Black Helicopters: zero dark thirty . . . . . again

 

I remember the Black Helicopters. That's right, I saw them. They hovered right over the crib, shaking the rafters, the pulse of their rotors like a bass drum played double time deep in a black cat bone. I didn't know whether to fall screaming to the floor or run into the street shouting platitudes to glory and firing my riot gun indiscriminately at erstwhile targets hidden in shadows. 

 

I wasn't the only one. It seems our own River City had been chosen, along with other metropolises across the nation, as practice grounds for doppelganger constructions born of the sands of Araby and beyond. San Diego was one, Dallas another and others, all without prior notice a dozen or so years after the Big One - 9/11. 

 

Actually, I went out on the roof to observe a squad of choppers, a hairsbreadth over 100 feet above, maneuvering like the bats that rose from the Mississippi on many a summer evening, door gunners and missiles glinting menace on that moonlit night. I could almost reach out and touch them.

 

The paper was headlined with explanations the next morning. It had been an exercise to protect our freedoms after all, in league with our now infamous efforts to save the world from "terr'ists" while spreading Democracy afar. 

 

Visiting the supermarket later in the day, I questioned the two off duty policeman stationed there to quell shoplifters if they had been informed, and, to the purpose of such an exercise. 

 

The officer responding boomed, "You don't want Bin Laden attacking us again, do you?", in proper authoritative tones, as though he were addressing the village idiot.

 

I didn't have the heart to remind him that Bin Laden had died quietly of kidney disease in Pakistan well over a decade before.

the fog of war --

even the general 

dons his battle fatigues