So far, I have done write ups for Irving Morrell, Alec Pomeroy, Armstrong Grimes, Michael Pound, Sam Carsten, George Patton, and Clarence Potter:
Irving Morrell was tapped by Harry Truman as his running mate for the 1952 elections (and is credited by presidential historians for being one of the reasons that Truman won; he would have preferred the position of Secretary of Defense, but was still able to excercise a key role in defense policy). Morrell served as Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961, and afterwards retired from public life and returned to Kansas. His three volume memoir (Great War, American Empire, Settling Accounts) was published in full in 1967, on the eve of the Fourth Pacific War. He passed away in 1970.
His legacy lives on as of 2009; his memoirs proved to be bestsellers and were eventually the subject of a trilogy of four-hour-long Endurance Films (filmed as one continuous movie from 1981 to 1985, which each movie released in 1987, 1988, and 1989 respectively).
His daughter, Mildred Morell-Quigley, served three terms as a Representative and one term as a Senator (for the Democrats) from Kansas. She served as Secretary of State under President Joshua Blackford (1973 to 1979) before leaving the administration to seek the Democratic nomination for the 1980 elections (which she won, only to lose the general election to Morgan Reynolds). After the 1980 election, she served as a consultant for the film trilogy based on her fathers’ memoirs, before retiring fully from public life. She passed away in 2000.
The Morrell family still largely lives in Kansas; there is a very strong tradition of national service that each generation aspires to. The family name lives on in other ways as well, from the Morrell Mark VI Barrel (scheduled to enter service by the end of the 2010s), to the Irving Morrell College of Armored Warfare (located in Topeka, Kansas).
Irving Morrell is also the only Vice President (who never became President) with a monument on the National Mall.
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Alec Pomeroy did not have a happy life. He was the only survivor of the US Army’s assault on his family’s diner in Rosenfeld, Manitoba in 1943 during the Second Canadian Uprising. He was six years old.
For Pomeroy’s new (Bureau of Protective Serivces) guardians, returning him to his only living family was out of the question (given the MacGregor-Pomeroy family history and the ongoing wartime emergency in Occupied Canada; his grandmother in Rosenfeld passed away from natural causes in 1944). Instead, he was sent to an orphanage in Dakota for two years, until the Bureau of Protective Services decided that what was needed for him was a life of military discipline; Pomeroy spent the next ten years at the Rock Island Military Academy (in Rock Island, Illinois).
As though being the only Canadian in a TL-191 American military academy was not hard enough, he also had to deal with the scorn that came from being the son of a widely hated terrorist. The reputation of the MacGregor family was still poisonous enough in 1954 to deny the 18-year-old Rock Island graduate admission to an officer’s training course, or any Army position that required any kind of technical education. The authorities were also fearful that Pomeroy could not be trusted on occupation duty in the former CSA (much less in the remainder of Occupied Canada).
At least Fiji had pleasant weather, even if he never had a chance of being promoted any higher than Private Second Class.
At a certain point in his Rock Island education, Pomeroy decided that he wanted nothing to do with his lost family, yet never really found acceptance (or a real sense of identity) anywhere else. Throughout the rest of his life Pomeroy preferred to keep to himself - during the Fourth Pacific War (where he served in Australia and West Papua in the Illinois National Guard), through three failed marriages, and through a thirty year career standing behind the counter at the Roosevelt Newstand-Cafe in Deerfield, Illinois, Pomeroy remained extremely introverted.
The only real hobby that he had consisted of frequent trips to the movies.
He died in 2002.
Pomeroy’s three failed marriages resulted in five children - two with his first wife (an Australian war bride), two with his second wife (a librarian who he met in a small town in Iowa during the only vacation that he took in his thirty years of work at the Newstand-Cafe) and one with his third wife (the president of the local Historical Society). Altogether Alec Pomeroy has twenty one grandchildren and three great-grandchildren as of 2009, none of whom care to know anything about the former MacGregor-Pomeroy family.
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Michael Pound serves in the US Army until 1950, when he is retired from active duty (over his very loud objections). Due to his old friendship and time of service with now Chief of Staff Irving Morrell, Pound is brought in as an instructor at the recently founded College of Armored Warfare in Topeka, Kansas.
Pound spends the rest of his life as an instructor at the College. He dies in 1965. Irving Morrell, by then retired from public life himself, delivers the eulogy at Pound’s funeral; Mildred Morrell-Quigley later writes that, “My father’s eulogy was for Michael Pound, yet also could have been for himself.”
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Armstrong Grimes spent two years being rotated around the former CSA along with his men. In spite of their worst fears, the intermittent violence that would plague most of the region for the first decade after the war never coalesced into a major rebellion (as had occurred in Occupied Canada and Utah).
In the 1944 elections, and throughout his first two years in office, President Dewey repeated his twin promises to “rebuild and reform” the Armed Forces and to successfully re-absorb the Southern states. Grimes resigned himself to never being released from active duty.
In late 1946, while stationed in Pascagoula, Mississippi, Grimes was brought before one Captain Coolidge Schneider. Schneider, also a veteran of the Canada and Utah theaters during the Second Great War, informed Grimes of a new unit being put together that would consist, “...of those like us.” While not offering any details, Schneider made it clear that it was Grimes’s choice to either stay in Pascagoula on occupation duty, or to join a new unit in the “rebuilt and reformed” Armed Forces.
Grimes accepted the offer on the spot.
The training for what would the first generation of the United States Army Irregular Forces was grueling, having a high drop out rate. Grimes succeeded in finishing the year-long course (which took the candidates across the Rocky Mountain West), and began his service with his fellow Grey Berets as Sergeant First Class in January 1948. A two-year-long Officers Training Course at Fort McSweeney, Oregon from 1952-1954 would see Grimes promoted to Second Lieutenant.
It was during his time in Oregon that Grimes would meet his wife, who ran the best-reviewed bed and breakfast in Fort McSweeney. Their marriage was strained by his long absences, yet ultimately endured.
Armstrong Grimes spent 25 years in the Grey Berets, eventually reaching the rank of Captain in 1968 during the Fourth Pacific War. During that conflict, Grimes and his fellow Grey Berets fought in Operation Grizzly (in Mongolia and northern China) and Operation Rainbow Dawn (in Korea). Wounded in action during the Battle of Seoul, Grimes would be honorably discharged in 1973. Grimes passes away in 1985, survived by his wife and three children (two daughters and a son).
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Sam Carsten dies in 1947 from melanoma. He is buried by the Department of the Navy in the National War Cemetary, just outside of Washington, D.C. in West Virginia.
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George Patton spent the last fifteen years of his life in Fort Custer, Wyoming - a military prison for high-ranking ex-Confederate military officers. Although afforded a degree of respect from his Second Great War opponents (namely Morrell and Ironhewer), the vast majority of Americans never forgave the general who had led Featherston’s treasonous Operation Blackbeard.
Patton spent the rest of his life reading (or re-reading) every military history that he could get his hands on and writing his memoirs, which would be published posthumously. He died in 1959.
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In between working on his own memoirs, Clarence Potter found himself with little else to do except to walk the streets of a devastated Richmond. He knew that the US government would never let him out of their sights (he wouldn’t have done anything differently in their shoes).
Potter was never reconciled to US rule, yet was also realistic (or perhaps just cold blooded) enough to recognize that the Confederacy would never return. The former intelligence officer was never tempted to take up arms against the US authorities, or even attempt to flee the former CSA for Texas (or somewhere farther afield). As he acidly reminded more than one angry, desperate ex-Confederate Second Great War veteran that he encountered on his daily walks, the USA had won a total victory: it was pointless to pretend otherwise.
In July 1946, just after Potter had completed a new draft of How I Blew Up Philadelphia, he was murdered on one of these walks by one of these angry, desperate ex-CS Army veterans (who himself did not survive the resulting one-sided firefight against arriving US military police); the murderer took offense to Potter’s “defeatist treason.”
Potter was cremated. His ashes were scattered in the Atlantic Ocean outside of US territorial waters.
The last draft of How I Blew Up Philadelphia was confiscated by the US military authorities, and would sit in the National Archives for the next fifty years, before being published in a heavily annotated edition in 1996 by Yale University Press. The book was controversial for historians and the general public alike; very few people who have read Potter’s memoir are entirely sure where the author’s self-serving personal worldview ends and where his frank descriptions of the Featherston dictatorship (and late Confederate society) begins.
In 2009, Clarence Potter is still among the most loathed people in US history.