[chico20854]

[December 11, 1997

Nothing in canon for today.

Civil unrest still rolls across the world as the remnants of national governments attempt to provide local and regional governments with resources, resources that are far from adequate given both the scale of damage and the breakdown of world trade.

Merchant ships try to avoid surviving major ports lest they be caught in a strike on one of them. The ships of Convoy 314 finally begin crossing the North Atlantic to Europe following strikes on Norfolk and Halifax, Nova Scotia, both marshalling ports for the flotilla.

Two investigators from the Bakersfield District Attorney's office are beaten by California State Guardsmen after attempting to conduct an investigative interview with the commander of the 5th California Brigade.

Most US Army training units have adopted a hybrid model. Depending on the length of training completed before the Thanksgiving Day Massacre, trainees are assigned differing levels of duties off-post supporting civil authorities. The senior-most trainees are officially graduated and assigned full-time duties, escorting food trucks, guarding fuel depots or assisting with refugees. Those with a month or more training completed pull civil relief duties part-time. Depending on the situation, they may perform a few hours of training each day or have several days of training each week and some days on civil duties. Those basic trainees with less than a month of service are, at this point, doing training full time in order to adequately transform them mentally from draftees to soldiers. Finally, to keep the pipeline going, local 18-22 year-olds, both men and women, are forcibly conscripted; the fact that college has not resumed after the attacks means that millions of college students are home and available for military service. (Meanwhile, FEMA has begun to implement plans to use unoccupied dorm rooms in rural areas as refugee housing, never mind that the rooms are full of student's possessions.)

When word is received of the nuclear strike on Hawaii, the battleship USS Missouri diverts to Puget Sound for repairs after it was damaged by a torpedo in November.

Private Cutler, having survived over three months in combat with the 36th Infantry Division, is promoted to Private First Class. His brother, still in Brownsville, Texas, is guarding a grocery distribution center.

The Soviets decide that they have suffered too much from American bombers and, being unable to close the gaps in their air defense net, the best way to stop them is to eliminate their main operating bases. (The GRU has a long list of suspected dispersal bases but absent confirmation that any particular one is being used the Strategic Rocket Forces are reluctant to waste warheads on them.). A SS-24 ICBM from the 60th Missile Division at Tatischevo near Saratov is fired at USAF bases across the south; Dyess and Carswell Air Force Bases (bases for B-1B and B-52H bombers, respectively) and Randolph AFB (headquarters of the USAF Training Command) in Texas are struck, alongside Shreveport in northwestern Louisiana, host of a number of military industrial sites and Barksdale Air Force Base, home of the 2nd Bomb Wing and its B-52s and tankers.

SAC strikes Soviet Central Asia, targeting the Central Asian Military District headquarters and aircraft plant in Tashkent, the SLBM plant and Communist Party apparatus in Alma-Ata, the energy weapons test and development center at Sary-Shagan and BMP plant at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.