.
Of course it was hard when you lost good buddies, as we did from time to time in spite of all the armour and weapons and everything - we were marines, after all, and went in first, and went in hard, and stayed there! And curiously, in spite of our fantastic comradeship, guys did leave when their tours of duty were up and they would not re-sign - usually it was some woman they'd got pregnant when they were on leave, who was whining for him to go and "be a proper dad". Me - well, I fucked around, of course, as there is a motley crew of women who always hang around marines' bases as they want a strong body and a big dick. And overseas the South Americans or the Asians or whoever would soon set up what amounted to a brothel near where we were peacekeeping. But somehow, when I was on leave, I never met a girl who I wanted to settle down with, or, rather, the whole thing kind of passed me by - I wasn't at home all that much, and then there wasn't time to break into the social scene in our small town and really have time to get to know anyone. My brothers and their wives tried to introduce me to people, but maybe I wasn't all that interested - the service gave me almost everything I needed in terms of emotional support, and the occasional woman, and liberal use of my hand every night, satisfied me sexually.
It's amazing how, even with TV beamed into all our bases where ever we were, and the US papers and everything, you can get out of touch. I guess that spending so much time in strange foreign countries I almost lost interest in what was going on at home. I was aware of the row breaking out between the south and the rest of the country, of course, especially when Alabama Senator Prexmire made such a splash when he clearly laid out the case for the reintroduction of slavery: I can see it now, the tall, heavy-set man in his immaculate but flamboyant clothes standing there as the rest of the Senate tried to shout him down. But he persisted, explaining that his state was tired of the wave of crime, tired of having to build new prisons, tired of paying for prisoners to live the easy life, tired of the seemingly endless and random shootings, of the drug traffic. All of this would be solved under his "two strikes and you're a slave" law,
as, at a stroke, there would be no need for prisons, no expense (indeed, there would be a positive revenue flow from the sale of convicts), and absolutely no re-offending as a slave working away chained in a coffle had no opportunity to break the law again. I remember watching that original broadcast on a base somewhere in Africa, and a lot of guys, me included, shouted "fucking right!" as we compared how we risked our lives with the cushy numbers prisoners now had in the USA.
Well, as even a cursory knowledge of modern history tells you, that speech was the start of the disaster that befell our country. Laughed out of the Senate, Prexmire campaigned in Alabama for a state law, and when this was introduced, and was seen to be wildly successful, all might still have been well had not those busy bodies in the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law, and took the case of one slave (a former drug dealer at that!) right up to the Supreme Court. The Court struck down the Alabama law, with a lot of the justices pontificating about how it was a basic infringement of human rights, never mind the constitution of the United States. Prexmire, now Alabama's Governor, responded by pointing out that slaves didn't have human rights - men had human rights, and slaves did as their masters ordered! He refused to implement the Supreme Court decision, and constitutional hell broke out.
Many of the states in the old south were in favour of the Alabama laws, and had been planning to implement similar ones themselves. And when the President, many said unwisely, ordered the infantry into Alabama to arrest Prexmire and release the slaves, the National Guard fought them. The cream of the infantry was of course serving abroad, and so the raggle of new recruits and so on were actually defeated just outside Birmingham by the well trained members of the Alabama National Guard, into whose training and equipment Prexmire had poured all the savings from the non-operation of the prisons and the revenues from the sale of slaves. And, of course, they were fighting on their home ground, for their state's rights.
There probably could still have been a compromise, a peaceful solution, But every time you turned on the TV there was another spokesman (or, as they said, spokesperson) from the ACLU ranting on about the "disgrace" and the "loss of dignity" down there. The forces of law and order never seemed to get air time, and with the next presidential elections looming, "something had to be done". Personally, I don't think most right-minded people anywhere in the country minded what was going on with a load of criminals in Alabama, but you know how it is when the TV gets an issue like that - it flogs it to death. The President had to warn the other old south states not to follow Alabama, and when they enacted their laws anyway, there were more troops sent in. Finally, things were so bad that we were called home from the Gulf, and were told we were going to put an end to this nonsense in the south, once and for all.
By the time replacements had been found for us and we were due to fly back home, things had really moved on.
Alabama and the other states had announced that they were seceding form the Union; the President had said that they could not, and there was a battle in the Supreme Court about the precise meaning of the Constitution, states' rights, and so on. And then Prexmire was acclaimed as the President Of The Confederation. We found ourselves fighting not just the Alabama National Guard, but well trained, highly motivated, and well equipped troops from all over: what the military geniuses in Washington had failed to spot was that for years most recruits into the armed forces had come from the southern states. When sent to fight on their home territory, against people who were probably their families, or guys they'd been to school with, they simply revolted and joined the other side! Instead of just a simple "fire fight", therefore, we were engaged in a full scale war against battle-hardened men, at least as well equipped as we were.
Of course, in the long run, modern wars are won by money and logistics - who has the industrial might and the money to hold out longest? The south couldn't possibly win against the industrial might of the rest of the country, rather as the north had ultimately won the first civil war as a result of its superior industrial base. But no one had reckoned that President Prexmire would be so skilled a politician, and so active on the world stage. His agreement with the Arabs to cut the oil supplies to the USA was a master stroke - such oil as there was in the USA itself was mostly pumped in the south, and without access to the imported oil the economy of the north quickly, and fairly disastrously, ground to a halt.
Short of weapons, with almost no ammunition, and with all our supporting command and control systems mainly out of action because of the collapse of the general infrastructure, our marine corps, who had beaten whole countries into submission all over the globe, had to surrender to the Confederate forces at the second battle of St Louis.
They took us to a makeshift prisoner of war camp, or so it was called. It was just a huge area of flat land somewhere, with hastily-constructed barbed wire emplacements all around it and some watch towers where Confederate guards in their smart grey uniforms sat and stared down at us. There was nothing there - just the flat land with a faint covering of grass. They searched us thoroughly, taking away even the tiniest combat knife, then just turned us loose into the area.
A couple of hours later a truck arrived and delivered a whole lot of plastic sheeting and some two by fours, and that was that.
I guess it's a tribute to the marines training that some sort of discipline was maintained. We had no officers, who had been housed elsewhere, but the sergeants soon had us working to fashion crude shelters out of the plastic and timber - and we needed it, because the rain soon started to pour down. The already soggy land quickly turned into a quagmire as we moved around, and we got ankle-deep in mud - fortunately our combat boots kept the worst of it out.
Sanitation was primitive - one corner of the vast field was reserved for pissing and shitting. And we were only fed some sort of emergency field rations - exactly the right number of bars were delivered every morning and every evening, and again, it's a tribute to marine corps discipline that there was no cheating as they were distributed. They kept us like this, no better than animals really, for over a week. We were all tired, as it was almost impossible to sleep on the soggy wet ground even if you could find a small area of plastic sheeting to lie on, and wet through from the incessant rain. If we hadn't all been so young and fit, I'm sure there would have been serious illness. Looking back on it, we must have seemed to be less than human by the Confederates guarding us - we were filthy, covered in mud, crouched there in the open crapping, and to all world looked like a big herd of some sort of strange farm animal. I used to see those huge pig farms as we drove around the country on vacation years ago, and I guess it was pretty much like that, except that we were men, and not pigs.
I suppose they'd put us there as a temporary measure as the whole country was in such chaos, and they had a lot of men to deal with at once. But on the other hand, perhaps it was to sap our will, and wear us down - yes, that seems the most likely explanation, as they could have housed us in high schools, or empty prisons, or somewhere, couldn't they? Fortunately they collected us on the eighth day, loading us onto standard army trucks, with a Confederate soldier riding as guard on each one. We arrived at what was recognisably an army base, and we all began to cheer up - there would surely be showers, bunks, perhaps even a PX? We could phone our folks, assuming the phone system was working again, and there was hope for that - the place was brilliantly lit, indicating that power was back on. But it was not to be - we were paraded on the parade ground, always guarded by Confederates with their guns, drawn up into standard ranks. The fucking rain started again, and they kept us standing there - in our previous "camp" we had at least been able to huddle under cover of the plastic sheeting, but here we just got wet. And when I say wet, I mean really wet - you know how those storms in the south can drop inches of rain, well, it was like that - you could hardly breathe it was raining so hard, your clothes were completely soaked through, and we were soon all shivering with the cold.
Slowly, though, one rank at a time, we were marched off the parage ground and into one of the buildings. We were placed in a line along one wall of a long corridor, and gradually, inch by inch, we shuffled forward along it. Still, at least we were in the dry now, and it was relatively warm. One by one we were taken through a door, each time it seemed to take a couple of minutes, and at long, long last it was my turn.
Inside, it looked like a standard military court room - not that I'd ever been court martialled, but I'd seen them on the movies. There was a dais with a long table on it, behind which sat three senior Confederate officers. To one side there was a desk with a lieutenant at it, and on the other, a desk with a PC at which sat a corporal. Eight guards, armed, stood smartly at attention, regularly spaced around the room.
"Name and number!", the corporal snapped as I entered, and as I had learned throughout my military career, I retorted "Masters, corporal. Steve Masters. 86607016."
He typed away for a moment, then turned to the officers and said "Private first class in the 147th marine corps, sir. Saw duty all over our country, most recently fighting in the battle of St Louis."
The three officers looked at each other, and just said "Guilty, then, of course?"
"Sirs!", the lieutenant rose to his feet. "On behalf of the prisoner I formally protest that this court is not properly constituted and that the prisoner cannot be tried here. The prisoner is a prisoner of war, and is subject to the Geneva Convention which prohibits enemy states from trying combat soldiers. If the Court rejects that argument, then I further respectfully remind the court that the prisoner was only obeying orders, which was his duty."
He sat down, almost sitting at attention, and the chief officer replied calmly and quietly "Thank you, Lieutenant. The Court rejects your arguments. This is a properly constituted Court of the Confederate Army. The prisoner is an American soldier and can be tried by the court as he is not an enemy combatant in the terms of Convention - he is a rebel, engaged in a civil war. And 'obeying orders' is no defence when the crime is treason."
Looking at me he simply went on "The Court finds you guilty of treason for fighting against the lawfully constituted authority in the state, and sentences you to death."
I gasped in shock, but the Lieutenant was on his feet again "Sirs, I request clemency for the prisoner."
"Granted. Sentence commuted to lifetime slavery, no freedom permitted. Next case...."
I realised it had all been a formula - I had been in there only a couple of minutes, and as a guard motioned for me to exit by a door opposite the one I had come in by, the other door opened and the next guy came in to the room.
There was another queue of guys on the other side of the door, and risking the wrath of the guards who patrolled the corridor, I soon discovered that we'd all been subject to exactly the same process. I realised why when, a few minutes later as we were still shuffling forward, a group of guys in suits, with big red crosses on armbands on them, strolled along. They were talking to a smooth-looking guy who was evidently a politician or in PR or something, as I heard him say "Of course we had a problem initially, as our systems were simply overwhelmed by the volume of prisoners. But we are closing the temporary transit camps as quickly as we can, and bringing the prisoners here for trial. They all get a proper Court Martial with three military judges and a defence counsel: The Confederacy wants to be recognised as a properly constituted state, and we're doing everything we can to fully comply with international treaties and conventions....."
I don't think that being condemned to be a slave had really sunk in until I got to the head of the line. I saw that there were showers there, and gladly stripped off my filthy uniform and actually revelled in being able to get the accumulated grime off me under the hot water. I had a couple of weeks of growth on my beard, and there were no provisions for shaving, but at least I felt properly clean as I got to the end of the long shower stall. It was almost like being back in our proper barracks again - you get used to showering with your comrades in the marines, and I didn't feel even the faintest trace of embarrassment about stripping and showering with the other guys. But it was quite different when I came out - there were no towels or anything, and we were simply moved along, the water dripping of us. In a small area heavily guarded with Confederates, one of them slipped something around my neck - a leather collar - and buckled it at the front.
"Hands behind your neck, boy!", he snapped, and when I hesitated, even for a moment, there was a dreadful kind of electric stabbing pain that shot through me, and made me cry out.
"That's a slave prod, boy. Get used to it. Slaves who don't obey orders get prodded. Or whipped. Now, hands behind your head...."
Well, what could I do, surrounded by guards and totally naked? Even a trained fighter knows those odds are impossible and the first rule of combat is to conserve your strength for when the odds are better. So I put my arms behind my neck, and felt them being fastened to the collar by cuffs.
"Right! Now...." The soldier reached up and unfastened my dog tags, simply tossing them into a container on the floor.
"Hey...!", I protested, and the soldier just looked at me, almost pityingly. "You want another prod, boy? The first rule you need to learn here is that slaves only speak when they're spoken to. Understand?"
I hesitated, and there was that dreadful shock again, making me scream out. "I said 'do you understand', boy! The second rule is that a slave always answers a master, and always answers respectfully. 'Sir, yes, sir' would be the appropriate reply. Understand?"
"Sir, yes, sir!" Well, it was only like speaking to the sergeant at boot camp, after all. So I carried on "Sir, permission to speak, sir?"
He nodded, and I went on "Sir, my dog tags, sir. A soldier always needs ID...."
"You're right, of course. But you're not a soldier any more, boy, you're a slave. Didn't you hear the Court - you were sentenced to life-long slavery. Slaves do need ID, and your owner, once you've been sold, will give you proper ID, not something that can be taken off like these tags... Now, move it, slave, unless you want to get the prod again...."
I re-joined the line of naked men, all, like me, with their hands cuffed behind their necks. I soon realised that this was almost the ideal way of controlling us - our hands immobilised like that, and totally naked, we were extremely vulnerable. Escape was impossible, of course, as there was no way of opening a door or anything. And as all the guards carried the slave prod things, and short riding crops with a leather strap at the end, we could be moved along, or made to be silent, or whatever, quite easily - the pain wouldn't permanently harm you, but you really did try to avoid it if possible.
They'd got this place set up rather like the medical centre that I'd gone through when I first joined the service when there was a whole bunch of guys whose blood and urine had to be taken, who needed chest X-rays, heart monitoring, and general fitness testing.
The only real difference, I suppose, was that we were then in regulation cotton boxers, and our hands weren't cuffed! There was another difference, too - at the first "station" a guy with a magic marker scrawled the number 639 on my left butt cheek, asked me my service number again, then keyed the two numbers into a PC. I hated being marked in this way - it made me feel like some sort of animal, as, after all, they could just have asked me for the number, couldn't they?
But no: every time something was done to me, they casually looked down at my butt to see the number, and the whole thing seemed to go on for hours. I was weighed, my height measured, then blood was taken, a guy with a stethoscope listened to my chest, a pad was put on my pecs and some tracing of my heard recorded, and then I got to stand on a grill in the floor.
"Right, slave - we need your urine to test for drugs and diseases", the guard at that station told me. "But it's hard for you to fill one of these little containers, when you can't use your hands! So we use Dylan here...." So saying, he scrawled 639 on one of those test tube things, and handed it to a young guy who, like me, was naked. He might have been a soldier, I suppose, but not a fighter like me - Dylan was thin and wiry, and can only have been sixteen at the most.
He took the container, knelt in front of me, and almost whispered "Just piss - I'll catch it. And I know it's difficult to stop, and you probably need a piss anyway, so just carry on... that's what the grill's for...."
Look, even when you need to piss, and I did, as I'd been standing in line for hours one way and another, you just can't do it, can you? Especially when there's a young lad holding your dick and pointing it at a container!
Start pissing, slave!", the guard snapped, and, when in spite of my efforts, nothing happened, he bought the riding crop down smartly on my butt. The sheer unexpectedness of this released my tension and the piss shot out of me, surprising poor Dylan who got covered in it. And, of course, once you've started, you can't stop, can you? The little container was full to overflowing in seconds, and Dylan scrambled out of the warm shower I was producing, wiped the container on a cloth, and put it into a rack full of others, evidently waiting for processing. He stood there as I finished up, then knelt and massaged the last drops out of my urethra, slightly skinning me back so that none lodged under my 'skin. I hated it - I'd never had a guy do anything like that to me before: I mean, a guy's dick is pretty private, isn't it? All your comrades see it all the time in the corps, but you don't touch each other! But I suppose I should have been grateful - I mean, us guys with foreskins have to be careful as it can soon go rank and smelly if you're not careful.
He scrambled to his feet again, and I saw his body shining with my piss where I'd covered him. "Look, sorry...", I started to say, before the guard snapped "Slaves remain silent at all times, or get punished....", then, as he seemed to be a bit more kindly than the others, went on "Don't worry about Dylan - it's his job. You all manage to leak some over him, but he enjoys it: we saw his profile on the gay dating service, and found he liked water sports, so he's almost in heaven here!"
At the end of this tedious line there was a huge room, filled with naked guys like me, all cuffed. Some crude barriers divided the area into several sections, and as I got to the front there seemed to be some sort of selection going on. Surrounded by guards with the inevitable prods and whips was a big, florid man in vaguely flamboyant clothes - a business suit, but in a very pale brown, with huge checkerboard squares of darker browns all over it, a silk shirt with a long, floppy collar, and instead of a tie, a huge cravat of bright yellow silk, very loosely tied around his throat. I didn't know it at the time, but I'm sure you're all aware that slave dealers tend to adopt this eye-catching style of dress so that in the crowds at slave sales they're more readily recognisable, in case you want to do business with them.
One of the guards looked at my butt, snapped "639", another keyed something into a hand-held PC, and said "This one was a marine, on active service, sir."
"Quite so", the dealer mused. "Even if you hadn't said that, I might have guessed. Very good body indeed. Fine musculature. Not a trace of fat. And I think that under that hair, he's probably got a nice face. Category A, for the time being I'll examine him more thoroughly later on."
Without any more being said I was pushed through a gate into one of the enclosures - not a very crowded one - where there were already a few guys who, like me, were evidently battle-hardened real soldiers. In the next enclosure to us were men who were clearly better than the idle population as a whole, as they were mostly lean, but who lacked our hard muscles - probably they'd been in logistics, or catering, or whatever. The third enclosure was the same as that, the only difference being that blacks were sent there, whereas the second one was for whites and Hispanics, and the fourth one, on the other side of us, was empty.
We all stood around as the flow of men went on, and the "sorting" continued. If anyone spoke a guard would push his way through the naked bodies, flailing with his whip and stabbing randomly with his prod, so we all soon learned just to remain quiet. Then, towards the end, there was a general rumbling noise as a couple of hundred guys stirred uneasily - coming into the room were women, naked, like us, hands cuffed like us, and their breasts therefore thrust out provocatively. They were all shepherded in to the fourth enclosure, next to ours, and a whole range of emotions ran thorough me. Look, I know that they have women in the forces, and they do a good job. These must have been doing support roles when they were captured, and I can understand why they're not allowed into front-line fighting roles - there's something about the male-female thing that makes guys instinctively want to protect women, isn't there? And it was working now - we had all been more or less content to stand there, worrying about our own fate. But the moment these women appeared, there was this muttering of anger.
Perhaps worse than that, though, was appearing naked in front of them, and of seeing them naked. I mean, a group of guys together doesn't mind changing, showering, and doing all kinds of stuff like tat together, do they? But with women present., it's different. We all felt acutely naked now, and, as you'd expect, most of us sprang huge boners, which just made us feel worse.
I'm sure there would have been a riot when the slave trader finally came into the women's enclosure and started to "assess" them had the guards not patrolled around the men's enclosures and maintained order. We watched in horror as he fondled their breasts, turned them around and ran his hands over their hips and thighs as if to see whether they were fat, or just big or small hipped, and then turned them around and brusquely inserted a couple of fingers up their cunts.
Many of the women were silently weeping at this, but the guy just didn't seem to care - he divided them into two groups, and I have to say that my own tastes were pretty much in agreement with his - all the women in the first group had nice faces and good bodies: well, pert breasts, nicely rounded bellies, not too broad in the hip: I'd have happily fucked any of them. The second group were best characterised as "earth mothers" - bigger breasted, wider hips....
We were stunned when he called to the guards "This group - they've been pre-sold to a breeder down in Nashville. They've all got good broad child-bearing hips... There's a transport waiting for them, take them out. And this group...", he indicated the ones I found fuckable, "they're for next week's sale of domestics and pleasure slaves. Take them to cell block G, and make sure you keep your hands - and dicks - off them: they're prime stock, and their new owners won't have wanted them mauled by a load of soldiers!"
The two corrals of blacks and whites were soon dealt with - the guards took one black and one white, took off their restraint collars, and cuffed the two men together, right wrist of one to left of the other, with metal handcuffs. Pair by pair they were then marched out, and I heard the dealer in conversation with the guards, almost laughing. "They're all in for a shock - they're just common fodder, destined to work in field gangs, and the modern theory is that you pair a black and a white like that as they both hate it - these racial things are buried deep! The white will try to boss the black, who'll resent it. The black will probably work harder and blame the white for being lazy... And before they realise it, they'll be competing with each other, which means more work out of them, and less time for them to think about escape and such like! Clever, those psychologists, aren't they?"
There were only about forty of us left, then. All fit-looking, strong, but varying in general body shape and colour. There were a couple of really big tall blacks, a few tall-ish guys like me, and the rest more or less around the average. We stood there as the dealer and guards came into our corral - what the fuck was he going to do to us?
End Of Part 1