Al Rosellini had wanted to sign the card. Dempsey had told him there was no time to reprint and re-issue the cards. Having finally encountered a politician whose innate decency shone through in everything he touched, the old soldier had no intention of allowing such a man to become a hostage to fortune. At some point in the future the Governor of Washington State might need to be able to claim he had clean hands and the purest of intentions when the subject of ‘that dirty business at Bellingham’ came up in Congress, or before the Supreme Court.
One in five Washingtonians had died in the October War — most of them as a result of the Sammamish strike which had destroyed Bellevue and central Seattle and wrecked the rest of the city — and as of this moment, approximately a third of the land area of the State remained outside the writ of State or Federal law. A new wave of disease; some kind of new and virulent strain of influenza, outbreaks of poliomyelitis, whooping cough and all manner of pestilences related to poor hygiene, bad water, malnutrition and the breakdown of state-wide health services, was sweeping the North-West. Things were rushing out of control and people had lost faith in the authorities to do anything about the ongoing disintegration of civil society.
Well, the time had come to do something about that!
Dempsey mounted the command Jeep, which backed further into the trees away from the gun line of M48s as the tanks poured high explosives and fifty-calibre machine gun fire into the enemy lines.
The first A-1 Skyraider tracked down the forest edge where the defenders had established a sniping picket line that afternoon. Momentarily, a quarter mile long wall of igniting napalm lit up the evening gloom as if it was high noon on a sunny day in Hell.
“BIG STICK TO FIREBIRD ONE! BULLSEYE! REPEAT! BULLSEYE!”
Dempsey heard the pilot’s lazy Californian drawl acknowledge the excited ground controller’s report.
“FIREBIRD ONE TO BIG STICK! I COPY THAT! ALL FIREBIRDS PRESENT AND CORRECT! WHAT ARE YOUR ORDERS?”
Dempsey patted the controller on the shoulder.
“Hit the enemy with everything you’ve got!”
“BIG STICK TO FIREBIRD ONE! I COPY THAT! HIT THE ENEMY WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT AS PER ATTACK PLAN ALPHA. OVER!”
Thirty seconds later another great blooming avenue of expanding napalm strikes burned down the road towards Bellingham.
The M48s’s Continental AVSI-1790 seven hundred and fifty horse power V12 air-cooled twin-turbo diesel engines roared and the stink of their exhausts filled the air. No plan survived first contact with the enemy but at this moment twenty main battle tanks, fifty armoured personnel carriers, and two dozen Bell UH-1 Iroquois — ‘Huey’ — helicopters carrying over two hundred heavily armed assault troops were closing in on the besieged town. Backing up the assault wave was a mixed force of over three thousand National Guardsmen, their ranks stiffened with regulars and veterans of America’s past foreign wars.
Bellingham was invisible in the falling dusk beyond the great stands of trees which carpeted this part of Washington State; but in the distance the sky was beginning to flash and glitter with fire and tracer, and the low clouds were painted blood red by each new series of huge detonations. At a range of over three miles the continual clatter of the Skyraiders’ cannons set the air itself trembling.
Some small part of Major General Colin Dempsey reviled at what he was doing. He was making war on fellow Americans; citizens whom he had sworn to protect all those years ago at West Point, and in whose name he had fought through North Africa, Sicily and France all the way to the Ardennes.
Is this what we have come to?
Whatever those people in Bellingham had done, whatever atrocities they had committed in the last year; they were still Americans like him. It was as if some terrible, final line had been crossed. He had paid the ferryman and now he must cross the Rubicon.
There was no turning back.
From this point onwards there was only war.
Chapter 6
Terry Francois had been elected President of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People — the NAACP — in 1959. Louisiana-born Francois had served in the Marine Corps in the Second War, returning home to study at Xavier University in New Orleans. Later he had received a master’s degree in Business Administration at Atlanta, then, after leaving the Deep South he had qualified as an attorney in San Francisco in 1949. In the years since he had immersed himself in the civil rights movement. His service in the Marines had taught him self-reliance and given him the confidence to stand on his own two feet, and his post-war education had equipped him to fight the pernicious dead hand of racism, segregation and discrimination that still seemed to be the immutable bedrock of American society.
For much of his time in San Francisco — even after the October War — he had been somewhat out of step with many of his fellow NAACP members; where he saw the absolute necessity for a more activist approach many others preferred either quiet protest, or no protest at all. Whereas, he saw in the partial ruination of the old World by the abomination of the October War a once in a generation opportunity to advance the cause of the civil rights movement in America; many of his peers saw only the pitfalls, the dangers of pressing too hard, of leaving themselves vulnerable to the accusation that they lacked patriotism and civil responsibility and were deliberately making a bad situation worse. While Terry Francois understood the feelings of his people — he knew as well as any man that members of the NAACP were no less patriotic and to his mind, a lot less irresponsible, than the majority of their fellow Americans — he often felt like he was wading through knee-deep mud. Nonetheless, he consoled himself with the thought that in recent years real progress had been made and was continuing to be made, albeit in baby steps.
Civil rights abuses tended to be less gratuitously self-evident, less visibly egregious and often, relatively subtle on the West Coast. The planter’s mansions of the old antebellum South did not dot the California landscape like signposts to an enslaved past. Here in San Francisco or Los Angeles or San Diego one took for granted the presence of Chinamen and Hispanics as well as blacks, the big cities were international melting pots with cultures infused and enhanced by influences that had either never, or rarely travelled to Atlanta, or Memphis, Birmingham, the Carolinas or into the murky backwaters of the Louisiana bayous. Here on the West Coast prejudices were less violently held, emotions were less visceral and there was a different status quo; the whites were on top, the Latinos and Chinese somehow lesser citizens, the blacks were a singular grouping often dispersed in neighbourhoods with people of many other races, creeds and histories. In many places the sense of a ‘black identity’ was peculiarly hard to pin down. For example, White San Franciscans might, at a pinch, classify the Fillmore District as a ‘black district’ but although a stranger passing through would have see a lot of black faces he or she would not necessarily agree with or care to recognise the ‘black district’ proposition. Put crudely, the whites did not fear the blacks in the West Coast, even if they were in many ways as eager to keep the black man — and the Hispanic and the Chinaman — under their thumbs as their more openly bigoted Southern cousins in Atlanta and Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery. The truth of the matter was that because the — still very real and callous — underlying discrimination was less savagely applied and that overt violence was rarely its preferred instrument, it was that much harder for Terry Francois to motivate his people to protest. While there were regular bloody riots in the Deep South, here in San Francisco the NAACP mainly organised peaceful sit ins, boycotted selected stores and hotels, politely campaigned for equal access to social and low rent housing, and generally focused on small, peaceful ways of improving the lot of the black worker.