Daunting Days of Winter
When mothers send their own sons out to blow themselves up, then celebrate when they do, that’s an enemy that should scare the stuffing out of you.”
    “Scare the stuffing out of you?”
    Frank shrugged. “Brenda doesn’t like me to swear. I have to use substitutes.”
    “Got it.”
    “Anyway, when the women think like that, that’s one screwed up culture. The leaders have no constraints. They can put their soldiers or the entire flipping country at risk.”
    Kyle snickered.
    “Shut up, Kyle. I could blow your damn head off if I wanted to.”
    Kyle looked at Frank and raised his eyes.
    “She lets me say damn,” he replied. “And hell, too. So I hope I don’t offend you with my French.”
    “I’m sorry,” Kyle said, trying to hide his amusement. “Please continue.”
    Frank cleared his throat and spit again. “I can stop talking, if you’d like. We can just sit here and wait for Brenda.”
    “No, no. Please. Go on.”
    Frank wiped at his nose. “You need to excuse me. My system doesn’t love this cold weather. But as I was saying, the Muslims don’t think like us. They are willing to sacrifice everything in this life, for the promise of what’s in the next. When you couple that with an absolute hatred of the West, it was obvious to me that they would forever do everything they could to bring us down, and an EMP was their best shot to get us. They paid a heavy price, but what do they care. They’re up there with Allah.”
    “What kind of a price? I haven’t heard any news for weeks.”
    “About three weeks ago the CIA traced the ship that launched the bomb back to Iran. Once we had sufficient proof, we went in there hard. Unloaded a hell of a lot of missiles on them. Any place suspected of having anything to do with their government or military is now a pile of rubble. Israel had already taken out Syria and Egypt and kicked Iran between the legs, but now with Tehran gone, the whole Middle East is in chaos. I sure as hell would hate to live in Israel right now, because there’s a butt load of angry Arabs. Those Jews always seem to be able to handle themselves though.” Frank laughed for a second. “To be honest, I bet right now the Jews are pretty glad that they aren’t Americans. At least they’ve got flush toilets and electricity.”
    “So how did you end up here? Missoula isn’t exactly a hotbed for military intelligence.”
    “I put my twenty years in, qualified for retirement, and got out. I was tired of all the PC bullcrap. Couldn’t say squat about the Muslims anymore.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Those damn Jihadists are our number one enemy, the ones we’ve spent over a decade at war with, and we have to go to sensitivity training classes to make sure we don’t say anything to hurt their feelings. And it wasn’t just that.”
    The turkeys had come around after fleeing the earlier gunfire, and Frank threw a couple of rocks to shoo them away. He took a cough drop from his pocket, unwrapped it slowly, and put it in his mouth before continuing with his story. “To top it all off was the whole gay issue. They got rid of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, which was tolerable, but all of a sudden there’s a concerted outreach to homosexuals, and I just couldn’t take it. I know I sound like a bigot, and maybe I am, but that was too much. I don’t care what a person does in their bedroom. Hell, a couple of the best analysts I worked with seemed to bat left-handed. But as soon as they dropped that policy, the military became some big social experiment. Gays needed to be hired, gays needed to be promoted, gays needed to be on all the important analyst teams. Everything was being re-oriented. Being straight became bad for your career. Once I knew the date I qualified for retirement, I gave notice and was gone. We were all happy. I was out, and they could hire a homosexual who liked Islam.”
    Kyle noticed Brenda coming back up the hill. “My brother was in the service.

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