Ian Slater: Payback

As the nation and the world watched the first reports from Marte Price and Adrienne Alamada, stunned by the three — obviously simultaneously timed — attacks, they heard the usual unthinking comments of survivors who proclaimed that they’d prayed to God — as if those who had lain dying hadn’t — and that “He was looking out for me.” On FOX, there were near-distance shots of the unidentifiable dead being carted away.

Numbness and sadness momentarily took over the nation, flags at half-mast, forlorn impromptu roadside monuments sprouting overnight. The one image in particular that filled the country with disgust, simultaneously arresting the attention and inciting the rage of everyone — except the terrorists and their apologists — was the black-and-white photograph of three black, charred bodies sitting together, the remains, a coroner said, of a woman, who had obviously been pulling two children protectively to her at the moment of their death. It was impossible to tell until further tests and passenger list verification were completed, but the coroner said he thought that the two children — the trio had been aboard the JFK Boeing 7E7 flight bound for London — were boys. National Transportation Safety Board investigations hadn’t been able to get inside the burned-out hulk of the $130 million Dreamliner for an hour and a half, the tangle of superheated alloys and melted materials that had earned the 7E7 fame as the first all-composite-wing aircraft still too hot to approach.

Within hours of the three shoulder-fired missile attacks, during FOX’s 10:00 P.M. newscast, it was announced that a group calling itself “Army of Palestine,” loosely allied with Hamas, claimed “credit” for the triple attack “against the Great Satan, the United States.”

“Army of Palestine, my ass!” thundered retired general Douglas Freeman, punching his TV remote back to CNN.

“Douglas!” came an imperious command from his sister-in-law, who was busily preparing dinner. “I’ve asked you before, please watch your language!”

Douglas Freeman, the legendary and voluble general made famous throughout the armies of the world for his outspokenness and for what had become celebrated as his brilliant WUA — withdrawal U-turn attack — against state-of-the-art Russian-made main battle tanks in a U.S.-led intervention around Lake Baikal, now said nothing, sitting like a chastised boy, glaring at the TV screen, mouthing an obscenity at CNN’s BBC hookup in the Middle East.

“What’s wrong now?” asked his sister-in-law, Margaret, a woman who, in her mid-fifties, still possessed the striking beauty of a gracefully aging film star and whom he was obliged to visit once annually, in Monterey, fulfilling a promise to his beloved wife, Catherine, who had died years before.

“Douglas, what’s the matter?” Margaret pressed. She knew his silence usually betokened disapproval. “You aren’t sulking, are you?”

“Certainly not! What’s wrong is that I’m listening to the latest anti-American sh — nonsense from the BBC. They’re yapping about ‘root causes’ again. Root causes for butchering hundreds of Americans, many of them children on these three planes. Canadians have had a free ride for the last fifty years under our defense umbrella. The damn root causes now are the same as the root causes on 9/11—those Arab loonies who hate Israelis more than they care about their own ‘martyr’ children hate us and the Brits and the Aussies so much, they’re obsessed with killing us. Not our military, mind you — oh no, blowing up a plane full of poor kids whose big crime was going to visit London. By God, if I had my way I—”

“Turn the TV off,” advised Margaret. “It’s bad for your blood pressure. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

And wasn’t that the truth, he thought. He’d done some great work for the government. They knew it, he knew it, but, crises aside, they didn’t want him. “A loose cannon!” the State Department had said. “George Patton’s ghost,” the doves had called him. “Out of control.”

Well, yes, all right, he wasn’t always that diplomatic, but, goddammit, in the field he was at his best.

Marte Price was back on-screen, but it was a few seconds before he consciously registered her appearance, the general momentarily lost in the reverie of old memories, Marte Price’s words unheard as he remembered her breaking the news of how on coming up against the crack Siberian Sixth Armored Corps in the dreadful depths of a minus-sixty-two-degree Lake Baikal winter, he’d ordered his armor to retreat “with all possible speed.” Not since the withdrawal of the Marines from the Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War or the withdrawal from Vietnam had the United States seemed so humiliated. But at least the Marines had been true to the Corps’ Semper Fidelis —Always Faithful — and had refused to leave their dead, and it was a heroic, fighting withdrawal along the valley road from the reservoir, with the Chinese Communists swarming down on the bedraggled American column from the snow-covered hills on either side. Their commander would deny it was a retreat, characterizing it instead as “an advance in another direction.” But when the American public had heard during the U.S.-led intervention in the Far East that Freeman — he whose favorite military dictum, like that of Patton, was Frederick the Great’s “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace” —Audacity, audacity, always audacity — had ordered his armor crews to retreat in haste from the Siberian Armored, there was a similar mood of shame that had not been experienced since the frantic withdrawal of the U.S. from Saigon. As Freeman’s M1 Abrams, to the disgust of his tank commanders, fled the Russian T-80s, which, sensing fright, only increased their rate of pursuit through the taiga’s deep snow and forest, Freeman had kept asking his meteorological officer for the temperature. The general’s action, reported the American division’s psychiatrist later, had seemed to fit the classic definition of avoidance behavior under pressure. His apparent obsession with the temperature was typical of people under extraordinary stress, like anxious travelers who, laden down with anxiety about flying, bookings, and business meetings, will suddenly turn all their attention to some inconsequential detail of clothing, where an errant piece of fluff or tiny stain on a jacket is seized upon as a worry bead in order to find temporary refuge from the far more seemingly unmanageable problems at hand. In Freeman’s case, the psychiatrist saw the general’s obsession with the temperature of the “damn forest” as Freeman’s second in command put it, as a classic example of “extreme” avoidance behavior. Several of the U.S. tank platoon commanders were in tears of utter frustration as they were commanded by Freeman to run away, at full speed, from the pursuing Russian armor. Yes, it was true that they were outnumbered by the Russians two to one, but for the Americans, the descendants of the men who fought up the slopes of Mt. Surabachi, fighting Japanese every step of the way before planting Old Glory atop it in the hell of the battle for Iwo Jima, the humiliation of this U.S. retreat at speed, as snow and forest whipped by, was too much. With the wind-chill factor, the temperature hit minus sixty-seven, and while several M1s were taken out by the T-80 hounds despite the M1s’ evasive twists and turns, the thermometers dropped to minus sixty-nine, at which point Freeman abruptly ordered his M1s, through his second in command, Bob Norton, to make a U-turn en masse and engage “targets of opportunity.” Sensibly, the Russians slowed, so as not to overrun and risk “blue on blue,” or, in this case, “red on red.”