Daily Socotra

09 May 2006

Foreign and Domestic

It is cold and dank this morning, the dawn pushing against thick gray clouds that are advancing against it. The result is a cold dark swirl that is growing light only by increments. It is cold again, and I shiver against the breeze that leaks through the open windows.

It is a morning for dark thoughts. The clouds are thickest over Fairfax County, where I used to live until I couldn't stand it anymore. My kids went to school there, almost all the way from K-12 in the same district, which is renowned in the region. That is what determined the location of the houses we bought, their proximity to the right elementary school that fed into the correct middle school, and ultimately to the best possible high school we could afford.

We spent all the money we had- and more- to live there. The last issue of Newsweek had the annual ranking of public high schools. The one we picked was still in the top hundred in the nation, and there were two more on the list in neighborhoods that were beyond our reach.

I presume it worked out. Both of my sons made it to college, and one has already graduated and makes his own paycheck. The younger one has made it to his senior year and I have every confidence that he will have the skills to earn a commute as miserable as everyone else in a year or two.

The sniper attacks had but a real crimp in his last year in high school. It changed the way we allowed the kids to gather, as we tried to make the schools secure from attack. The snipers had specifically threatened them. For a while we did not know if the murderers were foreign or domestic terrorists, and in the end it did not matter. All of us were vulnerable, in Virginia and Maryland and the District, pumping gas or mowing our lawns.

One woman was shot in the parking lot of my local Home Depot, and I still remember which spot her car was in.

I was hunched over the computer at home, on a case. I was looking for an inert 155mm artillery shell. Someone at the Labs needed one to see of some of our high-tech sensors could reliable detect its signature from a distance. That is an important issue, since Saddam purchased hundreds of thousands of the things, and they were left out for grabs after the end of major ground combat operations in Iraq.

Now, with a remote detonator strapped on, they are the charge-of-choice for the IEDs the insurgents are burying by the side of the road to kill passing motorists.

You would think the Government would be supplying them to people like us who have ideas on how to detect and defeat them, but that is not the way the systems works. First we have to prove our technology at our expense, and then perhaps Uncle Sam will pick up the tab for further development.

The response to my request was frankly overwhelming, both in terms of advise and in offers to loan me a variety of munitions from personal stocks. I assume what was offered was inert. I certainly hoped so, since I would probably have it in the trunk of my car for the trip to New Jersey. I don't think I could take it to the Post Office, after all, inert or not.

I was copying leads on the ordnance when the radio broke the story. Someone had attacked a police sub-station out in Chantilly. Officers were shot. The situation was unclear, but serious.

We have a flinch reaction here in the capital to news like that. The sniper rampage of three years ago is still not behind us. In fact, the adult member of the hit team is on trial again, this time in Maryland where he killed several of his victims. He is conducting his own strange rambling defense, not unlike the foreigner Mr. Moussaoui did in Alexandria last week.

Our sniper is a thoroughly home-grown loon, creepy, like Tim McVey, and the matter of his conversion to Islam is less a factor in the public psyche than one would think.

Taken with that, and the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon, and the intimation that United 93 had been headed for the dome of the Capitol before the passengers rioted lingers as well. We have had our dose of the “foreign and domestic” aspect of uncertainty.

After all, the first soldier killed in the Civil War was shot not far from where developers built our sub-division, and the region swarmed with Union troops who garrisoned this part of the Old Dominion at sword-point.

The attack on the police occurred near what had been the battlefield of Chantilly. Time was it was a little junction town a full day's ride from the District. The preservationists lost the battle to save any part of the historic field long ago as people fled outward from the anarchy of DC. Now it is strip malls and daycare centers and spanking new schools.

One of the big Intelligence agencies is not far from the sub-station, and the offices of the big contractors that service it, so that may account for the response to the attack. While the situation remained unclear, the level of the response was not.

As they counted things up this morning, one officer, a female Detective with nine years on the Fairfax County force was dead. Another officer was injured critically. He is 53, and my thoughts are with him. A third officer suffered a minor injury and was treated at the scene.

The killer appears to be a doughy-faced young white male, a recent graduate of the brand new high school nearby. They say he favored the Goth look, like the Columbine domestic terrorists, and apparently shared some of the same social adjustment issues. He had turned himself in for a car-jacking a few weeks ago, apparently to the same police sub-station.

He jacked another vehicle yesterday after lunch, from a bewildered groundskeeper. He was reportedly in possession of a Kalishnakov and a couple pistols. He drove the truck he took to the police station and began his suicide attack.

I don't have enough information to call it anything else. The police are being circumspect, and with the attacker dead at the scene, there are a lot of loose ends to wrap up. What interested me was the response.

As I said, that part of Fairfax County has a number of things that could be considered national security installations, and the schools and the rest have their own plans for defense. Activities across the jurisdictions have been coordinated. When the distress call came, the defenders began to swarm. The County Air Force took to the sky in a swarm of helicopters for constant surveillance of the scene. Hundreds of officers scrambled in response, in black tactical coveralls and helmets and body armor. Special armored vehicles were used to seal a cordon across normally clogged traffic arteries.

Our defenders appear ready for any contingency, but at the press conference they announced this was the first time the police had been attacked from out of the blue. The first time they were the direct target of an act of violence.

The long sad afternoon played out into the evening. By the time it appeared that the gunman was alone, and the crisis was over, I was able to nail down a couple solid leads to find my artillery shell, and hope to seal the deal today.

I certainly hope we can come up with an answer to the IED problem. Even the foreign crazies have come to like a terror weapon that doesn't mean they necessarily have to die using.

I hope the locals don't figure that out. It took us months to find the snipers.