November 3rd, 1987, was a cold
slushy day in
Washington. I had just returned from a
whirlwind of meetings with various generals and admirals over in the
Pentagon, the biggest single
nuke target in the world. A guy I know at the
CIA that says that the
Soviets test their new
spy satellites by counting cars in the parking lot. I turned my key in the
apartments lock, sat down on my couch and cried. I cried like a
kid who lost their dog. I just went
unhinged and sobbed for hours. Why?
I spent the day
planning the
deaths of 46
million Germans.
I had
chicken salad on
rye for lunch. It was deposited sans digestion in the
washroom just before 1:00. I pushed back the
horror and slogged out the rest of the meeting. I could feel myself getting
paler and
paler. The
blood pooled in my shoes. I had that feeling you get when you’re in
grade school and you get the
flu. All the social pressures of your life
come home to roost when you feel
ill among your peers. Help is so far away. Mom won't come to get you for
hours. You have to
sweat it out. The sweat dried from my face in the
cab on the way
home, not from relaxation but
escape.
I worked for a
defense-consulting firm. We were a
think tank focused on deciphering what the
Kremlin would do if
Ronny Ray-gun pushed them
too far. It was real
Cowboys and Indians back then. The climate of fear chewed up everything. The goddamn
china pattern in the
White House was discussed at a
Joint Chiefs meeting because it had the same shade of
red that was slapped on the side of
Russian bombers. Complete
madness.
Mutually assured glow-in-the-dark cockroaches.
Way back, deep in your head, you always watched for the
con trails.
Passenger jets soaring high above you could be
Armageddon. That elegant
stripe of clouds could be coming out the back of a
SS-24 Scalpel. You had to live on that
knife-edge and it ate at everyone. It chewed at
society.
I ate some
Valium for
supper.
I decided
early on that I would help save the
free world. I chugged through
University and voted
Republican with
religious fervor. It was all gray suits and
power ties on the
debate circuit. My blood burned with the assertion that the
godless commies were wrong. Devilishly
wrong. Sub humanly
wrong. How could they do this to the
world? What was
wrong with them? I puzzled and beat my
brow trying to answer that
question. I just couldn't get it. The recruiters lined up three deep for me before the
commencement.
Rabid Young American Patriot for sale: Everything must go.
I remember waking up that morning feeling a little
lightheaded. As kids we used to do the
wrestling moves we saw on
TV.
The sleeper choked you to the edge of consciousness and you came back up a long fuzzy
black tunnel to
reality. I had that youthful feeling
in reverse. The deep black rings under my eyes made me look
beaten, and I actually found a
gray hair in my eyebrow. At 30. You have no perspective that far
down the rabbit hole. I never saw
Alice's shoes bearing down on my head.
The
Pentagon was built during the 40s in about
15 minutes. It was
flash formed to fight the Nazis and the Japs and it started to
melt when they
died. The
War Department was never meant to stay so big.
CCCP refrigeration helped keep it humming right along. Either way, the place was built
cheap.
Monotone and
edged, the halls reminded me of the inside of a
casket. It was all a shade of
beige that leaked into your
eyes. The room was
gray, and the folders were
blue.
Cerulean blue, like the
sea. We sat with a map of
West Germany on the
overhead projector. The three-inch drafters template was a 10-
kiloton air burst. You could get about three little place names per
warhead. I listened to the wags
drone on about such and such
tank division, this or that
airstrip. I stared at the little dot of
Kammerforst.
Kammerforst sat all by itself on the map. Half the table assumed it would be swimming in
Red armor if
The Buttons got pushed. The other half loathed wasting a whole
silo in the Midwest on
soft target. Seeing as it was in the lethal
fallout plain of
Frankfurt, only one
B52 would visit Kammerforst, on the way to
Moscow. An
atomic Santa Claus. My head
swam. A small
BG-83 freefall present from the
heavens circled Kammerforst in red
overhead ink.
The day ended around me as I sat
fish eyed in the standard issue chair. The map was covered end to end in
overlapping circles,
bulls-eyes for
democracy. The total
force expenditure was cut by a full 77
megatons, which was a rousing
success. More
nukes freed for deployment in a
first strike we would never make. More swords to wave while deep in their
scabbards. The smiles around the table drove home the true
insanity for me. I slowly penciled my
epitaph on my
folder before I left the
room.
We had to destroy the village in order to save it.