Looking back now, it all seems so obvious.

There had been protests in front of U.S. diplomatic and business interests in Europe, the Middle East, and Korea for weeks, ostensibly because of the hard-line the administration was taking with Iran over their nuclear weapons program and the use of chemical weapons in Syria.  Threats to use force against Assad if he crossed that line had culminated in a few, mostly successful, air raids against his weapons depots, but other than that all he earned for the murder of thousands of civilians in rebel-controlled cities was harsh language.  Iran had apparently pushed her scientists and engineers to the firewall, because they started excavating a test area for an atomic bomb soon thereafter.  President Obama put a couple of carrier task forces into the Persian Gulf and the eastern Mediterranean and made a few speeches, but he continued making diplomatic and economic overtures to Tehran in an effort to head them off before they took that last, irrevocable step.

With all that in the news, very few noticed when Border Patrol agents found two large groups of dead people out in the Arizona desert.  They had all been shot at close range, and the body count was 76 men, women, and children.   One group was found just south of Hereford, Arizona, while the other was near Nogales.  At the time, authorities believed that they were victims of the ever-growing war between the Mexican government and the drug cartels, with these people being killed for hiring the wrong smugglers to get them across the border.

Like most people, I was pretty much as oblivious as the rest.  Get up, go to work, come home, try to enjoy the evening with Irish Woman and the kids, go to bed, lather rinse, repeat.  It was a few days before Christmas, and all of the attendant madness of the holiday was upon us.  I barely had time to check Facebook and email, much less spend a couple of hours a night reading the news.

That all ended a week before Christmas.

The night before had been bad.  Our embassy in Cairo had been attacked again, and molotov cocktails had been thrown at the gates of the embassies in Berlin and Paris.  The President had gone on TV to tell everyone that everything was under control, that this was just the actions of a few extremists and radicals.  I’d gone to bed with memories of Benghazi dancing in my head.

The next morning, the news barely mentioned the attacks on the embassies, and concentrated on fluff stories about some cat on the Internet and how active the holiday shoppers were.  I got the kids up and off to school, kissed Irish Woman good-bye, and headed to work.  I listened to the oldies station on the way, since it was the only one that hadn’t  switched over to around-the-clock Christmas music.  Halfway to work, the news on the hour reported that some sort of accident had happened at a school in Maryland.  Apparently a car had caught fire and exploded during drop off.  Merry Christmas, I thought as I parked the van and headed into the building

Some people were talking about it when I got in, but for the most part the few people who were at work that close to Christmas were discussing their plans for their time off.  I got my morning cup of coffee and settled in for my routine of emails, documentation, project plans, and the occasional actual use of technology.  About halfway through the coffee, Irish Woman texted me.

“Are you watching the news?”

Thinking that was a strange “Good morning, darling” message, I pulled up a news site.  Holy crap.

Schools in six states had been attacked in the past hour, all of them involving exploding vehicles that had pulled into the car-pool drop-off areas.  Casualties were unknown, but they were reported to be heavy.  A quick check of the local news showed no issues in Louisville, and a call to Irish Woman calmed her down and convinced both of us to sit tight and see what was going on.  Irish Woman was working from home, so if we decided our kids were better off at home, it wouldn’t be hard to get them.

I tried to get back to my work, but found myself almost compulsively checking the news.  Finally, I gave up and headed to the break room to watch the news on the TV.  At least that way I could get something done while I listened to the reporters.  Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought of this, since everyone who had come to the office was already there.  It was a scene eerily reminiscent of 9/11, when our entire building had crammed into the lunch room to watch coverage.

Things didn’t improve.  In fact, they went from bad, to worse, to absolutely horrible.

The final count of the car bomb attacks on the schools was 22 schools hit, 317 people, most of them children, dead, with over 1000 wounded.  Louisville closed schools by about 10 AM, and parents were instructed to not come to the school to pick up the children.  Students were taken on school buses to several places in the area, and parents were called to tell them where to pick up their children.  Irish Woman retrieved our kids, and I packed up and headed for home.  As I was leaving, the situation went even more sideways.

One of the places in Louisville where kids were being taken for pickup was a Walmart in the south end of town.  As the kids were herded off of their buses to wait for their parents, a woman came to pick up her children.  After her children were close to her, and she was close to the larger group of students, she exploded.  The vest she was wearing killed her and 38 children, three of them her own.   Louisville wasn’t the only one hit.  Indianapolis, Charlotte, Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago all had similar incidents before officials across the eastern half of the country just put the kids on busses and put them directly into the hands of their families.  Where it was possible, police followed school busses to watch over them, but no-one tried anything else.

Schools in the Mountain and Pacific time zones never even opened, which I guess was a blessing, although i can’t imagine that many parents were going to send their kids to school that day anyway.  That kept the death toll of children in the west down, but they didn’t come away unscathed.

In Denver, Billings, and Seattle, gas stations were attacked with more car bombs.  These weren’t huge truck bombs, but when an SUV blows up in the middle of a fuel island, it makes a big boom and causes a pretty big fire.

The rest of the west suffered under more suicide bombings that were directed at holiday shoppers and grocery stores.  One mall in California was hit twice by multiple bombers.  The first wave of 3 or 4 bombs went off in the middle of the crowd, killing and maiming scores.  Of course, EMS, fire, and police rushed to the scene, but they were caught in the second wave of bombers, at least one of whom had hidden in the crowd that was attacked in the initial bombing.  The loss of life in that incident went into the hundreds, and while it was the worst of the lot, it was far from the only such attack.  Shopping centers and such across the country were all hit right around 2 PM Eastern.  With the stores packed and no warning such as we got with the school bombings, thousands were killed or wounded.

The last thing that hit us, at least domestically, that day were the shooting rampages in Tucson and Phoenix.  Remember those groups of dead illegal immigrants that had been found in the desert?  Well, they weren’t killed because of a turf war between drug cartels.  As close as law enforcement has been able to figure it out, they either stumbled upon or came too close to groups of armed men who were coming across our porous border, and had been murdered in the name of operational security.  These groups hit office buildings and shopping centers promptly at noon, and shot everyone they came across.  A few of the victims were armed, and evidence points to some dying as they tried to fight off the attackers, but a handgun or even a pump shotgun isn’t much when you’re facing multiple assailants armed with AK-47’s and RPD’s that were smuggled into the country from Mexico and Central America.  When police, even the SWAT teams responded, they found themselves outgunned.  Those particular firefights went on for hours, until eventually the attackers ran out of ammunition.  Even then, only two out of 50 were captured, and those only because they were wounded badly enough to lose consciousness before they could pull the pin on their last grenade.  I did note at the time that the firepower of the police was augmented to a large degree by groups of ordinary citizens who grabbed whatever firearm they had handy and “marched to the sound of the guns”.  Think the James Gang in Northfield.  Not sure if the police were happy to get the “help” at first, but they sure didn’t turn it down.  These groups were what gave the governor of Arizona the idea for the Home Guard, an idea which eventually spread to all 50 states.

Of course, all of these things were broadcast on the Internet almost as soon as they happened.   Even worse, the executions of 25 Americans that had been grabbed off the street were posted to various websites.  The victims came from places like Minot, Fayetteville, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Killeen.  If those places sound familiar, they’re towns and cities that host military bases.  All 25 of the people who the enemy shot and beheaded in front of HD cameras were military dependents.  The voiceover on the videos basically said “We know who you are, we know where your families are, and we will find them again.”

At about 6 PM our time, the President addressed the nation.  For once, all of the TV channels carried it.  His speech basically boiled down to “We are still strong, we don’t know who did this, we will find out, stay calm, and stay home.”  Interestingly enough, he didn’t make the speech from the Oval Office, so I guess “undisclosed location” has TV cameras.

For the most part, people followed his advice.  The TV news, which was on pretty much non-stop, showed malls, restaurants, and theaters that were shuttered.  Bourbon Street looked like another hurricane was about to come through, and the Great White Way and Times Square in New York looked like the set of an apocalypse movie.  There were reports of people barricading their neighborhoods and turning away anyone who didn’t live there.  As much as the news media seemed to be waiting with bated breath, no-one was burning down mosques or hanging brown people from lamp posts.

I spent that evening sitting in my front room, long guns sitting nearby, transfixed by the news coverage.  I was waiting for things to get worse, but as the evening stretched on with no further attacks, I relaxed enough to read a story or two to Boo and get some rest.

Then it got worse.