The anniversary TV showed me 71 commemorative horror video clips by the end of the day today. After six months of not seeing those awful horror clips, my heart still sinks whenever one of those screaming jetliners heads toward one of those tall buildings up on my TV. As if a moment before they hit I could reverse time or something, like Superman flying backward against the rotation of the Earth. In fact, I’m finding out during this anniversary season (I wonder why now?) that whenever I see those black jets of September enter the TV screen frame, I even let out an audible little moan. Teeth clenched --- still too absurd to believe.

            Today I was shown 14 horror video clips of the jets hitting the skyscrapers and the Pentagon. I saw 31 shots of people jumping out of burning buildings in New York . And I watched 26 clips of skyscrapers crashing to the ground.
            Diligently remembering the dead on homefront TV was really starting to kill me.
            My horror clip day made me particularly crabby when I sat down to write this journal entry. I was pissed off at the world for no apparent reason and then again for every apparent reason. The Iraq thing is saturating the media and that pisses me off the most. The Bush people are either doing a great job saber rattling about Iraq --- or a lousy job representing our best interests. “An attack on Iraq will open the gates of hell,” was how one Islamic cleric described it. But more realistically, there are now millions of worried and angry people worldwide actively marching on the streets against America , protesting the bully and greed of this American aggression. And we’re losing all the good will we collected last fall when the entire civilized world was on our side for a few months.
            One man marching in Japan was interviewed on the TV [1] and told the reporter that he thought that the issue was exposing America’s aggressive nature and warned that he thought that if America acted unilaterally and invaded Iraq against the wishes of the majority of the world, that the issue would eventually become as divisive for the American people as the wars in southeast Asia were during the 1960s and 1970s.
            Knowing enough to know that a civil war is inevitable in post Saddam Iraq – invasion or not -- I found a lot of possibility in what the man said, and soon I was even more aggravated. So I flipped off the TV, and I flipped on the short wave radio for awhile, and I heard word over Radio Amsterdam that 12 more suspects alleged to have been involved in that American embassy terrorist bombing plot in Paris while Janet an I were there the week after September 11 had been arrested today around Europe. Bringing the total number of conspirators arrested in the planned September 20 Paris plot to nearly 25.

            Meanwhile there was a long report about their leader Osama bin Laden. Wondering where he was and what he was up to.
            “Where’s Osama?”
            It’s become a catch phrase since everyone began asking the question just after the fall of Kabul last November 13, and not knowing the fate of the most despicable freelance terrorist who ever lived and the evil architect of September 11 seems to be driving closure freaks batty.
            Me?
            Despite the gathering evidence --- I’m still positive that the little bastard was squashed in a cave at Tora Bora.
            I was there.
            I could feel his jihad bleeding into the airspace (if not he himself) as I stood there over the Khyber Pass on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border on December 14 at the “Al-Qaida Last Stand” and watched from the outskirts as the bombers and fighter jets went in for the kill. Fighting fire with fire on the red line border on the CNN war map in the year of the jets.

            Radio Amsterdam also reported to me tonight that the assassin of Dutch anti-immigration candidate Pym Fortuyn last spring had gone on a hunger strike in prison. And about how think tanks in Holland are beginning to agree that, “The events of September 11 had accelerated anti-immigration feelings in Holland and in most of the rest of Europe .”
            And there was another interesting report on the radio from Holland about how regular Americans like me were coping on the homefront with the approaching one year anniversary. I twirled around the radio dial and landed on news about the American anniversary on German, Swiss, and Chinese stations and it appeared to me as if the whole civilized world was beginning to re-focus on America again during this uncomfortable anniversary season. And for a few days the world will remember and grieve with us --- shoulder to shoulder as brothers and friends --- just like it did last year. But come next Thursday, when their calendars click forward like mine --- from September 11 to September 12 --- I believe the proper grieving time will have lapsed and that the suspicious eye of a weary world will open wide to what many fear will become a messy era of American aggression. A post-September 11 American World War III terror-war-justifying monster.

            The only superpower.

            Pumped up on furor and hate and drunk from victory in Afghanistan and from all that incessant flag waving. Over-policing the world and menacing everyone who gets on its nerves. And with that we will have squandered the goodwill of the world we earned in the aftermath of September 11. An historically rare period of global compassion that could have saved the world from itself if it had been used correctly.
            I just couldn’t escape my bad mood, short of fleeing to the cabin, and it was too late to go there tonight (after all, I still had a job to finish up here), so I flipped the radio off and the TV back on and I wound up watching the replay of this morning’s Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon briefing on C-SPAN. Perhaps the first Donald Rumsfeld Show episode I’ve sampled in six or seven months. But it wasn’t about the terror war, as I anticipated it might be, and instead turned out to be just another Axis of Evil pep rally. And so after the press conference had sufficiently bored and agitated me, I flipped to CNN where a yammering TV pundit had gotten screen time to say that he thought that in the nine months since Tora Bora the American presence in Afghanistan had, “Gone from that of an army of liberation to that of an army of occupation.” And he suggested that America had, “squandered the unprecedented global good will it had gathered after the 2001 attacks --- trading it all in for the mistrust, worry, and contention of it’s aggressive ‘Axis Of Evil’ doctrine.”

            “Did the fact we agreed make me a yammering TV pundit too,” I thought, “or should I just give some of these guys more credit?”

  5
“As Well With God ---
It Seems We Were All On Our Own
On September 11...”

Ezekiel 25(17)

According to the Bible

And I will execute great vengeance

upon them with furious rebukes; and they

shall know that I am the Lord, when I

shall lay my vengeance upon them.

                        The most interesting anniversary-related media program that came into my bungalow today was on television this evening on Kansas City ’s PBS station. A program about how religion and God had fared over the past year. The two-hour in-depth examination called, “Where was God on September 11; Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero,” turned out to be the most intriguing September 11 study I’ve seen since the beginning of the war. I took notes. A list of words and thoughts I jotted down on a notepad that were all reminiscent of my own September 11 experience.
            Over all --- the program portrayed a deepened sense of cynicism in America concerning religion. Of a people feeling alone and detached and haunted by questions of faith. Because as one man on the TV program put it, “As well with God --- it seems we were all on our own on September 11 ...”

The program asked its viewers to think about:
“How many times we’ve imagined ourselves:”

*    A passenger on one of the jets heading toward a west coast meeting.

*    A terrorist spending his last few days on the strip in Las Vegas before going into action.

*    A killer holding a box cutter to a flight attendant’s throat.

*    An executive sitting in an office building and watching a jetliner slam into your window
   at 500 mph.

*    A hijacker slamming a jet full of people into a building full of people for the glory of
   god and expecting everlasting life with virgins.

*    A custodian hanging in a 100th-floor window of a doomed skyscraper choosing
   between  death by fire or  death by falling.

*    A mother of four falling 90 stories to her death.

*    Being the Mayor of New York City.

*    Being the President of the United States.

*    A bombardier dropping a load of bombs on Afghan targets and perhaps innocent
   civilians as well from the belly of a B-52 bomber.

*    A father taking the subway into Manhattan every day for three months, handing out missing posters, and ultimately just standing there day after day watching the cleanup. Praying to God that the workers would just find a shoe with parts of your son’s foot in it so you’ll have something to take home to his mother. Something for her to bury in the family burial plot.

*    A terrorist in a cave underneath the bombers at the rout of Tora Bora.

      *    “It was an unimaginable horror... It broke all rules of engagement for civilized war... It was unjust and immoral on every account ... Evil must be addressed as an element of human nature, and it must be faced... The cold bloodedness of this thing was astounding... We lost so much in so short of a time that day... Seeing Ground Zero (The Pile) was like seeing the absence of God.”

     *    “The remains of the skeletal structure of what was left standing of the World Trade Center skin became for me,” a man on the PBS TV broadcast said, “A cathedral of pain and suffering and hate...  

            In the words of one of the people interviewed on the program, much of the PBS story dealt with the way people treated each other while they were stunned.

            *    “The natural kindness of people that surfaced --- where did that come from?” the program wondered.
                      “From God? 
                        Or was it always just there waiting to be needed?
                        For a while we appreciated each other (even strangers) and we took each other into account." 

                The testimony again made me lament that special season of compassion and how it had faded over time as we recovered. Bound to be forgotten, that for a few months at the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002 people stopped diminishing each other’s lives for a while. Criticism became a senseless and petty endeavor. All criticism (even comedy) became awkward and uncomfortable. One comedian, Bill Maher was even drummed off cable television when (on an edition of his Politically Incorrect comedy program) he had the audacity to compare the terror jets of September 11 with the pre-September 11 American-launched cruise missile attacks on terrorist training camps in Asia and Africa, calling both equally as cowardly as the other.
            His point was serious and appropriate and was hard to dismiss in a free America . But for Bill Maher, the timing was way too early into World War III and the argument festered a wounded America in the same manner as that Camping Zeeburg jerk’s insistence festered my wounds --- trying to force a Vietnam baby-killer discussion down my throat at a clearly inappropriate time. Comedy managed a comeback after only a few weeks for some, but for me it wasn’t until after Tora Bora that I was able to laugh at anything related to the terror war.
            There wasn’t even any of that petty Washington politicking going on (we’ve got a war to win here...) until the bully of the State of the Union Speech made many in the West and America waiver and squirm and opened up a window for our human nature to get the better of us, for everyone to get back to bickering as usual.
            A season of bipartisan politics (polite and patriotic please).
            A season when nobody parked illegally out in front of my house. When there were no petty celebrity crime stories polluting the TV news. When religions reached out to one another all over the planet. A moment when the French and Dutch were both on America ’s side. The: “Today, We Are All Americans” headline in Le Monde. The playing of the American National Anthem instead of God Save the Queen at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.
            That global mood of compassion and togetherness was surreal ...
            Nearly everybody I encountered in that season of tolerance was courteous, kind and patient, polite, respectful, gentile and cultivated. Everyone was mild and good mannered and they placed those around them (no matter how foolish or aggravating they were) in high regard. The civilized world was amiable, affable, accommodating, and --- well --- civil. And there was a great-frustrated desire out there among regular Americans to somehow be part of history and to somehow be of some sort of help in the healing. And a hankering to (somehow) thumb our noses at the terrorist monsters.

*    Like that Brooklyn man I heard about on the TV program tonight who after seeing the smoke from across the river just had to help. Who hitchhiked across the Brooklyn Bridge into the fire and who then volunteered every day until the Ground Zero cleanup was finished on June 1. Just so he could help. Just so he could be near the spooky smoldering thing. Just so he could do something more than just watch it all happen from across the East River at home like the rest of the country and world on the TV.

*   Or the Canadians who helped the Stranded Yanks when American airspace was shut down and thousands of jets full of Americans were put down north of the border. Who said they couldn’t just sit around and do nothing while their neighbors suffered such a horrible wrong.

*   Or the last survivor of the attack, who after being found after 28 hours and after falling 13 stories with 97 stories piled on top of her could only say that all she wanted now in life was to forget all the trivial pressures of the American Dream and to have a family and just be close to them --- “That’s all that really matters to me now.”

*   Or the local Lawrence, Kansas reporter who went overland to New York by car and published his travelogue about life in the whole new America in the local newspaper and who told me later that he took the trip to Ground Zero because he, “just had to do something.”

*   Or the story about Janet riding up to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris to thumb her nose at the terrorists, or the one about me going over the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan to watch from nearby as coalition bombers took out the remaining cave strongholds of the September 11 terrorists --- to thumb my nose at them in my own way.

            People put their lives in order during that season of compassion. They prioritized their lives and in a fog of twisted compassion and revenge chose people over money, order over disorder, patience over impatience, war over peace, and impertinence over terror.

5
A Soured Mood
9/11 on ABC
It’s where the country will come together again

                       As I was writing this entry tonight a new advertisement popped up on my CNN Breaking News Box. It was a bold TV headline that read: "It’s where the country will come together again." And the TV’s right. About coming together again. Because we’ll probably all never be this close. Perhaps never again as close as we’ll be again next week for a few hours on the first anniversary remembrance day. But polls out now indicate that some of the attitudes that spiked after the attack have inched back. That President George W. Bush’s job approval rating (although still at or above 60-percent) has lost much of its post-Afghanistan clout and continues a steady decline. That the public’s trust in the federal government -- which doubled during the fall -- has now shrunk to not much more than it was in the year 2000. Almost 83 percent of Americans, according to the polls, think they’ve been “changed forever” by what happened last fall --- down from 91 percent just after the attack. The local TV station just announced that 80 fewer international students registered to attend Kansas University this semester than did so a year ago. And many more Americans, according to the polls, think we’re now on the wrong path regarding Iraq and the Axis of Evil doctrine.

            I can testify from the homefront that I think that everyone (including myself) have been steadily backsliding toward the bad old days as our recovery time goes by, souring the historically-rare era of compassion.
            Discourteous, impolite, disrespectful, and vulgar.
            Rude, tactless, un-accommodating --- and sometimes downright nasty and insulting.
            Obtrusive, aggravating, and uncivil.
            We’re all going to the dogs, and there isn’t a damned thing we can do about it but to just hunker down, cringe, and hang on through the storm ...
            Celebrity scandals saturating our TV sets again. Politicians politicizing the terror war. People bitching and bickering and fighting just like the bad old days. And worse --- people taking sides on war and peace issues and taking their disagreements to the mat. People becoming as petty and as trivial as ever because were apparently sliding back into our normal lives --- self-serving and sometimes ugly. We’re becoming pre-September 11 fools again and we’re becoming impatient, ill tempered, and aggressive toward other fools that last year we found time for to console. Now once again we have more time for the trivial than we have for ourselves. And there’s been a re-emergence in our media of all that meaningless schlock programming that masquerades as useful information. Tolerating the kind of mindless crap once again being forced into our lives that was too mean spirited and trivial and petty to have wasted any of our time on during the un-cynical, un-petty, and un-selfish unified fall of 2001 ...

            Tolerating the kind of pessimistic bullshit that’s built up over the summer and hacked me off all day long today.

            Hell, I was so desperate to escape the thought of it never being that good in that way ever again on this Earth, that I picked back up my 2001 journal and read about the building bloodlust of that sad and nerve-wracking season of war last fall. Because despite the terror and subsequent bloodthirsty pounding of that time that overwhelmed me then, the knowledge of that spike of compassion we found out we were capable of during those months (in a way) might now serve to somehow sooth me.
            And so I chose to review the journal entries I wrote in the weeks after Janet and I got back to Lawrence from being stranded on the Europe front. Three weeks after the attack on New York and Washington --- and just a few days before the bombs began falling on Afghanistan.

 
~

October 2, 2001

Lawrence, Kansas

Chronic Headaches:

I Want Them All Dead

(Three weeks after September 11)

                        It’s October now, exactly three weeks after the attack, and it seems as if I get a headache every day. I’m a pacifist. A combat photography veteran. An artist of the everyday global street.

            I’m simple.

            I believe in peace and justice and in everyone getting along. I’ve always believed in Gandhi’s, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” And in Martin Luther King’s “If they try to kill you, develop a willingness to die.”

            But now all I want is that all the terrorists responsible for an era of terror war and for September 11 (and those who’d support such murderers) be rounded up and executed before they can have their evil way with our world.

            I’m not ashamed.

            I’m resolved.

            Resolved that I want them all dead.

            Their heads on sticks.

            Their bodies piled up high in roadside ditches.

 

            Any ditch will do ...

 
~

October 4, 2001

Lawrence, Kansas

Travel Warning

US Department of State

Travel Warning:

            The Department of State warns US citizens to evaluate carefully the implications for their security and safety before deciding to travel to Pakistan ... The September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and possible responses in Afghanistan heighten the need for vigilance on the part of American citizens resident in or traveling through Pakistan ... In neighboring Afghanistan, the Taliban authorities, which control at least 90 percent of Afghanistan continue to harbor international terrorist Usama bin Laden and members of his terrorist network. While the government of Pakistan has expressed its full support for the international campaign against terrorism, public sympathy and support for the Taliban, as well as for bin Laden, exists in Pakistan, and the presence of indigenous sectarian and militant groups in Pakistan require that all Americans in or traveling through Pakistan take appropriate steps to maintain their security awareness... Further, the US Consulate in Peshawar has temporarily located some US employees to Islamabad in light of rising tensions in Peshawar ... Americans who despite this warning reside in or visit Pakistan should exercise maximum caution and take prudent measures. This includes maintaining a strong security posture by being aware of their surroundings, avoiding crowds or demonstrations, keeping a low profile, varying times and routes and notifying the nearest US Embassy or Consulate in case of any change in the local security situation... The US Embassy especially urges all American citizens to defer travel to the tribal areas of Pakistan ’s Northwest Frontier Province ( Peshawar ) until further notice... tribal areas which lie outside the normal jurisdiction of the Government of Pakistan.

*Talk To A Muslim Today

                        I decided to go to Pakistan today and began making calls about a December trip, when I figure the streets will be lively with chaos, war, Christmas, and Ramadan.

            A Muslim Public Affairs Council public service announcement I heard on the CNN Breaking News Box told me this morning that as part of “the war effort” I should “Talk to a Muslim today.” And another PSA told me the best way to “thumb my nose at terror” was to go about my normal life. So I think that I shall. That is --- do a little of each --- for “the war effort...”

            Janet wondered how I could possibly have decided to go to Pakistan to talk to Muslims and to go about my normal life as a global street photographer when she reminded me that I’d promised her on September 11 in Amsterdam that I wouldn’t go to the Middle East . I pointed out that I considered the Middle East to be the place where Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs kill each other. I pointed out that Pakistan and its region is known as southwest central Asia. The place where Afghanis kill Afghanis, where Pakistanis kill Indians --- and where extremist Muslim terrorists kill just about anyone who they can get their hands on who they determine deserve killing.

            Speaking of Janet, she’ll be in the air this Sunday on a business trip through St. Louis (and the Gateway Arch there) to Evansville , Indiana in a jet airplane carrying thousands of gallons of jet fuel. From everything I’m gleaning on the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box and from the other tealeaves I’ve been reading, I believe bombing will begin in Afghanistan on Sunday.

 

                        I get a headache every afternoon just thinking about it ...

*Answering for American Shortcomings:

Defending American Valor

                        We haven’t yet been asked by our government to give much up for the war effort on the homefront. Nobody’s going door to door to gather scrap metal. Nothing’s been rationed at the grocery store or at the gasoline pumps. Nobody’s going without nylons.

            We’ve been asked to give a little bit of our time.

            We’ve suffered a lot of heartache.

            We’ve been asked to have some patience.

            And oh yea, the government’s asked us to, “keep our eyes open --- to stay aware --- and to be vigilant ...”

 

            A few simple things have became more tedious in this whole new world, like having to endure stiffer security checks while catching an airplane or when entering a public event or while mailing a package at the Post Office. But it’s not really much different now than it was before September 11 during our post-Cold War peace era --- at least for most black, red, yellow, and white Americans. But under the current conditions, I wouldn’t want to be brown, Muslim, or Arabic.
            America ’s not equal for everyone right now ...

 

            We have, however, been asked by our country during this crunch to come together with our fellow Americans in our hour of need. I’m vulnerable and weak right now just like everyone else because I have no armed forces of my own to deploy. So I’m coming together like just about everyone else. I’m not very comfortable with this union --- me who doesn’t trust any government anywhere marrying a government that’s jerked me around in the past and too often embarrassed me among my global friends. But I also have to admit in these times that despite the heavy load that America often is --- that it’s always been there for me at the end of the day. Despite my derision’s toward it, despite my cynicism and my sarcasm and my protests and my whining, at the end of the day -- push coming to shove -- I’ve always been an American and an American patriot nearly through and through. I was just never forced to feel as uncomfortably American as I felt several times in Europe last week and am feeling today on the homefront.

 

            Wherever I’ve gone in this world over my lifetime I’ve had to answer for America ’s shortcomings just because I was an American. And along the way as a global street photographer I got to know the America the rest of the world sees. Got to check it out from a distance --- from their points of view. But I’ve also always had a lot of trouble accepting the unfairly and overly critical negative view of an insidiously evil America as much as I’ve had trouble mindlessly waving the flag with the masses.

            Both are exaggerated extremes and way too often the global view unfairly paints America as a villain instead of in context with human nature and the accepted follies of the worldwide mankind. And way too often Americans who reject the global view unfairly paint America as God’s Country and everyone else on Earth as inferior and subservient. I only get hyper-cynical and pessimistic when I’m forced to watch the world on TV like I’m forced to watch it on TV right now. Because when I’m out on the streets studying the world I’m immediately in touch with and learning about the cultures and the circumstances and the times I find myself in and I can’t afford to waste much of that time and travel money being cynical. At least nowhere near the level I’ve learned over the years that serves my best self-interest to practice on the homefront while stuck in front of the TV.
            So like it or not I’ll soon probably be on my way to the sixth war zone of my life to fight the human nature of my own cynicism. But this time I won’t be going so much to keep my eye on my own government (as I have in the past) as I’ll be going to make sure my government’s September 11 will is done and that I somehow personally come to some kind of global understanding as to why these people were doing this to us. Because this time I’ll be going off to war (in eight weeks) to the streets of World War III as a damaged pacifist and a wounded American patriot.

            While I’m there, I’d also like to happen upon bin Laden in a public restroom so I can take a stab at choking the life out of him with my bare hands.

 

            God help me.
            God help us all ...

~

October 7, 2001

Lawrence, Kansas

The Bombing Begins:

A Righteous War in its Goals ...

There is no ambiguity here:

To suggest otherwise is to turn justice on its ear.

                                                                                British Prime Minister Tony Blair

As for those who reject the signs of God

and who kill the profits,

Alienated from truth,

And who kill those who call for justice for the people,

Inform thou of an excruciating pain.

They are those

whose works are futile in this world and hereafter;

And they have

 no (sanctioned) helpers or protectors.

                                                                        The Quran

                        As it turned out Janet was in the air when almost every channel on the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box simultaneously announced that the first American coalition bombs had fallen on the Taliban and al-Qaida forces in Afghanistan . She landed safely this afternoon in Evansville , Indiana on a five-day business trip there. She flies home on Friday and I wonder what will happen between now and then on the homefront and on the streets of southwest central Asia and beyond.

            Terrorist sleeper cells gone amuck?

            More buildings or monuments bombed?

            More innocents slaughtered?

            More American passenger jets crashed to the ground?

            Janet’s flight back home crashed to the ground?

 

            I had to run over to the grocery store this afternoon.

            I needed more aspirin.

~
October 9, 2001

Lawrence, Kansas

A Civilian’s War

(Four weeks after September 11)

                       World War III, as it turns out, is a civilian’s war.

            Since 1983, many more civilians than soldiers have been killed or injured in worldwide attacks leading up to the official breakout of war, during the American cruise missile responses, and now in New York, Afghanistan, Washington DC and god knows where else.

            The terrorist’s whole armed forces are civilians pretending to be soldiers of God. That’s why (I suppose) they’re more apt to kill civilians, because there’s no military code among civilians. It’s a disconnect from reality and sanity as far as the West is concerned, but it’s a civilian disconnect outside of state channels.

            It was regular civilians who fired back first when World War III was only just begun, snuffing out the United Airlines flight 93 bomb screaming toward Washington DC by foiling it’s intention over Pennsylvania. And it’s civilians who are under fire right now contending with biological anthrax weapons fired at them from envelopes delivered to their mailboxes.

It’s civilians who our baffled government is counting on as its first defense in these early days of World War III. “be careful, be alert, and be vigilant,” they keep telling us over and over again on the TV announcements.

 

“And here’s the toll-free number to call if you see anything suspicious ...”

 

            It was American civilians by the tens of thousands who on September 11 were stuck outside of US borders for up to two weeks. “Stranded Yanks” they called us. Accidentally stuck out in the wild world, wanting only to get back home where it felt safer. Yet aware after a few days of our important early role in this new world war. To be available to commiserate with civilized non-Americans everywhere on Earth wherever they’d gotten stuck so that the world could honor the goodness they recognize in freedom, democracy, liberty, and America --- face to face with the damaged giant. To support and sympathize with and to rally behind for the civilian battle that lay ahead --- the war of the civilized versus the jihad of the uncivilized.

            The forces of good versus the forces of evil, if there ever really were such things.

            And as the war progresses, civilians will also drive the politics of World War III with our opinion. When it will end, which direction it will take, when to ease off the freedom-unfriendly security measures.

            I’m on mission to have an informed opinion and I’m recording this quest in a journal, but it’s hard to have an informed opinion. Especially under my cultivated notion of what well informed means. Being on the streets of the war on the other side of the CNN TV screen --- out on the learning side of the world where instead of sound bites and summaries, I get 20 waking hours each day of experience and hands-on insight.

            Because to be well read about this war will be one thing --- but to be well traveled around this war will be irreplaceable.

            Of course, in many ways this terror war is a military war too. That’s not hard to see. And in many ways it’s the first religious war in the West in more than 400 years. Just ask those who rot themselves evil from the inside of their souls out. Those who’ve taken their religions so seriously that it’s warped them into the enemy they originally vowed to fight when they made peace with their Gods.

            Like Osama bin Laden of Saudi Arabia and the Reverend Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg , Virginia.

            In many ways it’s a social war too. Where the civilized (rich or poor) feel superior to the uncivilized because after September 11 the civilized found out that they outnumbered the uncivilized worldwide by more than nine to one. No matter their economic condition.

            In many ways it’s a cultural war too. Where modern technology has beamed every culture (especially Western culture) to every region of the world by sattalite and where controlling authority in Islamic republics are pushed to the boiling point by their loss of control --- and what extremists there see as a loss of virtue.

            But most of all it’s a civilian war.

            Where civilians die several times more often than the military. Where civilians fight back when they get the chance to, and where civilians are depended on to be an army of eyes. Marching through their normal lives (careful, vigilant,  and alert) weary of the evil men with their bombs out there somewhere on the edge of chaos ...

~

October 16, 2001

Lawrence, Kansas

Ticket to Islamabad:

The First US Soldier Dies

(Five weeks after September 11)

                        Today is the five-week mark after the attack and it’s been more than a week since we started defending ourselves in Afghanistan. On October 10th the first US soldier, Master Sgt. Evander Earl Andrews, died during the operation, in a support battalion forklift accident in Amman, Jordan. There may be tens of thousands more coalition deaths in the next few months, if that’s what it takes ...

            Two days later on October 12 -- after three days of planning and frantic wrangling over the telephone, I successfully arranged an airline reservation to get to Islamabad, Pakistan through Manchester, England, on Pakistan International Airlines (the only carrier still flying in and out of the war zone) from December 2 to December 30. I paid for my plane ticket and then sent the paperwork into the Pakistan Embassy in Washington DC to get my three-month Pakistan visa. And only when the extensive planning and the air travel arrangements and government bureaucracy were finished -- 72 straight hours of it with occasional naps -- did I realize that it had been three days since I’d read a newspaper.

            There they all were on my front porch in their tight little blue rain baggies, under the flooded mailbox avalanching with bills and offers for free credit cards and with come-ons for cheaper telephone services. Mail that had piled up in the three days since I’d last took the time to check.

            I was astonished!

            Standing there on my front porch, looking unkempt and frazzled like the loser of a three-day prize fight, staring bleary-eyed at the three unread newspapers at my feet and all that unread mail in the box. I couldn’t remember a time in my life (aside from wilderness mountain trips and when I was in intensive care at the hospital for a couple of months having leg operations) when I ever missed reading at least one newspaper in any one day --- much less a couple of mornings in a row.

*Jealous War

                        Today, Secretary of State Colin Powell traveled to Islamabad himself and then went on to New Deli, India. Huge anti-American protests broke out in Islamabad while Powell was there and the war between Pakistan and India over Kashmir heated up for the occasion with dozens killed in military operations and terrorist attacks and explosions along the Kashmir line of control. As if that old war were jealous of the new global war on terror and needed some attention of its own.

 

            The Anthrax scare continued to build here in America throughout the week, however no other terrorist attacks have occurred anywhere in the West as of yet. There was an Anthrax hoax at a publishing company here in downtown Lawrence and it was reported on the news that actual anthrax had been delivered inside letters sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in Washington DC and to NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw in New York City.

 

            At 4:40 p.m. I called the local public health department and I talked to a nurse Katherine there who also confirmed that my “flu-like symptoms” would have gotten worse (not better) if I’d been infected with and was showing signs of anthrax poisoning. We talked about the slain mail handlers who’d handled thousands of letters and about how many people who live in Washington DC might have handled hundreds of cross-contaminated letters and about how thousands had surely handled a dozen letters and how I’d handled only one.

            But nurse Katherine was genuinely concerned about the timing of my one packet, coming and going through Brentwood at the crucial times. And about the announced re-testing of the priority mail section on CNN.

            “You have the right to be concerned,” she told me, “But right now we’re all waiting for more information. Until then, I recommend that we should all just keep watching TV and keep up with expanding treatment perimeter.”

            But then at 5 p.m. nurse Katherine called me back to tell me that she’d been concerned enough about my case to have called a conference with other doctors and nurses at the public health department and she re-confirmed her earlier recommendation of no Cipro treatments until the new postal department tests in Washington DC are announced. She said that although facts and new information she was getting from the CDC pointed to my packet having (what she amazingly called) “probable anthrax exposure” --- that to be exposed enough to chance the side effects of Cipro, I’d need a more-concentrated dose of spores. She told me that from what she could gather by talking with the CDC, that my letter; “Likely contained only about 45 microns of anthrax,” and she said that, “at this time the CDC thinks that it may take as much as 8000 to 10,000 microns of anthrax exposure to infect a person.”

            She told me that “the theory right now is” that the mass testing of postal employees in Washington DC in the next few days will determine the number of victims who have handled many letters for nearly a week which all passed through the Brentwood Station. She told me that if the treatment perimeter eventually expands past all the Washington DC postal employees to postal employees around the country and around the world who may have handled bundles of DC mail, only then will the focus be put on people (like me) exposed at “low risk” to only one Brentwood package, despite the extenuating circumstances of my case.

            She told me I was already listed with the Public Health department as an “at risk” case, but she added that after speaking with the CDC late this afternoon after our first phone conversation, that she was comfortable with listing the case as, “at low risk.”

            Meanwhile, CNN just announced on TV that starting tomorrow, all US flags at all post offices throughout the system will be flown at half mast in honor of the two US postal workers killed thus far in this anthrax terror attack.

5
Thursday
September 5, 2002

A Bad Day to Quit Smoking

(The 30th anniversary of the Munich Olympic terrorist massacre)