I’ve spoken a number of times on my website of what I call the law of the gunfighter, and it seems of late that the topic has piqued the interest of a number of folks. More, a number of friends who happen to be in the Fifth Profession have written to ask how I would deal with Hezbollah and their latest outrage, that of firing hundreds of missiles into civilian populaces in Northern Israel, missiles whose blast is exacerbated by the shrapnel they contain. The professional security people also wonder how an old gunfighter like me would handle the impending nuclear confrontation with Iran, the nation supplying the rockets being used for atrocity and murder by Hezbollah.
Then, too, I have a tertulia at the Café Calypso here in Corpus, and the conversation this weekend was all about the murderous events in Israel and Lebanon. Included in the group was a U.S. Navy fighter jockey, a veteran of the first war in Iraq. Another of the group is a friend who has little good to say about Israel; especially where U.S. support is concerned. Another is Jewish. An interesting mix, you could say.
Let’s start where I left off when I wrote concerning the law of the gunfighter on the 16th last. When you intend to fight with a gun, there are several things you need to be aware of and make up your mind about. They all relate to the veritable avalanche of bullshit being spewed by the media’s blabber of windbags, the nation’s media commentators and their co-conspirators in politically motivated propaganda, television’s military “experts.”
Parenthetically, an old soldier like me would be surprised to learn that any of these guy knows how to field-strip an M-16 or clean a 1911, let alone even squad-level military tactics. The fact that their audience is so benighted as to be unaware of that obvious fact makes things even more frustrating. A tactician by trade and avocation, I can’t help wondering if all of it isn’t simply a smoke screen intended to cover for what seems to be actually going on – an excuse for spending billions on killing and enriching the arms makers. Once more, I ask why it is that while the poor and the young are being asked to contribute their bodies and lives, the arms makers and military industrial corporations are not only required to contribute nothing, but encouraged to gouge the taxpayer for billions.
But enough of that. The factual truth will do nicely here, especially where smoking out most of the real war-mongers and causes for the conflict in question are concerned.
First, most or all of the polemic being held on television and concerning the history of Israel and Palestine is nonsense. Who did what in 1948 has absolutely nothing to do with shooting rockets indiscriminately into a city. I don’t care what anyone has done to me, I don’t care how just my cause is, there is nothing – absolutely nothing - that justifies or excuses the indiscriminate firing of shrapnel laden explosives into crowds of the innocent. When the innocent included children, it’s worse – if that’s possible.
More, an act like that has utterly no military, no tactical or strategic purpose whatever. There is only one reason for this kind of thing: cold blooded, maniacal, satanic murder. It has only one possible purpose, that of satisfying blood lust and hate.
The individual or group who does that is the human – I speak of species alone, certainly not character – equivalent of a rabid dog. Rabid dogs, especially in packs, must be eradicated. They cannot be permitted to live in our midst. It’s that simple.
There is a second evil here, however, one nearly as virulent. That evil is the people who call themselves pacifists, and on that ground clamor for “cease fire” once a pack of rabid dogs like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or their odious like has committed another of its atrocities and blasphemies and is under the guns of their righteously outraged victims. These phony peacemakers would buy the lives of a few now, to pay for them with the lives of hundreds or thousands later. Able to posture piously in the present, they expect to conveniently be forgotten later when the price of their duplicitous cowardice is paid. It’s always so, and the wonder is that society hasn’t the intellect or awareness of history to know it.
The public in the U.S. may have a short memory; history hasn’t.
I know history in that regard all too well. In 1958, when I wrote the paper calling for development of tactical anti-terrorist (actually, the paper was about hostage situations, but people who take hostages are terrorists to me) teams a Los Angeles Police Chief would a decade later dub “S.W.A.T.,” people including many authorities called my idea “lunacy.” “The Mongoose Tactic” – its original sobriquet – you see, was brutal. The first line of my paper was, “There is only one way to handle a hostage holder who has a gun, and that is with a man who is better with a gun, so much better that he can kill instantly.” No questions, no negotiations; and nothing that would risk in any way the life of the hostage.
It was, I said then – and I say now - a matter of ethics and morality. Capable of the Mongoose Trick, the rescuer had no right to make any effort to save the hostage holder, inasmuch as there was – is - no way to do that without risking the life or limb of the hostage. More, the rescuer and his employers must adopt the attitude that whatever happens to the hostage taker is self-inflicted. He did it when he took a hostage.
But for that people who masquerade under the title “humanist,” that was “brutal,” too brutal. Later, when the idea was in the process of being stolen, and I was being asked to develop tactics for, even become, the first of the “sky marshals” necessitated by the same breed of terrorists we are now discussing – it was 1967 or ‘68. When Highway Patrolman and expert pistolero Ron Hansen and I discussed with federal officials the tactics of defending an airliner against terrorists, we were asked by more of the humanist persuasion why my tactical doctrine didn’t include “shoot to wound or disarm.” They were serious. Their kind always is, however psychotic, wrong-headed, or unfamiliar with the subject of violence and dealing with it they may be. In a political world, nonetheless, they must be heard, and the result is always disastrous.
Asked in the years that followed questions similar to that “can’t you shoot the gun out of his hand” gem, I always had the same answer. It’s the answer I gave my friends the other day, and the jist of the letter I will send tomorrow to Kofi Anon, members of the U.S. Senate (that by request from certain of their members), and others.
The “The Mongoose Trick” was born of a discussion in 1958, one concerning the once obscure, then infamous, now again forgotten incident at No Gun Ri during the Korean War. While there are several, even many, versions of what occurred, what was supposed the day of our discussion was that enemy soldiers were infiltrating our lines among columns of refugees. Discovered, the North Korean soldiers opened fire, and U.S. soldiers fired back, killing refugees as well as soldiers. The question the day of our discussion was how to deal with an enemy firing from amidst noncombatants. Asked my opinion, I said pretty much what I said in the paper I would write later. The guy who uses the innocent for a shield bears responsibility for what results, not the one shooting to save himself. Otherwise, the rulemakers – or the hypocrite peacemakers - are demanding that someone sacrifice their lives.
I suppose someone willing to sacrifice his own life might have the right to make such a demand, certainly no one else.
The people who clamor for “negotiation” and “negotiated cease fire” in Israel and Lebanon, between the Israeli Defense Force and Hezbollah, are wrong-headed as only the uninitiated or the oblivious can be. The only excuse morally available them is abject stupidity. To suggest negotiation with a mad dog is fatuous nonsense, and Hezbollah has shown that it is the equivalent of a rabid monster, its members mad dogs. There is no rational question that the world’s nations have by their continually repeated attempts at negotiated peace with Islamic extremist terrorists perpetuated both them and their murderous attacks. This amounts to tolerance, and it provides for even more of the vile depredations a hypocrite U.S. and European media sanctimoniously laments.
Again and again and again, Islamic terrorists have vented their demonically insane rage by every despicable act their hate-crazed minds can devise. The list is far too long – literally hundreds of incidents - to include here, but it is not inaccurate to say that beginning almost immediately after the partitioning of Israel in 1948, Islamic extremists have resorted to what the world now calls terrorism. One list of Islamic extremist terrorist acts is at http://en.wikipedia.org
In short, the maudlin, lugubriously bizarre “reporting” by the media, together with the panty-waist pontifications of its pundits – especially military – concerning the latest Hezbollah murder-kidnapping followed by showers of rockets is infuriatingly disgusting. If the nations of the world do not demonstrate by their utter destruction of Hezbollah their determination to tolerate no longer Islamic extremist terrorism, Hezbollah terrorism will result eventually and inevitably in nuclear holocaust.
When it happens, bubbles-for-brains humanists and politically prostituted liberals will blithely blame it all on Israel or their political or ideological opposites and look for more mischief to foment with their self-aggrandizing posturing. Until the terrorists get to them, that is. That’ll silence the “peace-lovers” and the negotiators, of course, the way death silences everything; otherwise, it will still their enemy ideological enemy Israeli’s fault – oh yeah, and the conservative and neo conservative “right.” Insane stupid serves insane murderous.
Frankly, though, I’m most pissed off at the moment with Israel and their IDF. Israel should have unleashed a full frontal assault, followed by a “vertical envelopment” by airmobile and paratroop units. Once their airborne assault had landed behind the Hezbollah troops, an Inchon-style landing from the sea should have driven inland to link with the airborne troops, to cut off the Hezbollah retreat and seal the terrorist battalions in a cordon of steel. As I write this now, Israeli units should be proceeding to annihilate the miscreant enemy inside their circle. No escape. No unethical – and immoral - mercy.
If Israel is incapable of that, the nations of the world should be doing it. Just as the bodyguard has no right to endanger his charge or charges with any compunction about killing their assailant or captor, the nations of the world have no right to endanger all of us by suffering these despicable Hezbollah bastards to share the planet with us.
Immoral mercy? Absolutely. Upon his death, General Douglas MacArthur was eulogized by columnist Stewart Alsop as the last of the humane generals. No better reason might be found than in the general’s own words, spoken a short time before his demise. “I know war,” he said, “as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes ... But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end.”
I know violence as few other men, too, and I know what is inevitable with the continued existence of Hezbollah and their terrorist kind. It is as obvious as is their character. It is as unmistakable as what they scream at the top of their raving lungs. How many more have to be tortured, maimed, and killed before the world has the balls to do what history and the ghosts of all the dead demand?
So let us have no more of this hypocritical and hateful nonsense, nonsense in the form of continued clamor for cease fire each time terrorists begin to work their vicious, blaspheming way. Ethics is a straightforward, mathematical science. Like the hostage taker, or the coward who shoots from behind or among women and children, the nations and world who negotiate with Hezbollah, Hamas, and terrorists like them bear the moral responsibility for all the lives these terrorist lunatics exact.
It’s that simple, the law of the gunfighter.
