Redcoat Lessons Forgotton
I came across this charming account demonstrating further ways to ingratiate your invading soldiers with the locals:
As the U.S. Army’s Seventh Combat Support Group, a unit of the Third Infantry Division, moved northward in the Arabian desert west of the Euphrates River towards the town of Najaf on March 26, the commander, realizing his exhausted men faced shortages of food and water, was looking for a place of refuge. He found it in the form of two Bedouin families. Drew Brown, reporter from Knight Ridder News Service who was embedded with the unit, reported that Col. John P. Gardner ordered the two families to leave their land and turn it over to his men. He reportedly gave them “receipts” for the tents, dogs, chickens, bowls, pots and other possessions they left behind–receipts that neither he nor anyone else could tell them how they could redeem–and sent them off “befuddled” into the desert.
After taking longer than expected to reach An-Najaf, the support group Wednesday faced shortages of food and water. Crews scheduled to follow close behind were held back by limited visibility and fighting along the supply route, where Iraqis waited to pounce on any convoy driver unfortunate enough to get into a wreck. The support group found refuge by moving two families of nomads off their land. They gave the nomads receipts for later reimbursement, but could not tell them how or where to cash them. Befuddled, the families left behind their dogs, chickens, tents, bowls and pots. All day and night, the dogs howled, the puppies whimpered and the chickens squawked until they found partially eaten MREs discarded by the soldiers.
The Third Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the one that bans the billeting of troops in private households, was a direct result of the British practice of taking over colonial farms and households at will for the quartering of Redcoat troops. It was this obscene imperial behavior, perhaps more than the issue of “taxation without representation”, that really fed the fires of rebellion in the U.S. colonies. Brown doesn’t tell us what the two “nomad” families felt or said as they were driven by Gardner and his men from their homes and lands, but it’s a fair bet they weren’t awash with feelings or gratitude at their liberation.