“Don’t tread on me!” I cried out, and our line surged forward. Some patriots echoed my words, while others bellowed various phrases.

“Get some!”

“Semper Fi!”

“Deus Vult!”

“Remember Chicago!”

“Molon Labe!”

“Remember Duke LaCrosse!”

“Better dead than red!”

“MAGA!”

“Where we go one, we go all!”

I swear I even heard some wag bellowing, “Wolverines!”

All the exclamations blended into a battle cry that resounded through the square.

There was no penalty box here, so I used my stick to slash and smash into the Blackshirts with calculated abandon. Enforcers blocked baton strikes with their improvised shields and hit back twice as hard with bats, axe handles and other blunt weapons.

Deputy Dawg and Idaho Joe led their platoons in a pincers movement that cut off the bulk of the Antifa column from their now-trapped comrades in the square.

Patriots went down here and there, but a score of Blackshirts fell in the first minutes.

Most plans don’t survive first contact with the enemy, but the Enforcers in my platoon held the line with good discipline for the first phase of the clash. Nobody advanced until everybody was able. When we did move forward, we had to step over unconscious or bleeding, moaning Blackshirts.

Police used bullhorns to shout at us, but I didn’t really pay attention to them.

Screaming Blackshirts were unmasked, sent into a panicked retreat, or knocked out cold. I couldn’t quite believe how good the battle was going for us, but there were multitudes of Blackshirts just beyond our encircling action, and that was a sobering realization. Their manpower was effectively unlimited.

Then mob psychology stepped forward to play a role. Simultaneously, about 30 Blackshirts in the square decided they should escape to fight another day. They fled our encirclement, bursting through a weak point in Idaho Joe’s line with sheer weight of numbers.

They sliced into the ranks of their own column. Their panic flight caused a chain reaction. Blackshirts turned to flee by the dozens, then the hundreds. Their bovine nature (which made them such a formidable force in social media dogpiles) now worked against them, causing a stampede that resulted in Blackshirts trampling other Blackshirts. Such was the power of their desperation that they busted through the police cordons in several places.

Panting, I raised my stick and yelled. Other patriots followed suit and we enjoyed a Braveheart moment there on the square.

Patriots located the Boomercon who lost his flag, and helped to his feet. He bled from a laceration in his scalp and scratches under one eye. He limped and held his ribs as if they were cracked or broken. While others talked trash about the cowards who ran from us, he cursed and said, “Those faggots still have my flag.”

Some others within earshot groused and commiserated with him.

“It’s gone, now,” said an average-sized guy with freckles, pulling of his tanker helmet and shaking sweat from his matted hair. “You might as well forget it. You’ll see it on Youtube tomorrow, getting shit on and burned.”

“The hell I will!” the wounded guy stated, weakly. “I want it back.”

Fellow patriots laughed off his declared intentions at first; but he continued to insist he wanted the flag back before it was desecrated further. The laughter stopped when he refused to be escorted to the first aid station and claimed he was going to go take it back, with or without us.

The massed Antifa column was now disorganized and not sure what to do, but there were scads of them still teeming in the street beyond where the pincer movement had cut them in two.

“You wanna fight your way through that?” somebody asked him, gesturing at the black mass of militant ignorance. “By yourself?”

“I don’t want to go by myself,” he said, stumbling towards the Blackshirts. “But I will if I have to.” He lost his balance and almost keeled over, but a short, potbellied guy grabbed him and kept him from falling. Some other men moved in to help support his weight, and the wounded patriot just sagged there for a moment, breathing raggedly.

“You don’t look so good,” the potbellied man said. “You need to let the medics check you out.”

“Gotta...save...the colors...”

“What the hell?” Asked a 40-something guy in a scuffed black leather jacket. “Is it a family heirloom or something?”

“It’s the...flag...of my country.”

A tanned, dark-haired young stud, built like a bodybuilder, rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on—don’t start cucking out about your silly decoration. Or mom, apple pie, and ‘muh Constitution.’ It’s Western Civilization you should be worried about—not some stupid piece of cloth.”

This drew angry responses from some of my Enforcers. An eloquent one, decked out in red, white and blue, said, “You must be at the wrong demonstration, then. If ‘muh Western Civilization’ is all that matters to you, then step the hell off and go somewhere else to defend Caesar’s right to crucify his critics, or feed them to the lions.”

This led to a heated back-and-forth. I stepped away from it, raised my stick, and called out, “Enforcers...bring it in!”

Flush from battle, the geared-up gang of marauders gathered around me.

“Do any of you want to try to go get the colors back?” I asked.

Some 40 stout-hearted men raised hands and growled in the affirmative—not counting the patriots nearby who weren’t Enforcers.

“Okay,” I said, and gave them some very simple instructions. With the help of my lieutenants, I quickly organized them into three-man teams. There was no point trying to establish squad-sized units or larger. We didn’t have a chain of command, or the training, to keep unit integrity intact during a mission like this. But it was possible each man could stick with two buddies, no matter how much we got mixed around along the way. Nobody should be left behind or swallowed up by the Antifa mobs this way.

I approached the wounded patriot and rested my hand on his shoulder. “Hey, I’ve got some volunteers to try to find your flag. But the deal is, you have to go to the aid station and let the medics check you out. Copy?”

The man studied me with glossy eyes for a moment, then nodded.

The Enforcers formed waves of skirmish lines and moved up the street.

Redbeard and Surfer Tim were in my team. We were in the center of the first wave.

As we approached the closest pocket of remaining Blackshirts, an ugly, overweight woman among them, who seemed to have lost her mask (to everyone’s regret) screamed at us, “You inbred Nazi pigs! Go back to your Klan meeting!”

She and her comrades pelted us with projectiles of varying size and density. Surfer Tim got something in his eye and faltered on my left flank.

Redbeard suggested she do something that was, to be fair, anatomically impossible; then added, “Go back to your dyke commune, you half-wit skank!”