31 March 2008
  
We Own the Night
 

  
President Bush owned last night, at least the beginning of it. He was at brand-spanking new Nationals Stadium to throw out the ceremonial First Pitch. The game started at twilight in the chill, and there was a minor delay of about an hour for many of the fans to get into the stadium based on the security concerns about the Commander-in-Chief.
  
There were some words about that from the crowd, cheers mixed with some jeers as the ritual was concluded. For the record, the President threw it high and on the third-base side of the plate to Washington Nationals manager Manny Acta.
  
It was not as accurate as the pitch he threw to open the World Series in New York, just after 9/11, but it was a respectable pitch for a Chief Executive’s. George Bush may be the hardest-throwing throwing President ever.

Bush acknowledged the crowd one more time by raising his hand as he left the field. If he heard the boos there was no evidence of it, just a serene confidence as he departed, clearing the way for the Nats to take their positions and open the season against the Atlanta Braves.
  
 Tim Hudson was on the mound for the Braves, and he settled down after a two-run first inning, retiring 19 straight to end the seventh. There was little offense, though, and Nats third baseman Ryan Zimmerman drilled a two-out homer against reliever Peter Moylan in the bottom of the ninth.
  
It was the first National’s homer in the new park, and it was the first game of the 2008 season on US soil, now that the Red Sox and the A’s are back from Japan.
  
The new stadium is getting rave revues, and you can say that the $611 million-dollar investment in SW Washington has taken back the night from the destitute who used to huddle here in the darkness.
  
The little slice of SW is all that is left of that quadrant of the original District of Columbia, which straddled the Potomac. It was too hard to manage the portion on the Virginia side, and it was returned to the Old Dominion in 1847. Had it not been, Big Pink would be towering on the heights in SW, instead of dominating Route 50 in Arlington County.
  
SW used to be a tough neighborhood. It wasn’t good before the riots of the 1960s, and afterward it became a home to large blocks of public housing where anarchy reigned. There were some sensitive activities that were conducted in one of the large brick buildings at the Navy Yard, which anchors the end of official Washington.
  
Knots of surly drunken men used to hang out next to the liquor store outside the wire on the corner of M and 1st street. Armed sailors would escort the government spooks to their cars for safety, right in the shadow of the Capitol Dome.
  
Not any more. With the arrival of the ballpark and the brilliant lights, order has been imposed on the darkness, and new condos and offices are rising under a forest of construction cranes.
  
Ownership of the night is what it is about. When the darkness cannot be used as concealment for those who do bad things, hope and security can thrive. In the SW that was, families huddled in their houses at night, wary of the stray bullets from the gunfights that came with the setting sun.
  
One of my pals got cross-wise with the Joint Staff during the Balkans shoot-em-up. He was running the intelligence cell in the Pentagon, and tried to contextualize the violence in Sarajevo by displaying the equivalent number of shooting incidents in the District.
  
He was quickly discouraged in that enterprise, since no one wanted to hear about it. The comparison was not exact, but it certainly was too close for comfort. The idea that the night did not belong to the law-abiding citizens of the capital of the Free World was troubling in the extreme, and something the military had been working on since Vietnam.
  
In SE Asia, it was a matter of catechism that “Charlie owned the night.” The Americans could do what they pleased during the day, but when the sunset, the mortars came out, sappers tested the wire and supplies moved down the rivers of the Delta and along the infiltration routes. It was discouraging in the extreme, and after sunset the darkened landscape was deadly.
 
It had been that way since the dawn of warfare. The American military became convinced that the sanctuary of the night had to be denied if the insurgents were to be defeated.
  
Today, the Army deployed in Iraq has triumphed in its mastery of the hours of darkness. Night vision goggles and advanced sensors make the landscape as bright as day, and bad guys move at their peril. In Afghanistan, the special operators are at their most lethally efficient when the moon does not shine.
  
When deny sanctuary for the opposition, good things can happen. If you don’t mind, we are going to take a little stroll through the Mekong Delta in 1968. That was when darkness began to get scary for the Bad Guys, and with courage, the night was taken back.
  
The project was called PRIZE CREW, and was just one of many innovative technical programs designed to detect and disrupt nighttime activity by the enemy. It is of particular interest, though, since it led directly to stealth aviation technology, and the invisible bombers and the airborne drones that whisper above the Euphrates river, and soar above the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
  
This week, with your forebearance, we will look at one of the last big secrets of the war in SE Asia, and how Charlie got spooked.
  
Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com