Now It's Over Here

By Colbert I. King

Saturday, September 15, 2001; Page A27

I was only a little kid, but it was clear from the way grown-ups were behaving that we were on a war footing. There was an antiaircraft gun emplacement on the roof of a tall building -- either the U.S. Weather Bureau on M Street or Columbia Hospital -- near our house at 24th and L streets NW. My father walked us to the base of 23rd Street at Constitution Avenue to see the antiaircraft weapons in the Mall area. The whole family went to a Union Station bustling with soldiers and sailors to see my uncle Robert Colbert, decked out in his Army uniform, off to war. Along with other kids in the city, we collected and carried old newspapers to school to help our forces overseas. (To this day, I have no idea how old editions of The Post, Times-Herald, Evening Star and Daily News helped win World War II.)

A neighbor on L Street was an air raid warden. At a signal, a siren maybe, he would patrol the block, blowing his whistle, shouting at residents to draw the shades and turn out the lights lest enemy planes see us and unload bombs on our heads. We did as we were told. As an added precautionary measure, my sister, little brother and I hid under the dining room table.

World War II came and went without bombs falling on Washington.

A few years later, we once again feared coming under attack -- this time from the Big Bomb. Grade school rehearsals got us ready. On word from the teacher, we would rush into the cloakroom, drop to our knees, rest our heads on one arm and place the other hand behind the head -- a posture we understood would help shield us from the incoming Communist-launched nuclear weapon.

The '50s also came and went without a blast.

But the '62 Cuban crisis really got me thinking that Washington might finally get it. Soviet missiles off the coast of Florida. I was in the Army at the time, a young lieutenant at Fort Niagara in upstate New York; my family was still here.

Moscow blinked, and took its missiles home.

This week, in a horrifying new American reality, war finally came to town. And it was like nothing we expected.

My generation was raised to believe that if we ever went to war, we would do battle with an enemy that had a government behind its name. And we always thought that if we ever had to fight, the clash of armies, ships and planes would probably occur on a conventional battlefield, at sea or in the air -- over there; certainly not here.

But all the M-1 rifle training, reading maps, doing push-ups, crawling under barbed wire, running obstacle courses and enduring tear-gas-chamber exercises did nothing to prepare this Washingtonian for what came our way on Tuesday.

How do you train for an enemy that boards an airplane filled with schoolchildren and their teachers, with mothers holding toddlers by the hands, with innocent civilians going about their business, just to kill them -- and all because they have the bad graces to live in America? How do you train for an enemy whose fundamentalist mind refused to recognize the innocence of:

・11-year-old Rodney Dickens, 11-year-old Bernard Brown, 11-year-old Asia Cottom, 3-year-old Dana Falkenberg and 8-year-old Zoe Falkenberg, all of whom boarded American Airlines Flight 77 at Dulles?

・3-year-old David Brandhorst, 2-year-old Christine Hanson and 4-year-old Juliana Valentine McCourt, who were on United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston?

・And all the other innocent passengers on the four aircraft that slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the ground in Pennsylvania?

How do you get ready for an enemy who is so convinced of America's evil nature and his own moral righteousness that he can justify making everything in this country -- its icons and people -- a legitimate target.

Now the talk in Washington is war. About taking out suspected terrorist camps over there. About holding terrorist-harboring countries accountable, over there. We talk as if, once again, we are only going to get it on "over there."

Can we be that certain?

Unlike threats of my youth, this week's attacks were launched from within. It could happen again. The hijackers lost their lives, not their support systems. There could be more. More opportunities for Osama bin Laden -- the fugitive Saudi bagman, terrorist sponsor and chief suspect in Tuesday's massacres.

This time landmarks in Washington and New York City were the targets. And the malignant objective in both cities was to kill civilians, to show the country how vulnerable it is, to instill fear among the people.

What next? A crowded suburban Maryland shopping mall, a downtown D.C. cultural center, a Northern Virginia subway station, a football stadium, the area's water supply? The targets are endless. So are the victims. And as we learned this week, women, children and people of all ages and races are fair game in the eyes of terrorists.

That is what makes the Osama bin Ladens of this world and their state sponsors 21st century menaces. But they can bleed, too.

And they must be broken -- not chased, harassed or condemned, but broken. Here, there, anywhere they are found. Bring them to justice if possible. But by all means, and for as long as it takes, bring them down. To do any less invites more strikes, more body bags, more shattered American lives.

And to think I was looking forward to the day when I could tell my three little grandsons in New York about wars in Washington that never came. Now they have something to tell me. But not out of their imagined fears.

The mother of one of their classmates works at the World Trade Center. Another playmate's father was among the second wave of firefighters to enter the World Trade Center.

Both parents are missing.

e-mail: kingc@washpost.com