War is Hell...
    William Tacumseh Sherman

We have things to do, of course.  At the Pentagon, they're waging a war, as well as managing a three hundred billion dollar enterprise.  In New York, millions of business owners, managers and workers are frantically avoiding getting caught up in a widening recession, fallout as much from the artificial run-up of the market in the last years of Clinton/Gore as the al Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11th.  And there's something else.  At Omaha Beach, you knew where the hostile fire was coming from; if you were lucky you could find a little cover.   But in Washington and New York, the only cover is a great police force, but one not well-attuned to nor well-equipped for the tactics of terrorists.  Subway riders stare at the wall and at each other, wondering: will they do it here?  Office workers lunge through doors, watching the skies through windows from the high floors, all too aware that their only cover is the occasional National Guard F-16.  We all hope the waiting will go on until the war ends, but we don't know and we have little reason to believe in more than good luck.  We feel this way because a lot of us saw those towers get hit and fall, including the writer.

On the networks they chatter on and on about anthrax and other dangers through the mails and through the air and water.  Many wonder who reporters are working for, as their stories about forty patients and four deaths have caused almost as much terror as the bombing of the World Trade Center, which cost more than four thousand lives (or auto accidents, which, since September 11th, have gone on at their mad pace -- 3,500 in a month; or heart attacks, which kill 20,000 a month or more).  In New York, a sharp, brutal divide, artfully covered for years, has opened up between the elite class of politicians, managers, media mavens and educators and the rest of us.  The booing of Senator Clinton was not confined to police and firefighters who listen to Rush Limbaugh and read the Post.  To many she's become even more repugnant as a representative of a class which has no apparent loyalty to this nation,  its people, or its history and ideals.

The divide is laughed off by the elite, as they sneer at Post journalism and consume the increasingly hallucinatory stories of the "newspaper of record," which some wag described as "The Theological Journal of the Upper West Side."  While that paper talks about fashion and the aftermath of "the events of September 11," the Post names names, issues warnings, praises heroes, and prays for successful conclusion to the war.  The elite seem puzzled that the police and firemen haven't gone back to their kennels like good dogs; they're amazed to see them regarded as magnificent human beings.

Some of the same steel riggers who built the Twin Towers are now cutting up the wreckage to be carted off for FBI and police examination at the Arthur Kill dump, re-opened after the terrorist attacks.  The hurt is burned into their faces; generally, construction workers don't intend for their work to be blown up by scum from the Middle East.  They take immense pride in what they've built; they point out projects to their grandchildren who are properly awed.

Funerals are still going on from September 11th's harvest of death.  The memorials never seem to stop.

And yet in Washington, Michael Jordan is back, scoring 19 against the Knicks last night in a losing effort that still electified the crowd.  The Yankees, although only down 2-1, are on the ropes; everybody knows it.  But, nobody cares that "Mr. Smooth" O'Neill can't get around on the high fast one anymore, or that Jeter is clearly injured from his dive into the seats against Oakland, or that there hasn't been such a devastating pair of starters aimed at an opponent in the World Series since Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale in the 1960's.  Who cares?  They're out there. And when we're out there, I find we all concentrate more on work and play than any of us have in years, if ever.  Conversations break out in the most unlikely places.  We have no reason to be bored.  If something happens, and we escape, we can turn for solace to church, friends, relatives, and colleagues.  We can go to a concert and weep at an Adagio.  We can keep cheering a basketball team, think back on recent memories of another World Series.  All these are luxuries that no soldier has ever had.  Wherever they are, when the action pauses, and drilling goes past old hat into a realm of stupefaction, whether on an aircraft carrier or somewhere on the ground, there's nothing for them but boredom and fear.  Send a long letter if you know a soldier, a sailor, an airman or a Marine; send a long, talky tape.  Nowadays, you can even call on a cell phone.  Help; otherwise all you have to do in the silent moments is wait and fear.
 

                                                    Arthur Mortensen