IT WAS 20 YEARS AGO TODAY...

When the phone rang, I was in that twilight of semi-sleep, my girlfriend having gotten up and left with an early call on set that day, squeezing my eyes shut against the growing sunlight through the window. At the second ring, I opened an eye and glanced at the clock on the bedstand.

0540? What the hell? Who calls at 0540?

The phone rang again. I put the pillow over my head.

It rang again. What the hell? Damn moron with a wrong number. If they stay on for one more ring, I’ll give them something to remember about phone etiquette.

It rang again. I threw off the pillow, sat up in the bed and grabbed the phone.

“What?!!”

“We’re at war!”

What the fuck? I stared at the phone.

“We’re at war!”

I finally recognized the voice of a friend who lived on the other side of the country, in Westchester, outside New York. He must have forgotten the time difference.

“Huh?”

“We’re at war!”

“What?”

“Turn on your TV! We’re at war! They hit the tower!”

“What?”

“Turn on your TV!” The line went dead.

I put my feet on the floor and stared at the phone in my hand. What the fuck?

I stumbled down the hall to the front room and turned on the TV....

Just in time to see the second airplane hit the north tower.

I stepped back and tripped over my couch and fell into it. They played the event again on the screen. I thought about what I was looking at with mixed emotions..

There are events in my life, moments for which I can remember each second like it was yesterday.

0900 on Friday, November 22, 1963, on North Island NAS, walking over to the EM club with friends after we were let off from an inspection to eat breakfast, and a Gold Braid Chief Aviation Bo’sun’s Mate was running up the street toward us in his dress blues, with gold hashmarks past his elbow, yelling “The president’s been shot!” “Hey, Chief, that stuff’s not funny...” He stopped in front of us, drew himself up and used that “Chief’s Voice”: “I said. The. President. Has been. SHOT!” “Yessir, Chief!”

September 11 wasn’t the first time I was awakened by the words “We’re at war.” On August 5, 1964, 0200, I was asleep on the lined-up office chairs in the Staff Operations Office on the old USS Rustbucket, the duty yeoman for the midwatch, when the Messenger of the Watch from the radio shack shook me awake and shoved a clipboard at me. “Sign here. Looks like we’re at war.” I remember looking at the message: “From: USS Maddox - To: CINCPAC, COM7THFLT, COMPATFOR7THFLT, MACV: report two enemy craft sunk and a third damaged.” I slipped on my shoes and put on my white hat and went down to the Chief of Staff’s cabin and woke him. He went and woke up the Admiral, still in a drunken stupor from his earlier evening ashore. We’re at war. Maybe?

Tuesday June 6, 1968, 0015, just after midnight. Celebrating the California Primary. Peace and Freedom Party got five percent of the vote. I’d gone in the bathroom at Pam’s house in Berkeley, came out and saw the flickering TV screen in the otherwise-dark bedroom: Robert Kennedy announces “On to Chicago” at the Ambassador Hotel, turns away through a doorway and gunshots ring out.

That just short of two months after sitting in Pam’s car up on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, smoking some excellent Panama Red and staring out at the lights of San Francisco and Oakland, with the radio on KMPX, and all of a sudden the record stops with a scratch and Tom Donahue comes on. He says “My friends. Martin Luther King has been killed.” And then he puts on The Doors: “This Is The End.”

On 9/11, world affairs reordered abruptly on that morning of blue skies, black ash, fire and death.

In Iran, chants of “death to America” gave way to candlelight vigils to mourn the American dead.

Vladimir Putin weighed in with substantive help as the U.S. prepared to go to war in Russia’s region of influence.

Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi spoke of the “human duty” to be with Americans after “these horrifying and awesome events, which are bound to awaken human conscience.”

In the United States, the Sept. 11 attacks set loose a torrent of rage.

The night of 9/11, George Bush addressed the nation. He said the terrorists could shake the foundation of a building, but not the foundation of “this great country.”

He was right, and wrong. The terrorists led us to shake the foundation of our country. Just as Osama Bin Laden hoped they would.

Those first few post-9/11 months was the last real sustained bout of bipartisanship against a common enemy - global terrorism - that our country has experienced. They counted the dead at Ground Zero as those counting the dead breathed in air full of stuff that would destroy their lives, and George W. Bush soared to a spectacular 90 percent approval rating. On September 14, Congress gave Bush the authority to use military force against “those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,” a blank check he and his successors stretched to unimaginable lengths.

And when they announced in December that Osama Bin Laden had gotten away at Tora Bora, I knew things were going to be more fucked up than they were after Tonkin Gulf.

When I said so, in some circles I became “Tommie the Commie” for my lack of belief. I lost more friends over that than I did over Trump 15 years later. It only became worse when all those Republican draft dodgers who thought they were running the world started banging the drums for war in Iraq.

In shock from the assault, a swath of American society embraced the us vs. them binary outlook articulated by Bush - “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”- and has never let go of it.

You could hear it in the country songs and talk radio, and during presidential campaigns since, offering the balm of a bloodlust cry for revenge. “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way,” Toby Keith promised America’s enemies in one of the most popular of those songs in 2002.

The Dixie Chicks lost their career for the crime of telling the truth, and I had moron “patriots” e-mailing my editors, announcing the start of a boycott if I wasn’t fired from writing there. The good news there is, the kind of editors I work for are the guys who reflexively tell idiots like that to go fuck off, whether they agree with me or not.

And then came what I called “Widdle Georgie’s Invasion of Poland, er, I mean Iraq.” If I hadn’t pissed off the “Patriots” before, that did it for sure. My e-mail address got dropped on the Freeper discussion boards and I became what seemed at times the busiest “delete and block” e-mail recipient on the planet.

A couple million people marched against that coming war in 2002, but America’s leaders were relentless in their desire to avenge their embarrassment. Off we went.

Funny thing. I’ve outlived the worst of the “Patriots.” I’m still here, assholes, and nobody can remember your name since five minutes after you got planted.

In the meantime, the 1.5% of Americans who actually put on the uniform, or know someone who did, got a bit overworked with the endless imperial misadventures. Everyone else, without a draft to fuel further thought and opposition to getting killed for nothing, went about the business Americans do best: pay no attention to that problem over there.

But by 2008, facing multiple tours in what was already known as “The Forever War,” dissent broke out in the ranks,.

(By the way, the term “Forever War” comes from a novel written by my old friend, Joe Haldeman, with the title “The Forever War”. It was his way of dealing with the demons of his time in Vietnam. It ranks high on any list of the 100 Best Science Fiction Novels Ever Written, a position it well deserves. It’s only more timely now than when it came out 40-odd years ago. Go get it and read it. I won’t ruin it for you by saying more.)

In 2007, a GI read an article I’d posted about the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse, the GI antiwar project in Killeen outside Fort Hood I helped run back in 1968-69. He was at Fort Hood now, veteran of a tour each in Afghanistan and Iraq, and all the shine of volunteering to “kick raghead ass” had worn off. He wasn’t the only one there. Or at a few other big bases. He wanted to know if I could start a new Oleo Strut.

As it turned out, I could. Old friends in Austin were looking for some way to bring people together against the war. I made a call to a famous actress I’ve known since being there when she first got arrested for antiwar activity, leafleting troops at Fort Hood back in 1969. She made some calls to friends of hers, and - presto! - a check for an amount in the mid-five figures showed up to set up what the GIs decided to call Under The Hood Coffeehouse. The GIs and the civilians who worked with them did some good things, raising awareness of the real truth of the wars.

But the rest of America went shopping, just like the president told them to.

And now here we are, twenty years later.

It’s time to tell you what I was thinking that morning 20 years ago today, as I sat on my couch and watched the endless replays of the planes hitting the towers.

My first thought was a sadness beyond words for the people this had happened to.

And then a lot of anger towards the people who had caused this.

And I wasn’t thinking about 16 Saudis or Osama Bin Laden.

I was thinking about 56 years of American bullshit around the world. And the words came: “It certainly took them all long enough to get this pissed off.”

I was thinking about Chilean friends I had who lost families there after that Great American Peacenik, Henry Motherfucker Kissinger, decided to destroy the attempt by Chileans to create something better for themselves.

I was thinking about my next-door neighbors, the ones I finally got to know the morning The Big One hit here in Los Angeles back in 1994. Rodolfo and Rosa. He told me the story of how he came here with a price on his head from the Salvadoran Death Squads for the crime of trying to organize a union, how she came here after returning to her mountain village in Guatemala from a day gone to the market town in the district, to find everyone dead but her sister and two cousins who had been at the river washing clothes, killed by the Guatemalan Army for supporting “terrorists” - the guerillas opposed to the blood lust of President-for-Life General Reyes, an Official Good Friend of America in the World Wide War Against Communism, led by the Greatest American Patriot Ever, Ronnie the Ray-Gun.

That was the day I learned that the only difference between the person telling me that story and my own refugee ancestors was a few hundred years and an ocean.

I thought about others whose stories I knew personally and about the bloody history of American imperial bungling I’ve studied too long.

I remembered the day in high school I finally confronted the kid who’d bullied me since seventh grade, how I beat the shit out of him so thoroughly that when they put him in the body bag in Vietnam (shot by his own men), he still had the scar over his eye from his face being shoved into a water faucet in the showers where it happened. After that, Nobody. Fucked. With. Me. Again. Ever. Fifty years later, people who were there at the time or heard about it, still remembered it.

That’s what the Twin Towers were.

Unfortunately, the towers were the wrong target, and 3,000-odd people who really were innocent got killed, a memory that still fills me with sadness beyond words.

But to those names, we can add all the other innocents in all the other wars of the American Empire, over all the years, all dead as “collateral damage,” and please excuse us for those accidents, you know how accidents happen and you don’t mean it, and can we pay you $10,000 for your loss? We’re only trying to improve things. We’re really sorry. Really!

I’ll add on the last collateral damage: the Afghan aid worker who spent years working with us in that “forever war,” who made the mistake of bringing water home to his family and by happenstance parking his car across the street when the drone strike blew up the guy who the ever-wonderful “They” claim was the mastermind of the bombing at the Kabul Airport.

I wonder how many terrorists our “mistakes” - our drone strikes that killed a wedding party who weren’t a convoy of Taliban terrorists, our “poorly aimed” bombs that blew up a market, all the others - have created in the past 20 years. In the past 76 years.

So I’ll spend today thinking about the people who really created that event: Harry Truman who listened to his advisors and started the Cold War. Dwight Eisenhower who listened to his advisors and authorized the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, who was the best chance of the Middle East ever becoming democratic and pro-western, so we could continue to control Iran’s oil (Have you ever wondered just why it is they hate us so much? That’s it.) I’ll think of John F. Kennedy, listening to his advisors and sending advisors to Vietnam because he got humiliated by Kruschchev at the Vienna Summit, and the millions of lives in “collateral damage” that blow to his ego cost. I’ll think about Lyndon Johnson telling his friends the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was “just like grandma’s nightgown - it covers everything.” I’ll think about Richard Nixon and that bastard Henry Kissinger - the master of “the banality of evil” - and their search for “peace with honor” killing more people in Southeast Asia looking for “peace” than during the first half of the war when we were “fighting to win.” I’ll think about Reagan listening to his advisors and his Central American wars that originally created the “illegal immigrant crisis” of people fleeing the death squads he sicced on them. I’ll think about Clinton shooting Tomahawks at Iraq to distract us from the fact he got a blowjob from an intern. I’ll think about Bush and Obama and Trump, who listened to their advisors and couldn’t bring themselves to end what they’d started.

And I’ll think about all of us, the ones who elected all of them. About how innocent we all are.

All those deaths. “Collateral damage.” Pardon us, we’re only trying to Make The World A Better Place.

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