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The State Guard's Role in Homeland Defense Barry Farber You know, that character Franz Kafka dreamed up may have been lucky. He woke up in bed one morning and found himself transformed into a cockroach. I find myself waking up EVERY morning in America these days feeling like an animal much worse than a cockroach. I feel like a bad squirrel. The good squirrel, according to something I once read, heard or imagined, would dart into the squirrel tavern, belt down a quick squirrel beer, and get right back out into the woods looking for the nuts that would carry him over the winter. The BAD squirrel just kept sitting there in the tavern ridiculing the good squirrels.
In his jaunty beret, dark sunglasses, and constantly puffing through a long rhinestone-studded cigarette holder, the bad squirrel would drunkenly yell out at the good squirrels: "Why don't you cut out all this stupid running around. You're making me nervous. It's actually still summer. It's still hot. We've got the rest of September and all of October and most of November to get those nuts in. Relax. Get a life. Be good to yourselves!" Story Continues Below
And, of course, the winter found our bad squirrel dragging himself from tree to tree begging for nuts from the good squirrels who had done their job. What follows is not a fable, a cautionary tale or an anecdotal sermon. It‘s as blistering an indictment of America's mood today as I know how to deliver. Superstar columnist, commentator and presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote movingly about her feelings on 9/11 watching some people racing TOWARD Ground Zero and others running for their lives the other way. She confessed to rating firemen and policemen as higher beings than media commentators beginning with that day. What made the difference between those who ran in opposite directions? Was it their religion? Skin color? Ethnic origin? Of course not. It was their TRAINING! Those well-trained ones who run toward the danger are part of the solution and those frantic hordes running away are part of the problem. It's been four full years and then some since 9/11. We've had two back-to-back killer hurricanes to emphasize the point. What has been done since 9/11 to "gather in the nuts"? What has been done across America to maximize the number of "solution" people, thereby minimizing the number of "problem" people? It was a disgusting cliché to me when I first heard it preached at me in the Army, but now I view it as a message that might save us all: "Training and discipline are what separate an army from a mob." What have we done since 9/11 to turn the American population into more of an army than a mob? The answer is zero. Not just too-little-too-late. Too-little-too-late would be a comparative blessing. What we've done is literally zero. As Boy Scouts during World War II we learned first aid and how to step in and take charge or at least be useful in a crisis. Here's a quick sample of that Boy Scout wisdom right now that could possibly save your life. We were taught that whenever we entered a movie theater or any other enclosed place, we should look around and figure out our best way out in an emergency. "If there's an emergency," we were told, "you will panic like everybody else. But YOU will panic in the right direction!" A little training goes a long way. I took basic training in the U.S. Army over 50 years ago, but if, God forbid, America were to be stricken today, I would still be a lot more useful than somebody who'd never had military training at all. We don't need any new answers. America already has the ideal organization to correct this shocking neglect of our survival skills. It barely exists and its existence is steeped in abandonment and contempt. Have you ever heard of the State Guard? Not the National Guard of a specific state; I mean the State Guard. Only half of our states even have a State Guard and those that do have pitifully small numbers and zero promotion, publicity or support. (New Jersey has a few hundred; New York slightly more than a thousand.) Unlike the National Guard, the State Guard cannot be redeployed outside its state. The State Guard meets and takes paramilitary training. Its members are not paid unless they're activated. And most states let you volunteer until you're 70! Right after 9/11 a State Guard contingent from SOUTH CAROLINA sped to New York to assist with security at Ground Zero. Let's take it step by step. Can we agree that not just our civilian populations but even many trained uniformed units are dismally unprepared to participate in our rescue? (The New Orleans Police Department comes to mind.) Can we further agree that no mold, blight or gene decay has eroded our American ability to volunteer, train, rally, jump in and succeed? It's just that everybody cared during World War II and nobody cares today! One more agreement, please. We hear constant threats of everything from a "dirty bomb" exploding in one of our cities clear up to a dozen or so atomic bombs detonated in American cities simultaneously. Are those threats plausible? Yes, yes and yes yields you a perfect score. Is there, then, any reason why Congressman Joe Wilson's bill to turn our State Guard network from a nothing into a something should languish in committee as untouched as a poisonous mushroom session after session? I can offer one legitimate taste of catnip to anybody willing to get enthusiastic but fears getting defeated by the lumpen unconcern of others. (Congressman Wilson's spirits might get lifted by this!) About eight years ago I flew to Israel on the same plane with a bunch of adventurers who were headed there to take a ten-day course in anti-terrorism tactics and techniques. They invited me to come visit their encampment and train with them for a day. And what a day! Part of it was like kindergarten. We were asked by former drill sergeants of the Israeli army to sit in a little circle in little chairs and look at each other intently; no further instructions. After a full minute of such staring we were told to turn our chairs around so our backs were facing each other. Then the instructor began barking. "Ginsberg, what color shirt and pants was the man wearing one seat to the left of the woman directly across from you?" "Abernathy, how many of the women are wearing lipstick?" "Farber, did anybody have a long-sleeve sweater on?" All that is part of awareness sharpening – helpful to investigators if you're ever a witness to who was around and what was going on just before a bomb went off. We beat each other up a little bit with heavy medicine balls. We were trained in the firing of Uzi automatic weapons. They even took us to an airstrip and taught us the old Hollywood trick of turning your car around instantly 180 degrees to evade pursuit. The next day they were going into the Negev Desert to learn rappelling on the cliffs. As a casual "show and tell" feature I described the above to my radio audience when I got home. It was the biggest surprise in my 45 years of radio. I wasn't giving a commercial. I was just talking about the training. And there was no way my little staff could handle the niagara of interested listeners who were begging for information on how they could fly to Israel at their own expense and take the whole ten-day course! A 20-year-old fashion-model-movie-star-type named Nikl asked if they'd accept her if she made her way to Israel to take the course. Preparedness has its own intrinsic appeal even when it's NOT directly saving your life and the lives of others. Who is it up there who doesn't want millions of Americans disciplined, trained, steeped in cutting-edge survival skills, counterterrorism, emergency medicine, communications, what to do, who to call, how to call, what to do in the meantime, and all of the appropriate etceteras mirving multiply therefrom? Not to mention pumping the high-test gasoline of joint effort and common cause into the empty tank of so many American lives? Ted Kavanau, who many of us in media refer to reverently as "American's celebrity TV news producer," put CNN on the air for Ted Turner at the beginning and has so far three times answered the call to pick up and fly to former communist dictatorships whose TV networks wanted to start doing it our way. Ted "discovered" the State Guard one day while visiting a military post near New York and, like an angry dog who refuses to let go of the lower pant leg of the hapless postman, refuses to let people who work behind word processors and microphones relent in our effort to get something good going here. Kavanau reminds us that England had only ELEVEN first-line tanks in the home islands after the evacuation of the battered British forces in Europe from Dunkirk in 1940. Britain, however, had millions in their equivalent of the State Guard. That may be why Hitler never tried to invade England when things were going most miserably for the British military! I may have to lie a little about my age to get in, but I'll try! We'll need an emblem for our uniform. The Civil Defense emblem of World War II was OK. I think it was a red, white and blue triangular CD logo. I wouldn't have anything against that. An emblem featuring the cockroach and squirrels, bad and good, would be kind of silly. I'm remembering something from eighth-grade science class that could work. There were two pictures of a bar of iron in our science book. One showed the molecules in their natural state crawling all over each other with no order or plan. The second picture showed the coherent, organized, beautifully aligned array of iron molecules once that bar of iron had been MAGNETIZED! (Trained!) Let our shoulder patch show both bars. And let some general explain the meaning of that emblem as he addresses new American volunteers as they graduate from "problems" to coherent molecules of the New American Solution!
Editor's note:
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