Ralph Peters - The War After Armageddon

I could be jailed for writing this. But I am old and must set down the truth. I do not fear for myself. I shall soon pass, and the Lord will dispose of my soul as He deems just. But were the Elders to find these pages during a Helpful Visit, my family would suffer. Unto my children’s children.

I am a fool for doing this, I know. But I have been a greater fool before. I see that now. And some sins belong to this world. Telling this tale is my penance.

“And a child shall lead them.” I long had sparred with thoughts about our errors but kept things to myself, as wise men do. My brethren in these United Godfearing States of America might disagree, but silence, too, can be a dreadful sin.

My grandson held up my sin and made me see it.

He is a lovely boy, much like his mother. One autumn day as sweet as the Lord’s caress, he came home full of lies. Or, if I would be honest, filled with more lies than usual.

“Grandfather?” he asked. “Were you really in the Holy War?”

I nodded. His innocence made me wary.

“Did you kill lots of Mussies?”

“Don’t say ‘Mussies.’ The word is ‘Muslims,’ Noah.”

“But did you kill any?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Not even one ?”

“Not one.”

His face displayed a child’s unshielded grief. I had been severe. Worse, I was disappointing.

“I helped, though,” I told him. Shamelessly and shamefully. “I helped kill a great many of them.”

The cloud passed, and his features shone with pride. “That’s what I told Gabriel. That you were in the war. I told him you took Jerusalem.”

I had not been at Jerusalem. Thanks be to God. But I let his bragging pass. I had been close enough to the Holy City. Close enough to smell the blood and corpses.

“Is that what you were taught today? About the Holy War?”

“Yes, sir.” His eyes burned pyres of imaginary corpses, the enemy’s dead, atop which he imposed himself in triumph. Isn’t it strange how sweet war smells to boys? At times I fear we are born of the Book of Joshua, not of the Gospels.

I wondered, briefly, if I should tell the truth. But the young want heroes, not old men’s remorse.

“I’m glad there are no more Muslims,” he said. Then he added, “General Harris was a traitor. I hope he burns in Hell!”

“Noah!”

I caught myself. In time. He had unlocked the darkness in my heart. The nagging sorrow.

“A good Christian boy would pray for the soul of General Harris,” I told him. My words rose from an empty barrel hammered with a stone. “It’s our duty to pray for all sinners.”

My grandson took on a devilish look. No doubt, he sensed my falsity. The pure of heart do that.

“That’s not what Blessed Teacher says,” he told me. And he ran off, the victor of the argument. In the good order of our system, no family member contradicts a Blessed Teacher. Faltering Christians have been jailed for less.

When the boy disappeared, I slumped. I felt as if Noah had struck me. As if the world had knocked me to the ground. As if the past had hit me from behind.

Lieutenant General Gary “Flintlock” Harris was no traitor. That is a lie. There. I have written it. In black ink. And I will say more: He was not only a magnificent soldier, but a better Christian than those who brought him down.

Of course, not all of us could see it then. Even fewer see it now, since the Cleansing of the Books.

I do not recall the past the Scribes approve. But I remember other things. I still see Flintlock Harris on a deck, a dozen miles offshore, with Mt. Carmel ablaze in the land of Israel.

His fate was a tragedy. For all of us.

That is heresy. And my task is to chronicle, not judge. Should any reader ever see these pages, the privilege of judgment shall be his.

He stood on the deck in the darkness, stealing a moment to discipline his thoughts. A few blind missiles streaked across the sky, desperate shots that fell between the waiting ships. A killer drone exploded in orange fireworks, stopped short by antiaircraft guns. Ashore, on the horizon, artillery fire lifted the night’s skirt. The Marines were pushing inland, beyond the crest of Mt. Carmel. But Lieutenant General Gary “Flintlock” Harris remained intrigued by the war he couldn’t see.

He had warned of the danger. Still, he had been appalled by how badly his generation had judged the coming wars. The overreliance on technology had troubled him for years, while his peers had dismissed him as an eccentric, hopelessly conservative, backward. His insistence on training his troops to fight on without their advanced systems had earned him the mocking nickname “Flintlock.”

Now the military he served was fighting a longer-range version of World War II, scorched by the few technologies that still worked.

Science had undone itself. Harris tried to visualize the wild electronic war playing out in the darkness, with each side canceling the other’s capabilities with hyperjammers, signal leeches, and computer plagues. Only a handful of his country’s satellites remained aloft, and the devastating effects of electromagnetic-pulse simulators destroyed every electronic system with the least gap in its shielding. Harris recalled the easy days when, as a company commander in Iraq, he could e-mail his wife on the other side of the world. Back then, generals could talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime they wished. Later, as a battalion exec, he had cursed the BlackBerry that kept him on an electronic leash. Now he longed for such a tool, but had none he could trust.

The sky pretended to be empty. But a mad duel raged on wavelengths no human eye could see. Harris turned back to the battle of metal on metal, of flesh and blood. He was waiting for the signal from Monk Morris and his Marines to send the 1st Infantry Division ashore. The 1st Cav would follow. Given the shortage of appropriate landing craft, the operation was bound to be a mess. This time, the Army had to rely on the Marines for support. Their new “get-ashore” boats were the operation’s lifeline, given that every port facility that hadn’t been destroyed remained hot from nuclear ground bursts and bombs with dirty triggers.

The Jihadis had expected his corps to land to the south, where the terrain was more inviting and Jerusalem waited. Instead, only the MOBIC corps obliged the Muslim high command, plunging ashore through the patches of radioactive debris just north of the ruins of Tel Aviv. Harris’s chosen landing zone, the Mt. Carmel sector, had been lightly defended. Relatively speaking. Monk Morris’s Devil Dogs faced rugged terrain, ambushes, and suicidal fanatics. But Monk thrived on that kind of fighting. The last message received before comms went down again had been a sitrep describing the slaughter of Druze civilians by the retreating Jihadis. According to Monk, the atrocities were the worst he’d ever seen.