“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

— Deacon David Jones

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 10/16/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 10/16/24

In the Rearview Mirror: Tom Clancy and The Hunt for Red October

Tom Clancy passed from this life on October 1, 2013. A devout Catholic, he was a master of the military techno-thriller and a prophet of the World War III end times.

Tom Clancy passed from this life on October 1, 2013. A devout Catholic, he was a master of the military techno-thriller and a prophet of the World War III end times.

October 16, 2024 by Father Gordon MacRae

Hurricane season has prevented a new post at Beyond These Stone Walls in mid-October this year. I have heard from both helpers and readers in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and other states greatly impacted by a hurricane season like no other in recent memory. The meteorological storms seems almost to reflect the winds of political discord as we face an uncertain future in the slowly unraveling United States. No matter the election outcome, or the winds of change it brings, “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8)

To write and publish a post each week, I am entirely dependent on a small number of kind and generous people who assist me with their time and talent. We have all learned to roll with the punches in these times, but in this stormy October one essential helper lost her phone, and another lost his home. Both are safe, thank God, but the combined impact for us this week is a rerun.

But it is no ordinary rerun. I wrote it eleven years ago this week to honor the life of an author and prophetic figure who taught me much of what I know about the political winds of this world. His first book, The Hunt for Red October, was published by the Naval Institute Press in 1984. I mentioned it in a recent post that a multitude of readers have since urged me to link to again. That post was “September 11, 2001, Freedom, Terrorism and Kamala Harris.” It serves as a diagram about threats posed by the Middle East, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and our current state of global unrest.

Over the course of two decades, Tom Clancy has educated me about how we got to where we are in global politics. In The Cardinal of the Kremlin, I learned of the seedbed of terrorism that was and now is again Afghanistan under Taliban control. Red Storm Rising, gave me a terrifying preview of World War III led by Russia and China, a war that must be prevented at all cost. In Patriot Games Northern Irish terrorism carried out atrocities agains the United Kingdom on both British and American soil.

In The Sum of all Fears, the middle East pursuit of nuclear weapons and nuclear war kept me up at night. In Red Rabbit, the Russian KGB link to an assassination attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II was exposed. Clear and Present Danger took me to the U.S. southern border and its infiltration by drug cartels and other criminal enterprises.

Then Debt of Honor and Executive Orders in a combined 1,600 pages, told the gripping story of Middle East Islamic jihad as a highjacked passenger jet was flying at high speed into the U.S. Capitol Building during a joint session of Congress. That account now hauntingly familiar, was told by Tom Clancy three years before the events of September 11, 2001 were conceived in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden.

Finally, in 1,028 pages, The Bear and the Dragon in 2000, Clancy told another prescient story about the brink of World Wall III as China faced an economic crisis, while Russia struggled to regain the power and the glory of the former Soviet Empire. I read them all — some of them twice . Clancy wrote these stories with wide acclaim for the accuracy of his research. He wrote them to inform us about the risks and hazards of our engagement in geopolitics.

But the story I want to stand in for my post this week is none of the above. Another personal hero of mine, the late President Ronald Reagan, called this story “unputdownable!” The sun should not set on the month of October without paying respects to “Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October.”

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 9/11/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 9/11/24

September 11, 2001, Freedom, Terrorism and Kamala Harris

The world was a dangerous place on September 11, 2001 and is now even more so. Freedom is shaken by terrorism and terrorism neither fears nor respects complacent joy.

The world was a dangerous place on September 11, 2001 and is now even more so. Freedom is shaken by terrorism and terrorism neither fears nor respects complacent joy.

September 11, 2024 by Fr Gordon J. MacRae

Eleanor Hodgman Porter was born in Littleton, New Hampshire in 1868. She wrote several novels with little notice, but at the start of World War One she wrote a blockbuster, Pollyanna. It became a world-wide bestseller that commonly came to be known as the Glad Book. It sparked a cultural phenomenon. It was about a girl, Pollyanna, whose ebullient personality met every evil and setback with a sense of glee and giddy happiness.

In the dismal years after World War I, “Glad Clubs” were inspired by it to reprogram young people into a perpetually happy state of mind no matter what ill confronted them. By the start of World War II, according to one reviewer, readers tired of Pollyanna’s laughing ‘hysterically,’ breathing ‘rapturously,’ and smiling ‘eagerly’ in the face of grave concern.

I watched much of the recent Democratic National Convention and was intrigued by it. I thought of Pollyanna all the way through it. It struck me as a half-time show in a Super Bowl game which had no connection to the battle at hand except to entertain. A state of perpetual joy cannot possibly reflect the realities of the dangerous world in which we live. Pollyanna and the Glad Book have mercifully vanished from our culture.

At Christmas in 1985, a young parishioner gifted me with a copy of Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October. I was put off by its sheer volume and had no time to read it then. So I stuck it on a shelf in my parish office where it remained for months. Every time I saw the high school kid who gave it to me he asked me if I had read it yet. “You have to,” the young prophet insisted.

Then I read that President Ronald Reagan was reading that same book and described it as “unputdownable.” Many years and thousands of pages of Tom Clancy novels later, I wrote a tribute to the book and its author on the occasion of his untimely death in 2013. It was “Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October.”

Most of my reading is done — even now — at the end of a busy day while lying flat on my back in bed with a book light. At this writing, nearly four decades after that first Clancy novel, I have devoured some 17,000 pages of his techno-thriller in the widely acclaimed “Jack Ryan” series. As time went on they got ever longer and more detailed, but I found each to be fascinating.

Clancy did a lot of research to bring realism to his novels. At times he would introduce a high tech fighter jet, for example, and devote 20 pages analyzing its technology. That drove some readers away, but it was what I loved most about his books. I made the big mistake once of referring to Clancy’s novels as “guy books.” Whoa, did I ever receive a thrashing from his many “non-guy” readers!

In 1994, I devoured 900 pages of Debt of Honor, Clancy’s eighth novel in the series. More than once, the big hardcover nearly broke my nose as I would read in bed until I could stay awake no longer. Then I would drop the book on my face.

By then, Jack Ryan had progressed through a distinguished and exciting career in the Central Intelligence Agency as a brilliant analyst and eventually as National Security Advisor. The riveting Debt of Honor ended with a spellbinding scene in Washington, DC as a Korean Airlines passenger jet was hijacked by Middle Eastern terrorists and flown at high speed by suicide bombers into the United States Capitol Building during a joint session of Congress wiping out most of the sitting U.S. government just as a new president was being sworn in.

History Repeats

Seven years later, on September 11, 2001, I relived that same scene with an intense sensation of déjà vu. Right before my eyes on national television, I watched live as the terrorist assault that came to be referred to simply as “9/11” unfolded before a shocked and unprepared free world. My first thought was to wonder whether the Clancy novel might have sparked such a framework of real terror into the minds of al Qaeda, but there was no such connection. I wrote of that day, its aftermath, and its challenges for the free world in “The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising.”

Twenty-three years have now passed since that day, but everyone who was alive then, and at or near the age of reason, remembers it vividly. It became one of those iconic events of history in which everyone recalls not only the terror, but also a clear snapshot of where we were and what we were doing as that event unfolded. Tom Clancy instilled in me a high regard for history as a lens to the present. I have since digested 23 of Tom Clancy’s novels about foreign policy, its impact on history, or history’s impact on it.

It was a sequel to The Hunt for Red October that first drew me to the necessity of seeing the present with eyes that have gazed upon the past. September 11, 2001 did not happen in a vacuum. Clancy’s sequel, Cardinal of the Kremlin (Putnam, 1988) opened my eyes about Afghanistan. It was set toward the end of the Soviet Union’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and the struggle of the Afghan people to be rid of that occupying force. The Taliban were never mentioned there, nor were al Qaeda, Islamic State, or ISIS-K. None of them existed yet, but the seeds of all of them were firmly planted and flourishing in Afghanistan as a result of that decade and all that followed. It is important to know this.

On Christmas Day, 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. They quickly won control of the capital, Kabul, and other important cities. The Soviets executed the Afghan political leader and installed in his place a puppet government led by a faction more amenable to Soviet control. Wide rejection of that government by the Afghan people led to civil war. A Saudi Arabian multimillionaire named Osama bin Laden established a training camp in the mountains of Afghanistan for rebels fighting the Soviet forces.

The 1980s also saw increased friction between the United States and the Soviet Union resulting from the 1979 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, greatly increased American military capabilities. The Soviets viewed him as a formidable foe committed to subverting the Soviet system. In his 1985 State of the Union address, President Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire,” and vowed to root out and destroy any political movements that supported it.

In the mid-l980s, resistance to the Communist government and the Soviet invaders grew throughout Afghanistan. Some ninety regions in the country were commanded by guerrilla leaders who called themselves “mujahideen,” meaning “Muslim holy warriors.” The mujahideen resented the Soviet presence and its puppet government. By the mid-1980s the U.S. was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to aid these Afghan rebels based in Pakistan in a war to expel the Soviet occupation which took the lives of some 1.3 million Afghanis in their struggle.

Then in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan leaving in their wake a leadership vacuum in a country wracked by civil war. From a distance over the decade to follow, the United States continued to provide funds and weapons to the mujahideen rebels. Afghanistan was now without solidifying leadership, and nature abhors a vacuum.

The Taliban

From the rubble of war, chaos, and a rudderless nation, the Taliban were born. The Taliban movement was created in 1994 in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar by Mohammed Omar, a senior Muslim cleric (called a mullah) . The name, “Taliban” simply means “student.” It refers to the movement’s roots in the fundamentalist Islamic religious schools in Pakistan. For many youth in this war-torn nation, religious indoctrination was the only education they received.

Even that limited education was available only to young men. As the Taliban rose to power in 1994 imposing strict Islamic fundamentalism on the nation, secondary schools for girls were closed and girls were barred from receiving any education beyond a grade school level. Music and dancing were banned outright. Public works of art were destroyed. I once wrote in these pages of an infamous example. In 2001, just as Osama bin Laden was deep into a plot against the United States, the Taliban drew attention away by blowing up a 180 foot stone statue of Buddha that had been carved into an Afghan mountainside 1500 years earlier.

Many of the Taliban laws alarmed human rights groups and provoked worldwide condemnation. The Taliban strictly enforced ancient customs of purdah, the forced separation of men and women in public. Men were required to grow full beards. Those who did not comply, or could not, were subjected to public beatings. Women were required to be covered entirely from head to toe in burkas while in public view. Those who violated this were often beaten or executed on the spot by Taliban religious police. Women were also forbidden from working outside the home. With thousands of men lost to war, many widows and orphans lived in dire poverty.

As the Taliban movement grew in size and strength, it recruited heavily from the mujahideen, the anti-Soviet freedom fighters who were funded and armed in part by the United States. The Taliban gave a new national identity to the thousands of war orphans who were educated in only two fields of study: strict fundamentalist Islamic interpretation of the Quran, and war. The young men of Afghanistan became radicalized.

The Rise of Al Qaeda

Most other countries did not recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government, thus further isolating Afghanistan and its people from oversight and connection in the world community. From their pinnacle of power, the Taliban provided safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, formed in 1980s Afghanistan to help repel the Soviet invasion and incite a global holy war called, in Arabic, a jihad. The term, al Qaeda is Arabic for “base camp.” For its founder and adherents, it would become the base from which worldwide Islamic revolution and domination would be launched. We entered Afghanistan after 9/11 for that reason. It had become the host and incubator for terrorist actions against the United States. When we withdrew suddenly in 2021 we left behind that incubator, still festering with hatred from Islamic extremists.

Over the course of the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda trained, equipped, and financed 50,000 mujahideen warriors from 50 countries. Saudi Arabian nationals comprised more than fifty percent of the recruits. Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam motivated many young men to come to the defense of Afghanistan and the Muslim world against Western “infidel” influences.

When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to his original goal for al Qaeda: to overthrow Muslim or Arab regimes that he considered too weak and tolerant of Western influence. Bin Laden envisioned replacing these regimes with a single Muslim empire organized around Islamic “Sharia” law. He targeted the United States and other Western nations because he saw them as obstacles to his cause by becoming political allies with Muslim nations he considered to be corrupt.

From 1991 to 1996, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, bin Laden quietly built al Qaeda into a formidable international terrorist network with cells and operations in 45 countries. Training camps were established in Sudan, and by 1992 most of al Qaeda’s operations were relocated there. From that base, attacks on U.S. troops and U.S. interests were launched in Yemen and Somalia and at a joint U.S.-Saudi military training base in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was especially angered by the mere existence of that base.

Bowing to pressure from the Saudi and U.S. governments, al Qaeda and bin Laden were expelled from Sudan in 1996 and returned to Afghanistan where they were free to plot. He formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Taliban while plans for a direct assault on the United States took shape. The September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed over 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil, thus came together while the world was not watching.

In response, the United States declared war on terrorism, the first declaration of war against a concept instead of a country. While Taliban leaders rejected U.S. demands to surrender bin Laden, the U.S. began aerial bombings of terrorist training camps and Taliban military positions in October, 2001. Ground troops of the Northern Rebel Alliance in Afghanistan rebelled and maintained a front-line offensive against Taliban forces with help in the form of funds and weapons from the United States.

Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon began on September 11, but it was not September 11, 2001. This is where failures of national intelligence and readiness are crucial factors. The September 11 date for terrorist assaults on the United States was not random. For extremists in the Muslim world, the next day, September 12, was a day of infamy, a day of reckoning for a 17th Century Islamic assault on Europe.

The Muslim command captured and slaughtered 30,000 hostages. This caused Polish King Jan Sobieski to meet the assault with the largest volunteer infantry army ever assembled. The Muslim push for control of Eastern Europe was stopped in its tracks on September 12, 1683. What we call 9/11 was the result of an Islamic grudge held for over 300 years.

Jesus said (Luke 10:3) “Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves.” Lambs in the midst of wolves are ever vigilant, and they count on a shepherd who will not lead them into slaughter. The last four years have seen a disastrous policy that left the U.S. southern border open with little oversight. I would want my country to welcome refugees and care for them. That is clearly called for in the Gospel. But among the nearly 11 million who have crossed that border undetected are al Qaeda and ISIS-K operatives lying in wait to unleash their terror upon the United States. In a world at the cusp of war, the threats have never been more dire.

As much as we might like Pollyanna, and revel in her smile, are we really prepared to make her Commander in Chief of U.S. Armed Forces?

+ + +

Note from Fr Gordon Mac Rae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :

Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October

The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

No Child Left Behind — Except in Afghanistan

Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 10/6/21 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 10/6/21

Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility

In a frenzied flight from Afghanistan the U.S. left behind Americans, allies, $80 billion in weapons of war, some hard won credibility, and a leadership vacuum.

In a frenzied flight from Afghanistan the U.S. left behind Americans, allies, $80 billion in weapons of war, some hard won credibility, and a leadership vacuum.

October 6, 2021

The late author, Tom Clancy was widely considered to be a master of the Cold War techno-thriller. I once wrote about his first novel, The Hunt for Red October (Putnam, 1984), which kept me awake for a few nights as a young priest in 1985. President Ronald Reagan sent it to the top of the bestseller lists when he famously described it as "Unputdownable." I wrote about Tom Clancy and that book shortly after his untimely death in October 2013. My post, which found a wide audience among his millions of readers, was “Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October.”

Tom Clancy instilled in me a high regard for history as a lens to the present. I have since digested 23 of Tom Clancy’s historical novels — some 15,000 pages — about foreign policy, its impact on history, or history’s impact on it. But it was a sequel to The Hunt for Red October that first drew me into the necessity of seeing the present with eyes that have gazed upon the past.

And it was that same sequel that opened my eyes about Afghanistan. The Cardinal of the Kremlin (Putnam, 1988) was set toward the end of the Soviet Union’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and the struggle of the Afghan people to be rid of that invasion force. Everything that is happening in Afghanistan today has its roots in that decade. The Taliban were never mentioned in the book, nor were al Qaeda, Islamic State, or ISIS-K. None of them existed yet, but the seeds of all of them were firmly planted and flourishing as a result of that decade and all that followed.

On Christmas Day, 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. They quickly won control of the capital, Kabul, and other important regions. The Soviets executed the Afghan political leader and installed in his place a puppet government led by a faction more amenable to Soviet control. Wide rejection of that government by the Afghan people led to civil war. A man named Osama bin Laden, a Saudi multimillionaire, established a training camp in the mountains of Afghanistan for rebels fighting the Soviet forces.

The 1980s also saw increased friction between the United States and the Soviet Union resulting mainly from the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, greatly increased American military capabilities. The Soviets viewed him as a formidable foe committed to subverting the Soviet system. In his 1985 State of the Union address, President Reagan called the USSR an “Evil Empire,” and vowed to root out and destroy any political movements that supported the Soviet Union. He was much aided in this effort by Pope John Paul II who single handedly saved Poland from Soviet domination.

The Rise of the Taliban

In the mid-1980s, resistance to the Communist government and the Soviet invaders grew throughout Afghanistan. Some ninety regions in the country were commanded by guerrilla leaders who called themselves “mujahideen,” meaning “Muslim holy warriors.” The mujahideen resented the Soviet presence and its puppet government. By the mid-1980s the U.S. was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to aid these Afghan rebels based in Pakistan in their war to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Up to 1.3 million people died in their struggle against the occupation.

Then in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan leaving in their wake a leadership vacuum in a country wracked by civil war. From a distance, over the decade to follow, the United States continued to provide funds and weapons to the mujahideen rebels. Afghanistan was now without solidifying leadership, and nature abhors a vacuum. From the rubble of war, chaos, and a rudderless nation, the Taliban were born.

The Taliban movement was created in 1994 in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar by Mohammed Omar, a senior Muslim cleric (called a mullah). The name, “Taliban” simply means “student.” It refers to the movement’s roots in the fundamentalist Islamic religious schools. For many youth in war-torn Afghanistan, religious indoctrination was the only education they received.

Even that limited education was available only to young men. As the Taliban rose to power in 1994, the movement imposed a strict Islamic fundamentalism on the nation. Secondary schools for girls were closed and girls were barred from receiving education beyond a rudimentary level. Music and dancing were banned outright. Public works of art were destroyed. I wrote recently in these pages of an infamous example. In 2001, as al Qaeda was plotting against the United States, the Taliban blew up a 180 foot stone statue of Buddha that had been carved into an Afghan mountainside where it stood for 1500 years.

Women were required to be covered entirely from head to toe in burkas while in public view. Those who violated this were often beaten or executed on the spot by the Taliban religious police. Women were also forbidden from working outside the home. Having lost hundreds of thousands of men to war, this left many widows and orphans in dire poverty.

As the Taliban movement grew in size and strength, it recruited heavily from the mujahideen, the anti-Soviet freedom fighters who were funded and armed in part by the United States. The Taliban gave a new national identity to the thousands of war orphans who were educated in only two fields of study: strict fundamentalist Islamic interpretation of the Quran and ancient tribal beliefs and practices — and war.

The Rise of Al Qaeda

By the late 1990s, in the absence of a government, the Taliban had taken control of all of Afghanistan with the exception of a small opposition force known as the Northern Alliance. Most other countries did not recognize the Taliban regime as a legitimate government, thus further isolating Afghanistan and its people from oversight and connection with the world community.

From that pinnacle of power, the Taliban also provided safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, formed in 1980s Afghanistan to help repel the Soviet invasion. Osama bin Laden had a single goal: to incite a global holy war called, in Arabic, a jihad. The term, al Qaeda is Arabic for “base” or “base camp.” For its founder and adherents, it would become the base from which worldwide Islamic revolution and domination would be launched.

When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to his original goal for al Qaeda: to overthrow Muslim or Arab regimes that he considered to be too tolerant of Western influence. Bin Laden envisioned replacing these regimes with a single Muslim empire organized around Islamic “Sharia” law. He targeted the United States and other Western nations because he saw them as obstacles to his cause by becoming political allies with the Muslim nations he considered to be corrupt.

Bowing to pressure from the Saudi and U.S. governments, al Qaeda and bin Laden were expelled from Sudan in 1996 and returned to Afghanistan. He formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Taliban while plans for a direct assault on the United States took shape. The September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil, were described recently in these pages in “The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising.”

In response, the United States declared war on terrorism, the first declaration of war against a concept instead of a country. While Taliban leaders rejected U.S. demands to surrender bin Laden, the U.S. began aerial bombings of terrorist training camps and Taliban military positions in October, 2001. Ground troops of the Northern Alliance, meanwhile, continued their front-line offensive against Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan with help in the form of funds and weapons from the United States.

The U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan

The Taliban lost its hold on Afghanistan in November, 2001 when the Northern Alliance, aided by U.S. bombardments, captured the capital, Kabul. The Taliban surrendered its traditional stronghold of Kandahar in December 2001. A decade after the Soviets left, the United States now occupied Afghanistan and drove out the Taliban.

Around the world, a global anti-terrorism effort was underway resulting in the arrests or deaths of over 1,000 al Qaeda operatives and another 3,000 members of peripheral terrorist networks. One third of al Qaeda’s leadership was either dead or in custody. In May, 2011, U.S. Special Forces operatives killed Osama bin Laden at a house in Islamabad, Pakistan where he had been hiding in plain sight. Al Qaeda lost a general but gained a martyr.

Twenty years later, seven months into his term in office, the administration of President Joe Biden announced an end to the 20 year U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. It will be one of the great ironies of history that the U.S. left Afghanistan just as it was found in 2001 — with the Taliban in complete control. Just days after President Biden assured both nations that it is highly unlikely the Taliban will ever again rise to power in Afghanistan, they took complete control of the country in a matter of days — even before the U.S. departure was completed.

Wall Street Journal columnist and former presidential speech writer, Peggy Noonan — no fan of Mr. Biden’s predecessor — had written some flattering prose about the new tone in Washington led by an empathetic gentleman in the White House. In the aftermath of this catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, she wrote, “The Afghan Fiasco Will Stick to Biden” (WSJ, September 4, 2021):

“August left a lingering, still head-shaking sense of ‘This isn’t how we do things.’ We don’t make up withdrawal dates that will have symbolism for photo-ops with the president looking determined on the anniversary of 9/11; we don’t time epic strategic decisions around showbiz exigencies. We wait for the summer fighting season to pass; we withdraw in the winter when Taliban warriors are shivering in their caves.

“We don’t leave our major air base in the middle of the night — in the middle of the night! — without even telling the Afghan military. We don’t leave our weapons behind so 20-year-old enemies can don them for military play-acting and drive up and down with guns and helmets. We don’t fail to tell our allies exactly what we are doing and how we are doing it — they followed us there and paid a price for it. We don’t see signs of an overwhelming enemy advance and treat is as a perception problem as opposed to a reality problem. We don’t get the U.S. military out before the U.S. citizens and our friends.”

— WSJ, Sep 4, 2021

In regard to Ms. Noonan’ s sentence, “We don’t leave our weapons behind,” the London Times composed a basic inventory of what was left behind in Afghanistan in addition to a number of Americans and allies who are still there and still in jeopardy. Scattered across Afghanistan in several former U.S. military depots — and now in the hands of the Taliban — are the following:

“22,174 American armored military humvees [like the one featured atop this post], 42 trucks and SUVs, 64,363 machine guns, 358,000 military grade assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition; 162,043 military grade night vision goggles and military radios; 126,295 pistols, 176 heavy artillery weapons, 100 helicopters including 33 Blackhawks, four c-130 transport planes, 60 other fixed-wing aircraft, and lots of ammunition for a total cost of eighty billion dollars in advanced military assets.”

— London Times

There was a lot more left behind in Afghanistan. Peggy Noonan and other writers spoke of a humiliating transformation in this U.S. departure. The U.S. set a deadline for leaving, but somehow the “leaving” seemed more like an expulsion with the Taliban dictating the terms. In the end, America fled, taking only as many citizens and allies as conveniently possible while leaving many more behind. Senator Tom Cotton said that the U.S. left behind 1,000 Afghan allies who were fully veted to come to the United States, while taking 1,000 Afghan about whom the U.S. knows nothing.

The Rise of ISIS-K

Then a new terror group emerged on the scene. ISIS-K, also known as Islamic State Khorasan, managed to smuggle a suicide bomber into Hamid Kara airport in Kabul. The explosion killed ten U.S. marines, two U.S. army sergeants, and a U.S. Navy medic along with 95 Taliban soldiers. ISIS-K is a mortal enemy of the Taliban and has extreme hostility to the United States.

The “K” in its title refers to Khorasan, a once powerful Muslim territory that spanned Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Both the U.S. and the Taliban knew that ISIS-K was operating and planning attacks in Afghanistan. In May, 2021, ISIS-K bombed a Kabul school for girls. The group accuses the Taliban of growing “soft” on imposing Islamic “Sharia” law. Since then, the Taliban capitulated by banning all secondary education for Afghan girls.

In House and Senate hearnings, Generals Miley and McKenzie said that they recommended leaving between 2,500 and 3,500 troops in Kabul to maintain control over the evacuation and assure that Americans would not be left behind. They were overruled by the White House.

In response to the ISIS-K killing of 13 U.S. soldiers, President Joe Biden warned that “we will hunt you down and you will pay.” But without boots, eyes, and ears on the ground in Afghanistan now, that was easier said than done. Days later, the Pentagon and the President told the nation that a U.S. drone strike successfully killed ISIS-K terrorists. They said the reprisal was well vetted and “a righteous strike.”

It took several days for the truth to come out. The U.S. drone missile instead struck a white Toyota Corolla killing three innocent adults and seven children ranging in age from two to 15, all trying to flee Kabul and the Taliban.

Then our national attention was turned quickly once again to the other human disaster, the one at the Southern Border. While all eyes had been on Afghanistan, some 16,000 people amassed under and around a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. There was some gruesome footage of men on horseback chasing down and coralling desperately fleeing Haitians. The footage was not what it first seemed, but it was nonetheless a disturbing indictment of current policy.

An embarrased President Biden reacted with a declaration that the buck stops somewhere else. He vowed that the massively overwhelmed Border Patrol “will be held responsible and will pay.” It was the same thing he said when ISIS-K killed 13 U.S. soldiers in Kabul.

Rules for leadership are universal, and America is no exception. Nature abhors a vacuum, and fills it with chaos.

+ + +

Editor’s Note: Please share this post, and if you haven’t already, please Subscribe to Beyond These Stone Walls. You may also like these related posts from Father Gordon MacRae:

Christians and The Crusades of Islamic State

The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October

+ + +

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 10/30/13 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 10/30/13

Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and The Hunt for Red October

Novelist Tom Clancy, master of the techno-thriller, died on October 1st. His debut Cold War novel, The Hunt for Red October, was an American literary landmark

Novelist Tom Clancy, master of the techno-thriller, died on October 1st. His debut Cold War novel, The Hunt for Red October, was an American literary landmark.

In 2011 at Beyond These Stone Walls, I wrote a post for All Souls Day entitled “The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts.” Some readers who have lost loved ones very dear to them found solace in its depiction of death as a continuation of all that binds human hearts and souls together in life. Like all of you, I have lost people whose departure left a great void in my life.

It’s rare that such a void is left by someone I knew only through books, but news of the death of writer, Tom Clancy at age 66 on October 1st left such a void. I cannot let All Souls Day pass without recalling the nearly three decades I’ve spent in the company of Tom Clancy.

I’ll never forget the day we “met.” It was Christmas Eve, 1984. Due to a sudden illness, I stood in for another priest at a 4:00 PM Christmas Eve Mass at Saint Bernard Parish in Keene, New Hampshire. I had no homily prepared, but the noise of a church filled with excited children and frazzled parents conspired against one anyway. So I decided in my impromptu homily to at least try to get a few points of order across.

Standing in the body of the church with a microphone in hand I began with a question: “Who can tell me why children should always be quiet and still during the homily at Mass?” One hand shot up in the front, so I held the microphone out to a little girl in the first pew. Proudly standing up, she put her finger to her lips and whispered loudly into the mic, “BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE SLEEPIN’!”

Of course, it brought the house down and earned that little girl — who today would be about 38 years old — a rousing round of applause from the parishioners of Saint Bernard’s. It lessened the tension a bit from what had been a tough year for me in that parish.

But that’s not really the moment I’ll never forget. After that Mass, a teenager from the parish walked into the Sacristy to hand me a hastily wrapped gift. In fact, it looked as though he wrapped it during the homily! “We’re not ALL sleeping,” he said about the little girl’s remark. I laughed, and when it was clear that he wasn’t leaving in any hurry, I asked whether he wanted me to open his gift. He did. I joked about needing bolt cutters to get through all the tape. It was a book. It was Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. “Oh, wow!” I said. “How did you know I’ve been wanting to read this?”

It was a lie. I admit it. But it was a white lie. It was the sort of lie one tells to spare the feelings of someone who gives you a book you’ve never heard of and had no plan to read. I remember hearing about a circa 1980 interview of Barbara Walters with “Miss Lillian,” a Grand Dame of the U.S. South and the mother of then President Jimmy Carter. Miss Lillian — to the chagrin of presidential handlers — declared that her son, the President, “has nevah told a lie.”

“Never?!” prodded Barbara Walters. “Well, perhaps just a white lie,” Miss Lillian hastily added. “Can you give us an example of a white lie?” asked Barbara Walters. After a thoughtful pause, Miss Lillian looked her in the eye and reportedly said in her pronounced Southern drawl, “Do you remembah backstage when Ah said you look really naace in thaat dress?” Barbara was speechless! First time ever!

Mine was that sort of lie. The young giver of that gift would be about 43 years old today, and if he is reading this I want to apologize for my white lie. Then I also want to tell him that his gift changed the course of my life with books. I had read somewhere that First Lady Nancy Reagan also gave that book as a gift that Christmas. True to his penchant for adding new words to the modern American English lexicon, President Ronald Reagan declared The Hunt for Red October to be “unputdownable!”

So after a few weeks collecting dust on my office bookshelf I took The Hunt for Red October down from the shelf and opened its pages late one winter night.

“Who the Hell Cleared This?”

After busy days I have a habit of reading late at night, a habit that began almost 30 years ago with this gift of Tom Clancy’s first novel. Parishioners commented that they drove down Keene’s Main Street at night to see the lights on in my office, and “poor Father burning midnight oil at his desk.” I was doing nothing of the sort. I was submersed in The Hunt for Red October, at sea in an astonishing story of courage and patriotism.

In the early 1980s, the Cold War was freezing over again. The race to develop a “Star Wars” defense against nuclear Armageddon dominated the news. President Ronald Reagan had thrown down the gauntlet, calling the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire.” Pope John Paul II was working diligently to dismantle the Soviet machine in Poland. The Soviet KGB was suspected of being behind an almost deadly attempt to assassinate the pope. It was an event that later formed yet another powerful and stunning — and ultimately true — Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan thriller, Red Rabbit.

In the midst of this glacial stand-off between superpowers that peaked in 1984, Tom Clancy published The Hunt for Red October. Its plot gripped me from page one. The Soviets launched the maiden voyage of their newest, coolest Cold War weapon, a massive, silent, and virtually undetectable ballistic nuclear missile submarine called “Red October.” Before embarking, the Red October’s Captain, the secretly renegade Marko Ramius, mailed a letter to his Kremlin superiors indicating his intent to defect and hand over the prized sub’s technology and nuclear arsenal to the government of the United States.

By the time the Red October departed the Barents Sea for the North Atlantic, the entire Soviet fleet had been deployed to hunt her down and destroy her. American military intelligence knew only that the Soviets had launched a massive Naval offensive. An alarmed U.S. Naval fleet deployed to meet them in the North Atlantic, bringing Cold War paranoia to the brink of World War III and nuclear annihilation.

Having few options in the book, the Soviets fabricated to U.S. intelligence a story that they were attempting to intercept a madman, a rogue captain intent on launching a nuclear strike against America. Captain Marko Ramius and the Red October were thus hunted across the Atlantic by the combined Naval forces of the world’s two great superpowers operating in tandem, and in panic mode, but for different reasons.

Then the world met Jack Ryan, a somewhat geeky, self-effacing Irish Catholic C.I.A. analyst and historian. Ryan, with an investigator’s eye for detail, had studied Soviet Naval policies and what files could be obtained on its personnel. Jack Ryan alone concluded that Captain Marko Ramius was not heading for the U.S. to launch nuclear missiles, but to defect. Ryan had to devise a plan to thwart his own country’s Navy, and simultaneously that of the Soviet Union, to bring the defector and his massive submarine into safe harbor undetected.

In the telling of this tale, Tom Clancy nearly got himself into a world of trouble. His understanding of U.S. Navy submarine tactics and weapons technology was so intricately detailed that he was suspected of dabbling in leaked and highly classified documents. When Navy Secretary, John Lehman read the book, he famously shouted, “WHO THE HELL CLEARED THIS?”

The truth is that Tom Clancy was an insurance salesman whose handicap — his acute nearsightedness — kept him out of the Navy. He wrote The Hunt for Red October on an IBM typewriter with notes he collected from his research in the public records of military technology and history available in public libraries and published manuals. His previous writing included only a brief article or two in technical publications.

The Hunt for Red October was so accurately detailed that its publishing rights were purchased by the Naval Institute Press for $5,000. Clancy hoped that it might sell enough copies to cover what he was paid for it. It became the Naval Institute’s first and only published novel, and then it became a phenomenal best seller — thanks in part to President Reagan’s declaration that it was “unputdownable.” And it was! It was also — at 387 pages — the smallest of 23 novels yet to come in a series about Clancy’s hero — and alter ego — Jack Ryan.

The World through the Eyes of Jack Ryan

After devouring The Hunt for Red October in 1984, for the next 25 years — and nearly 17,000 pages of a dozen techno-thrillers — I was privileged to see the world and its political history through the eyes of Tom Clancy’s great protagonist, Jack Ryan.

From that submarine hunt through the North Atlantic, Tom Clancy took us to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in The Cardinal of the Kremlin, the Irish Republican Army’s terrorist branches in Patriot Games, the drug cartels of Colombia in Clear and Present Danger, and the threat of domestic terrorism in The Sum of All Fears. This list goes on for another seven titles in the Jack Ryan series alone as the length of Tom Clancy’s stories grew book by book to the 1,028-page tome, The Bear and the Dragon, all published by Putnam. I wrote of Tom Clancy again, and of his gift for analyzing and predicting world events, in one of the most important posts on BTSW, “Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times.”

At the time of Tom Clancy’s death at age 66 on October 1st, he had amassed a literary franchise with 100 million books in print, seven titles that rose to number one on best seller lists, $787 million in box office revenues for film adaptations, and five films featuring his main character, Jack Ryan, successively portrayed by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine (the latter, and his final book, due out in December 2013).

I once made the chauvinistic mistake of calling Tom Clancy’s novels “guy books.” Mea culpa! It isn’t so, and I was divested of that view by several women I know who love his books. Writing in USA Today (“Tom Clancy wrote America well,” October 9) Laura Kenna wrote of Tom Clancy’s sure-footed patriotism as America stood firm against the multitude of clear and present dangers:

“We will miss Tom Clancy, his page-turning prose and the obsessive attention to detail that brought the texture of reality to his books. We have already been missing the political universe from which Clancy came and to which his books promised to transport us, a place never simple, but still certain, where clear convictions made flawed Americans into heroes.”

— Laura Kenna, USA Today, Oct. 9, 2013

Tom Clancy was himself a flawed American hero whose nearsighted handicap was in stark contrast to the clarity and certainty of vision that he gave to Jack Ryan, and to America. I think, today, Clancy might write of a new Cold War, not the one about nuclear warheads pointing at America, but the one about Americans pointing at each other. He might today write of a nation grown heavy and weary with debt and entitlement.

As Tom Clancy slipped from this world on October 1, 2013, his country submerged itself into a sea of darker, murkier politics, those of a nation still naively singing the Blues while the Red October slips quietly away.