A Time for War (5 page)

“That was the hippie movement, all right,” said Doc. Matson's first military deployment had been in the bunkers under Lincoln Park and the Legion of Honor, his knowledge of which had made him invaluable in Jack's actions against the Hand of Allah. When the bunkers were closed the young Matson volunteered to go to Vietnam before his officers had even formed the thought of sending him there. He was a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne, in a company full of “felons,” as he put it—he wasn't kidding or exaggerating—before returning stateside for Special Forces training. He earned a medical degree in Guadalajara, too, but never developed a taste for the safe life. Instead of opening a practice, he had started working as a mercenary soldier wherever and whenever he was needed. He'd seen action in El Salvador, Haiti, Iraq, and—Jack was sure—more than a few places he couldn't mention. He had no patience for passive resistance, or passive anything else.

“The author of the article was calling it ‘societal corrosion,'” Jack said. “Photos of hippies putting flowers into gun barrels and painting their faces with peace signs.”

Doc sat back, his arms crossed on his chest. His index finger tensed as he pulled an imaginary trigger.

“The guy was arguing that if you neutralize the power of the military and police with pacifism, you declaw the state. Clever insurgents make themselves the equal of the state. That's about when I stopped reading.”

“Like those ‘Occupy' crybabies,” Bruno said.

“Only the first wave was crybabies,” Doc said. “The rest were outright anarchists.”

“Amen,” Bruno said. “And where did any of that get us, the hippies and the Occupiers?”

“It ended wars,” Abe said.

“Bull,” Doc said. “It stopped us from winning them, it didn't end anything. And it started wars at home. It turned the mainstream press into a mouthpiece for the Communists—”

“After they had been a mouthpiece for Joseph McCarthy and the witch-hunters,” Abe said.

“They did lose their nerve,” Jack agreed. “I've had some experience with media who are afraid to take unpopular stands.”

“What's happening today is worse,” Doc said. “Chicken hearts are bad, but Red Diaper doper babies are worse. You listen to the news this morning? A protest about a pipeline from Canada that would create thousands of jobs but might—might—threaten a few wild turkeys got as much coverage as a chopper full of SEALs going down in Afghanistan.”

“Yeah, I heard the tail end of that this morning,” Jack said. “What do you know about it?”

“Nothing,” Doc shrugged unhappily. “No one does. There wasn't even a Mayday from the cockpit.”

“A CEF?” Jack asked.

“What's that?” Abe asked.

“Catastrophic Electronic Failure,” Doc replied. “That's what it looks like, though that's never been a problem with the Chinooks.”

There was a moment of respectful silence for the fallen warriors. Then Bruno said, “God bless them. As for the Communist media, the protesters, their negativity, their entitlement, this is exactly why this stupid city, the whole country, are bankrupt.”

Abe Cohen shook his head sadly. “‘Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you,'” he said. “‘The meek shall inherit the earth.'”

“I mean all kinds of bankrupt,” Bruno said. “Financially, mentally, also spiritually. I mean these people who think the Bible is embarrassing, is an anachronism. They are unable to respect anything, to have respect. And this infected everyone. Look at how all the people communicate now. They tap on their phones like primitives banging little drums. There is no politeness. You know, I never hear the words, ‘Excuse me,' here anymore. Everything, everyone, is cheap, is tasteless. Clothing stores full of crap from China. Coffee stores, the coffee is undrinkable, it tastes like battery acid. But here I find the strangest part, you know, is a society where mainly women are walking around with plastic bags and they're picking up dog crap. Imagine what this looks like to a Muslim woman fresh off the boat. She comes from a fanatical, third world country, she sees us through that slit in her burka, she watches women bending over picking up dog crap with smiles on their faces. Only in America. Only in your America, Abe. And now, excuse me.”

The restaurateur went back inside. Jack noticed a group of tourists staring at them. He couldn't believe how boorish they were, goggling like that. It was degenerative; they'd lost all concept of dignity or space. He could swear that the Chinese man at the table next to theirs was eavesdropping, too, but then, Jack did his share of that. A reporter had to, and the man was at least being polite about it, pretending to read a magazine. Jack set his attention back on his friends.

“Always an adventure with Bruno,” said Doc, grinning. “He was a whole lot happier when his clientele was mostly North Beach Italians.”

“Then the tourists found him,” Jack said, “the food critics raved about him, the gays picketed him for things he'd say to customers, the government found new ways to tax small businesses, the waitstaff tried to organize, that Chinese clinic opened next door with screaming kids lined up outside—”

“Oh, you mean he couldn't deal with the rest of humankind,” Abe joked.

“He couldn't deal with them telling him how to conduct his life and business, having their free speech protected while his was restricted,” Jack said. “Believe me, I know something about that.”

“My cousin Mickey Cohen felt the same way when they told him he had to stop killing people,” Abe said. “You know, the famous gangster? First cousin once removed. He was an enforcer during Prohibition, helped build the Flamingo Hotel, which was the first one in Las Vegas, had no problem murdering anyone who cheated him in business or at cards. Spent time in Alcatraz,” he cocked his head in the direction of the Bay, “which is how our family ended up here. He was still running things and we were all messengers.”

“Which is why you can be a hippie-of-leisure,” Doc said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “When Mickey died in '76, he left his favorite cousin a nice little nest egg.”

“That was only because he liked me,” Abe said. “People tried to kill him on the Rock, people from both sides of the law. Lead pipes, shivs, strangulation, poison, once even a poison dart.”

“Agents used to use poison darts,” said Doc. “Not anymore. They've got an undetectable drug called succinylcholine now that can produce respiratory paralysis, creates a heart attack verdict upon autopsy. Lose the dart and you've got—”

“Anyway,” Abe cut him off, “I started publishing a little underground newspaper called
The Bay Area Veritas
—”

“Nice try,” Jack whispered to Doc.

“I wrote,” Abe continued, “about conditions on Alcatraz and campaigned for prison reform. Mickey appreciated that—it helped get him transferred to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.”

“That was about the same time I was putting M16 rounds into the heads of bad guys,” Doc pointed out.

“But Mickey was called a gangster and you were hailed as a freedom fighter,” Abe said.

“Context, brother Abe,” Doc said. “Your cousin was blowing up honest businessmen. My targets were using babies for bayonet practice.”

“‘Thou shalt not kill,'” Abe replied.

“How do you expect people to hear that, Abe?” Doc snapped. “In the context they live in, with all the other voices screaming for their attention? Can the Ten Commandments compete with the evening news? Can the warnings and exhortations of Job compare with MTV, or the blogs of those digital gossips who call themselves journalists? Look what the
Times
has become. One power-mad psychopath after another paraded throughout, with all the details of his or her personal wealth displayed so as to render the averagely successful reader impotent and hopeless by the time the sports page is reached. Can the epic of the Sulzbergers be compared with Ecclesiastes? No.”

Jack could see Abe building up a head of steam to retaliate. “Deuteronomy 31:6, right?” Jack asked him. “Your earlier quote.”

“Yup,” said Abe.

Jack knew that Abe only quoted the Bible as ammo. In fact, he had once referred to its authors as “a collection of constipated poets, failed jewel hustlers, bankrupt sandal makers, whoremongers past their prime, child molesters, animal torturers, and other biblical age riff-raff.” Jack didn't want Abe going off on that kind of pageant right now, and he didn't want Abe and Doc getting into a scrimmage, either. He was about to segue into something safe when the Chinese man at the next table leaned over.

“From the Greek, Deuteronomion. It means ‘second law.'” He answered their startled glances by saying, “Excuse me for listening in. I'm a doctor at the clinic. This was one of the more interesting conversations I've heard over breakfast.”

“People don't debate the way they used to,” Doc said.

“It's true,” said the Chinese man. “That's why I come to Bruno's.”

They all smiled.

“My family is of the Hui nationality, from China,” the man continued. “We are Muslim Chinese. People forget there were Muslims in China before the People's Revolution. But after the revolution when mosques and churches were being destroyed indiscriminately, Bibles and Qurans burning in the same piles, the Muslims and Christians in my father's town helped each other. My father remembers reading the Bible as well as the Quran in secret, and he raised me on both. I wish I could introduce that required reading to the Middle East, and any site of a religious war. I think that if we got to know the people we're supposed to hate, we'd find a lot in common.”

Jack and his friends sat for a moment in silence, pondering that—the idea that tolerance and understanding should not only be self-evident but so easily accessible. Then Jack invited the man to join them, but his shift at the clinic was starting and he left after a round of handshakes.

“Hey, Doc,” said Abe. “You know that old line ‘Jesus saves, Moses invests?'”

“Yes,” Doc said warily.

“How about this? Jesus saves, Moses invests, Buddha divests, Mohammad digests, and Krishna suggests.”

“You're on a wrong tangent, Abe,” Doc said. “Get off it.”

Luckily the waiter arrived to take their order then, and Abe was easily distracted. Abe then talked about his poster shop—which Doc insisted on calling “a head shop in disguise”—until the waiter returned with sand dabs, risotto, lightly grilled potatoes, some of Bruno's specially cured Italian bacon from his famous “Prosciutto Room,” and veal for Eddie. Bruno refused to introduce a brunch or lunch menu. It was the same offerings day or night, all served with a bottle of Bruno's own olive oil from the trees in his Sonoma hillside vineyard. Jack had once mentioned how he loved a particular brand of Spanish olive oil and Bruno had been incensed.

“Spanish olive oil, what are you talking about!” he said. “I have the best olive oil in the world! We brought olive trees from Tuscany and our olive trees, they are Leccino, Pendolino, Moraiolo, Coratina, and Frantoio, the classical Tuscan blend. Olive oil is something sacred, God multiplied the world with olive oil!” Now Bruno gave Jack bottles of olive oil to take with him like a mother packing school lunches.

The rest of the conversation was relatively benign, except when Doc and Abe inevitably brought up the 1960s again. They were a microcosm of the era: the my-country-right-or-wrong warrior and the unreformed hippie. Despite the extremes, there was nonetheless common ground: the longing for an era when both sides still cared about the country, and put the well-being of the United States before their personal needs. That was gone now, swallowed by the sinkhole of entitlements and putting hyphenate interests before the best interests of the nation.

“America really is at a tipping point,” Jack said at the end of the meal.

Bruno had come out to say good-bye to them. “The world is at a tipping point,” he said.

“The world is always in peril,” Jack said. “Americans are accustomed to disagreements and even a little chaos. But even the Civil War was between two big factions, big ideas. To feel the foundations of the country being undermined by countless little cracks and self-interests for the first time—that's new to us.”

“There's no patching it,” Abe said. “It's over.”

“I don't believe that,” Jack said. “As long as people of different opinions can be brought to the same table by common ground, as we do all the time, we will endure.”

Suitland, Maryland

When the Office of Naval Intelligence was founded in 1882, its charter was to “evaluate” the navies of other countries. That was government-speak for “spy.” After the attack on the battleship
Maine
in the Havana, Cuba, harbor in 1898, the ONI charter was expanded to include the “protection of Navy personnel and the ferreting out of spies and saboteurs.” Its mission remains unchanged, and as the oldest such agency in the American military the ONI has a high degree of autonomy within the larger National Maritime Intelligence Agency, which is itself a part of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Suitland is an unincorporated community in Prince George's County and a suburb of Washington, D.C. When Dover Griffith moved there five years ago after graduating from NYU, she told her parents that the town was famous for being the home of the Census Bureau and having the highest crime rate in the county. She found it darkly amusing that the murder rate caused residency data to fluctuate wildly, but her parents didn't see the joke. They worried whether their five-foot-seven daughter, with blond hair and blue eyes, was too easy a target.

Griffith had landed the job in D.C. when she was thirty-one years old, just after she received her master's degree in journalism. During her final summer in New York, while earning tuition money at the sales counter of the Strand Book Store, she wrote a play called
Ops Attract
about a pair of spies who fall in love. It played Off-Off-Broadway as part of the Fringe Festival and was well reviewed; it was seen by the Director of Civilian Operations for the ONI, who asked for Griffith's resumé and offered her a job when she graduated. Since there were precious few jobs to be had in traditional journalism, she accepted the position. Dover's grandfather—a pilot in the Royal Air Force who was shot down by the Luftwaffe over the White Cliffs, hence her name—would have been proud.