The town of McKinley, since it's modern inception as the vacation spot for American GIs stationed on the island between WWII and the Korean War, always had a significant American-descending majority population, so the military planners expected it to be one of the most significant areas of support for the war effort and the new government. However, through regime change after regime change, even the people of McKinley grew distasteful of the American 'liberators'. Massive protests rocked the city for weeks upon weeks, though they didn't take on quite the violent character of the anti-invasion actions that populated the rest of the island. With American policy showing no signs of changing anytime soon, late April had protest action only increase in popularity as the days and nights went by.
At approximately 9:30 PM on May 3rd of 1983, on Palm South, where now stands a bowling alley and a small park, Theo Watson, son of Vietnam-era draftee and subsequent AWOLer Eric Watson, tried to climb atop a US Army Bradley Fighting Vehicle that had been mobilized to keep protesting to a minimum. He waved a black banner, rejecting the percieved soviet alignment of the red banners some others wove. It is unknown to this day who gave the order, or if there even was an order gave, but an American soldier fired three successive shots into Theo's chest, killing him instantly. The sound shook the crowd, but did not immediately cause most of them to flee. Instead, they parted, looking in sheer shock at the teenage boy whose body stood, still convulsing, on the pavement. After a few-seconds long silence, the crowd made up it's mind. They were no longer protestors. They were revolutionaries.
The Battle of Palm South, as the Americans called it, and the Massacre at Palm South, as the people called it, ended in less than 20 minutes. A few in the crowd who had firearms on them tried to pull them out in defense of the rest of the people, but it wasn't even close to enough. The American soldiers, panicked, opened continous machine gun fire on the crowd in an attempt to disperse it. They achieved their aim, but at the cost of 28 innocent lives. No soldiers died that day. The people of Kinley crept back into their homes, patched up the wounded, mourned the dead, and prepared for the fight of their lives the next day.
It was at that point, on May 4th, that the US Army command on the island realized that perhaps they were in over their heads, and that the invasion might've been a mistake. But Reagan and the men in Washington knew that a retreat from invading a tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific would be political suicide, so they ordered the troops to keep on. Fortifications were erected in makeshift bases in towns all across the island, more ammunition was ordered, and the soldiers desperately hoped that the events of the night prior would convince the people to stay home. The head of the occupation, General Joseph Edwards, had plans to appear on television at the end of the week to attempt an explanation to the people. Privately, he didn't know if they would accept anything short of total withdrawl.
The report US command prepared for back home for their expectations of the night of the 4th read 'Calm expected. Sectors One, Five, and Six to recieve surplus matriel.' Sector Five, in this case, was McKinley and the surrounding area. The Army had stationed IFVs on the highways in and out of town, and had guards posted at building of slight import. They had made their base in what is now the Theo Watson Memorial Communual Hall, at the corner of Second Street and Palm North. By most estimations, around 210 soldiers were in and around McKinley on the night of the 4th - the majority of the troops were in the northeast, dealing with the stubborn Frolov insurgency. US Army Colonel David Grant was in charge of the forces, and had ordered his men to refrain from firing unless absolutely necessary.
The people had been on a campaign of preparation themselves. Enraged at the martyrs made the previous night, the armed contingent exploded in membership and popularity, with thousands of rifles finding their way from disused Vetrov, GI, or Burya-era caches into the hands of so many freedom fighters scattered around the island. McKinley, being situated on the foothills of the Stanart range and in the middle of a forest of palm trees, had a number of advantages for would-be rebels, and the people planned to take full advantage of it. At around 6 PM, a series of convoys shipping in supplies were harassed by popular militias. They weren't destroyed, but it was enough to rattle the troops and set them hunting through the forest for combatants that had already swiftly left. The effect was left to settle in for a few hours, until the militias struck.
At precisely 9 PM, Colonel Grant was ildly sipping on his coffee and reading about recovery efforts from the Coalinga earthquake - he had a friend from southern California before he enlisted. The soldiers guarding the makeshift command post were ildly chatting about what they'd do on the island when this all blows over. All at once, the sound of something approximating thunder shook the whole building. The guard peeked out the door and, much to his surprise, noticed a crowd of hundreds upon hundreds of people, all armed with whatever they could get their hands on, marching towards the base. And on every building as far as he could see, there were black banners just like the one that boy had the previous night.
A member of the crowd stepped forward and announced that the soldiers were under arrest for murder, terrorism, and seeking to subvert the will of the people. None surrendered themselves to the assembly, but a few soldiers escaped out the back door into the forest surrounding the city. What ensued was an intense firefight involving the whole city and a majority of it's population, killing dozens. The turning point in the battle has been noted as when a number of militants commandeered a tank and managed to use it's main cannon to fire at the makeshift Army base. The shot punched clean through, knocking the 'Mc' off the name of the city on the outer wall of the building. In the wake of this, the people decided they liked it as Kinley, and not McKinley, which is the reason it bears that name to this day. By nearly 4 AM the US forces had been fully routed from Kinley, and the May Revolution had begun in earnest.
With the dramatic loss of Kinley - previously considered by the American forces to be a rather safe area to draw support from - US occupation command began to get desparate. They thought they had the Soviet's men sieged in a series of concrete rat holes to the northeast, but then out of nowhere a city is sacked in the complete opposite side of the island, one that previously had reported anti-Soviet partisan activity. General Edwards, realizing the front in Frolov wasn't going anywhere, ordered a contingent of men to pull out and reinforce McKinley, in hopes that in a few days it could be regained. This would prove to be a fatal mistake, as the same popular mobilization that had seized McKinley was now moving to do the same in Frolov.
Frolov had been under constant bloody warfare for four months now, and the cracks were beginning to show. Literally, in some cases - the Palm Building, the centerpiece of Frolov, had a massive crack in it's facade through floors 10 to 14. Food shortages were crippling, transport infrastructure annihilated, and thousands left stranded in the middle of a portracted siege. From it's inception the city had been a home to staunch Soviet support, but that had hit it's high water mark in the late 50's, and it was now 1983. Vetrov and his ex-KGB goons were just as much imperial agents as the US troops, at least to the people in Frolov. And so, after the liberation of Kinley, a coalition began to assemble, and a promise began to be made - an island free of those who would give orders. Be they Soviets, Americans, whoever. That promise was a very enticing one, it turned out.
The city was well fortified on both sides, so to crack it, a wide array of people needed to be collected. A surprisingly large piece of this coalition was the Mountain Men, the GIs that went AWOL during the Vietnam war and made a life in small mountain villages dotting the Stanart Range and Mount Ebbott. For close to two decades they had watched the developments on the island from afar, and, like everyone else, was starting to get a little sick of the constant regime change and oppression. The Mountain Men offered their weapons and training in exchange for a promise of freedom, true freedom, for them and their compatriots. The others eagerly agreed. The others were comprised of defected Red Army units that had had enough of serving Vetrov and his Soviet masters, bright-eyed student revolutionary groups from the recently re-opened Litke University, and just everyday people pressed into action - like the people who liberated Kinley. After a resoundingly successful meeting in the tea room of a disused hotel complex on the shores of Lake Stanart, the coalition was forged.
The plan the group compiled was a risky one, but had the potential to pay off significantly if it succeeded. The Red Army and Frolov's former citizens would sneak in through the tunnel system they knew decently well, and the Mountain Men and the students would stake out a perimeter around the largest Army encampents. All at once, the people would spring into action, hopefully pressing the US Army and Vetrov's troops against eachother in a deadly arrangement. As the 6th proceeded into the 7th and more and more militants found their places, a request to strike was sent out and quickly approved. The trap sprung to it's intended effect, but neither side accepted surrender terms, so the fighting was much bloodier than anyone had expected. Building to building, room to room, the three sides fought for almost five days before the Vetrov was captured and General Edwards ordered a withdrawl from the city. Reportedly, Vetrov was very surprised that the people were fighting against, and not for, him. He emerged from his balcony on the Palm Building after hearing word that the US was pulling out, only to see a massive crowd outside chanting for his arrest. By the end of the 11th, Vetrov had been placed under custody of the people, and Frolov was - at least for now - secured under the watch and love of the same.
With the triumph of the people at Frolov, unexpected by most everyone involved, a series of copycat uprisings occured across the island that penned the US forces to Astor and the surrounding area. Gyoson, long ignored by both Soviet and American governmnets, was the first to go, taking up arms on the 10th and routing the small US force stationed there to the old fort in nearby Reigen. Reigen would stage it's own uprising just a few days later. Litke was easily taken as initiatve was taken over the retreating occupation soldiers, and the USN forces in Point Rezanov dashed back to Astor as soon as Frolov fell. This left the people with an interesting situation - in only two weeks the US troops had gone from controlling almost the entire island to a single city and it's surroundings. How would the people govern their new land, the land they had claimed for only themselves, and not for any superpower to treat as it's playground. Once more, people from all across the island went to the hotel complex the coalition that liberated Frolov was born in to build something entirely new. What they came out with was The Ochay Declaration, the founding document for Ochay to this day.
Preamble: For decades, this island and it's peoples have been subject to the wills and whims of foreign governments, foreign systems. The Empire of Japan and its fascism. The United States of America and its capitalism. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its communism. They have each built something in their own image, and while they can retreat and think little of it, we bear the scars. So many times over it's history has this island served as a place that promises freedom, true freedom, that you can't get anywhere else. But it has always been under the noses of governments, of people who would and do rob us of that freedom for material gain. We must throw off the shackles that the imperial powers have placed on us, and that means building a future that they could never even conceptualize. We cannot rush to build any sort of government that has been achieved before, for every time those government were used to subvert the will of the people. Nay, we cannot rush to build a government in their conception at all, for there is not simply the imperialism of the superpowers on this island that forges the chains around our wrists. A society is built in steps, and even if we ensured freedom from imperialism, we would still bear the chains of governing passed down from a capital city to the lowest governmental subject. We must reject imperium in all it's forms, we must reject all dominion of one human being over another. We hereby proclaim that we serve not a nation, but something higher - a concept, a principle. We serve respect, we serve freedom, we serve equality. The signatories of this declaration entered this tearoom as combatants in a war, but we leave as something entirely different. Companions, of the highest order. We believe there is power in what this tearoom represents, what we have called Ochay - the Japanese and Russian words for said room put together. Thus, we declare not a nation, but a people united on this island, pursuing Ochay in all factors of life, determined to build a society that respects it.
The ideal of Ochay expressed in the titular declaration spread like wildfire, and soon nearly the whole island was marching under its call to freedom. The only problem, of course, was that the Americans still controlled the largest city on the island, and were dead set on retaining control as soon as possible. The signatories of the Ochay Declaration had a daring plan for this, much like they concocted a plan to seize Frolov from those who would corrupt and destroy it. Astor was built out of the Yankee Delta - the termination of the Western River to the Pacific Ocean - and as such was rather dense and tricky to navigate for those who didn't know their way around. Luckily for the Ochayans, they knew how to navigate the Delta, and the US forces didn't.
The Ochayans assembled a grand army of riverboats, stolen patrol boats, and even kayaks and canoes at the beginning of the Delta, armed their inhabitants with as many guns and explosives as they could fit onboard, and had them boat south, towards Astor. It wasn't going to be all at once, like the liberation of Frolov was. Instead, the Ochayans would mount a harassment campaign of the US forces - sinking ships, blowing up bridges, firing on patrols - that would force them to pull more and more back until either they abandoned the island completely or a full-scale assault of Astor could be mounted. The first boats started trickling their way down the streams and tributaries during the cover of night on May 13th, and by the end of the week everyone was engaged in hit-and-run tactics on the Americans. Many of the fighters had fled from Astor, so they were apprehensive about a longer-term strategy, but most were very enthusiastic about the chance to get the imperialists off the island for good. By the 20th, the attacks had hit their stride, and the Americans were abandoning whole sectors at a time in an attempt to wait for reinforcements.
On May 25th, 1983, US forces had been pressed into only holding downtown Astor and the port facilities - Ochayan insurgents were beginning to make their way into the suburbs, even. General Edwards had been pleading every day with Washington for increased troops, increased planes, something to beat back the insurgency, but the empty assurances had increasingly faded into only radio silence as the days went on and the losses were more and more severe. But on the 25th, only one order came in, two single words - 'Abandon Mission'. Edwards dutifully followed through with a hollow sense of sorrow, and by the end of the day, without even an announcement to the occupation's few remaining civilian supporters, the Americans abandoned their quest to dominate the island. In that sense imperialism on it didn't end with a brilliant military scheme, or a daring covert action, but with a people united in defiance and an army realizing they could win a few battles on the ground, but they would never defeat an idea.
May 25th is an island-wide holiday to this day, celebrating the success of Ochay and the people's triumph against imperialism and domination. Shortly after the final helicopter departed, the people got together for a third time, building a constitution that would put Ochay in practice, that would make an island and a people free of everything they had spent so many decades rebelling against. The ad-hoc direct democratic communes that propped up during the May Revolution to administer workplaces, apartment buildings, and cities were solidified, and the Free Territory of Ochay was declared a few days afterwards. In 1985 a proposal was approved to construct the city of Ochay in the hills of the Southwest Range to serve as a neutral meeting place and informal capital, having it's construction finished in 1989. The economy has never seen better days, as the communes coordinate with eachother to give their people not just what they need, but what they want. While the violence of the Revolution has certainly died down since those days, the spirit of love, justice, and equality certainly hasn't, and today Ochay is a pleasant and peaceful land of freedom you truly can't find anywhere else.