With his brow deeply furrowed Poulengy returned Scott’s stare. “You know they will, Scott. What happened to that fighter wing out of Mountain Home Air Base yesterday cannot be written off as an aberration. This morning the Chief of Staff of the Air Force was in the Sec Def’s office jumping up and down swearing ‘never again.’ Scott,” Poulengy added in a lower tone, “we can’t afford to be embarrassed like that. If you get there after all our huffing and puffing and find out you don’t have enough men to kick the door in, ‘We, The People,’ are screwed.”

While he had been hammering out the actual plan of operation, the same concerns Poulengy was expressing had never been far from Scott’s mind. He had tried to think of ways of sidestepping the issue, to ignore it. But if the shooting started, he knew that some of his soldiers would, out of respect for their own homes and countrymen, hesitate, if not turn. That there was a great deal of sympathy throughout his division for many of the principles that the people of Idaho now represented was no secret.

After a long silence, during which the two men abandoned themselves to their deepest, darkest thoughts, Scott stood up, went to the door, opened it halfway, and motioned for his aide. Snapping to, the aide bounded over to him and leaned forward so Scott could whisper in his ear. When his general was finished, the aide went over to his desk, hit the speed dial for the 2nd Brigade, and relayed Scott’s instructions.

The post gym, normally occupied by a handful of off duty soldiers shooting baskets at this time of day, was alive and crowded with soldiers of the 4th Armored Division’s 2nd Brigade. Because that brigade was the farthest along in their annual training cycle Scott had selected it to be the lead element for the divisional deployment and advance into Idaho. They would deliver the main effort that would originate in Utah and follow an axis of advance defined by Interstate Highway 84. The division’s 1st Brigade would stage in northern Nevada. That brigade would move north along two widely separated routes that would link up with the main effort at Twin Falls, Idaho, before heading into Boise. In that manner the Idaho National Guard would find its flank turned if they tried to stop the Second Brigade at any number of choke points along 1-84. The division’s National Guard round-out brigade, which normally was included in all real world contingency planning and operations, hadn’t even been notified.