Armageddon 2019 A.D.

Elsewhere have I set down the chronicles of how we broke free of the Merican Menace, but it occurs to me that a telling of how I came to be here would be of interest.  I am 552 years old.  Or let me be clear, I am to my knowledge the only man who has seen a span of 552 years, having been born in 1498, living 21 years and then spending the remaining 31 years since 2019!  Nor did I age in that time, but was preserved somehow, by magic or the will of Allah, or even this "Science" that is responsible for so much I see.  Now, at 52, I desire to set down the record of that remarkable incident.

I was in Persia, exploring the mountains near my village, with an eye to finding what treasures might sometimes be found in various caves.  In exploring a particularly deep and winding one, I came across a crystalline ore that I had not seen before.  Gladly was I chipping some off for my bag, when a tremor was felt, and the passage through which I had crawled was closed off by falling rocks!  My torch grew dim quickly, and then went out, and shortly after did I fall asleep. 

When I came to, there was light again, and much dust in the air.  Coughing and retching, and staggering at the further loud noises and shakings, I did crawl towards the light, and found that instead of the labyrinth that I had navigated coming in, that the outside was quite close.  I was outside of the cave, but was shook by such a force that I was promptly thrown to the ground.  From where I lay dazed, I could see that every where I looked the ground was being beaten and dispersed by some unseen force, tearing everything and tossing it about.

After a time that could not have been too long, but felt like eternity, it stopped, and I was left there alone, gasping and trying to collect my thoughts and ponder what djinn may have been responsible for such reckless force.  I got to my knees, said a prayer to Allah, and then got up and tried to brush off my robe as best I could before making my way back to the village.  Imagine my surprise when I could not get my bearings, and indeed, the village was not where I had remembered it at all.  Instead only a road, but of the oddest material and stretching off with no break in a limitless direction either way.

I will skip over those first two days, where honestly I thought I might have gone mad.  What looked like silvery birds streaked over me now and then, but worse were the giant metal carriages that would come from the distance, approach me with astonishing rapidity, then streak by as if I was nothing.  At that, the beasts might not have seen me, as I quickly hid in the ditch near the road each time one such came.  At one point, one slowed, and I could see heads of people peering out of the inside, one pointed at me and the other shook his head.

Were they damned souls?  Slaves of the djinn?  I did not then know.  

It was when I was in a ditch the last time that I got introduced to this "21st Century".  I was crouching and watching, but this time as the beast passed, a great flame erupted underneath it and it was flipped about and in flames!  Men from inside vomited out of it, burning and screaming and before they could get far, loud thunder sounds, over and over, too fast to count assaulted my ears and the men seemed to be hit by invisible punches over and over till they fell and screamed no more.  I was wondering about this when I felt a stick in my back, solid like the haft of a spear, and a voice said in a strange dialect, "Don't move."

Now, aware of my status as the village headman's son, and unused to letting myself be treated in any cavalier fashion, I did not accede to this order, but whirled about, and grabbed the stick out of his hands, though surprisingly it was all of metal and oddly shaped.  One end wide, the other a tube that was warm in my hands.  What was more surprising was that a rather young and smooth faced man fell back at once and held his hands out, then clasped them together and begged for mercy.  

Seeing no danger in the stick, I offered it back to him, not wishing to create an enemy in this strange land unnecessarily.  And promptly he grabbed it, pointed the tube end at me, and looked for all the world that he was in charge again.  And such was how I met Waelah Derham, who yes, turned out on closer examination to be a woman!  She told me that I was her prisoner, and that I should come with her.  I told her that I was Bukhari, the son of Ibrahim, the slave of no woman, but only Allah, who's name be praised, and that made her cock her head.

"You're a strange one.  You speak the language, but like no other I've ever met.  You're not Merican, but you gave the gun back and still acted like you were in charge.  You will come with me to see my unit leader, or I'll kill you."  Now, I was not seeing how she could honor this threat, but I was very hungry and even more thirsty, having had no water for two days and feeling very faint.  At this point I figured that I could probably negotiate a release of me back to wherever my village was, if I had a chance to speak to this "unit leader".  Silently then, I walked in the direction she pointed, her walking behind and pointing the haft of that strange spear at my back.

And talking all the way she did, more than any woman I had ever known!  And it was in her incessant talking that I learned things that made me question my very sanity!  

I did finally learn, after much questionings in which she was reticent to answer, for she thought they were the questions of a child or madman, that five hundred years had passed since I had entered the caves, and instead of this being 903 it was 1440!  And even then, it was hard to grasp this, as she gave the years in the infidel reckoning of 2019, with me having apparently passed out back in 1519!  

Understand, when I had entered that cave, my civilization was supreme.  No where in our land was not Allah the acknowledged Lord of All Creation and the European infidels were backwater barbarians, beneath contempt, and the even further off English the least regarded of all.  Yet now to hear this woman, the English, now called Mericans, or Yanks, or Yu-essay, reigned without limit, and we were all hunted animals in our own land!  Remarkably, Islam was a minority and barely tolerated faith, and these descendants of the unlettered and unwashed Crusaders ruled the whole of the Earth!

Mourning the victims of the Mericans.

In the course of this I told her my story, which she found as hard to believe as I had found hers.  But the strange beasts that I now learned were called "transports" or "trucks" or "tanks", and the odd birds called "planes" or "missiles" gave credence to her tale, and my dialect, and perhaps my childish sounding innocence gave credence to mine.  The water she had gave me from a metal pouch had certainly aided me in viewing her in a more friendly light!  And my literal jumping into the air when she demonstrated what that "spear" really was let her view me as more truthful than she had thought!

We got back to her camp in a cave in another mountain.  It was a hive of activity, of men and women scurrying to and fro.  I learned then that Waelah was the exception, and that women in this resistance were in their proper places, cooking, keeping things in order, and in all ways being respectful of their men.  Only Waelah, who I learned was the daughter of a great leader in their resistance, could act in so unseemly a fashion.  

The leaders, and the others when they heard my tale, were all far more reticent about accepting it, thinking me a madman or a spy.  There was talk of killing me, but at Waelah's insistence, and my knowledge of some esoteric aspects of my era that they were able to verify with a device called an iPhone, they were willing to give me at least a chance.  At that, some gathered from my description of my father's house and my own position that I might have some strategy to impart that could be useful, and in this they were not to be wrong.  

For among these men I could see that the flame of freedom and independence was burning well, and yet to be extinguished, no matter the horrors they described to me.  The supremacy of the Merican "Air Force" was unchallenged, but on the ground they were not so pervasive.  They had their "bases" here and there in our land, and their convoys ranged from base to base, but always with "air cover".  This could be their planes, that streaked back and forth, or their copters that were frighteningly agile, but most of all, and greatly feared, were their drones.

Drones were said to fly so far up in the heavens as to be unseen by men.  But they could rain death down upon anyone, any where and any time.  One never knew when.  And it was ill advised to help those who were on the fringes of the fiery death, as those who rushed to help and give mercy to the injured would be blown into nothingness in a second hellish explosion.

Most remarkable, these air drones were not operated by men within, like the transports and copters, but were empty inside, and guided by men in far away places, sitting in comfortable chairs, watching magical windows into our world called "monitors" and then pushing on buttons that would make us die without ever seeing the faces of our murderers.  We had known of some mechanical advances in my own era, but these Mericans had taken these arts to undreamt of extremes, and instead of using such to make a paradise on Earth, used it to enslave all who would not think as they think and believe and do as they believe and do.

For they were a casual and cruel people, and regarded us as we would an unlettered barbarian, though we treated even such better than they now treated us.  They were contemptuous even of enslaving us personally, preferring to rely on their machines and their slave class in their own nation called "illegals", men and women who had to work for little in return and with no rights.  Us, they treated as a nuisance at best, when they were not actively hunting us down for sport or information.

I was out with Waelah one day when she explained about a particularly vicious group among our people, the collaborators.  Such were given titles of authority by the Mericans, and supposedly were our true leaders, but in reality they only were there to make us imagine we were free, they were the slaves of those who were stealing our wealth.  And wealth we did have, though not as I'd have reckoned it in my previous era!  A black liquid, oil it was called, that was sucked out of our lands with mighty machines and took on great ships to ports in the Merican lands where it apparently fed their machines and made them even more powerful!

************************************************************

The second year of my stay saw me not only fully accepted, but leading my own cell.  Gone was anyone's concern about working with me, and I had long since proved myself both as a hand to hand combatant and a well spring of ancient tricks and strategies to keep these Mericans hopping.  And I'd long since got used to this tech of theirs, though I still had private wonderment over it.  

It was a cool Spring evening, and it was a daring mission that I led with only our best men along.  We had a specialist with us, a man who could fly one of the enemies helicopters, and we had stolen one to that purpose.  And such was the greed and corruption of our enemy, that they yet did not know we had it, as the "stealing" had been by bribing a low level officer into letting us have it.  We had told him that we were representing a random republic that had once been part of the Soviet Union, and this satisfied the pig's conscience that he could enrich himself without being a total traitor.

But such was how these men of the West thought, that there was no black and white morality but that all could be - and was - justified.  They had lost billions and billions of dollars, not from us stealing from them, but from their own stealing from them.  Whole billions were unaccounted, and they'd pretend to investigate their higher officers, while really just putting on a show for their own peoples.

The helicopter was heading towards our target, which wasn't one of their heavily defended bases, but an office building that housed one of the multinational corporations that was in charge of extracting various petrochemicals.  Enough years had gone by since the original invasion and occupation that it was thought by them to be business as usual, and of course, they expected us to adhere to their self-serving rules on only attacking "military" targets.  This from a people who bombed weddings and ambulances and blithely dismissed such atrocities as "collateral damage".

But as I had said, and credited the saying to my centuries dead father, "Make it costly".  As I further elaborated, "The lives of their infidel child soldiers are nothing to them, they pay enough so that the poor of their lands always volunteer no matter how many we kill.  Hit them where they trade.  No trade, and they will soon enough know they are in a fight."  And now, tonight, I and two others, not counting our pilot, were going to make our first try at that.

The city was easily visible, but we had to be very high up to not be detected.  The air was thin, and the helicopter strained to stay up.  Abdul had a hand-held scanner he had acquired that was searching for the right signal from a sympathizer on the ground.  Finally he nodded and said, "It worked!  Our man has given us a laser signal that we can home in on!  You won't see the building clearly at first, but we can lower you down to the top within a few meters!"

With that, I and Mahomet needed no more encouragement, but were already readying our descent by a thin but incredibly strong guide wire.  Soon we were falling somewhat more rapidly than I cared to down towards the many lights below, our final destination not yet discernible.  My headphones went off, startling me as they still sometimes did when I was lost in my own thoughts, and told me that it was time to slow down.  Mahomet was surely getting the same message, as he and I both applied our clamps at once, and slowed a bit to a more manageable speed.

Soon enough, we landed, smack in the middle of the roof of the corporate offices, and Mahomet was up and using his locksmith tools on the roof door while I was still looking about, still awed by the lights of a modern city.  How different than the village of my era, how much cleaner smelling!  And how much brighter!  But faint music reached my ears from many stories below, and I knew that one of the decadent bars of the Westerners was down there.  Not enough to rob us, they must insist on their own morality as well.  If one could call what they do for recreation "morality".

We snuck down several flights of stairs, till we came to the floor our own informant had told us had what we needed.  We were in without incident, but as we walked down a hallway, we could see a guard come out of a side passage and turn on his route so that he was now ten meters in front of us, unaware of our presence.  I idly wished that there was a way of incapacitating such low level servants - for he was a civilian, not one of their young soldiers - but no such methods existed yet.  Maybe in another five hundred years!

I was not idle while thinking such weak thoughts, but was already gliding up to him and had his throat slit before he could register that he heard an out of place sound.  I said a prayer for him, but knew there was little hope.  He was, no matter how good a man his mother might think him, and no matter how good he might actually be, still an occupier in a land foreign to him.  No mercy should have been expected by him, and certainly none was given.

Shortly after, we were behind another well locked door, and facing what were called "mainframes".  Dozens of rectangular shapes with many little lights and all humming softly.  I had been taught that such could "think", but not as we think.  The Western devils used them to remember things and figure out things beyond human ability.  And at that, some could be used for good, and our own people made use of some to limited degrees.  But the Westerners controlled the majority of world's computers like they had a lock on control of the air and of the seas.  

We shrugged off our backpacks and started affixing bits of a gray clayish substance which I knew from having seen tests could make very large explosions.  We carefully inserted the rods and wires as we had been taught.  It took a half an hour, but we were done in there.  Cautiously, and with a final nervous look, we went back out and started back up to the roof.  Where we had a frightened moment, as we did not immediately see the ball on the end of the wire!

But there it was, off to the side, and we grabbed it, and with radio communication let the pilot know to reel us back up.  Slowly, this took place.  We were maybe halfway back up when we heard a faint alarm!  Someone must have come across the dead body of that guard I had killed!  Spotlights were coming on now, and a very loud siren wailing up and down was deafening me!  I shouted for us to be took up faster, but there was no change in our upward speed.  

There was a deafening explosion, though!  And we started moving, sooner than we were supposed to, as the pilot wisely started to fly away before we were even up and back inside!  So while we were slowly reeled in, we were also trailing behind the copter as it took off for the designated meet point.  And just in time, too!  The Mericans, not sure what was going on, but knowing something was, were taking no chances, but firing at any object in the air that they could not identify as theirs.  Very little was not theirs, and so such little as was native stood out pretty well.

But our pilot's instincts had been good, and he had broke away in time that we were outside the city before the air space started getting too dangerous.  Scrambling in, we laughed together, then sobered up quickly, as we were not out of the woods yet.  Behind us, the city was alive with their own air machines, and while we couldn't see, we knew that their satellites and drones would be looking about ceaselessly.  And their air forces would be sending planes over to see what they could find.

Their mastery of the skies being near absolute, they could see what men's eyes could not see with radar and infravision.  That they would put such god-like powers to use in harming people as inoffensive as my descendants never ceased to amaze me, and was one more reason I hated them.  Given every gift by a merciful and munificent Creator, they turned such talents to hurting others instead of helping.  A reckoning would be had one day.  I had vowed that before, and I vowed it again.

Tonight Allah was merciful to us, though, or so it seemed.  We got to the site, and met up with the crew sent to get us.  But no sooner than we had started to relax when a flare went off several kilometers away.  First a green one, then a purple.  I was trying to remember what the code on such were, when Abdul cried out, "Scatter, scatter, scatter!  Ground units converging, meet at secondary checkpoints!"  Such was doctrine for cases like this, and the odds were that we did not all have the same secondary checkpoints.  This made sure that there was the greatest chance of the greatest number of us to get back.

I did manage to get about halfway to the secondary checkpoint by dawn the next day, and was just contemplating this still odd world that I had found myself in and how hard it would be to get the rest of the way back to our camp when I heard a soft scraping sound behind me.  I just started to turn around - too slow, too slow! - when I was struck hard on the back of my head and knew no more.

When I awoke my hands were tied behind me with a tough plastic cord and a bag was over my head.  My awakening must have registered with one of them, or perhaps I let out a groan, as one of my captors reached over and took the bag off.  "Hello, Abdul!" he said, grinning evilly.  At first I wondered if he had meant to capture Abdul and mistook me for him, then I remembered that they enjoyed calling all of us "Abdul".  Somehow that was supposed to hurt us, as if the murders and tortures and rapes did not do that sufficiently.

"Allah have mercy upon you.", I said, and in the English that I had made myself learn over the past year and a half.  The young soldier looked faintly surprised at my knowledge of English, but moreso, the venomous contempt in my tone.  Then the Captain behind him laughed and said, "Good!  A towelhead that can speak proper English!  This will make our 'interview' easier!"  And with a nod to the younger soldier, he turned away.  The younger one went off, and I had a chance to take in my surroundings.  I realized that I was on a plane, but a plane with their typical hedonistic luxuries.  

It was like a bar, soft easy chairs, a refreshment center, and two women looking like houris, waiting to serve.  Like most Merican women, they were too skinny, and while older, taking too much pains to try to look younger.  Modesty was unknown among them, with whore red lipstick and nails, and skirts centimeters above the knees.  Besides the Captain were two soldiers to guard me, and a General with whom the Captain was now conversing, but too softly for me to hear.  Somewhere forward were pilots, unless this was one of those times they could use an automatic pilot. 

I could not tell how many were further back in the plane, but it was clearly big enough to hold many.  And I doubted that any Western General went about without enough defenders to protect him.  As if he caught on that I was thinking about him, the General looked over and motioned for me to come over.  Awkwardly, hands still behind my back, I did so, and at once he looked annoyed and made a hand motion to the Captain who came over to cut my ties.

I finished walking over and at the General's further gesturing, sat down across from him.  "You fanatics from the back country have been getting too restive lately.  We are going to rectify that soon enough.  But tell me, what did you hope to gain by blowing up those mainframes at one of Halliburton's subsidiaries?"

"Rogers, Bukhari, Captain, 7th Irregulars.", I said, using the last name that I had adopted when told early on by Waelah that I'd need one.  "Rogers" was what was sewn on the shirt of the first Merican I had killed, and it seemed as good a way to remember that occasion as any.  "Captain Bukhari Rogers, eh?", the General asked with a chuckle, pronouncing "Bukhari" like it was "Buck Harry".  I had expected the name to raise his eyebrows, though, the joke had been explained to me long before, by those in my unit who enjoyed calling me "Buck".  "Can I call you, Buck for short?  Or you prefer Captain Rogers?", he continued, still chuckling.

"Rogers, Bukhari, Captain, 7th Irregulars.", I said again, as I had been taught was in accordance with their own rules concerning the capture of prisoners during a war.  The General laughed again.  "Son, we aren't at war, so you aren't a prisoner of war.  You're a criminal and an insurgent who revolted against your own lawful government!  If you cooperate, things can go pretty well for you, smart young man like you, speaks English and all, there's some real opportunities for you!  Don't cooperate and...well, everyone cooperates in the end, you know?"

"So you don't even follow your own rules.  It is as I was taught.", I said and then simply stared at this man who held my life in his hands.  He looked annoyed, then said blandly, "If you're wrong, then you are speaking ill of me to no point.  If you are right, you are upsetting a man who does not play by the rules to no point.  Either way, knock it off."  With that he dismissed me, and I was allowed to walk back to my seat and remain unbound.  I was even given food and drink, but the dinner, it was pork, and I left it.  To the amusement of my guards who had been pretending not to watch carefully how I responded.

I observed all my captors, and such was their arrogance that they cared not.  What a marvel of mastery these Mericans had with their "tech", as each was engrossed with some device or another.  Yet physically they were very decadent, soft, faintly flabby.  Everything in their world was designed for ease and luxury, buttons and screens and consoles all to be reached out for lazily, all within arm's reach, annoyance registering in their faces on such few times as they might have to get up to get something.

And these had humbled my people?  Such as these had conquered the world?  Pray Allah it not always be so!  The plane landed soon enough, though, which told me that we'd not traveled so far as they could.  Turkey?  Surely not so far as Germany or England, both vassal states of the Mericans.  The General seemed annoyed, though, so perhaps their plans were not going as they wished.

**********************************************************************

The confusion of the series of blasts that had gone off at the airport in Istanbul having led to my escape, I was having to soothe down a much agitated Waelah.  "Really, dear, I'd not have advised so much effort to try to get me back, no movement is dependent on any one man!", I was telling her.

"Nonsense!", she retorted, "And I'm not the only one to think so!  It wasn't even my idea, or rather, while I thought of it, others had already been moving to get it into play.  Still, we lost seven suicide bombers, and while I'm glad they are receiving their reward, it hurts to lose so many good men all the same."

I agreed with her, as she knew I did.  I had heard of the oddity of the Westerners, and how they claimed to their people that a man giving up his own life, while taking the lives of others, was somehow "cowardly", but they sitting in a lounge chair, playing a video game in which we died real deaths was somehow "brave".  But we had not changed our policy, nor would I ever wish us to.  Yes, we had remote controls, but if it is worth causing any innocent to die, it is worth we pledging our own lives, too.

"Nevermind all that, dear, given the success of the raid, were we able to then gain the information we had sought?"  For while we had principally undertook the blowing up of those computer mainframes as a means of harming the Mericans, we also knew that it was a job that would make a high placed official in the Occupied Government glad, and in exchange, he'd give us some information that we greatly needed to know.

"Yes, Buck", she said, calling me by the nickname everyone enjoyed me having.  "The group of collaborators - at least a main group of them - has been identified by that official.  We are making plans to deal with them now, and when we do, we'll all have an easier time of it."  As it turned out, it was a group bound by kinship ties who had no power prior to the arrival of the Mericans back in the nineties, but had made a living selling out their own for years.  Decades now.  They did translating work for the Mericans, and worked jobs on their bases.  A thoroughly unpleasant group, and one that mostly stuck to itself.

For no one else having anything to do with them.  Each base, each occupied nation of ours, had such traitors.  Had such traitors to the faith and Allah and most of all, their own people.  But this one was the one that had been a particular thorn in our side, as they had a man in our camp.  But now we knew who that man in our camp was, and which group of quislings he reported to, and we could deal with them appropriately.  As for that man, he hadn't died - yet.  Merely sent away on a mission that would have him die before the night was over, and without being any the wiser before his death.

"Is it my plan being used?", I asked Waelah.  "Yes, Buck, it is.  It's a good plan, and that it's so old should really cause a lot of surprise and distress."  Good, I thought.  Anything that could affect the arrogance of those who degraded us in our own lands would be good.  And it was a good plan in and of itself, which while drawing on very ancient tactics that would be perfect for what we needed.

The subdivision of modestly prosperous houses where the collaborators lived was well known.  Any city sizeable enough to have Merican occupation forces, or "Advisors" as they enjoyed pretending to be, had such a subdivision.  Certainly the Westerners, as fastidious in this manner as we were, never let such turncoats live among their own Diplomats and officers and mercenaries and corporate boys.  

We had that whole subdivision mapped out, and knew who lived in each house.  I could see through my binoculars, from my vantage point of an office in a high rise building downtown, the pleasant homes, the pools, the well manicured lawns.  Such was the price of their honor.  But tonight would see their real payment come.  Sure enough, six hours later, at a bit past midnight, the last of our forces reported readiness, and I gave the okay.  

Precisely 15 minutes after the signal, so that each unit could go at the exact same time, various old warehouses and abandoned buildings and at least one old empty grain silo, saw activity where none should be.  Large doors opened and giant trebuchets - a form of catapult - were wheeled out, and with no more tech than wheels and many strong men, rolled into various positions surrounding that subdivision, even when the men had to roll it half a dozen blocks.

Simultaneously, and to keep the Mericans distracted, an attack on the military base of theirs was made.  A hard choice, that, as we knew that those who bravely volunteered for that would die.  But they volunteered willingly all the same, and it would keep the Mericans occupied and unsure of what all was happening long enough for our purposes.

All trebuchets in place, now large trucks with at least a dozen 55 gallon drums on each came up.  Instantly, and based off of meticulous computer models and simulations we had done, and quite a few practice tests in the desert, drums of explosives were loaded and fired at each house.  Not all 36 houses we chose could be hit at once, we had only six trebuchets.  But we could fire, and reload even before the first hit it's target.  Even taking into account the time it would take to shift the trebuchet, we could fire a barrel every 40 seconds.  In a little over three minutes, each trebuchet had hit it's half a dozen targets blowing them up and giving off a blaze that all could see.

And nor were we done.  While those men left the trebuchets, they yet had tasks.  Each team had secondary targets and those were sped off to, and various tactics employed.  One "various tactic" was that we blocked off roads by which Emergency service vehicles would try to enter, and in the case of one Westerner staffed fire department, blew that up with a more conventional truck bomb.  Said truck waiting for the fire house door to open, then flooring the accelerator and, racing up the driveway, crashing right into the first fire truck to try to leave the garage.  

Others simply made sure that no car from that neighborhood made it out.  While other teams went to houses that were not blown up and dealt with those there.  It was reported by those teams that the nest of quislings were in the utmost of confusion.  Ignoring the fact that the Mericans were unlikely to desire to bomb them, they nevertheless jumped to the conclusion that they were being drone bombed!

Some were frantically calling their Merican masters, on their cellphones, and no doubt the sounds of battle were then heard by the Mericans.  But they were dealing with their own issues, and had no more love for this bunch than any have love of traitors.  We had other teams now roving about the city, setting off explosions, shooting up nightclubs, and generally causing mass terror.  The Mericans, unsure as to what all was going on fell back on their usual defensive policy and just holed up on their base till their vast intelligence apparatus, made up of people and machines and satellites and drones could give them more information.

Which would be hours, at the least.  In the end, not one quisling made it out of that subdivision alive.  Our own casualties were 14, but that was only those who deliberately had suicided while taking out the enemy.  All targeted traitors dead, as far as we could tell, though we learned later that a few had been missed, as they were in the apartments of their Western whores and upon hearing of the carnage, snuck off to the British embassy, it not being under attack, and they being well known as lapdogs of the Mericans.

We considered the raid a great success.

It had a far greater significance than this, though.  It showed the effectiveness of low tech and definitely established a confidence in our ability to overcome the Mericans.

As I pointed out to Waelah:  "It has long been my belief that our resolve to live free in our own nation, with our own ways, will ultimately overcome the pride and tech of the Mericans.  As a weapon in the hands of any who yearn to breathe free, simple resolve will always be the best weapon.  And always triumph in the end.  We resolve not to be ruled.  We resolve to have our own ways.  We resolve to worship and live as we please."

She replied, "I tremble, though, Buck dear, when I think of the horrors that are ahead of us.  The Mericans are clever.  They will develop defenses against our new tactics.  And they are sure to mass against us not only the full force of their power here, but in the united forces of the Western World.  They are a cowardly people in one sense, but clever as the very Devils in Hell, and inheritors of a calm, ruthless, vicious persistency."

"Nevertheless," I prophesied, "the Finger of Doom points squarely at them today, and unless you and I are killed in the struggle, we shall live to see Islam blast the infidel from the face of the Earth."