The Almost War - Battle of Pleasant Oaks
This interview was recovered through the efforts of the War Stories Archive, which works to preserve the oral history of the Second American Civil War.
Things had been pretty quiet for a while, but then the Cypress Ranch Patriots came in and flipped the whole equation again. A little group from the teachers’ union had been holding on to the Best Buy for most of the summer, but the Patriots brought so many technicals down that the whole thing was just a matter of time. I watched it all happen from this little condo I had found downtown, 10 floors up, with no one in the building but me. I taped trash bags over the big windows to block out my lights, but during the daytime I would peel back a section of the plastic and watch.
I went to school with the guy that people said had been running the Cypress Ranch Patriots, Brice Something. I don’t really remember much about him, except that his family had a Ford dealership, which would make sense about all the technicals.
I didn’t really mean to get stuck downtown like that, but when things got hot again at Pleasant Oaks, I had no choice but to stay put. I had been trying to see my parents for a couple of weeks at least, but there was nowhere safe to cross the 10. Everybody was so jumpy on the borderlines, they were pretty much just shooting anyone that tried to cross. Until they figured out the whole situation at the shopping center and one side took this section of freeway for good, I had to find an arrangement where I was. Downtown emptied out early when all this stuff started, so I had a lot of empty offices and apartments to choose from. Most of the people that had lived in those condos saw the writing on the wall, I think.
There was no water in the building, so I would take 2 gallon jugs over to the lake and run them through my filter back at the condo. The little green belt with the lake was about a mile from my spot, but it would take an hour each way because of all the barricades. I would wake up around 10, and then wait around until around midnight to get going. You had to be really careful downtown, even that late. If there was shooting on my route that I had to wait out, it could take me all night to get back. When I had the water situation figured out, I could make something to eat. My food situation was actually OK that summer, because I had traded an old powerbank to some bikers that were selling off a hijacked UN shipment. They were just interested in the gear and the truck, and pretty much let me go nuts on the Food Program bags. I carted off two 20 kilo rice bags, 3 containers of dehydrated potatoes, and half a flat of sardines before the bikers started giving me funny looks.
During my first week in the building, I broke the lock on every single utility door until I found the old break room. I hit the jackpot on an unopened Folgers can, one of those giant red ones that promise you 260 cups or something. Cooking was my biggest problem, because it was almost impossible to find any fuel. I had about half of a propane container left, and a tiny camping gas container that I was saving in case I needed to bail. I would try to make food without using any fuel on every other night, and just stick to cold-soaked potato mash and a few sardines. I’d also make fires in this apartment one floor up from me sometimes, but that was dangerous. I had to keep the windows closed and risk inhaling too much smoke, so I tried to avoid doing that as best as I could.
After breakfast I would usually read or watch a movie or something. My little solar panel gave me enough power to dick around with my hard drives all day if I wanted to, so that’s what I ended up doing a lot of the time. Sometimes I went digging through one of the other condos, but they were all pretty picked over by the time I got there. A few dirty clothes on the ground, or maybe something big and useless, a treadmill or a dryer. A couple definitely had bodies in them, you could tell by the smell in the hallway. I just avoided those. I guess I didn’t think about it that way, then, that I was living downtown in a big, expensive condo building with only a couple of corpses as my neighbors. By the time my movie was over or I was tired of reading, the sun would usually be coming up, and the shooting would start back up at the plaza. I wouldn’t be tired enough to go to sleep yet, so that’s when I’d fold back a little section of the window covers and watch what was happening below.
I guess that’s why everybody’s been wanting to talk to me, because I had a pretty good view of what happened down there that day. People always want to know about those hostages, but like I keep saying, I didn’t even see that part of it. That was all inside of the Home Depot, and I didn’t find out about it until I came here. To be honest with you, I always just think about my parents. That’s what really messed me up, that’s why I really had to get out of there. People assume that I left with everyone else because of what happened at Pleasant Oaks, and I don’t tell them any different, because I don’t like talking about it anyway. They’re saying if I talk about what I saw, I’ll have a better shot at getting resettled soon, so that’s what I’m doing. I just want to be honest about that.
