{ClearwaterShadow-BlackSnakeBay}{Tiger Lily Serge}
“You could say, I suppose, that Bob Lee Swagger gave everything to his country, and in return, it took everything from him. His heroism was of a sort that makes many Americans uneasy. He wasn’t an inspiring leader, he didn’t save lives, he didn’t rise in the chain of command. He was simply and explicitly an extraordinary killer. Almost certainly for that reason, he never got the medals and acclaim he deserved.
“He lives in a trailer, alone, in the Ouachita Mountains, a few miles outside of Blue Eye, subsisting on his Marine disability pay, and what’s left of the thirty thousand dollars his pal, an old country lawyer named Sam Vincent, won for him in a lawsuit against Mercenary magazine in 1986. Alone, that is, except for his guns, of which he has dozens. And which he shoots everyday, as if they are his only friends.
“You can see, of course, his ready fund of resentment, his sense of isolation. All these things make him vulnerable and malleable,” said the doctor. “He’s the man we’ve been taught to hate. He’s the solitary American gunn’y nut.”
…
“Wait a minute,” said Payne.
Dobbler swallowed. In the dark Payne looked over at him with a pathological glare. Everybody was afraid of Payne except Schreck.
“Colonel, I been around a lot of guys like that in the service, and so have you,” he said to Shreck. “Proud to say, I served with them in my twenty-two years in the Special Forces. Now, when it’s killing time, there ain’t no better boy than your white country Southerner. Those boys can shoot, and they got stones the size of cars. But they got an attitude problem, too. They got this thing about their honour. Cross one of them boys, and they make it their business to even the score, and I ain’t shitting you. I’ve seen it happen in service too fuckin many times to talk about it.”
“Go on, Payne,” said the colonel.
“They’re true men, and when they get something in their heads, they won’t let go of it. I saw enough of it in Vietnam. I’m just telling you, cross this man and I’m guaranfuckinteeing you the worst kind of trouble.”
“I think,” said the doctor in a loud voice, “that Mr. Payne has made an excellent point. It would not do at all to underestimate Bob Lee Swagger. And he is especially right when he notes Bob’s ‘honour.’ But surely you can also see that it’s his honour that makes him so potentially valuable to us. He is in fact quite a bit like the precision rifle with which he earned his nickname – extremely dangerous if used sloppily, yet absolutely perfect if used well. He, after all, knows more about what we are interested in than nearly any man alive. He is simply the best snip’er in the Western world.”
“But there is a problem. Bob the Nailer, as perfect as he seems, does present one terrible, terrible problem. He has a deep flaw.”
“His flaw,” said the doctor, “is that he will not kill anymore. He still hunts. He goes to great lengths and puts himself through extraordinary ordeals to fire at trophy animals. But he hits them with his own extremely light bullets machined of Derlin plastic at a hundred yards’ range. If he hits the creatures right and he always does – he aims for the shoulder above the spine – he can literally stun them off their feet for five or six minutes. There’s a small compartment of red aluminium dust for weight in each bullet, and as the bullet smashes against the flank of the beast, it smears the animal with a red stain, which the rain quickly washes off. Extraordinary. Then he saws their antl’ers off. So that no hunter will shoot them for a trophy. He hates trophy hunting. After all, he’s been a trophy.”
Colonel Shreck spoke.
“All right, then. It’s Swagger. But we’ll have to find a trophy this asshole will hunt,” he said.
…
Bob had no real need or urge to leave his mountain, he hadn’t been down in five years.
“You’d get respect and appreciation.”
Bob made a sour bitter look. He’d believe it when he saw it. But he knew he couldn’t stay up here forever. He looked at the rifle cartridge. He was curious. Goddamned thing looked like it would shoot the tits off a mother flea, but there was only proof in the shooting, not in the looking. But he heard it singing to him in a strange way. Poked. He was poked in the head. Hadn’t been poked in the head since he’d given up the drinking.
.!.
“Then that’s all there is to it,” said Bob. “Now I have to feed my dam’ dog.”
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~
[5]
{Sir Cossack Igor}
He was all right, too, until the last night. He knew he had to get up early for the drive to Little Rock and just when he’d thought he had everything checked out and was ready for the sack, it came over him. That’s the way it came: fast, without preparation, without announcement. It just came and there it was.
It was a bad one. He hadn’t had it so bad since the president declared the little war in the desert a victory, and America went on a bender and everybody was happy except himself and maybe another million boys who wondered why nobody put up ribbons for them twenty years ago, when it might have mattered.
Now you got to hold it down, he told himself, aching for the glass of smooth brown whiskey to flatten himself out, knowing that if he had one many more would follow.
But there was no whiskey, nothing to blunt what happened in his mind. The memories hit him hard. He remembered the VC he shot who turned out to be an eight-year-old boy with a hoe – it had looked like an AK through the 9X at eight hundred meters in the bad light of sunset. He remembered the smell of burned villages after the Search and Destroys, and the crying of the women and the way the goddamned kids just looked at you during his first tour. He remembered the bellytime, moving through the high grass, avoiding the crest lines, as the ants crawled over you and the snakes slithered by and you just lay there, waiting, for days sometimes, until someone passed into the kill zone eight hundred meters out and you could put them down. He remembered the way they fell when hit, instant rag doll, the toppling surrender, the small cloud of dust it raised. So many of them. The “confirmed” kills were only the ones with a spotter there, to write it in the log and make a report.
You could never forget stuff like that, not really. But he learned somehow not to let it rag him most of the time; he could ride it out in the mountains or in the solitude.
He could feel what he called his own personal night passing over him. Of course the time of day had nothing to do with it. What he called his own personal night was about the feeling of being nothing, of having no worth, of having spent himself in a war nobody cared about, and having given up everything that was important and good. In other days, this was what got Bob off on his drinking, and drunk, he turned mean as shit.
But now he didn’t drink, and instead he threw on his coat and went out into the harsh Arkansas night and walked the mile or so downhill. Inside Aurora Baptist, some kind of service was going on. He heard the black people singing something loud and crazy. What are they so goddamned happy for inside that shaky little white clapboard building anyhow?
Out beyond the church was the little graveyard, and there among the Washingtons and the Lincolns and the Delanos of Polk County was a spindly marker for a man named Bo Stark. Bob just looked at it. The wind howled and roared through the trees, the moon was a raggedy-assed streetlamp, the music pumped and blasted, the black people were singing up a storm, beating the devil down.
Bo Stark was his own age, and the only white man in the cemetery because no other cemetery would have him. They’d gone to the same dentist, the same doctor, played in the same football team. But Bo’s people had money; he’d gone on to the university of Fayetteville and from there had joined the Army and spent a year as a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne, another fool for duty who’d believed in it all. And after that, nothing. Bo Stark had gone a man and come home a no-account. The war got inside him and never let him go. One bad thing turned to another; couldn’t hold down a job, wouldn’t pay back loans, was searching for the death he’d only just missed in the Land of Bad Things. Two weeks after the war in the desert was over, after the mighty victory and the celebration, one Sunday night he’d finally killed a man in a bar with a knife in Little Rock and when the police found him in his daddy’s garage in Blue Eye, he’d blown a .45 through the roof of his mouth.
So Bob stood there as the wind brought cold memories from the cold ground out at him, and looked at the marker: BO STARK, it said, 1946-1991. AIRBORNE ALL THE WAY.
He came here when he was frightened, because in the radiance of the glowing church, standing over the body of the man who could have been and was almost him, he could see it in the stone: BOB LEE SWAGGER, 1946-1992, USMC SEMPER FIDELIS.
Now he looked at it, and realized it was time to do that which could kill him fastest of all possible dangers: to go back. He wondered if he had the Pure-D stones for it.
.!.
“Earth to Planet, Doctor!” It was the horrid Payne.
Oh yes, he was holding forth on Bob’s unique capacity for utter near-death stillness, explaining to Payne’s perplexed listeners why it was that Bob, though in his room from five-thirty p.m. on the previous evening, had simply ceased to exist for their listening devices. He was trying to get them to see how important this was, for it got to the very nature of Swagger’s uniqueness.
“Ah—yes, he has an ability to shut down and let the world go about its business while he’s frozen; and then when he’s become a part of the environment, then and only then, will he strike. But like any skill, it’s a skill that simply has to be practiced. He was practicing nothingness.
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~
{Zhivago’s Gale Clover}
“All right, gentlemen, let’s move away. Eyes and ears on.”
Bob uncased his rifle, lodged it on a sandbag rampart and slid the bolt back. He cracked open a box of the Lake City Match rounds, threaded five, one after the other with a brass clicking, into the magazine, pushed home and locked the bolt which flew forward and rotated shut with the gliding ease of a vault door closing on ball bearings and grease. He pulled his ray-ban aviators on, hooking them behind the ears, and slid his earmuffs down across the top of his head, clamping his ears off from the world. He felt the roar of blood rushing in his brain.
Bob slid up to the rifle and found his bench shooter’s position, his boots flat upon the cement apron of the range as if making the magic construction of stability up through his body that would translate to the rock-hard hold of the rifle itself.
He pulled the rifle up, and in, chunking it against his shoulder, placing his hand upon the comb so just the faintest smudge of fingertip caressed the lightened trigger, adjusting a bunny-ear bag underneath the butt-heel. His other arm ran flat along the shooting bench, under the rifle itself had been sunk just right into the sandbags.
Bob found his spot-weld, and closed his left eye. The image was a bit out of focus, so he diddled with the ring to bring it back to clarity and for his effort was rewarded with the black image of perfect circumference, quartered precisely by the stadia of the scope, ten times the size it had been, now as big as a half-dollar at point-blank range.
He exhaled half a breath, held what he had, and with that wished the end of his finger to contract a bit and was rewarded with the thrill of recoil, the blur as the rifle ticked off a round. As he was throwing the bolt, he heard a spotter.
“X-RING, Damn, right in the middle, perfect, a perfect shot.”
Bob fired four more times into the same hole.
“I guess I’m zeroed,” he said.
…
“You’re paying the bills. Let’s get cloverleaf shooting,” Bob said.
…
It was fine ammo. Only fifty to sixty men in the world could handload ammo that fine, Frank Barnes maybe, a couple of the sublime technicians at speer or Hornady or Sierra, a few wildcatters of a dying breed, old gnarled men who’d lived with guns in machine shops their whole lives. A few world-class benchrest shooters who aged in the 1’s. A few Delta or FBI SWAT armorers. Whoever put this stuff together knew what he was doing. Bob had an image in his head of some old man who’d done it a million times, working the brass down to the finest, smallest perfection. It took more than patience; it took a kind of genius. He felt him. He felt him on the range: the presence of an old shooter who knew what he was doing.
Bob knew then. He’d suspected before but now he knew. They were playing him, guiding him; they weren’t what they said. Then who were they?
Bob smiled… He was damned curious where all this was headed. He knew in a general sense, of course, what it had to be. It had to do about killing.
His reputation had preceded him. People in certain zones knew of him. Occasionally something weird would comes his way – a nibble, a veiled hint, just the slightest indication that some really nice money could be his if he’d only meet so-and-so in St. Louis or Memphis or Texarkana and listen to a certain proposal. These offers came from strange sources, over the years. Some were from organized crime, others intelligence sources – Bob, after all, had done two jobs against civilian targets in the ‘Nam, when ordered to in writing by higher headquarters. Still other approaches were simply well-off men with pathological inclinations who wished to use him, in some way, to solve a business problem, to right a wrong, to avenge an infidelity.
No, Bob always explained. It was against the law.
Go away, please.
Most of them did. Though occasionally, one didn’t; there was one breed of hater it took special effort to drive away – those who knew that the country was entirely theirs, and that all good things would flow if others were removed. Of course what they meant, usually, was the black people. Bob had served with too many fine black NCO’s in the ‘Nam to listen to this kind of shit, and though he had more or less given up on violence, he had broken the nose of a fellow from some outfit calling itself the White Order. The man had said through blood and anger they’d put Bob on The List too, and Bob had grabbed the man and thrust the blunt muzzle of his Colt Government Model down his throat and explained simply, “Mister, if you can’t do your own killing, you don’t scare me worth a drink of spit!” The man had pissed in his pants and disappeared off Bob’s mountain but fast.
But now – these others, this damn Colonel Bruce with his medal and his little bird dog Payne. Rich enough to buy this whole spread, bring him way out here, have someone make up these excellent cartridges. Who were they? Who was worth killing to go to this much trouble?
Agency.
He could smell it all over them. This was how the Agency worked, at odd angles, never quite out in the open, bringing you halfway in so that by the time you figured out what was what it took more effort to get out than to stay.
Agency wants me hunting again.
But who?
Bob thought and thought on it in the little restaurant, his head and hip aching, and got nowhere and only after many hours did he notice the place was about to close, and the waco waitress was making hungry eyes at him. He’d have no part of that, no thank you. No women, no liquor, never again. Only rifles and duty.
But what was duty?
Who was worth hunting?
Bob got in his car and drove back; he slept dreamlessly, still setting course by a single star: nothing is worth killing.
He’d tell them tomorrow after hearing them out. He would not kill again.
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~
[7]
{Zhen Elefente Keyes}
“I’ll take another shot,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get lucky again.”
“This one is straight up your alley. It’s pure sniper war. This one is based on an incident that took place outside Medellin, in Colombia, in 1988. It’s highly classified to I’ve got to ask you never to disclose specifics to anybody. Fair enough?”
“I’m just here to shoot, not talk.”
“As I explained it to you, I think you’ll understand the need for delicacy in the matter. It involves a DEA agent who took a fourteen-hundred-yard shot at a drug dealer who was responsible for the murder of a DEA team. The guy had fantastic security, bunches of Colombians packing a lot of automatic heat. And the word was out, if anybody tried to take the guy down, the Colombians would just start blasting. So, reluctantly and unofficially, DEA decided to take the guy out with a minimum of fuss. Highly illegal, but it was felt a message had to be sent to certain parties in Colombia.”
“So, it was a straight hit?” Bob asked.
“Yes. Your kind of work. No hostages, nothing. Just a man and a rifle and a hell of a long shot.”
“You’re not making any fourteen-hundred-yarder with a .308 H & H Magnum, with a Sierra 200-grain slug. Here, here’s the rifle. The same one.”
He nodded, and one of the technicians brought a rifle case over and opened it. Bob only saw a rifle.
But what a rifle.
“Goddamn,” he said almost involuntarily, “that’s a honey of a piece. Damn!”
It was a bolt-action Model 70 target, pre-’64, with a fat bull barrel and a Unertl 36X scope running nearly along its entire barrel length. It’s dark gleam blazed out at him in that high sheen that was now a lost art but had reached it’s highest pitch in the great American gunmaking days of the 1920s and ‘30s. It was almost pristine, too, clean and crisp, well tended, much loved and trusted. But it was the wood that really hit him. The wood, in that slightly thicker pre-’64 configuration, was almost black; he’d never seen a walnut with such blackness to it; but it wasn’t like black plastic for it had the warm gleam of the organic to it. Black wood?
That’s a hell of a rifle,” he said. He bent quickly to look at the serial number: my God, it was a one followed by five beautiful goose eggs! 100000. The hundred-thousandth 70! That made it infinitely desirable to a collector and marked it as having been made around 1950.
“From a Winchester plant in 1948. The metal was heat-treated at higher temperatures to give it the strength to stand up to a thousand-yard cartridge.”
“Okay, let’s give it a whirl. You have the ammo?”
Hatcher handed over a box of Accutech Sniper Grade .300 H & H Magnum.
LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY, it said in RED LETTERS.
Bob opened the box, took out one of the long .300 H & H’s: it was like a small Ballistic missile in his hand, close to four inches of shell and powder and bullet, heavy as an ostrich’s egg.
“It’s a thumper. We’re kicking it out off 70 grains of H4831 and our own 200-grain bullet boattail hollowpoint. About three thousand feet per second.”
Bob thought numbers and came up with a 198-inch drop at a thousand yards; figure maybe 355 for fourteen hundred yards.
Bob took the rifle. His first love had been a Model 70, often called the Rifleman’s Rifle, and he now owned several, including that recalcitrant .270 that had consumed him before coming up to Maryland, and whose problems he hadn’t quite mastered. So the rifle was like an old friend.
“Where can I take it to zero?”
“Uh, it’s zeroed. One of our technicians has worked it out to the yard. It’ll shoot to point of aim at the proper range.
“Hold on, there, sir. I don’t like to shoot for money with a rifle that I haven’t tested.”
“Ah, I can assure you that –“
“You can’t assure me of a thing if I haven’t done it myself.”
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~
[8]
{SSD Bayonet Lynn}
The colonel had attitude, that was for certain.
Not a twitch of regret touched his tough face, not a shred of self-doubt. What he got from Bob – furious rectitude, and the concealed threat of violence – he paid back in spades.
“All right, Swagger,” he said. “You’ve seen through us. What do you expect, congratulations? You were supposed to. It’s time to put the cards on the table.”
“They say you don’t trophy-hunt anymore, Swagger. I want to let you know that there are still trophys worth hunting.”
The colonel glared at Bob. “What is your name, sir?” said Bob.
“It isn’t William Bruce,” said the Colonel. “Though there is a Colonel William Bruce and he did win the Congressional and he was supervisor of the Arizona State Police. A fine man. I am not a fine man. I’m a man who gets things done and I usually don’t have the time to be anything except an asshole, and this is one of those times.”
“I don’t like being lied to. You’d best come clean, or I’m on my way out of here.”
“You’ll sit there until I say so,” said the Colonel, fixing those hard, level eyes on him, asserting the weight of rank.
It was a sense of command that he’d seen in some of the best officers, the men who pushed the hardest. It wasn’t inspirational, except by deflection; it was instead a gathering of will, a fury to win or die. It was a gift, too, and without it in battle an army was lost. But Bob had seen its ugliness too – that rigidity that could conceive of no other way but its own, that willingness to spend other men’s lives that came from holding one’s own cheaply but the mission dearly. This guy stunk of duty, and that’s what made him so fucking dangerous.
“We’re after a man,” the colonel said. “He’s a very special man, a very sly man. We think we’re going to get a shot at him. We’re after the Soviet sniper…
..
It was amazing, Dr. Dobbler was thinking. His self-control was astonishing. No gasp, no double take, as if it didn’t matter. Swagger simply took it in, and went on, his concentration unmodified, his glare unblinking. No signs of excitation as were common to the species in moments of conflict. No rapid breathing, no facial coloration, no lip-licking, muscular tension. No excitation! No wonder he had been such an extraordinary soldier in battle.
..
“Here he is, Mr. Swagger,” said the Colonel.
Bob looked at the face that the colonel had brought to the tele-screen with the snap of a remote control. He tried to see some special thing there, something that said shooter, something that said sniper. What he saw was a lean hard face, a face that had no nonsense in it. The eyes were slotted and dark, like gun slits; the cheekbones were streamlined knobs; the hair a tight military sheen. There was a streak of the Orient in him in the slight flare of his cheekbones – he looked like a Mongol.
“Solaratov, T. We think that’s his name. But nobody knows what the T stands for.
Bob just grunted.
“T. Solaratov, as photographed from quite a distance away by an agent code-named Flowerpot, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1988. Our last picture of him, and our best. He’s fifty-four years old, in peak condition. Runs twelve miles a day. He was in Afghanistan advising Spetsnaz units on sniper deployment. He’s an expert on sniper deployment; he’s hunted men all over the world. Whenever the Soviets needed a shot to be taken, he took it for them. How many men have you killed, Sergeant?”
Bob hated this question. It was nobody’s business; it didn’t matter.
“We figure Comrade T. Solaratov has sent over three hundred fifty suckers on to a better world. Head shots, mostly, his trademark. No pussy center-of-body shit for this boy.
Bob grunted. That was serious shooting.
“All right, Swagger, here’s what we’ve been able to turn up on the guy. T. Solatov, according to an Israeli team that went after the fucker and almost nailed him when he was instructing Fatah in sniper techniques in the camps of the Bekka Valley in the mid-seventies – our best source of information on him, I might add, and a damned shame for all of us that as close as they got, they weren’t able, quiet to get their man…. By 1960 – after certain exploits in the Congo – he had obtained a commission and been selected out of the Soviet Naval Marines for an even higher elite, the Spetsnaz, the Soviet special forces.
“He was spotted in July. Guess where?”
“I don’t like games, mister.”
“Downtown Baghdad, in the presence of a General Khalil al-Wazir, who is head of Al Mukharabat, the Iraqi secret police…
“Now can you solve the puzzle, Swagger. These photos. Solaratov in Iraq. Do you see it yet, Swagger?”
“Sure,” said Bob. “They’re prepping a shot. Those are buildings and streets. He’ll have handled the range and angle solutions already. It’ll be familiar to him.”
“We should have come to you in the beginning. It took a young man in the Agency, a photo analyst, weeks to come up with the same answer, and those are lost weeks. But he finally had the bright idea of coding the grids of buildings to streets by angle with the help of a computer and having the computer run a check on those same streets and angles. Swagger, it’s the Inner Harbour from the U.S.F&G Building in Baltimore, it’s the back porch of the White House from a roof at Justice Department – the Justice Department! – and it’s Downing and Huguenot streets in North Cincinnati, and finally it’s North Rampart and St. Ann in New Orleans.”
“All right,” said Bob. “So it is.”
“Sergeant, those places have one thing in common. They are the sites of speeches to be given over the next several weeks by the president of the United States.”
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~
[9]
{Pink Peasant’s Wizzard}
Peking & Moscow
by Klaus Mehnert
The result of the June 30, 1953 census, announced the following year, had two conflicting effects on the Chinese Communists. On the one hand, proof that they ruled over by far the largest country in the world (in terms of population) filled them with pride; on the other, they now realized for the first time the full extent of the task confronting them. Their attitude was complicated by the thesis hitherto proclaimed by all Communists, and especially the Russians, that a strong population increase posed a problem only for the decadent West, and none for the Communist countries and that therefore any measures to promote birth control were to be severely condemned. It seems that in Peking opinions differed: side by side with enthusiastic comments on the high population figures were demands for the enlightenment of the population concerning contraceptive methods.
The wave of propaganda started in full force on ‘Women’s Day’ (March 8), 1957. When I arrived in China shortly afterwards it was still at it’s peak. There were sixty birth control clinics in the capital alone. But the new trend was short-lived. In line with the Great Leap announced in May 1958, Liu Shao-ch’I proclaimed: “The more people there are to put wood on the fire, the higher the flames leap.” And in September 1960 Choe En-lai declared in an interview that birth control methods were being taught in China ‘to protect the health of mothers and provide favourable conditions for bringing up children, not because of so-called ‘population pressure.’”
.!.
A distorted picture also emerges from the simple statement that an overpopulated China borders on an unpopulated Siberia. According to the latest census figures, those in 1953, in the NE, N & NW border areas of China, there were an average of 24.3 people per square mile. In the corresponding areas of the Soviet Union (1959), there were 9.6 people per square mile.
.!.
No exact figures are available on the opening up of virgin territory within China since 1949. It did not begin on a large scale until after Krushchev’s virgin land campaign of 1954. The Chinese made extensive use of the slogans heard in the Soviet Union, as, for example, this appeal ‘To youth on it’s march to virgin land!’:
“You will transform deserts into a paradise… Birds and animals live there, why not people too? Difficulties only overwhelm people who are unable to withstand hardship: difficulties are afraid of warriors who can withstand hardship. You are an army of steel making an attack on Nature.”
.!.
However, even if Peking should one day decide that it absolutely must have additional arable land, this does not mean that it would necessarily look toward the Arctic Circle rather than the equator. There are the Philippines, Borneo, and Sumatra, Australia and New Zealand, where many millions of thrifty settlers could be placed, according to some estimates more than 300 million. This would mean war – but does not this also apply to an expansion to the north? Hence for Peking it would be a political decision, certainly not one determined by the laws of nature, whether, if war is inevitable, China should ‘explode’ into the near-by but hard and inhospitable north in a struggle against the Soviet Union, or whether it would not be more profitable to wage war against the Western powers and seize the distant but immensely fertile southern regions. In any case, China has plenty of time to make up its mind.
No doubt Moscow is concerned over the Chinese population trend: while Peking was computing the results of the 1953 census, Khruschev was preparing a population offensive toward Soviet Asia. In February 1954 he launched his virgin land program.
An appeal was made above all to the patriotism and idealism of the younger generation, and eulogies of heroic young people who settle in Siberia as farm-hands or industrial workers occupy a good deal of space in the officially inspired products of Soviet literature. In Kruschev’s speeches the theme of population policy is particularly audible, for example in phrases such as these: ‘Comrades, I was recently in the Far East [of the Soviet Union]… It is an immensely rich land, but there are too few people there; it must be opened up and appropriated … In the East we must appropriate the empty spaces more quickly and settle in them permanently… We must root the people there firmly… that’s the main thing!
Among the Russian people’ themselves the constant appeal for the settlement of the East is definitely regarded as being connected with neighbouring China. On a train journey through Manchuria I was standing by the window next to a Russian. We both looked at the crowded streets of a little town through which the train was passing. The Russian, who was going home after some years spent as a technical adviser in China, said, half to himself and half to me (whom he probably took for a Soviet colleague): ‘The Chinese are really multiplying like rabbits. It’s not for nothing that Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev has said we have to populate Siberia.”
.!.
I was also in Burma at the same time as Khruschev. His reception there was cool, at times unfriendly. The Burmese saw themselves as exposed to Chinese frontier demands, and this had influenced their attitude toward the Communist world as a whole. Khruschev went to Burma – as to India – uninvited. The Burmese extended the minimum hospitality required by courtesy. It must have been the most unenthusiastic reception Khurschev has ever encountered on all his travels: a few hundred Communists and Communist-sympathisers at the airport, a scattering of people along the road to the city, hardly any flags, no one – apart from a few government officials – to see him off at the airport, no farewell speeches, and an icy atmosphere in the press. The Rangoon Guardian wrote that four wicked capitalists were not as bad as one Communist; and it’s competitor, the Nation headed its editorial with the words: AN UNWELCOME VISITOR, and called Khurschev a heavy-drinking politician whose appearance one felt like calling out, as at the approach of invading soldiers, Hide the silver and the girls!
Khurschev himself was also regarded more critically by the Indians than during his first visit; half-amused, half-indignant, they shook their heads when they heard that, after a performance by an interpreter of religious dances who was revered throughout India, Khruschev had asked her how much she was paid.
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~
{Cead Mile Failte}
That Others May Live:
by Senior Master Sergeant Jack Brahm and Pete Nelson
THE JOB
Johnny Got His Gun, is a book about this soldier who wakes up in a hospital and realizes he doesn’t have any arms or legs, and he can’t smell or taste or see or hear, and somehow he even realizes he doesn’t have a face, and then he remembers that he was in a battle, and now he’s in a hospital, but he doesn’t know if it’s an American hospital or an enemy hospital. After a full year of mental anguish, he finds a nurse who knows Morse code, so he taps out an SOS message in Morse code with his head, and a nurse responds by tapping in Morse code on his forehead, “What do you want?” at which point, his mind just explodes. Something like that.
CHERRY MISSIONS
There was a PJ stationed out in the Pacific Northwest who got handed the worst nickname. It wasn’t his fault in any way, but for the first seven or eight missions he went on, either they got there too late or the injuries he treated were too severe and the victims died, so guys started calling him “The Bagger.” All he did was put people in body bags. Of course, you learn that you can’t save everybody, that you have to accept the fact that your training and your abilities have limitations, and that death is part of the job. Sometimes you develop a dark sense of humour as a coping mechanism, maybe the way doctors or morticians can have dark senses of humour. Still, you really ache to have a good first mission, partly because you’ve been preparing for it for so long that you blow it out of proportion. You want to get off on the right foot. At any rate, you don’t want people calling you “The Bagger.” In the rescue business, that’s a nickname you hope doesn’t stick.
KRYPTONITE
AR: Air Refueling
BDU: Battle Dress Uniform
CARP: Controlled Aerial Release Point, a parachute tactic usually performed at altitudes at or below 800 feet, a way of putting men on the ground in the shortest amount of time.
CISD: Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, a counselling tool usually used to help emergency relief personnel cope with job-related stress.
COULOIR: A mountain ravine or gorge
DECADRON: A synthetic adrenocortical steroid used to reduce swelling in the case of high altitude cerebral edema.
DIAMOX: A carbonic anydrase inhibitor that promotes diuresis and controls fluid secretions.
DROGUE: The basket on the end of the hose that is extended by a midair refuelling tanker, the female receptacle into which the receiving aircraft’s probe is inserted to on-load fuel.
DUCK BUTT: Slang for a mission in which rescue personnel are assigned to escort another aircraft.
HYPERGOLIC: Refers to volatile gases that mix in open air and can spontaneously explode.
JDAM: Joint Direct Attack Munitions or ‘smart bombs’
JSTARS Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System
KINGBIRD OL-J Operation Location J – the site, at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas where the pararescue indoctrination school is located. Also called Indoc, Ingsoc or Superman School.
PENETRATOR: A forest penetrator, designed to penetrate the canopy in the jungles of Vietnam, a milk can-shaped device that can be lowered via a hoist from a helicopter, used to extract survivors.
SARSAT: Search and Rescue Satellite, a satellite operated jointly by the United States, Canada, and Russia that picks up EPIRBs and ELTs.
SIE aka SEE: Self-Initiated Elimination
STARS The Air Force’s demonstration parachute team, called Special Tactics and Rescue Specialists.
TDY: Temporary Duty, a tour of duty, often abroad, lasting anywhere from a day to six months.
WRW Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a short-circuiting of the hearts electrical system, in which an extra electrical pathway develops between the atria and the ventricles, causing extra contractions that speed the heart rate.
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~
[11]
{Flanagan VII “Pro”}
The Feather Men
by Ranulph Fiennes
Over a period of fourteen years, from 1977 until 1990, a group of hired killers known as the Clinic tracked down and killed four former British soldiers, one at a time. Two of the victims were ex-SAS. All four had fought in the Arabian Desert. Throughout those fourteen years the Feather Men hunted the Clinic and were never far behind. Eventually, in the autumn of 1990, the Feather Men achieved a form of justice.
The Feather Men are a part of our society. This, the first revelation of their existence, will not be officially welcomed by the Establishment, although an Establishment figure – named in this book – is at the helm of the organisation.
It may be that in a democracy where the taxpayers do not want an all-powerful invasive police force, there is a need for private groupings like the Feather Men. Some readers will be thankful that the Feather Men exist. Others will not. It is a shocking and intriguing true adventure with, at its heart, a moral conundrum of importance to us all.
~~*!*~~
I am not that feather to shake off
My friend, when he must need me.
Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
~~*!*~~
‘Do you realize this thing has been going on for nearly ten years and we’re still none the wiser as to the motives of the opposition.’
Mason stubbed out his cigar, ignoring the glare of the elderly waitress, who instantly removed the evil-smelling ashtray. ‘You say ten years, Darrell, but we don’t know what we were in at the beginning. Milling may not have been their first target. Nor do we have any idea how many people they are after.’
‘Why do you give up valuable time for Spike?’
Mason smiled. ‘I like the man. I believe there is a need for us. We harm nobody but characters who would, without us, continue to harm others. What about you?
“I’m Welsh,’ Hallet mused. ‘I like to see fair play and, in this particular case, the boyo you followed to Muscat once gave me a very stiff neck.’
‘Charles Bronson and his Death Wish films have done us no big favour,’ said Mason. ‘No member of the public would be seen dead condoning vigilantism and that is how our activities, if revealed, might be classified. The silent majority might approve but most would never admit it. Just listen to the shrill squeals directed at the very idea of Guardian Angels on the London Underground. Everyone knows there are not enough Transport Police to protect the passengers yet few approve of the thought of red-bereted patrols.’
‘I can think of nobody,’ Hallet interrupted, ‘who would not support the Angels when saved from yobbos or rapists on a dark and lonely Tube platform.’
‘Too right,’ said Mason, ‘but the fools who denounce our existence do not stop to think of the lives we have saved and the fears we have eased.’
‘Ah well, said Hallett, paying the bill. ‘I am proud to have worked with Spike and you and the others. To hell with the righteous bloody Pharisees. My conscience is clear and that’s what I have to live with.’
‘Are you happy with everything?’ Mason asked, handing Hallett the receiver.
Hallett smiled. ‘If they show their faces, they’ll regret it.’
~~*!*~~
‘But Inspector Milling clearly states that he did not kill my brother Salim. He even tells you that the officer responsible for the ambush openly admitted his role in a book.’
‘That is true,’ de Villiers agreed, ‘but I have experienced such flights of the imagination from condemned men on other occasions. It is not uncommon. If Milling had really known of such a book, he would certainly have known its title and the name of it’s author. He would have revealed both key points then and there. Surely you can see that?’
‘You assume that he had no honour.’ Bakhait gave a small smile.
‘I look at this man Milling’s face and I see a strong personality. A soldier who would not have another man killed to save his own neck.’
‘With all due respect,’ said de Villiers, ‘I cannot agree with you. We are talking of a European, not a Muslim.’
‘I am not European but, yes, I have over the years noted a different set of priorities between the true followers of Islam and the majority of Western Christians.’
~~*!*~~
The Anglo-Arab stallion was Anne Fontaine’s favourite horse. Four evenings a week she rode around the estate and, in fine weather, further afield through the Tokai pinewoods and the gum groves of Platteklip. These outings were her only pleasure. She rode bareback, the better to savour the power of the horse.
Sometimes, and despite her surroundings, Anne wished that she had never been born. She craved children yet could have none; the doctors did not know why. She yearned for love and there was only jealousy. She craved sexual satisfaction but her natural sensuality was denied outside marriage because of the stern moral code of her formative years. Only once had she known a man with whom her loins could have run wild and Luther be damned.
Within the cold walls of her marriage there had been a great deal of sex, all quick and mechanical. The remaining mystery was how disgust had not driven her permanently frigid.
A crescent moon edges into view about the distant silver grove and Anne murmured to the Anglo-Arab, pressing her thighs inward and gently shortening the rein. She would cool the stallion by walking the last mile of vineyard.
The stallion snorted, nosing the air, and Anne clearly saw the figure of a man on the sandy track to the house.
The man had stopped, statue-like, when he heard her approach, but only when she had thankfully passed him did she hear him call her name. She had heard that voice so many times in her dreams. Was it possible or was this the ghostly robber, come down from his legendary lair in the foothills?
Few words were spoken. Time ceased to exist. They were back in the forest clearing of ten years earlier. The stallion grazed beside the track and the world was far away.
Their bodies moved as one in the moonshadows of a bamboo island. As wild as animals, as gentle as hedonists, as abandoned as their instincts dictated. Each had long nurtured fantasies of this act – the one through many killings, the other through a thousand hot nights of hopelessness.
For three wonderful weeks they met in the evenings: out of sight of prying eyes, for there is no gossip machine, no jungle-drums telegraph system, half so efficient as the Cape grapevine of un-conscious pret’enders
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~
White Sun, Red Star
by Robert Elegant
Here follows a brief explanation of the chief forces in the troubled China during the first half of the twentieth century.
Confucianism then dominated the behaviour and the thinking of almost all Chinese. That conservative political and moral code had been developed from the teachings of the Sage Confucius who lived in the sixth century B.C. It fostered authoritarian control within the home, as well as the nation, and it militated against change.
Warlords were ambitious generals who fought each other for power over China after the Nationalist Revolution of 1911 overthrew the Confucian Manchu Dynasty. Warlord rule was usually rapacious, inefficient, and cruel.
The National People’s Party of Dr. Sun Yat-sen struggled to sweep away the warlords and to create a unified, independent, and powerful Republic of China. Dr Sun’s policies were initially inspired by his Christian faith and his belief in modified socialism, both acquired abroad.
Strong foreign influence throughout China was exerted from treaty ports like Shanghai, where the outsiders governed themselves under their own laws, having exacted the concession of such extra-territorial rights from the Chinese by force. The foreigners were chiefly interested in fat profits and the soft life – for themselves, not necessarily for the Chinese. Some idealists – and some missionaries – supported Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalists, but many foreigners wanted the lucrative disorder to continue.
Foreign ideals like democracy, science, feminism, individual liberty and universal equality, however, inspired the students at China’s new universities and colleges. They exercised political influence wholly disproportionate to their numbers because of inherent Chinese reverence for learning, another legacy of Confucius (The common people treasured even scraps of paper bearing the intricate Chinese characteristics, called ideograms because each expresses one idea.) Therefore the natural leaders of the nation, the young intellectuals played the decisive role in its transformation.
Valour of Ignorance
By Homer Lea
“To free a nation from error is to enlighten the individual, and only to the degree that the individual will be receptive of truth can a nation be free from that vanity which ends with national ruin”
~ Homer Lea ~
It was a melancholy, stifling night, but in the bright dry room, one talked, as every visitor in Manila did in those days, lightly enough of the possibility of a Japanese invasion of the Phillipines.
“If it comes, where will they strike first?” I asked.
Colonel Charles Willoughby drew a deft map of Luzon on the Major’s tablecloth. “The main attacks will probably come here, at Lingayen Gulf,” he said, making an arrow, “and then here – at Polillo Bight. Ye old pincer movement.”
“You’re not giving away military secrets?”
The officers all laughed. Colonel Willoughby pocketed his pencil. “No,” he said. “Just quoting military gospel – according to Homer Lea.”
“Who is Homer Lea?”
“Tell you a funny story,” the Colonel said. “When I first came out here, about a year ago, some nimble wit in Military Intelligence had just hauled in a ‘spy.’ Young college-bred Filipino. Seems he had written a letter to a pal, complete with rough maps, analyzing the Jap plans for invading Luzon.
The pal turned it over to G-2, who had the boy on the mat. His maps, and his analysis corresponded rather too well with the Department’s. The terrified kid swore he’d gotten the whole thing right out of an old book he’d taken out of the library. ‘Son, have you by any chance been reading Homer Lea?’ I asked. When he produced the library card which showed he had, we let him go… You see,” the Colonel said, “thirty-five years ago, a strange young man who called himself ‘General’ Homer Lea, wrote a book about a war to come between America and Japan. In it he described, in minutest details the Jap campaigns against the Phillipines, Hawaii, Alaska and California.”
“A sort of American Nostradamus?”
The Colonel said, “Not at all. Homer Lea was neither a mystic nor a prophet. He was a scientist. He studied the science of war – the fundamental laws of which are as immutable as those of any other science. He also sought to analyze the causes of war and diagnose the symptoms of an approaching conflict. And, having proven, at least to his own satisfaction, that great causes of war existed between the U.S. and Japan, that the symptoms of the approaching conflict were apparent to all but fools or wishful-thinkers, he proceeded to set forth the tactical course that war would take.”
The Major said, “I read him at West Point. Damned convincing militarily – if you accepted his political premise – that our democracy wouldn’t get ready in time to lick the Japs.”
“Is America ready?” the Colonel asked of nobody in particular.
“From which dismal question,” I said, “am I to assume that you, like Homer Lea, doubt for a moment we could lick the Japs, even if they attacked tomorrow?”
The Colonel said, “Don’t jump to conclusions. First, Lea wrote over thirty years ago. Since then, there have been revolutionary changes, not in the science, but in the instruments of warfare. Second, like all scientist, he did not make enough allowance for that forever inexact science: the science of the human soul. There are two things – and only two things – having to do with the defense of these Islands which Lea did not, could not, foresee. One was the courage and genius of a man called MacArthur. The other was a machine called the airplane. If these omissions are decisive factors – Lea’s analysis, that these Islands cannot be held will be proven wrong.”
“Are they decisive factors?”
“Well, I hope to God they are!” the Major said fervently.
“Amen,” said Colonel Willoughby. “But in any case, next month, when you get home – brush up on the General.”
~!~
Writing eight years before the outbreak of World War I, twenty-nine years before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, thirty-three years before the outbreak of World War II, Homer Lea states, as militarily axiomatic, that all these dire events – including the surprise attack on Hawaii – would be in time and space, inevitable. Why? Because:
“No state is ever destroyed except through those avertable conditions that mankind dreads to contemplate. Yet nations prefer to perish rather than to master the single lesson taught by the washing away of those that have gone before them. In their indifference, and in the valour of ignorance, they depart, together with their monuments and their constitutions…”
That single lesson is vigilance, the eternal price of liberty.
…
The Valour of Ignorance is charged with the bitterest apoghems ever penned against Isolationism and Pacifism. It explodes with florid and savage indictments of the smugness and conceit that lead fat rich contented nations to disarm while encouraging tough frugal hungry nations to attack them. Like a battle drum it beats the need of militant patriotism in times of peace – so that times of war may be avoided. Like the blast of a reveille bugle, it seeks to shatter “our mock heroism of dreams,” and our “valour of the rostrum.”
~!~
The Day of the Saxon, the second book by Lea, is equally prophetic – and equally gloomy. Published in 1912, its thesis is also stark and simple: The British Empire (the Kingdom of the Saxon) shows certain specific military defects which leave it vulnerable to German aggression. Lea predicted that if the British Empire continued to rely solely on commercialism and sea power, if it could not, in short, quickly form a lasting military alliance with a great friendly land army power – it was doomed by the ever resurgent armies of Germany. But nowhere on the teeming greedy earth, except in the Western hemisphere, where America alone among all the great powers neither feared Great Britain, nor desired what was hers, could Homer Lea, in 1912, find for the Empire a “great land army” ally. And despairful that the United States would ever see – in time – “that the Brittish Navy” – not the Monroe Doctrine is this Republic’s true protection,” he foretold that “the day of the Saxon” was drawing to a close, and that on a hundred fields of battle – in Belguim, France, Holland, Russia and Egypt, the day of the Teuton was dawning. And, bitterest prophecy of all: Great Britain at long last, exhausted by her perhaps “victorious” Germanic wars, would then lose her Empire to Japan and Russia.
~!~
I sought Who’s Who for 1912, the year his last book was published. He was there:
“Lea, Homer, author, souldier, b. Denver, Nov 17, 1876…”
And with this as a clue, to other clues, in old newspaper files… It is the story of the Valour of Homer Lea.
~!~
In the early days of the Civil War, Alfred Erskine Lea, fourteen year old son of a Tennessee doctor, living in Missouri, had made his way alone, through the bloody border states, in a mule-drawn covered wagon to the West. In Colorado, Alfred Lea mined at Cripple Creek, prospered mildly, married Hersa Coberly who bore him a son, Homer, and two daughters, and finally moved to Los Angeles.
There Homer attended a public high school for two years, where he was a “brilliant though erratic student.”
Homer wanted to be a soldier. And it was so very plain he could never be. He was a hunchback child, and after he was twelve years old and five feet tall, he never grew. As he approached boyhood a curvature of the spine grew more pronounced until it earned him the unhappy nickname of “Little Scrunch-neck,” among his classmates. But “Little Scrunch-neck,” nothing daunted resolutely played soldier. Two childhood friends, the late Harry Carr of the Los Angeles Times and Marco Newmark, recalled that after hours “he drilled the kids with broomsticks and laid out campaigns in his backyard.” His sister once wrote a friend that on Fourths of July Homer wasn’t content just to set off firecrackers like other brothers; he insisted on staging manoeuvres on the lawn, using the firecrackers as artillery to blast h is little sisters out of the “untenable positions” he had entrenched them in behind trees and bushes. Why his sisters and his schoolmates meekly took orders from the frail hunchback, whose manner was always gentle and whose voice was always soft, they could never quiet explain. Years later, a Chinese who had been with him on the field of battle said, “He had eyes that could bury you nine feet under the ground, if you disobeyed him.”
Homer spouted the campaigns of Ceasar, Hannibal, Alexander, Turenne and Napoleon, which he knew far better than they knew their football and baseball scores. To this, he added another idiosyncrasy: a tendency to talk Chinese; which he picked up from the family cook, a pigtailed Chinaman. Carr said that Homer once confided to him that his interest in China was the result of a strange set of dreams, in which at last in a blare of Chinese trumpets, he saw himself revealed as the reincarnation of a great historic Chinese warrior called “The Martial Monk,” marching at the head of his army to defend China. The true dreams of a small sick body, or the “daydreams” of a sensitive boy who felt his physical inferiority keenly, or simply the imaginative reflection of the interest all political-minded Californians had in the “Chinese problem” in those days, the fact remains that by the time Lea entered Leland Stanford in 1895, to study law, his main preoccupations were all things military and all things Chinese.
Although still popular, as cripples are always “popular,” most of his college classmates thought him a full-fledged “nut.”
~!~
The creation of a great strong democratic China – was more important to him than all the British Empire, for with uncanny vision, with a strategic insight that verged on mysticism, Lea knew that his America would need an Asiatic ally in it’s inevitable war against Japan.
At a presidential reception he congratulated the President, and is supposed to have uttered a strange word of warning, in which he paraphrased in his own written words:
“Now China,” he said, “is like a Republic. America, too is a Republic. Your Republic, like ours, can only be preserved in its beauty and freedom by vigilant swords… China’s enemies now are its historic pacifism (apathy) and political corruption… and Japan. We have the same three enemies… I can do nothing for either of our two great countries. I am a dying man. I have warned America in my books. I now warn you, in words… Free China will yet perish unless there rises from your innermost bosom the militant spirit of another Martial Monk. If he does not come, Republic or no, the hour for this ancient kingdom has come…”
~!~
Civilisation has not changed human nature. The nature of man makes war inevitable. Armed strife will not disappear from the earth until after human nature changes.
~!~
High or low, the ambitions of the heterogeneous masses that now riot and revel within the confines of this Republic only regard it in a parasitical sense, as a land to batten on and grow big in, whose resources are not to be developed and conserved for the furtherance of the Republic’s greatness, but only to satisfy the larval greed of those who subsist upon it’s fatness.
If there is any patriotism worth having it belongs alone to the primitive principles of the Republic, to the militant patriotism of those who in simple, persistent valour laid with their swords the foundation of this national edifice and who after seven years of labour cemented with their own blood the thirteen blocks of its foundation. The continuation of this building, and the endless extension of the Republic, the maintenance of its ideals and the consummation, in a world-wide sense, of the aspirations of its founders, constitutes the only pure patriotism to which an American can lay claim or, in defence of, lay down his life.
Warfare, either ancient or modern, has never been nor will ever be mechanical. There is no such possibility as the combat of instruments. It is the soldier that brings about victory or defeat. The knowledge of commanders and the involuntary comprehension and obedience to orders is what determines the issue of battles. An army controlled by more than one mind is as many times useless as are numbered the minds that direct it. But what mankind does not take cognisance of is that, in the alteration of modes of combat by mechanical and scientific inventions, there must be a psychological readjustment of the militant spirit of the combatants. As the instruments of warfare become more intricate, the discipline and esprit de corps must be increased accordingly. Because of this fact volunteer forces become more and more useless as the science of warfare progresses.
~!~
An army possesses a heart and brain as does every other living organism. This heart and brain of an army is made up of the officers composing it, while the soul of it is the spirit that inspires them. The worth of an army must be measured primarily by the character of his soul. In volunteer armies it is little more than embryonic, and in its absence armies are but mobs. It is immaterial how numerous they may be, how vast their armament, or how perfect their utensils of war, these things shall avail them not at all.
The creation of this martial soul necessitates year after year that callouses not alone the hands, but also the weakness inherent in man and wrings sweat from his heart. In the lessons of these years they learn that in warfare a relentless absorption of individuality must supervene, an annihilation of all personality. Only then can they reach that pinnacle of human greatness, to seek glory in death.
~!~
It is through empirical knowledge alone that man is able to ascertain what laws do or do not regulate his activities. Inventors do not invent; they only apply in a new manner laws and forces that have existed from the beginning of time. Chemists do not create; they only make known the presence of elements and conditions existent already in nature. Thus it is that sophists and theorists and all that category have not left to mankind, throughout the ages of the human race, one single substantial legacy, and for no other reason than that they try to invent out of airy nothings that which the laws and forces governing the world deny; or labour to create, out of nebulosity of their own sick brains, elements unknown to nature.
As far as the world is concerned they might as well be a louse on the back of a wild duck as it wings its way through the stormy night.
It is on account of the prevalency of this smattering of education that every ism has its followers, every form of religious dementia its sanctuary and apostles, every visionary his devotees; and it matters in no way from what depths of absurdity they may come up, they have their adherents.
In this class of visionaries we place International Arbitrationists and Disarmamentists, who are so persistently striving through subservient politicians, through feminism, clericalism, sophism and other such toilers to drag this already much deluded Republic into that Brobdingnagian swamp from whose deadly gases there is no escape.
The idea of International Arbitration as a substitute for natural laws that govern the existence of political entities arises not only from a denial of their fiats and an ignorance of their application, but from a total misconception of war, its causes and its meaning.
The source or origin of war must always be searched for, not in disputes between states, but deep down in the bowels of one or all of them. There alone will be heard those bruised noises, political, industrial or revolutionary, sooner or later to end in that eruption of mankind called – war. Disputes or disagreements between nations, instead of being a source or cause of war, are nothing more nor less than the first manifestations of approaching combat, or are the preliminaries thereto. To remove them by arbitration, or any other means, is at best but procrastination.
Investigation shows that whenever two nations have become engaged in warfare they have been advancing on converging lines of self-interest and aggrandizement. When the contact takes place, the struggle for supremacy, or even survival is at hand. This inevitable hour is approximately fixed and determined by the angles of convergence plus the sum of the relative speed by which the nations are moving along their respective lines. Thus it is that, when the angle of convergence of both or even one of the nations is acute and the speed or progress along one or both of the converging lines correspondingly great, war results in a few years or decades.
~~!*!~~
The morality of any nation whose people have electoral rights is no greater than the morality of its people. No republic can be free from any of the motives, passions, ambitions, hate or delinquencies to which the majority of its people are subject.
When will that Golden Age be ushered in upon this unhappy earth, and arbitration between individuals substituted for law and dynamic force in which it originates and ends? When will laws made by man for the government of man, together with his courts, his penal institutions, be put aside and voluntary arbitration between man and man take their place?
Only when arbitration is able to unravel the tangled skein of crime and hypocrisy among individuals can it be extended to communities and nations. As nations are only man in the aggregate, they are the aggregate of his crimes and deception and depravity, and so long as these constitute the basis of individual impulse, so long will they control the acts of nations.
~!~
The suddenness with which the precipitating causes of war break upon public consciousness almost invariably hides the true reasons – in all probability extant many years prior – that tend to bring on the conflict; hence it happens – as is the case with this Republic – that nations go rushing blindly along acutely converging lines to that point of contact – which is war.
Whenever a nation fails or scorns to differentiate between the sources and causes of war, it enters into the conflict unprepared. But those nations whose affairs of state are carried on by men fully cognisant of the difference between the trivial and the immutable are not only always prepared for battle, but they determine the time and place of the conflict; which, more often than otherwise, is an assurance of success.
~!~ ~!~ ~!~ * ~!~ ~!~ ~!~
The Right Man
An Inside Account of the Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush
by David Frum
Chapter 5: Like a Fox
Bush meanwhile had the power to grant Fox the thing Mexicans crave most: respect in the United States. Each time Bush rolled out the red carpet for Fox and treated him like the leader of a great power, every time Bush praised Fox’s democratic reforms and promised the full cooperation of the United States, he strengthened Fox against the machine hacks and hard leftists who still controlled Mexico’s federal Congress and most of it incorrigible bureaucracy. The two presidents covered each other’s backs like two soldiers working their way up a dangerous street.
U.S. presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have always selected Canada as the destination of their first foreign trip. Bush broke that custom and travelled instead to Fox’s ranch. Fox and Bush saw each other again in Quebec City in April at the Summit of the Americas. Fox returned to Washington in May, toured the American Midwest in July, and paid a formal state visit with his new wife and much of his cabinet in the first week of September 2001.
Bush never wearied of wooing Hispanic voters with gestures of welcome and friendship: Spanish words in speeches, appointments of Spanish-surnamed officials, support for social services for legal immigrants, and the deployment of his Spanish speaking nephew, George P. Bush. But Bush knew that Cinco de Mayo proclamations are not the stuff of enduring political coalitions. He would take the Republican Party where he knew the Democrats could not follow. He would reinvent the GOP as the party that advocated an ever closer relationship between Mexico and the United States – and that won Mexican American votes by delivering prosperity to people of Mexican ancestry on both sides of the border.
He envisioned a border open to labour, a border open to trade, and a border open to investment – especially investment in energy. Mexico had banned foreign investment in its energy industry in 1938, and ever since, Mexican oil production has been controlled by the creaky, corrupt, and polluting state monopoly, Pemex. As a result, even though Mexico’s oil reserves are already known to be larger than those of the United States, Mexico provided less than 7 percent of America’s 3.3 billion barrels of imports in the year 2000, one-seventh as much as OPEC’s Arab members. If Mexico opened itself to the exploration and development of its oil resources by American entrepreneurs and technology, Mexican oil might possibly displace Arab oil from the U.S. market altogether. The United States would never be self-sufficient in oil again, but North America could be – a message that runs through the Cheney energy plan like a leitmotif through a Wagnerian opera.
For this energy “quid,” Mexico would of course demand some equally valuable “quo” – and in Bush’s mind that “quo” was immigration reform. Bush believed that immigration was valuable to the United States and praised it again and again in his public speeches and his private conversation. But if immigration was valuable to the United States, it was indispensable to Mexico. If all those eager young people who slipped across the border to earn dollars for their families were locked inside Mexico, the country would explode. Even after the economic reforms of the 1990’s, Mexico would be burdened with more workers than it could employ for years to come.
So the Bush administration went to work to design some kind of system for regularizing the Mexican American labour relationship – not an amnesty like that of 1986, which simply invited a whole new generation of illegals to try their luck, but some grander system for enabling Mexicans to work in the United States temporarily and then to go home again. Regularisation would help both economies. It would protect the United States from developing a submerged caste of workers without legal rights. And it would show Mexican American voters that President Bush wanted to help not only them, but also cousin Frederico who still toiled in Guanajuato and dreamed of working for two years in Chicago to earn the $15,000 it would cost to buy the gas station on Avenida Diaz.
As like-minded as Bush and Fox were, they envisioned very different futures for the continent. Bush saw Mexico evolving into a sunnier, spicier Canada – a country that retained its separate and distinct political system, even as it gradually merged seamlessly into the American economic system. Fox, on the other hand, imagined a much more political integration: a North America that looked like the European Union. Visiting Chicago in July, Fox proposed that Mexicans illegally present in the United States be allowed driver’s licenses, access to American colleges and universities, and the right to vote by absentee ballot in Mexican elections. Bush believed that everybody who lived for any length of time in the United States had to become an American like everybody else. Fox dreamed of a future in which millions of people of Mexican ancestry lived in the United States and somehow identified with both Mexico and the United States at once.
These differences were not merely theoretical. They stymied negotiations all through 2001 and embittered Fox’s state visit in September. Fox stepped out of his helicopter on the South Lawn on the morning of September 5, walked to the microphone, and without preliminaries assigned Bush a deadline for meeting his demands. “We must, and we can, reach an agreement on migration before the end of this very year.”
Visitors do not usually talk in such a peremptory way to the president of the United States, especially not when they are standing on his lawn and getting ready to walk into his home. The objectionable tone of Fox’s opening comments foreshadowed the entire disastrous visit. At the staff and cabinet meetings, Mexicans made blunt demands on their American counterparts for concessions on immigration, while refusing even to discuss the opening of their energy market.
I still remember that last week. The weather was hauntingly beautiful, a perfect Washington late summer. Mexican flags were bunched alongside the Stars and Stripes on the lampposts of West Executive and Pennsylvania Avenues. Dazzling boughs of flowers filled the White House. All was lovely – except for the grim-faced aides who stomped up and down the big staircases of the Executive Office Building, muttering about the instransigence of their Mexican counterparts. But in the photographs of the event that lined the halls of the West Wing for a week afterward, I could see Bush and Fox and the two First Ladies toasting one another jovially on the Truman balcony – and it occurred to me that the mutual exasperation of the two delegations was not the only reality of the week. Bush and Fox were of course not friends. They may have become fond of each other, even enjoyed each other’s company, but two men with such large and often contradictory responsibilities can never truly be friends.
~!~
But they were perhaps something more: collaborators in one of the greatest works of imagination ever essayed on this continent. That work might be obscured by events to come, but its day would return. And if Bush sometimes blanked out on the details of Article 114.3(e)ii of the North American Free Trade Agreement, well, something has to be forgiven to the artistic temperament.
~!~
Even Bush’s sternest critics were prepared to concede that he handled the relationship with Fox well. But Mexico, they complained, was too easy a test. The commanding Fox had made Bush look good. Set Bush a tougher challenge, and he was sure to fail. Bush’s June meeting with Vladimir Putin in Slovenia seemed at the time to prove those critics right. The American and Russian leaders met in a baroque castle for two hours of face-to-face conversations, and their press conference afterward was instantly filed alongside the Hiller interview in the “Bush is a dunce” dossier.
“I looked the man in the eye,” Bush said of Putin. “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
His soul? Putin was a former KGB man who, according to some in U.S. intelligence, had helped the spy agency hide billions of dollars of assets before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin had pressured Yeltsin into appointing him vice president, most likely by threatening to publicize the graft and corruption of Yeltsin’s family and friends. Yeltsin had then resigned six months before the scheduled election, enabling Putin to run for the Presidency backed by all the sinister advantages of Russian incumbency. Putin had used an extremely peculiar series of bombings in Moscow to justify a war in Chechnya. He had laid flowers on the grave of Yuri Andropov, former KGB chief, former Communist Party general secretary, and the Soviet ambassador who urged the invasion of Hungary in 1956. Since taking office, Putin had stealthily moved to close or take control of every independent media source in Russia. Most ominous of all, Russian companies were selling nuclear technology to Iran – and Putin either could not or would not halt them. Had Bush known any of this when he pronounced Putin “straightforward” and “trustworthy”?
The Washington Post, a newspaper not reflexively hostile to the administration, complained that the president sounded “naïve”. The liberal New Republic complained, “Gush, gush, gush: Bush has mistaken big power summits for daytime television.” The popular television pundit Chris Mathews commented sarcastically in his newspaper column, “Such powers of observation deserve our attention. George Reeves, the first Superman, could see whether a bad guy was hiding a gun under his coat. George W. Bush can see clear into a Russian ex-spymaster’s ‘soul’.” Senator Joseph Lieberman complimented the president with heavy irony on his ability to gain such insights in two hours of conversation.
That hurt. And it did not help that Bush – stung by the criticism – gave an interview to Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal and proceeded to expand at some length on what a fine job he had done in Slovenia. “I think Ronald Reagan would have been proud of how I conducted myself. I went to Europe as a humble leader of a great country, and stood my ground.”
For two months after the Slovenia summit, Bush’s most ardent supporters and even his staff tacitly accepted the media’s hostile verdict. Putin the ex-KGB man, the leader of a has-been country with an economy the size of the Netherlands, had been lavished with presidential praise in return for nothing at all that anybody could see. Bush’s inexperience must have finally caught up with him.
Or had it? Bush told Noonan that he and Putin had identified one common supreme security interest: Islamic fundamentalism. And he described how he had given Putin a short introduction to the Bush preference for imagination over memory. Putin had told Bush that he loved to read history. Bush replied: “I do, too, I like history a lot… You know, sometimes when you study history, you get stuck in the past.” I said, “President Putin, you and I have a chance to make history. The reason one should love history is to determine how to make good history. And this meeting could be the beginning of making some fabulous history. We’re young. Why do you want to stay stuck?’”
~!~
Sixty days later, America was at war. And at the head of the queue to help was… Vladimir Putin. Putin ordered up an increase in Russian oil production to help calm world markets. He kept his nuclear force on standby even as America went to the highest standard of alert – an act of trust in the United States that would once have been unthinkable for a Russian leader. Even when U.S. forces entered the territory of the former Soviet Union itself, in Uzbekistan and other newly independent states, Putin uttered not one word of protest. Bush had given Putin words of praise. Putin repaid him with coin more solid than words.
~!~
In Bush’s first six months in office, he had executed the most ambitious reorientation of America’s grand strategy since Nixon’s time – away from China and toward Russia. He might be a little hazy about the details. But more than either of his immediate predecessors, he dared to discard obsolete ideas and habits and adapt himself to new times and new circumstances. And if Charles Darwin is to be believed, isn’t adaptability the highest function and ultimate purpose of human intelligence?
“Bush isn’t very smart – he just gets good advice.” How often did we hear people say that in the first year, as if it were obvious which advice was good and which was not? Presidents are inundated by advice, and the very worst of it often sounds as beguiling and plausible as the very best. A president who consistently recognizes and heeds good advice will make good decisions. And about a president who consistently makes good decisions we can say: He’s smart enough.
Bush was not a lightweight. He was, rather, a very unfamiliar type of heavyweight. Words often failed him, his memory sometimes betrayed him, but his vision was large and clear.
On a visit to Crawford Elementary School later that summer, one of the students asked him whether he found it hard to make decisions.
His answer described the workings of his mind with more candour – and less false modesty – than he usually allowed himself.
“Is it hard to make decisions as president? Not really. If you know what you believe, decisions come pretty easy. If you’re one of these types of people who are always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, decision making can be difficult. But I find that I know who I am. I know what I believe in, and I know where I want to lead the country. And most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you.
“I realize sometimes people don’t like the decisions. That’s okay. I’ve never been one to try to please everybody all the time. I just do what I think is right. The good thing about democracy, if people like the decisions you make, they let you stay. If they don’t, they’ll send me back to Crawford. Isn’t all that bad a deal, by the way.”
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