I woke to gunshots here at dawn on the farm. I knew precisely the sound, and after the events of last night, it took a moment to realize that the long-gun deer season had started at sun-up. Someone had got up early and climbed up into their tree stand to get their buck.

Friday had been a highly emotional day. I attended the Memorial Mass for Betsy, and got there on the back roads watching the colors of Virginia in the Fall. I like to pass through places like Mineral and Montpellier. Small towns. Old towns, and increasingly older as one approaches the cradle of this Republic

At the Mass, I found myself intensely moved as the Monsignor conducted the service in a clear high tenor voice. He was kind enough to explain parts of the ritual to us heathens, and that enhanced the intimacy of the rite, assuaging the sadness that attends death with the knowledge that faith rends the veil between the worlds through divine grace.

I was thinking about the dignity of the Mother Church, whose rites and rituals span two millennia. Catholics know how to do these things. It was a refreshing and dignified experience in comparison with the steady drumbeat of hostility we hear these days to all things Christian. Seriously, I heard a 25-year old actress yesterday- apparently part of the earnest relativist school of thought- who compared wearing the cross on a necklace to the moral equivalent of waving a pitchfork. I marveled at that, but let it go in the soaring majesty of the ancient ritual of the burning of incense at the funeral mass.

When it was done, and the tears were dried, I drove over to the reception a John’s house through one of America’s oldest places. Colonial Williamsburg, a town between two rivers, was near Jamestown, the first English-speaking colony on these shores. The town is sheltered by the field at Yorktown, where the French applied the military force to humble the most powerful Empire of the day and guaranteed that there would be a United States. The Middle Neck of Virginia is a haunting mixture of everything old and everything new.

Punching in John’s address on the GPS, I heard the radio murmuring something about a shooting in Paris.

I mentioned it to some of the Old Spooks at the reception, and they nodded in the context of everything else that had gone on in a very high intensity day. I didn’t know more until I made my farewell and headed back north in the darkness toward the farm.

My eyes widened as I listened to breaking news on the voyage home. Attacks were in progress in the City of Lights, new details spilling out of the dashboard, minute by minute. As many as seven distinct attacks. A rock concert featuring a Palm Desert, CA, band called “Eagles of Death Metal” were playing to a sold-out house at Le Bataclan, a venue on the Boulevard Voltair in the 11th Arrondissemen . Forward to descriptions of non-step carnage for the rest of the two-hour drive through the battlefields of Frederickburg, Chancellorsville and the Wilderness on the route home.

At one point, the President made an address, expressing his sorrow for the people of Paris, though “we don’t know who did this.”

I snorted and almost spilled my Diet Coke in my lap.

When I got back to the farm and opened things up for the evening, I made a stiff drink and watched cable news. One of the jihadis was captured, we were told, and they say he claimed to have been recruited by ISIS. I know from long experience that virtually everything I heard was subject to revision and change. Except for that bit.

This morning, Presdient Hollande, who was at the soccer game when the first suicide blasts occurred, says that France is “in a state of war with the Islamic State.” As I recall, the NATO treaty’s Article 5 states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all. Does that mean anything anymore?

This morning the Pope said that we were now in a Third World War.

The Russians just had 222 of their citizens blown out of the sky by an ISIS bomb.

What exactly is it going to take to get someone to say that we are at war with the faction of Islam that has always been at war with us? Anyone who thinks they are not coming here- and they had already murdered thousands of us- is seriously delusional.

(USS Constitution en route the Mediterranean to share our feelings about safe places with the Barbary Pirates in August, 1803).

For goodness sake, Thomas Jefferson didn’t want to become entangled in overseas affairs. But our merchant sailors, and those of other nations, were being enslaved and held for ransom. Accordingly, he came around to the notion that there was an imperative to kick the ass of the Bey of Algiers, and make him stop. That bit of “Radical Islamic Terror” was the cause for the genesis of both the US Navy and the Marine Corps. We have been fighting these people for a long, long time.

The jihadis have not forgotten. Apparently we have.

I heard the Secretary of State this morning call for a cease-fire in Syria to solve everything. It was positively amazing. What the hell is he thinking? That you can negotiate with people who will blow themselves up in the name of God? What is it going to take to get people to wake up?

9/11 wasn’t enough? The execution, one by one, of innocent kids at a rock concert? The massacre of patrons relaxing at a sidewalk café in the most civilized of cities? Belt-bombs at a soccer stadium?

For Christ’s sake! Look alive. This is war.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Editor’s note: I am going to complete the Nagato saga, and I am also going to try to stay in the past as much as I can, since I know how that stuff turned out. By way of contrast, we have people on the campuses of our finest Universities who see oppression and offense behind every bush. It is pathetic. I am almost inclined to support closing the prison at Guantanamo and shipping the hard-core badass jihadis to Yale. We could offer them free tuition and a “living wage” to expose the poor dears on campus a glimpse of the real world. The events on both the domestic and world stages are starting to make me physically ill. Sorry.