In 2008, I was standing with a few others behind a Cadillac hearse on the usually noisy tarmac at March Air Reserve Base in California’s Riverside County.
Except for the flap of the American flag above the hearse’s headlight, a solemn silence cocooned the airfield as we waited for sailors carrying the casket of Marc Retmier to emerge from the belly of the Kalitta Charters Learjet. A royal red carpet stretched out from the plane to Marc’s family at the opposite end.
It had been six days since a Taliban rocket hit the Navy corpsman’s Humvee while on patrol in the northern Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan. Marc, 19, had just gotten the OK to go home for the Fourth of July.
“We almost had him back,” Marc’s father told the LA Times.
Suddenly, the family got the first peek of Marc’s flag-draped casket. It’s what an Esquire reporter described as “the moment when the family is hit by the truth, when the nose of the casket finally pokes through the door. That’s when the air comes out of them.” A moment when a sudden gust “buckled men’s legs,” he wrote.
A pillar of calm until now, Marc’s grandad was overcome by a sudden gust of grief that buckled his legs before he sank limp-like toward his wife. Pressing his hand against his mouth to muffle deep sobs pushing through his fingers, his anguish blended with the primal gasps of his family.
“It doesn’t seem real, does it?” an uncle asked his wife. “I mean, I know it is, but it just doesn’t seem real.”
Truth hit me, too. That sight of the teenager’s coffin punctured the inflated war narratives that pundits and politicians had yapped about, written about, and politicized, as if the human cost of the war wasn’t real.
Yet, it was their babbling, drummed into the public mind for years that twisted America’s skewed view of things. We were entranced by illusions until, like Marc’s coffin, the truth hit – Biden’s cacotopian retreat from Afghanistan.
Exposing the world to a cascade of catastrophes at biblical proportions, Biden’s pullout was the most irresponsible evacuation in American history.
A chaplain warned Marines to prepare to “see things that no person should have to see,” according to the book Kabul (2023), co-authored by Jerry Dunleavy and James Hasson.
They saw Taliban shooting into throngs of innocent people at the airport. They saw dead children floating in a nearby canal. They saw babies dying every day – some after accidentally suffocating inside backpacks where mothers tried to keep them safe. They saw one mother throwing her baby over a fence to the safety of Marines “but misjudged the distance, and the child landed in the stack of razor wire on the wall’s exterior,” according to the book.
Like lions led by sheep, our military was forced to do nothing.
Swaddled in Washington, Biden decreed that the same Taliban that killed Americans like Marc Retmier, were now “businesslike” and could be trusted to help secure Abbey Gate.
Even as we watched, none of it seemed real.
It was a moment that the truth hit the world that something sacred was dying in America – the first poke of an institutional casket that knocked the air out of Americans at home and buckled men’s legs across the West.
“What Biden has done in Afghanistan,” said Lord Blencartra, British House of Lords, “will go down in ignominy as one of the most shameful and despicable acts of betrayal by any American president.”
Unmoved, Biden and his phalanx of political zombies just draped a flag over the “despicable act,” renamed it an “extraordinary success,” then walked away.
Our gatekeepers, with buckled knees and tons of words, never held Biden – or anyone! – accountable. So, the despicable acts never stopped and we’re all seeing things that “no person should have to see.”
They intentionally opened the border; corrupted our election system; fanned the George Floyd mayhem to repackage socialism as “equity”; politicized COVID, the J6 riot, Big Tech, the military, law enforcement, the intelligence apparatus, and the courts to keep power; and raped the minds of schoolkids about history, race and gender.
Drumming this stuff into the public mind has so twisted America’s skewed view of things that when political psychopaths butchered our laws to raid, prosecute, and attempt to jail a former president, the clear cancer of it all is debatable; the evil of praising Hamas “depends on the context”; and mutilating children becomes an industry.
This stuff is so bizarre, so cancerous, so deeply irreconcilable with basic common sense that it just doesn’t seem real.
It is.
Radicals in suits and street clothes are strategically injecting political gangrene into every institution in America to kill the Judeo-Christian root that birthed Western civilization and to put it, once and for all, in a flag-draped coffin.
They don’t want to debate. They don’t want facts. They don’t want compromise. They want to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” whether we like it not. That’s not democracy, that’s despotism.
What “just doesn’t seem real” today is that they’ve molested America – right in front of our eyes – and except for a ton of words, nothing’s stopping them.
Fortunately, the truth about cancerous policies – doomed through history – has started to hit Americans where they live. Still, whether we continue full-speed toward a point of no return has climaxed to one year: 2024.
America is not secure. This is an emergency, and the cavalry is not coming. Politics as usual is dead.
Like the founders, forced into a “time that try men souls,” we’re in a time that buckle men’s legs. Despotism is forcing us to exert the “Right” and “Duty” to provide “new Guards” for our future security” – whatever that means in our time.
Given all we’ve seen, we refuse to tell our grandkids, “We almost had the country back,” without a ferocious fight.
“Civil war” is not coming. It’s here. And it’s real.