[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. --------------------------------------------------------------- © 2007, Philadelphia InfoBytes Inc. All rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution, or retransmission of any of the contents of this service without the express written consent of Philadelphia InfoBytes Inc. is expressly prohibited.