Shanghaied - 2ACW

I wonder, to the extent there are factions on both sides that want the war to end peacefully with either reunification or a permanent split, how much influence do they have? Are they powerful enough to be heard, and to wield influence?

153 – Running away

The Brave Rifles covered the withdrawal of the last disorganised pieces of what had been the US III & VII Corps when they withdrew from Arizona and back into New Mexico. It was mainly non-combat units which the 3rd Cavalry Regiment helped on their way to get out. Enemy interference was minimal. On the ground, the weakened Arizona Corps from the DAR Army didn’t properly pursue those in full retreat who ran with their tails between their legs. There wasn’t much air interference either. The DAR Air Force had a stand-down in activity. Overstretched and worn down, that air power gave the US troops making good their escape a let off from all of their previously intensive bombing runs and strafing attacks. It was only missiles which flew eastwards: Tomahawks fired at distance towards transport nodes where US activity was concentrated around when on the move. It had been the III Corps HQ to which the Brave Rifles had been assigned before the destruction of that multi-division force which was followed by the elimination of that command itself too. That left Colonel McSherry reporting direct to the US V Corps out in New Mexico during the withdrawal made, with that command post on the other side of the Rio Grande. The Brave Rifles were tasked to follow what the V Corps had done and recross that river where it ran through the middle of New Mexico. All of those troops who had returned from Eastern Europe, during ‘REFORGER in reverse’, had been held back in New Mexico west of the Rio Grande ready to go forward… until they weren’t. McSherry followed his orders and started taking those with him towards crossing points in-place to allow for the river to be gone over.

It was no easy feat. Yet it was done.

It took two days before the Arizona Corps started moving again. The 2nd & 3rd Armored Divisions, wartime-raised, were in no fit state at that time in late-March to go on the offensive even with such a weak opposition. Instead it was veteran units which moved forward to follow the retreating US Army. The 29th Infantry Brigade – Hawaiian national guardsmen from a state which had re-defected back to the United States – joined with what remained of the 25th Infantry Division (that unit had had a torrid time in Colorado early in the war losing half of its strength) in crossing the eastern reaches of Arizona and then moving into New Mexico too. They were ordered to establish contact where possible with the 3rd Cavalry Regiment but not expend themselves in a stand-up fight. Barely any real contact was made due to the head-start that those retreating had. Instead, the advancing Arizona Corps units ended up ‘policing the battlefield’. They ran into stragglers, small groups of cut-off soldiers from both sides of the conflict. There were injured service-personnel, again from both the US & DAR Armed Forces, who they came across. Abandoned weapons, equipment and even supplies were secured. Partisans were met as well. Men and women with guns but not in uniform were encountered all over the place. Some of them fought the DAR soldiers while others declared their intention to join the cause for which the Arizona Corps was fighting for. Armed criminal gangs were also met with fire-fights erupting: some of those had come up from Mexico while others from elsewhere within America’s borders. A smattering of Green Berets had been left in the wake of the retreat made out of Arizona by US forces and they caused the DAR soldiers a good number of problems with sniping ambushes, explosive devices and a good lot of activity which most people would call terrorism.

Convoys laden with prisoners and the wounded ran back westwards. There were DAR Marines around Phoenix, keeping the tense situation there under control, and through their over-watch positions went those convoys. Both EPWs and all of the many injured (DAR and US again) went through the Phoenix area due to its generally intact transport links that hadn’t seen significant war damage due to the presence of civilians all around them. Selected EPWs were flown out through the airheads around the city though the majority were moved further onwards to holding sites spread across the west of Arizona. Through March, the DAR had taken an extraordinary high number of captives and had struggled to deal with them. The ones policed up and sent backwards joined the masses of others held in facilities bulging at the seams. The critically wounded were transferred to medical care facilities ready to receive them including elements of the civilian sector. The less badly hurt, though who had been evacuated to the rear, were moved about to a good number of sites. Those in US uniform were afterwards moved onto the EPW camps while DAR service-personnel whom the doctors judged capable of returning to service were directed to do just that. The United States and the Democratic American Republic alike each treated EPWs in their custody well. There were a fair number of special cases where select prisoners were removed form the ranks of others for intelligence purposes or if they were suspected of committing war crimes, yet everyone else was treated properly. All around Phoenix, where the soldiers from two full corps of destroyed US Army and Army National Guard units were held, no one really suffered while held by the DAR. To keep those men guarded, fed, with shelter and provided for with medical care was immensely taxing for the DAR Armed Forces. They did it though because those were their fellow Americans. What was really wanted by the captors though was to see all of them sent home eventually.


General Lambert leading United States Army North, under instruction from US NORTHCOM’s General Reilly, had the Brave Rifles go to the Rio Grande then over it with the ragtag collection of service-personnel from all over the place that McSherry had gotten out of Arizona. The two generals had their own instructions on that coming from above: the Secretary of Defence at Raven Rock. The same order had come for the V Corps to cross the river beforehand. Lambert had wanted to send out ahead elements of the 1st Armored Division, tank-heavy and without little logistical tail behind them, as escort to ensure the 3rd Cavalry Regiment made it back but was denied permission. There was zero air cover available and despite the near stand-down by the DAR Air Force, the risk was judged too great. The Brave Rifles made it to the Rio Grande without needing to be rescued though would have sure been glad of an escort on the way.

On the eastern side of New Mexico, away from the abandoned western reaches of that large state, ARNORTH had on-hand the majority of its fighting strength. The US XVIII Airborne Corps was there alongside the V Corps, and there were US Marines as well though they were still engaged in low level fighting near to Santa Fe. Lambert had all of his forces spread out. There were huge gaps between component pieces down to below battalion-level of combat units from the brigades, divisions and corps. It was the same with combat-support and service-support elements too. One of his senior staff officers compared it all to a safe distancing measure taken to ensure minimal losses in a nuclear weapons scenario. It wasn’t nukes that the spacing was done to guard against though. It was instead the skies above when they were expected to fill with hostile jets again on conventional missions that the concern was over. The US Air Force was unable to fly its advanced fighters and had no ability to provide AWACS support for those older ones which could fly. Air defence missiles in US Army service, its SM-6s and Patriots, were all inoperable as well: only shoulder-mounted Stingers worked. Without air cover, bunching up would mean taking serious losses.

When McSherry when over the Rio Grande, inside the last Stryker armoured vehicle no less, as he thought that a good commander should do in such a situation, he took a second to look out a vision block at what was behind him. He told the sergeant who served as the vehicle’s gunner that the US Army had run away from the fight and that would be the last time that the army in which they both served would see the ground on the far side of the Rio Grande. It had all been given up, left to those committing treason against their country of birth, to hold and crow over their successful capture of. The shame was something that McSherry didn’t think he, let alone his country, would ever live down.

That's basically the Wild West in modern days. So now we have nutjobs fighting both sides and criminals running a free real estate.

Glad to see humanity being shown by both sides. The notion of Americans shooting fellow Americans will always sound stupid and a senseless waste of lives.

In OTL, I have many friends serving in the U.S. military. They are stationed in Japan, Hawaii, Alaska, California, and North Dakota. I couldn't help but think those stationed in Hawaii and California would be forced to join the DAR or shoot their fellow friends and neighbors that pledged their allegiance to the USA.

154 – Culiacán

Back in 2022, Samuel Pierce had successfully primaried the sitting Democratic incumbent in California’s gubernatorial contest. Pierce had won big on the back of a strong progressive campaign and then gone on to easily defeat his (somewhat token) Republican opponent that November. Unlike others, President Walsh at the top of that list, Pierce was never regarded as having ‘sold out’ during the Twenties by his supporters with a move to the centre. He had stayed left, refusing to be a moderate or, worse, a neo-liberal. There had been no real corruption during Pierce’s first term in office nor during his renomination to go for a second term. It was only after he won re-election, right at the end of 2026, when the Governor of California had ended up doing something illegal on behalf of a friend. Felix Jesus Carrillo Morales needed a little help with a little matter. Pierce could have said no, should have said no, but he didn’t. What was done wasn’t something to end the world over but it was against the law: if exposed, Pierce would have lost his position and even ended up in jail. Carrillo turned out to be far from a friend. He blackmailed Pierce, slowly but ruthlessly, into acting more and more in his interests. What Pierce ended up doing for Carrillo over the next few years was just plain bad. There had been no way which the governor could escape the clutches of the drug lord and people smuggler who built up his empire to staggering heights off the back of Pierce’s influence from Sacramento. Many times, Pierce had convinced himself that he was an innocent party caught in a web cast by the deceiver Carrillo. However, he enjoyed the benefits that the relationship with Carrillo gave him and then indulged himself in more corruption independent of Carrillo too. Once his innocence had been lost, Pierce went right over to the illegal side of political activities and personal enrichment from his office. No trouble had come from his conscience over what he had did.

Using Pierce, Carrillo held significant responsibility for the establishment of the Democratic American Republic. Many other players were in that same game, Pierce included, but without Carrillo, the secession of the West could never have happened. The murders and terrorist attacks which took place, ones blamed on the federal US Government and left extremist groups which seemingly sprung from the ground, combined with what else went on in a perfect storm to light the bonfire which became the Second American Civil War. Carrillo did what he did to make himself rich and powerful. Pierce just wanted the power. He had put Maria Arreola Rodriguez into the role of his nation’s first president because he believed that the DAR would only work with her at the top of it. She was the one whom the 2028 US President Election had been stolen from and who had all of that popular support which had become the footsoldiers of the secession where it took place on the streets of cities in the West. Pierce had had inklings of at some point assuming control yet he had never thought that he would need to do so, be able to do so, within a couple of months. Once he had understood that it had to be done though, he had moved fast and decisively. Power came naturally to him once in his hands. He did what he thought had to be done for the sake of the country he led… and also himself. When it came to that assumption of power, where with the aid of the military and security forces he had rid the DAR of the shared leadership, Pierce did that without Carrillo. His blackmailer had moved himself down to Mexico where he was in the midst of consolidating a coast-to-coast drug empire south of the border. Carrillo had been used as an intermediary by Pierce and the Council of Twelve ahead of his seizure of power to try and bring the war with the United States to a conclusion and had believed that the DAR’s new president wished for him to continue with that. The fool. Pierce was someone no longer in Carrillo’s grasp and had only the wish to see an end to the man. With the full power of the state in his hands, one with quite the reach in the right circumstances, Pierce had Carrillo killed on March 25th.

The CIA had been trying to assassinate Carrillo and there were various Mexican plus Columbian criminal entities also seeking the man’s death. The Mexican government had been left unable to deal with him in anyway due to the chaos which Carrillo’s consolidation effort had unleashed though, if the circumstances had presented themselves right, Mexico’s embattled president would also have liked to have seen Carrillo dead. President Pierce got to Carrillo before anyone else. The assassination of that American-born criminal took place during the early hours within the Sinaloa city of Culiacán. A fleet of well-protected SUVs crossed over the Jorge Almada Bridge with Carrillo surrounded by bodyguards of quite the calibre. They could do nothing to stop the drone strike though. A wave of hellfire missiles fired from unseen aircraft high above smashed into every vehicle in the convoy. Carrillo was one of thirty-four people left dead in an attack where there was no obvious culprit. Mexico’s drug war, in its third deadly decade, about to enter its fourth, was upended in narrative and would take some terrible, unforeseen twists once Carrillo died in such a manner. The murder in Culiacán set off a firestorm.

No longer did Pierce answer to anyone after that.


The same day, Pierce made a broadcast on DAR state media – the previously private and diverse media had been thoroughly reorganised under central state control – where he declared that the war for the independence of the West was almost won. Naturally, he said nothing about what had happened that same day down in Culiacán. His focus was on the fight against the United States to ensure that the Democratic American Republic would keep what it had taken: freedom from the failed state that it had broken away from. Pierce told those listening and watching that the liberation of Arizona had been completed and the country’s armies were moving back into New Mexico. There was still fighting for that second state to be had, along with the highly-populated eastern regions of Colorado too, but the DAR’s president said that he was certain that there would be ‘liberation’ of those areas soon enough. He moved to then talk to the people and leaders of the United States.

Pierce offered an end to the war.

It was within the grasp of both countries, two different Americas so he called them, for a peace deal to be reached. There was no more need for any more of the killing to take place where the war was nearly at a finish. Pierce implored the United States to listen to the offer he had sent for a conclusion to all of the fighting to occur.

US media broadcasters didn’t air footage of Pierce and nor did the print and mainstream online media directly quote his words. To do so was something still regarded at that time as putting out enemy propaganda while Americans were dying at the hands of the illegal regime which had installed itself in Las Vegas. However, it wasn’t something ignored. There was media coverage of his Pierce’s claims that the war had been won by the DAR and also that he had sent onwards directly to President Mitchell in the White House a peace offering. What was in that proposal for an end to the war wasn’t known. The details were sought though. Both the White House Press Secretary and SecDef Darby were asked by journalists whether they agreed with what those three former Cabinet secretaries (the past two Defence Secretaries and the last Secretary of State too) had said about the war being lost in light of Pierce’s remarks. It was absolutely not the case at all, the two respondents replied, that the war had been won by the DAR. There was talk of those ‘setbacks’ and an expectation that the ‘tide would be turned’: that had all been said before though, before the US Army had ran away from the fight in western New Mexico and over the Rio Grande. Yet the war hadn’t been lost by the United States! As to what was in the peace deal presented to Mitchell, neither the president’s press secretary nor his recent appointee for the post of Secretary of Defence would even confirm that a serious one had been made.

There was one though, one being talked about by the 50th President and his top-tier people.

That takes care one of the evil people in this timeline. Carillo won't be missed.

Imagine the U.S. Armed Forces getting beaten by a computer virus that was supposed to be used against China or Russia by small and illegal regime out west. Americans in this timeline would have wished the Walsh Administration used the Glowworm against the PLA during the invasion of Taiwan.

They are getting more and more f*cked with no end in sight to that shutdown of military capability. The US cannot fight at home and not even overseas too with what is happening.
Well... how we go towards the eventual end is something I have yet to thoroughly think through so I too am looking forward to seeing how that plays out!




No one is going to miss him.
I wanted something dramatic when I started the war and thought that that would be something I could take in unexpected directions. Its worked out well for story crafting purposes too, better than any other super-secret weapon - like an aircraft or missile etc - could have.


Interesting idea there about Walsh. Something I hadn't thought of before either. I'll think on that indeed.