Night Fighter
Page 33
“We welcome change and openness,” he said, “for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is no sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to the gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
The Soviet Union’s efforts to counter the United States militarily over that past two decades had led to its economic decline and finally to this ultimate confrontation in an arms race it could not win. It was Reagan who led the final assault that wrecked the Soviet economy and overwhelmed its technological capabilities. Overextended, hampered by economic and social stagnation that set the stage for its own dissolution, it began to withdraw into itself and abandon its aspirations for world domination.
Socialism had, in fact, collapsed in Russia on a number of occasions. Whenever the State is the single producer and distributor of goods, the results must inevitably be shortages, corruption, and political tyranny. Each time before, when confronted with breakdown, it survived only because it briefly compromised and permitted the free market to make a rescuing adjustment, such as Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s.
But as soon as things were going good again, Lenin or Stalin or Khrushchev or whoever else happened to be in charge jumped back in to re-impose full-blooded socialism. This time, however, the Iron Curtain was cracking. Backed into a corner, Gorbachev blinked first and signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. While the treaty offered relief from economic decline due to fierce competition with the United States, Gorbachev still found it necessary to temporarily release the free market and the people for another “rescuing adjustment.”
“Do not be concerned about all you hear about glasnost and democracy,” he reassured the Politburo. “Those are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no serious internal changes in the USSR other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm America and let them fall asleep. We want to accomplish three things: 1. Get America to withdraw conventional forces from Europe; 2. Get America to withdraw nuclear forces from Europe; 3. Get America to stop proceeding with the Strategic Defense Initiative.”
Forced democratic reforms resulted in unintended consequences. Reagan’s victory over the “Evil Empire” became all but complete as internal USSR institutions began to fall apart and satellite slave nations declared their independence and broke away from the Soviet. The USSR was negotiating its own surrender as Reagan’s presidency drew to a close. It formally dissolved itself on Christmas Day 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev was out the door. Boris Yeltsin became the first president of the New Russian Federation.
The long Cold War was over. Ronald Reagan won. Chalk one up for the good guys.
I retired from the Navy and public service and collected the pet dog I had long coveted, a Kerry blue terrier pup. President Ronald Reagan retired to his California ranch with his horses. Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize. But then so had President Jimmy Carter and PLO terrorist Yasser Arafat.
“Miss it all?” Barbara asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “But it was a good run. Some of the seeds were good and strong and brave.”
She frowned, not understanding. “What?”
I grinned at her. “Honey, you are the best of the seeds.”
AFTERWORD
I’M EIGHTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD. There are a few who remember me, who let me know when a big operation is going down, who discuss with me and solicit my advice as sort of an elderly statesman of unconventional warfare and counterterrorism. I’m just an old warhorse now, out of harness and casting my last daily seeds into a wind that seems to grow harsher.
I’m not so steady these days. I fall. Clumsiness, old age, blacking out sometimes. Four times so far, which meant trips to the emergency room. It’s a hell of a way for an old night fighter to end up. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember so much anymore, all the falls.
But I remember who the enemy was and who he still is. And I remember the brave men who fought to win the Cold War, to stop communism, tyranny, and terror: Beckwith, Boehm, Rodriguez, Fane, Kauffman, Bucklew, Howard Hunt, Marcinko, McCone, Ashcroft, Mad Mike Hoare. Most of them are dead now. I close my eyes sometimes, and my memory returns and I see their faces and I see white crosses in ranks at Arlington.
My mother is buried there next to Dad. My brother, Frank, and I are the last of our family’s generation. Barbara retired from the CIA in 1993 but continued contract work for the Agency several more years before finally retiring. I bought her a Mercedes, which she still has.
We packed up and moved to the sunny suburbs of Tucson, Arizona, as though to escape to the center of the country and away from wars and terrorism with which we had both invested much of our adult lives.
On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, with the sun barely risen, I took my dog for a walk through the quiet residential streets of our neighborhood. Barbara was in a tizzy when I returned.
“They’re bombing us! They’re killing people!” she cried.
I watched with her, live on TV, the second airliner fly into New York’s Twin Towers. We huddled around the TV for the rest of the day as the 9/11 drama played out, horrified by scenes of collapsing buildings, panicked people fleeing through soot and smoke. It reminded me of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Total loss of lives—2,996, including 343 New York firefighters and 72 police officers. It was the greatest loss of American lives in an attack since Pearl Harbor.
Militant Islamic terrorism takes center stage. In the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror, which was to become the longest war in U.S. history, extending into the Desert Storm clash of 1991 and on and on through wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then into Syria and the rise of ISIS.
At the CIA and at the Pentagon those years ago I tried to warn against the rise of international Islamic jihad so often I sometimes felt like Chicken Little. “The sky is falling!” I watch now from the sidelines, feeling helpless as the entire world unravels.
On a recent visit to the Pentagon, I met Major General Vernon Chong, an air force surgeon and commander of Willford Hall Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. He later used parts of our conversation in an essay.
“Our country is now facing the most serious threat to its existence, as we know it, that we have faced in your lifetime and mine (which includes WWII),” General Chong warned. “We can definitely lose this war [on terror]. It would appear that a great many of us think that losing the war means hanging our heads, bringing the troops home, and going on about our business, like post-Vietnam. Not the truth.
“The attacks will not subside, but, rather, will steadily increase. Remember, they want us dead, not just quiet. If they had just wanted us quiet, they would not have produced an increasing series of attacks against us over the past eighteen years. The plan was, clearly, for terrorists to attack us until we were neutered and submissive to them.…
“They will pick off the other non-Muslim nations, one at a time. It will be increasingly easier for them. They already hold Spain hostage. It doesn’t matter whether it was right or wrong for Spain to withdraw its troops from Iraq. Spain did it because the Muslim terrorists bombed their train and told them to withdraw their troops.
“The next will probably be France. It may already be too late for France. France is already 20 percent Muslim and fading fast. Without our support, England will go also. There are now more mosques in England than churches.
“The radical Muslims fully know what is riding on this war, and are completely committed to winning, at any cost. We’d better know it too, and be likewise committed to winning at any cost.”
I agree with my friend Rear Admiral Albert M. Calland III, until recently the Navy’s top SEAL, when he said, “The
fight against this dispersed and elusive enemy requires a small, flexible, responsive force supported by a robust intelligence capability. … This concept of ‘SOF [special operations forces]-centric warfare’ is built on the foundation that in order to stop future terrorist acts from happening effectively—to stop the emergency before it occurs—we need to be a preemptive force.”
Barbara and I moved back from Arizona to Virginia Beach to be near where we spent so many years of our lives. I walk my dog. I visit SEAL Team Six headquarters down at Dam Neck Annex south of Virginia Beach. The wars have been long and tiring on special operations people. I find the guys, my guys, looking battered physically and mentally. An old man, I feel like tottering off somewhere, sitting down on my butt and crying my eyes out for what we are doing to them when we need them most.
I like the old movies. Turner Classics on TV with John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Jimmie Stewart, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Susan Hayward. … The Night of the Grizzly, God Is My Copilot, Bend in the River, The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn on Lake Tanganyika where I fought Che Guevara. They are the enduring symbols of when giants who walked the earth stood up for honor and principle, with real guts to call a spade a spade and not apologize for it, who knew the enemy and were bound to kill the bastards, not preach and whimper and grovel to them.
But what the hell? I’m an old man mumbling in my soup. I’m off the main battle line now. All I can do is rage about it. And take my dog out for a walk. Slower now, pondering.…
So I walk my dog. My seeds thrown out the window of the speeding car are blown away. But sometimes I still see those faces in my mind—night fighter ghosts. I close my eyes and my memory returns in brief glimpses. I see faces looking at me with tears in their eyes.
“Bone? Bone, wake up. We still have a job to do.”