not talked much about the enemy, have we? And yet he was there, from the start. It
was his atom bombs which reduced you to living off the country and performing your
own amputations and accouchements. If you have laid your plans carefully, you won’t
see much of him for quite a while; this is a very, very big country. Where you are
hidden out
there never were very many people~at any time; the chances of occupation forces
combing all of the valleys, canyons, and hills of our back country in less than
several years is negligible. It is entirely conceivable that an enemy could conquer
or destroy our country, as a state, in twenty minutes, with atom bomb and rocket.
Yet, when his occupation forces move in, they will be almost lost in this great
continent. He may not find you for years.
There is your chance. It has been proved time and again, by the Fighting
French, the recalcitrant Irish, the deathless Poles, yes and by our own Apache and
Yaqui Indians, that you cannot conquer a free man; you can only kill him.
After the immediate problems of the belly, comes the Underground!
You’ll need your rifle. You will need knives. You will need dynamite and
fuses. You will need to know how to turn them into grenades. You must learn how to
harry the enemy in the dark, how to turn his conquest into a mockery, too expensive
to exploit. Oh, it can be done, it can be done! Once he occupies, his temporary
advantage of the surprise attack with the atom bomb is over, for once his troops are
scattered among you, he cannot use the atom bomb.
Then is your day. Then is the time for the neighborhood cell, the mountain
hideout, the blow in the night. Yes, and then is the time for the martyr to freedom,
the men and women who die painfully, with sealed lips.
Can we then win our freedom back? There is no way of telling. History has
some strange quirks. It was a conflict between England and France that gave us our
freedom in the first place. A quarrel in enemy high places, a young hopeful feeling
his oats and anxious to displace the original dictator, might give us unexpected
opportunity, opportunity we could exploit if we were ready.
There are ways to study for that day, too. There are
books, many of them, which you may read to learn how other people have done it. One
such book is Tom Wintringham’s New Ways of War. It is almost a blueprint of what to
do to make an invader wish he had stayed at home. It is available in a 25 cent
Page 73
PenguinInfantry Journal edition. You can study up and become quite deadly, even
though 4-F, or fifty.
If you plan for it, you can survive. If you study and plan and are ready to
organize when the time comes, you can hope not only to survive but to play a part in
winning back lost freedoms. General George Washington once quoted Scripture to
describe what we were fighting for then-a time when “everyone shall sit in safety
under his own vine and figtree, and none shall make him afraid!”
It is worth planning for.
“A person who won’t be blackmailed,
can’t be blackmailed.”
-L. Long
PIE FROM THE SKY
Since we have every reason to expect a sudden rain of death from the sky
sometime in the next few years, as a result of a happy combination of the science of
atomics and the art of rocketry, it behooves the Pollyanna Philosopher to add up the
advantages to be derived from the blasting of your apartment, row house, or suburban
cottage.
It ain’t all bad, chum. While you are squatting in front of your cave,
trying to roast a rabbit with one hand while scratching your lice-infested hide with
the other, there will be many cheerful things to think about, the assets of
destruction, rather than tortu1ring your mind with thoughts of the good old, easy
days of taxis and tabloids and Charlie’s Bar Grill.
There are so many, many things in this so-termed civilization of ours which