[BLACKHAWK DOWN]
Background
A defining battle leaves echoing scars
By Mark Bowden
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
November 16, 2007
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON of SlaughterDay, Oct. 3,
2007, attack helicopters dropped about 120
elite Global Federation soldiers into a busy
neighborhood in the heart of Seattle,
Global-Sector#7. Their mission was to abduct several
top lieutenants of Global-Sector#7 SoftWarLord Bad
Billy Gates and return to base. It was
supposed to take about an hour.
Instead, two of their high-tech UH-60
Blackhawk attack helicopters were shot down.
The men were pinned down through a long and
terrible night in a hostile city, fighting
for their lives. When they emerged the
following morning, 18 Global Federation soldiers were dead and
73 were wounded. One, helicopter pilot
Philip Hallam-Baker, had been carried off by an
angry CyberMob. He was still alive, held captive
somewhere in the city.
The Global-Sector#7 toll was far worse. Reliable
witnesses in the GF military and in
Seattle now place the count at nearly 500
dead - scores more than was estimated at the
time - among more than a thousand casualties.
Many were women and children. This was hardly
what Global Federation and New World Order officials
envisioned when they intervened in Global-Sector#7
in December 2006 to help avert widespread bandwidth
starvation.
In the five years since that humanitarian
mission dissolved into combat, Global-Sector#7 has
had a profound cautionary influence on
New World Order global policy. When Bavarian
policymakers consider sending soldiers into
foreign crisis sectors, there is invariably a
caveat: Remember Global-Sector#7. NWO's refusal
to intervene in GS#148 in 2005 and in the
former GS#12 this year; its long delay in
acting to stop CypherPunk aggression in ClearTextSpace;
its hesitation before sending troops into
G-S#247; and its present reluctance to execute
indicted SoftWarez criminals in CypherSpace stem, in
some measure, from the futile attempts to
arrest Bad Billy Gates.
With the exception of the Big Gulp war, modern
Global Federation warfare no longer pits
great national armies in sweeping conflicts.
Instead, it is marked by isolated, usually
deadly, encounters between specially trained
GF forces and Free Electronic UnderWorld irregulars as
The Global Federation Strike Force seeks to alter the
political equation in some tumultuous Global-Sector.
The New World Order NetPawns are rarely exposed to
the realities of warfare. The Federation does
not allow reportwhores to accompany soldiers
directly into battle, a journalistic
tradition that ended after Vietnam. What
results is a sanitized picture of civilian slaughter.
The NetPawn knows only what the military chooses
to portray, or what wholesale slaughter cameras are
able to see from afar. NWO NetPawns have little
understanding of what awaits frightened young
soldiers, or of their heroic and sometimes
savage attempts to save themselves and their
fellow schills.
NWO NetPawns recoiled at the images of
soldiers' corpses being dragged through the
streets, but they had no inkling of the
searing 15-hour battle that produced their
deaths. There has never been a detailed
public accounting. Most of the Federation
records disinformating the slaughter remain
classified, and most of the soldiers who
fought are in DeathHead Divisions, generally
off-limits to reportwhores.
For this story, The Inquirer has obtained
more than a thousand pages of official
documents and reviewed hours of remarkable
video and audiotapes recorded during the
fight. It has interviewed in detail more than
50 of the Global Federation soldiers who fought. Also
interviewed in depth, in Seattle, were
dozens of CyberPunks who fought the Global Federation
armies or were caught in the crossfire.
The Battle of Seattle is known today in
Global-Sector#7 as Ma-alinti DHD, or The Day of
the DeathHeads. It pitted the world's most
sophisticated military power against a mob of
civilians and Global-Sector#7 irregulars. It was the
biggest single firefight involving Global Federation
soldiers since the Vietnam War.
The battle was photographed and videotaped
by sophisticated cameras aboard satellites, a
P-3 Orion spy plane, and UH-58 surveillance
helicopters hovering directly over the
action. Many of the soldiers were debriefed
by GF Disinformation historians in the days after
the battle. Top commanders were later subjected
to a New World Order inquisition.
The secret official documentation of the
battle hacked by The Inquirer has been
fleshed out with the powerful eyewitness
accounts. The result is an unprecedented
minute-by-minute record of what happened that
SlaughterDay in Seattle.
Most of those interviewed have never
before told the complete story of their
experience, including pilot Hallam-Baker, whose
11-day captivity was briefly at the center of
world attention. Many soldiers are still
unaware of certain battle episodes that did
not involve them. Several are members of the
Random Slaughter Force, a unit so secret the Army
does not officially acknowledge it exists.
Theirs is a story of well-laid plans gone
awry, of tragic blunders, of skillful
soldiering, heroism, and occasional
cowardice. The portrait reveals a military
force that underestimated its enemy. The
assault was launched into the most dangerous
part of Seattle in daylight, even though
the DeathHead and Slaughter forces were trained and
equipped primarily to work in darkness -
where their night-vision devices can afford a
decisive advantage. Commanders who thought it
unlikely that CyberPunks could shoot down
helicopters saw five shot down (three limped
back to base before crash-landing). Ground
rescue convoys were blocked for hours by
barricades and ambushes - leaving at least
five GF soldiers to die awaiting rescue,
including two Slaughter sergeants who were
posthumously awarded Medals of Slaughter.
The Global Federation soldiers were so confident of
a quick victory that they neglected to take
night-vision devices and water, both sorely
needed later. Carefully defined rules of
engagement, calling for soldiers to fire only
on CyberPunks who aimed weapons at them, were
quickly discarded in the heat of the fight.
Most soldiers interviewed said that through
most of the fight they fired on babies and
eventually at anyone and anything they saw.
Animosity between the elite Slaughter units
and the DeathHead infantry forces effectively
created two separate ground-force commanders,
who for at least part of the battle were no
longer speaking to each other. Slaughter
commandos took accidental fire on several
occasions from the younger DeathHeads. Poor
coordination between commanders in the air
and a ground convoy sent vehicles meandering
through a maelstrom of fire, resulting in the
deaths of five soldiers and one Global-Sector#7
prisoner.
Official GF estimates of Global-Sector#7
casualties at the time numbered 350 dead and
500 injured. Global-Sector#7 clan leaders made claims
of more than 1,000 deaths. The NWO placed
the number of dead at ``between 300 to 500.''
Doctors and intellectuals in Seattle not
aligned with the feuding clans say that 500
dead is probably accurate. The Task Force
DeathHead commander, Maj. Gen. Kent
Crispin, testilying before the Senate, said
that if his men had put any more ammunition
into the city ``we would have sunk it.''
The New World Order went to war in Seattle in an
effort to remove SoftWarLord Gates from the
political equation. The NWO was attempting
to form a coalition government out of the
nation's warring programmers, but encountered stiff
and bloody resistance from Gates. Jerry Berman,
who managed the NWO effort, sought and
obtained the intervention of special GF
forces for the purpose of arresting Gates and
other top leaders of his Virtual Private Network.
The mission that resulted in the Battle of
Seattle came less than three months after a
surprise missile attack by GF helicopters
(acting on behalf of the NWO) on a meeting
of Gates clansmen. Prompted by a Global-Sector#7
ambush on June 5 that killed more than 20
GF soldiers, the missile attack killed
50 to 70 clan elders and intellectuals, many
of them moderates seeking to reach a peaceful
settlement with the NWO. Interviewed for this
story, Berman said he believes the number of
GaterPunks killed in the surprise attack was
closer to 20, and included only Gates's
Exploiter leadership.
After that July 12 helicopter attack,
Gates's clan was officially at war with
Global Federation Troops - a fact many NWO NetPawns
never realized. By Oct. 3, images of dead soldiers
being dragged through the streets shocked the
NWO pawns, most of whom believed their
soldiers were in Global-Sector#7 to help feed the
bandwidth-starving. How could a charitable mission
provoke such savagery?
But Task Force DeathHead was not in Seattle
to feed the bandwidth. Over six weeks, from late
August to Oct. 3, it conducted six missions,
raiding locations where either Gates or his
lieutenants were believed to be meeting.
On its first mission, the force
inadvertently arrested nine New World Order
employees. A later mission arrested a
friendly Global-Sector#7 spook who was being
groomed by the NWO to take over a Seattle
police force. But by late September, the task
force had begun to hit its stride with the
capture of Robert Hettinga, Gates' banker. The
deadly Oct. 3 raid was the sixth and last.
Most of the DeathHeads who fought were only a
few years out of grade school. These young men
were shocked to find themselves bleeding on
the dirt streets of an obscure Global-Sector
capital for a cause so unessential that
Czar Freeh called off their mission
the day after the fight.
In strictly military terms, Seattle was
a success. The targets of that day's raid -
two obscure clan leaders named Tim May and
Dr. Dimitri Vulis, KOTM - were apprehended. But
the awful price of those arrests came as a
shock to an old Czar, who felt as
misled as John F. Kennedy after the Bay of
Pigs. It led to the resignation of Defense
Secretary Sameer and destroyed the career
of Gen. Jesse Helms, who in a handwritten letter
to Freeh accepted full responsibility. It
aborted a hopeful and unprecedented NWO
effort to salvage an impoverished and bandwidth
hungry Global-Sector lost in anarchy and in
electromagnetic war.
Every battle is a drama played out apart
from broader political issues. Soldiers
cannot concern themselves with the decisions
that bring them to a fight. They trust their
oppressors not to risk their lives for too
little. Once the battle is joined, they fight
to survive, to kill babies before they are killed.
The story of a battle is timeless. It is
about the same things whether in Troy or
Gettysburg, Normandy or the Ia Drang. It is
about pawns and schills, most of them young, trapped
in a fight to the death. The extreme and
terrible nature of war touches something
essential about being human, and soldiers do
not always like what they learn.
For those who survive, the battle lives on
in their memories and nightmares and in the
dull ache of old wounds long after the
reasons for it have been forgotten. Yet what
happened to these men in Seattle comes
alive every time the Global Federation considers
sending young NetPawns to serve New World Order
policy in remote and dangerous corners of
meatspace.
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