I had Second's sniper shoot him in the elbow. It was nice and exposed.
Then I shot him.
And, yes, he appeared unarmed. But I couldn't be sure. He was still moving and thus "a potential threat to myself and noncombatants."
So I shot him several times. Some of the shots at point blank range.
Sue me.
That night we broadcast "Chains."
Two hours, by previous negotiation, it laid out what had really been happening in the "kindly" Islamic Caliphate of the 9/11 Martyrs.
Mullah Ali had established true Shariah. There were three classes of people. The Muslims, "dhimi" and slaves. Dhimi were any people who refused to renounce Christianity or Judaism but were able to successfully contribute to the Caliphate's brutal "tax regime."
If you could not contribute, you were made into a slave. Sometimes. Actually, what usually happened was that you sold a member of your family. Usually a pretty daughter; they brought the most money. Or you'd lose your business and eventually become a slave.
It was, in fact, very much on the normal lines of a caliphate.
The only added fillip is that each week every dhimi household was paraded before the "faithful" and forced to undergo a ritual auto de fe in which they were at first threatened with death and then "reprieved" if they paid their taxes.
Dhimi females were, by law, not to be veiled. They had to wear the "hijab," the headscarf, which is a sign of ownership by the way, but they could not wear veils.
At the weekly auto de fe, females ranging as young as ten were pulled out of the dhimi households and "used" for the pleasure of the caliph and his "generals."
Sometimes they were used publicly while the parents and husbands were forced to watch.
Rape is a method of control. It is an exercise in naked power. It was used as such to ensure that things in the Caliphate were "peaceful" and "ordered."
Then there were the slaves. The slaves were dhimi who could not pay their taxes. They did the majority of the labor on building the mosque, as well as the combat emplacements. Chained in long lines, the shackles on their legs were muffler clamps mostly, they were as ragged and emaciated as death camp survivors.
Given all that, you'd think that anyone would want to become a Muslim, right?
Only "persons of color" were permitted to "submit to Allah."
Like I said, he'd have made MLK a racist.
The news media, by the day of the final assault, was trying to change its tune. Why?
People had stopped watching anything but The New Centurions. They knew they would get their news as facts, not spin. Not a picture of something and a whining bitch talking about how soldiers, who were incredibly well regarded by then, had been killing innocent women and children but what was actually happening.
There's no point in watching a 24-hour news cycle if all the "news" is wrong.
People were turning off TVs until Centurions came on.
By day four, the news media was getting the hint. It was taking a clue-bat, but they knew that whatever they showed that night, we were going to deconstruct and destroy them with.
"Chains," we actually had a hard time. But CNN could be counted on to toe the party line and they had a shot of dead women and children lying in a roadway.
They'd been chained up to stop our advance. They couldn't run and they couldn't hide. They were shot in the back by "soldiers" of the Caliphate when Farmer's Freaks breached the perimeter. And the "soldiers" died seconds later, courtesy of two fast acting TCs and the World War One era Ma Deuce, thereby saving hundreds of lives.
CNN showed the bodies, from the hips up.
They didn't show the chains.
They didn't show the sobbing men, women and children being released from them by soldiers of the United States Army.
They didn't show the women screaming at us, "WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?"
(Actually, they showed the angry mob, they just did a voice-over that cut out what they were angry about. We deconstructed that one, too.)
We deconstructed piece after piece that showed the Army and the Carson administration in the worst possible light. We talked about what the Koran really said, how it could be interpreted and how the "Caliph" had perverted even that perverse document. (Don't like my take? Go read Surahs Eight and Nine. Skip One. It's superceded by Mohammed's own directives in Surah Six.)
We found "moderate" Islamics, real ones that were immigrants and had been good Islamics their whole lives, and got interviews about their anger at what had been done. The one imam from Iraq who was crying and apologizing over and over again was particularly good, I thought.
By the next day, the news media was effectively broken. They were interviewing survivors and even CBS and CNN reporters were getting a bit testy at what had been allowed to happen.
"That this travesty could be permitted in America at even the worst of times says something about the previous administration. And the news media has to share a portion of the blame."
CBS evening news, President of CBS News, Day Five.
By then, units were going into all the "contested" cities and finding similar horror stories. None as bad as the "Caliphate" that had been held up as "enlightened" but very fucking bad in their own way.
Then came "Trust."
That was all me. I'd actually built most of it from footage going back to the very beginning of the Plague. It was, in parts, very dry. It's not anyone's favorite and perhaps I should have quit on a high note. But I wanted my swan-song to be my song.
I talked about trust. I talked about societal trust, when it worked and when it didn't. I talked about assimiliation, the "melting pot" concept vs. "multiculturalism," the "salad" concept. I talked about studies of societal trust. I pulled in shots from The Gangs of New York, talking about how "multicultural" it had once been when Italians and Irish and "American" Americans couldn't talk to each other and didn't trust each other and therefore killed each other in such droves that the Army had, way back then, had to do a "Detroit" on New York City itself. And now one group had great food and the other great beer and it was otherwise hard to tell them apart.
I talked about how Swedes and Norwegians, two cultures as white-bread as you can find, had once battled even here in the U.S. over differences brought to our shores.
"If we sunder ourselves internally, if we accept the false divisions, then we bring with those false divisions all their ills, all their blood of centuries. Where then, can we find trust? If we cannot see the difference between the evil that stands here before us with blood-soaked hands and what we are told is the evil we do in bringing peace and plenty to foreign shores, where then is the trust? If we cannot remember who we are, if we cannot comprehend what it means to be this shining light on the hill, this country of wonder and riches, this . . . America, then we shall surely slip into the long dark night that the enemies of our freedoms so richly desire.
"We are told, always, that there is no black and white. That there are only shades of gray. This is a picture that is held up to us. But it is only a picture and it is false. Each day, each of us makes countless choices, and each of these choices is black and white. If we choose, over and over again, as we have for so long, to choose the black choices because they are easier, to choose 'me' over 'us,' to choose division and strife over assimilation and trust, then we slowly slip into that black night.