Hey, have you guys heard about this Operation Jade Helm shindig? Yeah, it kind of came as a surprise to me, too. I didn’t know I’m about to be living in a region soon to be occupied by a U.S. military invasion force. I didn’t know the Southwest was a hotbed of insurgent activity, or when the revolution actually started. It wasn’t in the paper or on the community bulletin board along with the notices asking about missing horses. It wasn’t in the gossip at the local grocery store. But oranges were on sale and there’s spring lambs for sale from local herders! Wow, and who knew that Utah was hostile territory? That’s only a hop, skip, and a guerrilla night march away from here! Yeah, good ol’ Mexican Hat, Utah, we hardly knew you had it in you! And Texas, boy, I guess the feds took you seriously when you just flippantly talked about secession a few years ago. Now you’re one of the hostile states.

Ok, so, Operation Jade Helm is only a military training exercise. Well, anyway, that’s what the government wants us to believe. Evidently, the golden boys over at SOCOM (Special Operations Command) aren’t able to make do with the several hundreds of square miles they’ve already got for training in vast military installations spread out across the Southwest. Therefore, these Battlefield America: T... John W. Whitehead Best Price: $10.95 Buy New $18.80 (as of 10:15 UTC - Details) exemplars of military wisdom, such as it is and if such a thing actually exists, are planning to use the states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and possibly the part of California that borders Mexico, in a military exercise called Operation Jade Helm. About 1,200 of these stalwart heroes will attempt to infiltrate American civilian populations and engage one another in fierce firefights with blank ammunition. There will certainly be fun for the entire family with airdrops of paratroopers and helicopter air assault operations. They want to see if American civilians will be able to finger U.S. military infiltrators in their midst. Well, unless they’re shepherds or ranchers, they aren’t going to successfully infiltrate anything out here where I am. Perhaps they’ll be disguised as goats, who knows? I saw a suspicious looking mule the other day.

But the point is, look here, General Patton. You guys were given huge swaths of Southwestern states so you had room to do this crap without risking or pulling civilians into your silly little games. Ok? Got that? I wasn’t asked for my consent, nor was anyone else I know. We live here. We don’t want to be involved in your childish games of “war” or “cops and robbers”. Go play those games on your own land, not ours. Places like Fort Irwin, which were built for that at great expense to the American taxpayer, that is, us. We don’t need or want you sneaking around our women and children firing blanks or who knows what else you plan on doing. It’s bad enough how obvious it is that this is a training exercise designed to prepare you for fighting Americans. That’s why you’re training on how to infiltrate American civilian populations undetected and undertaking whatever it is you plan to do afterwards. But do that on your own turf. Again, we didn’t ask to be involved in Suicide Pact: The Radi... Napolitano, Andrew P. Best Price: $0.25 Buy New $2.84 (as of 04:15 UTC - Details) a military training exercise, nor did we give our consent. So, what, you told the local cops you’re going to do this and that makes it ok? Wrong, it doesn’t make it ok. You didn’t ask those cops, you told those cops. What’re they going to do, say no? Right, then you won’t give them any more Humvees and armored personnel carriers. “Nothing to see here, folks, move along. Just the U.S. military learning how to occupy American cities and towns and identify people to be carted off and disappeared, that’s all…”

And another thing. If you clowns intend to involve us in this cockamamie war game, then we want to be paid for it. Ok, so you will designate the entire Southwest a make-believe combat zone. Then I want to see a check for unwillingly being forced to participate in your ridiculous charade. You’re using me and everyone else here as a marker on your little war game board, so we should be paid just like your soldiers. And have the UN do some food aid drops here, too, while you’re at it. I can always use the rice. It’ll be more good training in how this works. That’ll go along way to keeping us here from throwing in with the enemy over in Utah. But only if the UN aid drops have decent coffee, otherwise, count on us crossing the San Juan River and forging an alliance with them. Utah has already sent out feelers and said they can promise some gourmet dark roast, so you’re going to have to beat that. We’re in an area not yours totally, according to your war game, but leaning towards you. Yeah, well, you got to pay for that. That’s how it works. That’s how it worked in Iraq, right? What’s in it for us?

Progressivism: A Prime... James Ostrowski Best Price: $8.99 Buy New $10.95 (as of 08:30 UTC - Details) So, ok, here’s the U.S. military training to fight an American civilian population. Dig what that means. If they were training to fight a foreign power, they could do that at Fort Irwin, which was created for that. If they were training to infiltrate a civilian population, why use the American civilian population? Our social customs and culture are different from those of the Middle East and, to some extent, Russia. The answer is to be found in the very motto the U.S. military has written for Operation Jade Helm. That motto is “Master The Human Domain”. Now, I ask you, does that sound like something the Founding Fathers would have said? No, it sounds like something Caligula or Nero would have said. Not to “guard” or “defend” the “human domain” (that is, the American people) but to MASTER it. In other words, enslave it and subjugate it. Master it. That motto is something a tyrant would say. And certainly has.

So, here I am, your accidental war correspondent in the Second Civil War military exercise. I hope they don’t start moving tanks in this exercise. Many of our bridges can’t take the weight. We just got a new bridge over the Little Colorado River out on Highway 89 in Cameron and I’d hate to see it collapse because they tried moving a tank over it. And, hey, all these mock battles they plan to fight using blanks, I have some questions. Will there be bleachers set up so we can watch? Shoot, we can make bets on which side will win. We can set up food concessions, hot dog stands, and sell Against the State: An ... Rockwell Jr., Llewelly... Best Price: $5.02 Buy New $5.52 (as of 11:35 UTC - Details) t-shirts. “The Federal Government Occupied My State And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt”. And where will these paratroopers be landing? If we knew that, we could set up a snowcone stand there, maybe make a couple bucks. Hey, it’ll be July in the Southwest! Everyone loves snowcones! Or, better yet, our regional favourite: Paletes! If these troops stay a little past July, we’d set up a green chile roasting operation, too. Who doesn’t love roasted green chiles? Those would go a long way to making MREs halfway edible.

Look, we have good reason not to want to be involved in their military training without our consent or knowledge of what they’re actually doing. When they did atmospheric nuclear weapons testing over at the Nevada Test Site, the fallout drifted across the Southwest. Lots of innocent people died from cancer as a result. You can go into medical clinics here to this day and see notices that say: “Are You A Downwinder?” A Downwinder is someone who was here when those tests were being done. The government won’t even admit to the possible long-term genetic damage that may have resulted from those tests. And we’ve got abandoned uranium mines, mills, and tailings piles strewn all over the place out here. So, no, we don’t trust them. And we have good reason not to. They said it was for national defense, like they’re saying about Operation Jade Helm. Well, excuse us, but we’re a bit jaded ourselves.

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