Emergency

by Neil Strauss

  Behind the fence was a building I never thought I’d actually see: the U.S. embassy. Looking at the disappearing graffiti on the wall and the blossoming green foliage on the other side, I thought about how long it had been since the hostage crisis of 1979, how times had changed, and how we were in a new millennium of peace, prosperity, and democracy. Under the leadership of the reformist president and former minister of culture Mohammad Khatami, Iran no longer wanted to destroy America. It wanted to open up and modernize.

  In the Golestan Shopping Center, women wrapped in burkas shopped for designer jewelry. Though the only skin showing was the front of their faces peering out from beneath black chadors, at least one in twenty of those faces had a bandaged nose from recent plastic surgery. My cab driver later told me that Iran was the world capital of nose jobs, proving that even in a culture like this, a woman’s vanity could not be kept down.

  It seemed as if Iran was slowly falling in step with the West. Although there was no Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tehran, there was a Kabooky Fried Chicken that looked suspiciously the same. Although there was no McDonald’s, there were dozens of fast-food restaurants selling burgers called Big Macs.

  When we visited tourist attractions, markets, and mosques, men stood up and greeted us. “We’re so glad Americans are visiting again,” they would say. Then they’d often ask, “You don’t hate us anymore?” After we reassured them, they’d continue hopefully, “Do other Americans feel the same?”

  It was as though a family rift had been resolved and resentment over an incident two decades ago was finally fading. It was further evidence that the survivalists hiding from the world in their hillside retreats were wrong. We were entering a new era of tolerance and understanding. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  As we traveled through Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, and the ancient city of Persepolis, the only time we heard anything negative about Americans was when we gave a painter the thumbs-up sign and learned that the gesture actually signifies fuck you in Iran.

  Perhaps people everywhere are the same; only the symbols change. The problems occur when people believe their symbols are the right ones and everyone else’s are wrong.

  Maybe that’s why the Serbians had so many anti-American postcards. Though the Clinton administration’s decision to bomb noncivilian targets had helped to end the genocidal Slobodan Milosevic regime, the U.S. had taken the moral high ground. The problem with that is it leaves someone else on the moral low ground, and being put down there is so repellent to human nature that the only solution is to claim a different moral high ground yourself. This is how hatred is created: two different groups, each insisting they’re on the moral high ground.

  One day, as we walked to the Imam Mosque in Tehran, we noticed tanks rolling down the street. They were followed by missile launchers, antiaircraft guns, and squads of soldiers. This was more like the Iran I’d imagined as a child.

  “What’s going on?” I asked after finding a soldier who spoke English.

  “It’s Sacred Defense Week,” he told me.

  “Is there a war?”

  He explained that it was the anniversary of the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War, and the military was showing the people and the Ayatollah it was still capable of defending the country. “When your biggest enemy lives next to you,” he continued, “it’s necessary sometimes to make your people feel safe.”

  I felt so ignorant. I may have known everything about the entertainment world, but I knew nothing about the real world. I had no idea that Iran’s biggest enemy wasn’t the United States but Iraq.

  I felt lucky, in that moment, to be alive in an era when I could safely travel just about anywhere in the world as an American without encountering enemies. The most forbidden place was Cuba, but even the embargo there seemed like a vestige of a dead Cold War.

  As Francis Fukuyama had foretold in his essay, the world seemed to have advanced beyond wars over religion and nationalism. These conflicts were limited to more primitive societies, which just needed time to catch up. Norman Angell had written in a similar work, The Great Illusion, that war was becoming obsolete in the face of a modern world full of multicultural, polyreligious societies that were economically dependent on each other.

  Of course, Angell’s book about the end of war in the modern world was written in 1911. Three years later, World War I broke out in Europe. So perhaps all that Angell and Fukuyama and, it would turn out, myself were feeling was the quiet before the storm, buoyed by a resolute human optimism and enough vanity to believe we were living at the end of history—in much the same way that World War I was known as the War to End All Wars, though in truth it was just the war that made the next war possible.

  And so, after I returned from Iran with my graffiti photos and official government stamps like these—

  —I officially began collecting anti-American propaganda. Much of it came from Russia during the Cold War, China during the Cultural Revolution, and North Korea today, like this poster:

  But what was most exciting was finding unexpected sources of vitriol, like this late-nineties advertisement by an Indian jeans company, with the slogan at the bottom NOT MADE IN AMERICA. THANKFULLY:

  I collected them for the same reason I wanted to spend New Year’s Eve with Bible-thumping prophets of doom—because I didn’t take them seriously.

  After all, we were America, where all the lessons of the past had supposedly coalesced into perfection. We had the best movies, the best music, the best government, the best opportunities, the best lives. We didn’t have to invade countries. Instead, we opened a McDonald’s in their town square and played Die Hard in their theaters and put the Backstreet Boys in their stadiums. And the more they ate our food, the more they admired our action heroes, the more they hummed our songs, the stronger we became.

  Of course that created resentment, which expressed itself in the form of the propaganda I collected in much the same way a singer confident in his talent makes a collage of bad reviews by hack writers and hangs it on his wall with pride.

  I was too ignorant at the time to realize that it wasn’t our burgers but our policies that were responsible for this resentment—and that its consequences would be fatal.

  Unbeknownst to me, another book was released as I was traveling through Iran in my rose-colored glasses, and it wasn’t about the end of history. It was about the end of an empire. Written by Chalmers Johnson, a former consultant for the CIA, the book was Blowback, named after intelligence jargon for the unintended repercussions of covert foreign operations.

  “The evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of the Cold War,” Johnson wrote, “the United States largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation.”

  Johnson went on to warn that “the by-products of this project are likely to build up reservoirs of resentment against all Americans—tourists, students, and businessmen, as well as members of the armed forces—that can have lethal results.”

  If I knew then what I know now, I would have realized the obvious—that my collection was a symptom not of open-mindedness, but of the exact American naïveté and arrogance that leads others to hate us in the first place.

  Because when I look at these stamps, T-shirts, and posters today, they don’t seem so funny anymore:

  STEP 3: ********* **, ****

  After calling friends in New York to make sure they were okay—only to be confronted with an ominous busy signal every time—I raced out of the house, drove to the nearest gas station, and filled my tank. With planes down in three states so far, it wasn’t clear yet that the attacks were over.

  Though I imagined panic in the streets and long lines at gas pumps as people tried to flee to rural areas, the Arco station near my home was strangely quiet. Afterward, I drove to the grocery store to stock up on water. I imagined pandemonium as famili
es filled their carts with supplies, but instead it was eerily deserted.

  Perhaps most people were sitting at home, glued to the television, awaiting more information and further instructions. But my Y2K conversations had taught me that there are only two kinds of people in a crisis: the quick and the dead.

  Where the future was uncertain on the eve of the millennium, after 9/11 it was much more certain: there were people out there who wanted to kill us just for being American. My propaganda collection suddenly wasn’t so hip and ironic. It was a warning sign.

  Just like when man first walked on the moon or ran the mile in under four minutes, all of a sudden anything was possible. If they could hijack planes and blow up the World Trade Center, then they could just as easily slip a biological agent into our water supply or release nerve gas into a crowded airport, subway, school, or theater. It now seemed like common sense to take precautions.

  Of course, I was years away from becoming a true nutcase. Back then I was just a reactionary, scrambling like everyone else. A survivalist is prepared beforehand.

  After stocking up on water and canned food, I stopped at an ATM and withdrew $200 in emergency money. If there was a national crisis and the power went out, I’d need it to buy more gas and supplies.

  When I returned home, I opened the copy of the Bible I’d bought while researching the millennial doomsdayers and stashed the money inside. The page happened to be Proverbs 27: “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished.”

  I didn’t take it as a sign, though—there’s an apt prophecy on nearly every page of the Bible. It is, after all, the original survivalist manual, full of righteous men fleeing floods, fires, plagues, genocides, and tyrants.

  Though it took the federal government seventeen months to issue its first clear instructions on preparing for another terrorist attack (sending a nation of would-be survivalists shopping for duct tape and plastic sheets), it took only seven days for the next one to occur.

  On September 18, letters containing anthrax spores began arriving anonymously at the offices of government officials and journalists, eventually infecting twenty-two people and killing five. As a reporter at the highest-profile newspaper in the country, I was suddenly that much closer to being a target. So when a suspicious-looking envelope with a handwritten label arrived for me at the Los Angeles bureau of the New York Times, I left it unopened.

  In that moment, I realized I was no longer a detached observer, chronicling and mocking the paranoid. I was now officially one of them. And so my stack of unopened hand-addressed letters and packages grew from a single envelope to a small pile to a veritable mountain.

  We make fun of those we’re most scared of becoming.

  Fortunately, in case I caught a respiratory infection while traveling in Iran, my doctor had given me a prescription for Cipro, which happens to be the same pill to take in case of anthrax exposure. So I felt vaguely protected. But newscasters also warned that a chemical attack could be next, and I had no protection from that.

  So I decided to purchase a gas mask.

  Like many others since the attacks, I was haunted by a demon I’d always known about but had never met face-to-face before. It’s the same demon that haunts mothers who are overly protective of their children and people who take aspirin before they actually have a headache.

  The demon is known by the name of Just in Case. It has many heads. And the more fear you have, the more heads you see.

  I was too late. The shelves of Major Surplus and Survival had already been picked clean. Just minutes before I arrived at the army supply store, a husband and wife had bought the last six gas masks for their family.

  Fortunately, one of the first lessons I learned as a journalist was to always go to the source. So I decided to call the distributor that supplies the army surplus stores.

  Again, I was too late. “We sold in excess of twenty thousand gas masks in three days,” Pamela Pembroke of CORP Distribution’s sales department told me. “Even our supplier overseas is out. There’s just no more supply.” She paused, then added, “If it’s going to be that bad, I don’t want to be around.”

  After a few more hours of research, I found an emergency-planning company called Nitro-Pak. This time, I called and asked to speak to the president, Harry Weyandt. It was easy to find his name because there was a thumbnail picture of him on the Nitro-Pak website. He looked incredibly normal, like the proud parent of a high school quarterback.

  Within thirty minutes after news of the attacks spread, Weyandt told me good-naturedly, the phones at his company were ringing off the hook. Sales doubled on Tuesday and Wednesday, then tripled on Thursday. “By Friday they went up by seven hundred percent,” he continued, “and in the last few days, they’ve gone up three thousand percent.”

  “It looks like you’re in the right business,” I said in an attempt to befriend him before begging for a spare gas mask.

  “It’s been a wake-up call for all of us,” Weyandt said. “We all pooh-poohed Y2K because nothing happened. Anyone who got prepared was seen as foolish. But now people who were prepared are seen as prophets.”

  I suppose I had to agree with him, especially since buying beef jerky and a Bible made me sort of a prophet by his definition. St. Slim Jim.

  “So,” I finally asked, “do you have any gas masks left in stock?”

  “I called eight of our suppliers, and every single one of them is sold out.”

  “I figured. It was worth a shot.”

  “But,” he continued, “I was able to eventually find some Israeli civilian gas masks that are being shipped to us now. We’re probably the last ones who have any.”

  “Are those reliable or just collector’s pieces?” It seemed too good to be true.

  “They’re the masks the Israeli government issues to every civilian. They’re very popular and easy to use, and they’ll give you six to ten hours of clean, filtered air in case of a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack.”

  Sold to St. Slim Jim.

  “The other thing that’s been very popular is the Evac-U8 smoke hood,” he continued. He knew a sucker when he heard one. “It’s the size of a soda pop can, and in the event of—heaven forbid—there’s a hood that protects you from heat and flames and takes out carbon monoxide. If you ever use it in an emergency, the company gives you a free one as a replacement. It’s only sixty-nine dollars, so that’s cheap insurance.”

  As he spoke, I searched for the smoke hood online. It looked ridiculous:

  I may have been paranoid, but I wasn’t that paranoid. Maybe I’d made a mistake trying to befriend him. I felt like I was talking to a car salesman. The difference is that the car business benefits from optimism and wealth. The survival business benefits from fear and tragedy. It sells not speed, but longevity.

  And since life is something I enjoy when I’m not taking it too seriously, I let Weyandt talk me into several additional items that were only slightly less preposterous than the Evac-U8 smoke hood.

  A week later, I received two space blankets, a heavy-duty tube tent, two waterproof ponchos, a thirty-six-hour emergency candle, a box of waterproof matches, twenty-four purified drinking water pouches, a first aid kit, an AM/FM radio, an emergency survival whistle, a pair of leather gloves, a random nylon cord, and, just to ensure that every human need was cared for, a small cardboard folding toilet. They were all part of a seventy-two-hour emergency kit, conveniently squeezed into a black duffel bag in case I had to evacuate my home during a crisis.

  In addition to the kit, I also ordered a box of twenty-four ready-to-eat meals (MREs, in military parlance), which contained beef stroganoff, chicken stew, cheese tortellini, and other entrées and snacks, all freeze-dried in small packs and made to last roughly seven years unrefrigerated. I had no idea at the time that exactly seven years later, I’d find myself eating those meals.

  I brought the supplies to the garage, hoping I’d never have to use them. My precious gas ma
sk, in particular, looked daunting. It was packaged in a cardboard box covered with red Hebrew letters and handwritten numbers. Inside there was a rubber gas mask, a filter secured by a silver sticker tab with more Hebrew writing on it, a piece of white plastic that looked like a miniature toilet seat, a metal cap, and a cardboard ring.

  I had no clue how to use it, and the Hebrew instructions weren’t helping any. So I called David Orth, an assistant fire chief I’d once interviewed, for pointers.

  That’s when I learned I hadn’t actually bought survival. I’d only bought the feeling of safety.

  “A gas mask is iffy, so I wouldn’t depend on it,” Orth told me as soon as I asked for help.

  “What do you mean?” My heart sank. “Do you know how hard I worked to get this thing?”

  “The filters are really designed for basic irritant gases and won’t protect you against a nerve agent,” he continued. “It won’t really protect against a biological agent either, because those may not be purely an inhalation issue.”

  “What other kinds of issues are there?” My chances of survival were shrinking by the second.

  “Skin contact with anthrax is a more common cause of infection than inhalation. With sarin gases, also, there’s a threat of skin contact. As firefighters, we wear positive-pressure self-contained breathing apparatuses, so I wouldn’t use a filtering-type mask as any guaranteed protection.”

  “So I’m basically screwed?”

  “It’s a false sense of security,” he concluded.

  For a moment, I wished I’d bought the Evac-U8 smoke hood. But only for a moment. The company later recalled the smoke hood when it was discovered that it didn’t completely filter out carbon monoxide.

  When I first relocated to Los Angeles in 1999, my boss at the New York Times, Jon Pareles, had advised against the move, warning me about earthquakes and riots. Now, after 9/11, Los Angeles actually seemed like a safer place than New York. Not only was the city too spread out for a single target to immobilize it, but, unlike Manhattan, it had no single building or monument that symbolized the nation.