Christian Nation (40 page)
S
TEVE
D
UNCAN TURNED
out to be a brilliant organizer and natural guerrilla. The mole people were fearless and effective. Together, they quickly grew a dusk-to-dawn operation, creating a continuous flow of products and materials onto the blockaded island. We established in City Hall an office code-named Amazon, which prioritized orders from Manhattan hospitals and public services, routed those orders to active Sec supporters on the outside, and, through Steve Duncan, coordinated our clandestine system for delivery into Manhattan. A few couriers were shot for breaking curfew, but others promptly took their places.
By the end of the winter, we realized that we could not have endured the siege without this network. I checked once at the archives to see if there was any record of Steve Duncan on the Purity Web. It was a foolish thing to do, as each search is recorded, analyzed, and added to my profile. Duncan had, as I suspected, been removed from history. There was no record of his birth, his dissertation, his tenure at Columbia, his books, or his role during the siege. I don’t know whether he is alive or dead. I realize now that once those of us who were there during the siege are dead, no future historian will know he existed or what he did for New York. Steve Duncan was one of the great heroes of the siege of New York, and I hope some copy of this memoir survives, if for no other reason than to carry that message to a future historian.
The spring of 2020 was a joyful time in Manhattan. The 1.7 million citizens of this twenty-four-square-mile island had survived the winter without, frankly, terrible hardship. Yes, we were sick of protein shakes, turnips, and apples, but suddenly every horizontal surface of the city burst with spring vegetables. We feasted on fresh sweet greens, snap peas, asparagus, and spinach. The hospitals somehow managed to carry on, the subways still ran, electricity flowed, children went to school, and a certain rhythm had settled over this new and strange form of urban life. People reported to offices, even if little work needed to be, or could be, done. With the dramatic increase in leisure time, the libraries, museums, and gyms were full all the time. There was virtually no crime. At first it seemed as if we could carry on this way indefinitely.
But the relief and jubilation of early spring proved to be only a temporary distraction from the underlying peril of our situation. In early June we became nervous that the seven-month anniversary of the siege might be a symbolically potent time for the Holies to end it. Joshua brought down the walls of the besieged city of Jericho in seven days, following a parade of seven circuits around the city walls, and so a triumphant occupation of Manhattan after seven months of siege would have a satisfying biblical resonance. So literal were our foes in their beliefs that we posted special lookouts around the island for the sole purpose of detecting the beginning of any kind of processional circumnavigation of Manhattan that might signal that an attack would follow within seven days.
At that point I had spent over a year considering how to defend Manhattan against an amphibious assault. Thanks to the density of skyscrapers and small scale of open spaces, the use of airborne troops in quantity would be difficult. We knew they couldn’t use the bridges or tunnels. This left a seaborne invasion as their only practical choice. Since there were no beaches on Manhattan, this would require open spaces with low edges in which amphibious assault vessels could discharge their troops. If these water’s-edge spaces abutted open seas as opposed to narrow rivers, this would increase room for maneuver and the rapidity with which subsequent waves of assault vessels could pull up to the land, unload, and retreat.
The strategy I proposed was counterintuitive. Battery Park, with its long gently curving low seawall, the expansive waters of the harbor beyond, and the open lawns of the park on the land side, was by far the best spot for an amphibious assault. It thus might have been logical to erect all the physical barriers we could to block a landing at that spot. But in my view, what we needed was a virtual guarantee that the Battery would be irresistible as the place of attack for the simple reason that our shortage of trained troops and very limited supply of weapons made it impossible to defend all the potential landing spots along the thirty-two-mile perimeter of Manhattan Island. If we were not confident of where the attack would come, we could not mount a resistance even remotely likely to repulse it. When I convinced the governor of my logic in early December, we decided to use the last of our precious fuel stores to position all city buses, trucks, and private vehicles then in Manhattan to create physical barriers to landing at all the potential landing spots around the island
other than
Battery Park. We posted highly visible gun and Guard units at a number of these other places, so it was not totally obvious that we were indifferent to their defense. And we added all remaining stores of razor wire to the edge of the Battery so it did not appear too obviously inviting.
When the seven-month anniversary approached in June, the governor ordered our forces to a state of high alert. The bulk of the Sec fighters and virtually all our artillery and automatic weapons were placed in defensive positions around the Battery. Our Sec fighting force comprised roughly twenty thousand men and women of all ages, most of whom entirely lacked military experience. They were led by officers consisting of the few National Guard commanders left in the city when the siege commenced, about a hundred veterans, and a handful of senior brass from the NYPD. The squads were assembled in a totally ad hoc way. One, for example, consisted exclusively of sanitation workers led by a union officer who had been a master sergeant in Vietnam. Another squad was staffed primarily with Chinese American male nurses from New York Downtown Hospital. The lack of weaponry was our major problem. During our siege preparations—and frankly in the smuggling operations over the winter—we had concentrated on food, medicines, and other essentials, affording low priority to weapons and ammunition. This was a choice that we regretted when faced with the prospect of trying to repulse an actual military invasion.
I was surprised when the seven-month anniversary at the end of June passed without any visible activity on the part of the feds. They had failed to starve Manhattan into submission, but they had succeeded in laying the groundwork for an invasion. The people remaining in Manhattan, whose energies and aspirations had been focused on surviving the winter, and who were jubilant in early spring at having succeeded, were now again facing the grim reality that they were living on a twenty-four-square-mile island surrounded by overwhelming force and any day or night could end with a violent invasion. As the spring progressed, fear and impatience transcended hope as the prevailing sentiment. The talk among increasingly bored New Yorkers turned more and more to the probable fate of the city following the end of the siege. Would its male inhabitants be slaughtered, as seemingly authorized by the Bible? Would residents be allowed to remain or be transported to other locations? Would the governor call for surrender, as he did for the outer boroughs, when further resistance was futile?
I was convinced that the day we all feared would dawn sometime soon, and certainly before the one-year anniversary in late November. We never demobilized the Sec fighters who had been placed on alert to resist the expected invasion in June, so all our defensive positions were staffed around the clock. But as long as there was no visible sign of activity on the part of the blockading forces, half the troops left Lower Manhattan each night and returned home to sleep. During the days, we drilled in an organized but increasingly desultory manner. By early August, when the weather turned hot and muggy, even the slightly salty sea breezes blowing across the Battery could not revive the troubled spirits of the men and women assembled there.
My patrol partner on the night of Tuesday, August 19, was Matthew McManus, a happily married thirty-something who before the siege had been a personal trainer ministering to a diverse roster of private clients who had in common only stress, money, and Matthew. Matthew relieved the tedium of many a night standing watch in the Battery with entertaining accounts of confidences shared by his clients, such as the Citigroup mergers banker and mother of two who revealed that she moonlighted as a dominatrix specializing in latex, which she assured Matthew was the fetish of the moment among thirty-somethings working in private equity.
“
G
REG, WAKE UP,
” Matthew said at about four in the morning.
“What?”
“It’s starting,” he said. “Fuck.”
Our company was arrayed in forward positions behind the twenty-foot-high concrete and marble slabs of the Battery Park East Coast World War II memorial, two rows of four each, lined up like gigantic dominos and engraved with the names of the dead. Our mission was to cover the central part of the Battery seawall with thick fire and grenades to prevent the first wave of commandoes from blasting down the railing, cutting through the razor wire, and opening the way for amphibious landing craft. Our positions were well shielded from forward fire and located only yards from the water’s edge.
There was no hint of dawn over Brooklyn, but we could just make out a smudge of dark gray arcing across the water. Through the night-vision binoculars, the smudge was revealed to consist of scores of landing craft, side by side, each with their ramp bows aimed at the seawall. At least six identical rows of the small ships appeared behind the vanguard and wrapped ominously around the west side of Governors Island.
Moments later, through the channel between Governors Island and Brooklyn, where for years I had watched with fascination the Queen Mary 2 turn and dock, two navy destroyers emerged at high speed, their big guns ominously lowered for the close-range target. An almost grotesquely fat robin, doubtless having feasted on the unusual abundance of worms aerating our urban food gardens, landed heavily on the oakleaf hydrangea bush just a few feet to my right and set about greeting the dawn. The next moment the big guns opened fire and four shells exploded on the lawn behind us. We heard screams. Moments later, two helicopters swept in from the west and attempted to take the air just in front of the tall buildings along Battery Place, and from that position to strafe our defensive positions from the rear. The antiaircraft batteries arrayed along the tops of those buildings opened fire, and one helicopter plunged dramatically to the street, careening off the reflective glass façade of an office building.
The cacophony and chaos were almost instantaneous. In one moment, the robin’s song occupied the deep silence of early morning. In the next, I was surrounded by percussive violence so extreme that I lost my balance and bearings. The combination of the destroyer fire, antiaircraft guns, crashing helicopter, and strafing from the remaining helicopter was overwhelming. We had not trained with live fire.
One of the Guard officers in charge of our position ran up the center of the memorial shouting “Twelve o’clock. Twelve o’clock. Give ’em all you’ve got.”
Straight ahead, on axis with the center of the memorial and the Statue of Liberty in the distance, two almost comically small boats—they might even have been Zodiacs—pulled next to the seawall. With astonishing courage and calmness, a group of commandoes, with only the cover provided by machines guns mounted on the bows of the small craft, placed explosive charges at the bases of about ten posts supporting the railing atop the seawall. Then they retreated only a few yards, blew the charges, and returned to cut the top rail with a saw and pull a large section of rail into the harbor. A second team of commandoes emerged with long-handled wire cutters and started to cut through the tangle of razor wire along the water’s edge. Finally one of our forward teams threw two grenades, and one of the boats and her crew were obliterated. A moment later I saw a disembodied hand, still gripping wire cutters, floating on a fragment of wood. I felt the bile rise in my throat and swallowed hard. The second crew was momentarily disoriented, and our machine gunners peeked around the corner of the massive walls and killed all the second crew. At the same time, the Sec antiaircraft team on the top of One Battery Place scored a direct hit on the second helicopter, which had been only moments away from being in position to strafe us from the rear. There was only a brief pause in the action when the navy ships again started their barrage of the park from the water.
Two new Zodiacs took up the position, and a second wave of commandoes attacked the razor wire with urgency. Their gunners, having observed the fate of the first crews from only yards behind them, pinned our forward gunners behind the memorial pylons with unrelenting fire. I was close enough to see the arm patch that identified the Joshua Brigades, the stylized city wall and battlement image now of course well known to all and a favorite motif for teenagers to wear on the back pocket of their jeans. Within less than a couple of minutes—which seemed to me, and must have seemed to them, an eternity—the second team of commandoes had opened a hole in the razor wire that was at least forty feet wide. Two of the amphibious ships, with their broad ramps up and presenting a formidable shield, advanced on the opening. When they were only sixty yards offshore, the Sec fighters nearer the water again managed to take out the two Zodiac machine gunners with grenades. For the moment, we were free to blanket the opening with fire, which we did the moment the first boat lowered its ramp. It struck me as completely suicidal for the marines in these ships to attempt to come ashore.