Smoke Bomb Quotes

Gazzy, man, jeezum!" Fang exclaimed. "What the heck have you been eating for God's sake?" That was a smoke bomb!" Gazzy defended himself. "Not even i could fill this whole flippin' house!

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

Kevlar wrist cuffs in place, smoke bombs in left cargo pocket, zip ties in the right, and my handy-dandy, military-grade, metal detector-defying, twin APS daggers snug in their sheaths and hidden inside my steel-toe Doc Martens. Nothing like a well-stocked pair of black cargoes to make me feel girly.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star… Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago. I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below. I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon. History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment. 'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple. I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.' He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.' 'What?' He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said. 'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.' Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him. 'That information is classified, I'm afraid.' 1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor. 'Is it open to the public?' I said. 'Not generally, no.' I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point. 'Are you happy here?' I said at last. He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said. 'But you're not very happy where you are, either.' St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch. 'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.' He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.

You two have to promise to be careful!" Sinead handed Amy a small plastic bag. "I made you a going-away present–a high-powered miniature smoke bomb. Could come in handy against the Vespers. It works with knockout gas, so I tossed in a couple of breathing filters." "That's the Cahill equivalent of a Hallmark moment," Dan observed. "A smoke bomb. When you care enough to send the very best–explosives." "I'm not a flowers-and-candy kind of girl," Sinead informed him.

The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

As for me, I believe that if there's a God - and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible - then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.

If you think atomic explosions in Asia wouldn't affect Americans, consider this. A study published in Scientific American in 2010 looked at the probable impact of a "small" nuclear war, one in which India and Pakistan each dropped fifty atomic bombs. The scientists concluded that the explosions would ignite massive firestorms, sending enormous amounts of dust and smoke into the atmosphere. This would block some of the sun's light from reaching the earth, making the planet colder and darker - for about ten years. Farming would collapse, and people all over the globe would starve to death. And that's if only half of one percent of all the atomic bombs on earth were used. In the end, this is a difficult story to sum up. The making of the atomic bomb is one of history's most amazing examples of teamwork and genius and poise under pressure. But it's also the story of how humans created a weapon capable of wiping our species off the planet. It's a story with no end in sight. And, like it or not, you're in it.

Tatiana fretted over him before he left as if he were a five-year-old on his first day of school. Shura, don't forget to wear your helmet wherever you go, even if it's just down the trail to the river. Don't forget to bring extra magazines. Look at this combat vest. You can fit more than five hundred rounds. It's unbelievable. Load yourself up with ammo. Bring a few extra cartridges. You don't want to run out. Don't forget to clean your M-16 every day. You don't want your rifle to jam." Tatia, this is the third generation of the M-16. It doesn't jam anymore. The gunpowder doesn't burn as much. The rifle is self-cleaning." When you attach the rocket bandolier, don't tighten it too close to your belt, the friction from bending will chafe you, and then irritation follows, and then infection... ...Bring at least two warning flares for the helicopters. Maybe a smoke bomb, too?" Gee, I hadn't thought of that." Bring your Colt - that's your lucky weapon - bring it, as well as the standard -issue Ruger. Oh, and I have personally organized your medical supplies: lots of bandages, four complete emergency kits, two QuickClots - no I decided three. They're light. I got Helena at PMH to write a prescription for morphine, for penicillin, for -" Alexander put his hand over her mouth. "Tania," he said, "do you want to just go yourself?" When he took the hand away, she said, "Yes." He kissed her. She said, "Spam. Three cans. And keep your canteen always filled with water, in case you can't get to the plasma. It'll help." Yes, Tania" And this cross, right around your neck. Do you remember the prayer of the heart?" Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Good. And the wedding band. Right around your finger. Do you remember the wedding prayer?" Gloria in Excelsis, please just a little more." Very good. Never take off the steel helmet, ever. Promise?" You said that already. But yes, Tania." Do you remember what the most important thing is?" To always wear a condom." She smacked his chest. To stop the bleeding," he said, hugging her. Yes. To stop the bleeding. Everything else they can fix." Yes, Tania.

You can’t run, you can’t hide, and the idea that you have no control at all just gets into your head and it sticks there. In my time in the Navy, I was never so scared in my life. Bombs and smoke everywhere, fires on the deck. Meanwhile, the guns are booming and the noise is like nothing you’ve ever heard. Thunder times ten, maybe, but that doesn’t describe it. In the big battles, Japanese Zeros strafed the deck continually, the shots ricocheting all over the place.

...we're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the great lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to pursued our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it.

There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors. p.116

An LSD experience without the LSD" -that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally smoked that no one could believe they were. Nobody would risk it in public like that. Well the kids are just having an LSD experience without the LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice.

The thing about tragedy is that it isn't about just getting through it, it's about getting on with your life when the dust has settled but the landscape is bombed out, smoke in the air, charred remains at your feet.

In the middle of the swinging sixties people in England were apparently under some sort of obligation to have a good time and most of them didn't. A Russian and an American walked about in space to no one's particular advantage. The Beatles received their British Empire medals and, so it was said, smoked cannabis in the lavatories at Buckingham Palace. American aeroplanes were bombing Vietnam, but no one seemed to talk about the nuclear holocaust any more.

The dark sky. A hundred million stars. More stars than I’ve ever seen before. My eyes let me see farther, but they don’t show me the one thing I want to see. I would trade all the stars in the universe if I could just have him back again. Wind whistles through the trees nearby. Birdsong weaves in and out of the sound. The hybrids emerge from the communication building, heads tilted to the sky. And then we see the end. Godspeed’s engine was nuclear; who knows what fueled the biological weapons. But they explode together. In space, they don’t make the familiar mushroom cloud. They don’t make the boom! of an exploding bomb. There is, against the dark sky, a brief flash of light. It is filled with colors, like a nebula or the aurora borealis, bursting like a popped bubble. Nothing else—no sound of an explosion, no tremors in the earth, no smell of smoke. Not here, on the surface of the planet. Nothing else to signify Elder’s death. Just light. And then it’s gone. And then he’s gone.

I remember the room. How it burned because Lan sung of fire, surrounded by her daughters. Smoke rising and collecting in the corners. The table in the middle a bright blaze. The women with their eyes closed and the words relentless. The walls a moving screen of images flashing as each verse descended to the next: a sunlit intersection in a city no longer there. A city with no name. A white man standing beside a tank with his black-haired daughter in his arms. A family sleeping in a bomb crater. A family hiding underneath a table. Do you understand? All I was given was a table. A table in lieu of a house. A table in lieu of history.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.

In retrospect, I came to Nagasaki for the regenerative properties. The second atomic bomb blast so many years ago, which had swept up most of the city in a plutonium cloud, had made the city radioactively peace-loving. Reversing the usual cycle that turns victim into perpetrator, the people who stepped from the rubble filled their hearts with a fervent devotion to peace in all its forms. In my mind's eye I see them: wounded and dying, their lungs filled with ash and smoke. The ash sits there for some time, and when they exhale, miraculously, something akin to love comes out.

The sky is glowing over Stalingrad. Greyish-white smoke billows from the ground; flames shoot high into the sky in between. The long probing fingers of the searchlights tear at the half-darkness of the breaking day. There must be a lot of aircraft up. Bombs are ceaselessly raining down on a city that has been condemned to death. The explosions merge into one another, creating a devastating inferno.

Smash cut to a smoke-bombed quarantine, Guards like 'all signs correlate with sorcery', It's more a dormant cell of valor as awoken by the smell of sordid power and defecting shortly after, Fist bump dry land, brackish, cat nap 15, back to swiss-cheese the flagship, Uh, blue in the menacing grip of a day for which you're manifestly unfit.

Everything I know about bombs tells me they are built to explode. But something must set them off first. There must be a trigger before the noise goes off, before the big burst of bright, choking smoke. Otherwise a girl could stay quiet for years.

Drop heavy,” Kaz shouted, and Wylan let loose with every rocket, flash bomb, and bit of demo he’d been able to fit into the boat. The sky above the Van Eck house exploded in an array of light, smoke, and sound as the guards dove for cover. Kaz put his arms to work, feeling the boat slide into the current as they passed into the glittering traffic of Geldcanal. “In and out without him ever knowing?” said Rotty.

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don’t feel good don’t bother me. I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I’m sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument. Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I’m trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I’m doing. America the plum blossoms are falling. I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry. I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble. You should have seen me reading Marx. My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right. I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer. I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. I’m addressing you. Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I’m obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. ...

He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world’s grim arsenal of possibilities. And yet he goes on taking in. It is not what he does, it is what he is. He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering, guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory, as if it were something precious, as if it were itself the loved child tottering homeward on the road. But there is so much of it. So many injured children; so many locked rooms; so much lonely anger; so many bombs in public places; so much vicious zeal; so many bored teenagers at roadblocks; so many drunk girls at parties someone thought they could have a little fun with; so many jokes that go too far; so much ruining greed; so much sick ingenuity; so much burned skin. The world he claims, claims him. It burns and stings, it splinters and gouges, it locks him round and drags him down… All day long, the next day, the city is quiet. The air above the city lacks the usual thousand little trails of smoke from cookfires. Hymns rise from the temple. Families are indoors. The soldiers are back in barracks. The Chief Priest grows hoarse with singing. The governor plays chess with his secretary and dictates letters. The free bread the temple distributed to the poor has gone stale by midday, but tastes all right dipped in water or broth. Death has interrupted life only as much as it ever does. We die one at a time and disappear, but the life of the living continues. The earth turns. The sun makes its way towards the western horizon no slower or faster than it usually does. Early Sunday morning, one of the friends comes back with rags and a jug of water and a box of the grave spices that are supposed to cut down on the smell. She’s braced for the task. But when she comes to the grave she finds that the linen’s been thrown into the corner and the body is gone. Evidently anonymous burial isn’t quite anonymous enough, after all. She sits outside in the sun. The insects have woken up, here at the edge of the desert, and a bee is nosing about in a lily like silk thinly tucked over itself, but much more perishable. It won’t last long. She takes no notice of the feet that appear at the edge of her vision. That’s enough now, she thinks. That’s more than enough. Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know. She is weeping. The executee helps her to stand up.

Everything I know about bombs tells me they are built to explode. But something must set them off first. There must be a trigger before the noise goes off, before the big burst of bright, choking smoke. Otherwise, a girl could stay quiet for years.

What is what?” asked Armand. “I don’t hear anything.” I hadn’t taken my eyes from Jesse. “There’s more than one. Two at least, right?” “Two,” he said. “I hear two.” Armand stood. “Two what?” I sent him a look. “Zeppelins. Headed this way.” He stared at us, silent. And really, what could he say? Sorry my father doomed us all? Nice knowing you? “All right, all right.” I chafed my hands nervously up and down my sides, rumpling the shirt. “I can-I can fly up there. Turn to dragon. Claw them open, make them crash.” Instinctively, I turned to Jesse, almost plaintive. “Can’t I?” He took up my and. I swear I saw the stars brighten around him, a sparkling, silvered nimbus. “Perhaps.” “Well, I have to. That’s all there is to it. I have to.” “No,” burst out Armand. “They have guns! Bombs! They’ll fill you with holes before you can blink!” “Not if I’m smoke.” “Smoke can’t tear apart a dirigible!

He scans the horizon from his arboreal vantage point, but he can’t see anything that looks like smoke. Arboreal, a fine word. Our arboreal ancestors, Crake used to say. Used to shit on their enemies from above while perched in trees. All planes and rockets and bombs are simply elaborations on that primate instinct.

I won’t let you stay here. Julia, we’re a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We’re destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we’ve begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radio-active fallout that put poison into our children’s bones, and we knew it. We’ve made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we’re used to it.

In August 1944, the War Ministry in Tokyo had issued a directive to the commandants of various POW camps, outlining a policy for what it called the ‘final disposition’ of prisoners. A copy of this document, which came to be known as the ‘August 1 Kill-All Order,’ would surface in the war crimes investigations in Tokyo. Bearing a chilling resemblance to actual events that occurred at Palawan, the directive stated: ‘When the battle situation becomes urgent the POWs will be concentrated and confined to their location and kept under heavy guard until preparations for the final disposition will be made. Although the basic aim is to act under superior orders, individual dispositions may be made in [certain] circumstances. Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, and whether it is accomplished by means of mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, or decapitation, dispose of them as the situation dictates. It is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.’ (pp. 23-24)

Dazzlement and enchantment are Bester’s methods. His stories never stand still a moment; they’re forever tilting into motion, veering, doubling back, firing off rockets to distract you. The repetition of the key phrase in “Fondly Fahrenheit,” the endless reappearances of Mr. Aquila in “The Star-comber” are offered mockingly: try to grab at them for stability, and you find they mean something new each time. Bester’s science is all wrong, his characters are not characters but funny hats; but you never notice: he fires off a smoke-bomb, climbs a ladder, leaps from a trapeze, plays three bars of “God Save the King,” swallows a sword and dives into three inches of water. Good heavens, what more do you want?

Sergeant Pepper was dead. G.I. Joe lived on. George Bush was president, movies stars were dying from AIDS, kids were smoking crack in the ghettos and the suburbs, Muslims were blowing airliners from the skies, rap music ruled, and nobody cared much about the Movement anymore. It was a dry and dusty thing, like the air in the graves of Hendrix, Joplin, and God. She was letting her thoughts take her into treacherous territory, and the thoughts threatened her smiley face. She stopped thinking about the dead heroes, the burning breed who made the bombs full of roofing nails and planted them in corporate boardrooms and National Guard Armories. She stopped thinking before the awful sadness crushed her. The sixties were dead. The survivors limped on, growing suits and neckties and potbellies, going bald and telling their children not to listen to that satanic heavy metal. The clock of the Age of Aquarius had turned, hippies and yippies had become preppies and yuppies. The Chicago Seven were old men. The Black Panthers had turned gray. The Grateful Dead were on MTV, and the Airplane had become a Top-40 Starship. Mary Terror closed her eyes, and thought she heard the noise of wind whistling through the ruins.

Katniss Everdeen, the girl who was on fire, burns on.” Suddenly, there I am, replacing the mockingjay, standing before the real flames and smoke of District 8. “I want to tell the rebels that I am alive. That I’m right here in District Eight, where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women and children. There will be no survivors.” Cut to the hospital collapsing in on itself, the desperation of the onlookers as I continue in voice-over. “I

You may come or not to walk beside me, I won't stand still in silence while the oceans burn and the sun turns dark - I will either right the wrongs or perish in the attempt - and even if I burn to ashes in trying to humanize my surroundings, those ashes of mine will still smoke inclusion, equality and humaneness - I am not born a human to crawl as an indifferent vermin, I am born a human to embrace death for the values, the principles, the virtues that ought to be the foundation of human civilization - I am sleepless and I will stay sleepless till all the children of earth can sleep in peace with a full stomach and a happy heart, without worrying about guns and bombs, without worrying about prejudice and phobia, without worrying about discrimination and deportation - I will stay sleepless till the whole world becomes a family, not in theory, not in philosophy, not in argument, not even in futuristic vision, but in reality and practice.

Oak is peering at the lock on the chest. “Once, the Bomb told me a story about poisonous spiders kept inside a trunk. When the thief opened it, he was bitten all over. Died badly. I believe she was trying to dissuade me from stealing sweets.” Tiernan kicks the stack of wood with one snow-covered boot. The logs rumble out of formation. “I am going to make a fire.” I lift the fur and turn it inside out, brushing my hand over the lining to check for rot or bugs. There’s nothing. No discoloration, either, as there might be from poison. The only odor it contains is the faint smell of the smoke used to tan the hide. A few uniforms from a long-disbanded army are in a gray woolen heap. I shake them out and assess them while Oak tries to pry apart the rusty chest. “There probably aren’t any spiders,” he says when I look in his direction. Inside is a waxed wheel of cheese and ancient rolls, along with a skin of slushy wine. He appears disappointed.

In 2008, some of the scientists who modeled the original 1983 nuclear winter scenario investigated the likely result of a theoretical regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, a war they postulated to involve only 100 Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapons, yielding a total of only 1.5 megatons—no more than the yield of some single warheads in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. They were shocked to discover that because such an exchange would inevitably be targeted on cities filled with combustible materials, the resulting firestorms would inject massive volumes of black smoke into the upper atmosphere which would spread around the world, cooling the earth long enough and sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse. Twenty million prompt deaths from blast, fire, and radiation, Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon projected, and another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.

We had expected to take losses," Colonel John Kane said, "but I never will forget those big Libs going down like flies." His radio operator, Ray Hubbard, added, "I looked through the open bomb-bay doors and could see flames from exploding gas tanks shooting right up into us. The fire wrapped us up. I looked out of the side windows and saw the others flying through smoke and flames. It was flying through hell...I guess we'll go straight to heaven when we die. We've had our purgatory.

Lora, beloved. Lora of the moon and sky. You are a dragon.” Ah, sighed the fiend, swelling with delight inside me, filled with an awful, awful recognition. Ah, ah! AH! “That is enough,” I shouted over them both; rather, I tried to shout, but my voice was so strangled it came more as a gasp. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but I don’t appreciate your games. I-I came here to tell you to stop pestering me, and leaving me gifts, and smiling at me-“ “You dream of flying,” Jesse said, which cut me off midsentence. “Aye.” He nodded, shadows and gold, tall and warm and much too near. “I know all about it. I know all about you. You have wings at night. You lift as smoke. And you come to me, don’t you? Always to me.” I could not reply. I could barely take a breath. This is a dream, this is all still a dream, it’s just a new part to the dream, that’s all- “It’s why you’re here now, tonight. You’re drawn to me, as fiercely as I am to you. You didn’t even have to follow my song this time. I muted it, didn’t you notice? And you came anyway.” For a long, long moment, I gave up on breathing. For a long, long moment, all I heard was my heartbeat and his, and a gull crying miles away, and the distant thunder of a German bomb exploding on innocent ground. Jesse lifted a hand and placed it on my arm. His palm felt hot against the cotton of my sleeve, his fingers felt firm, and that rush of longing and pleasure that always overtook me at his touch began to build. “Lora,” he whispered again, so quiet it was barely a sound. “Inhale.” And when I did, he bent his head to kiss me.

The frightened soul ran into the wine cellar with the steel door. I’m safe, Calloway thought, but he was dead wrong. Railrunner’s claws slashed through the steel door. They cut through the metal like butter. He then began to pull the door off its hinges. Suddenly a smoke bomb fell to the floor, making the place vaporous, but Railrunner’s eyes could see through it. He discovered the flashing lights of squad cars. His eyes narrowed and he growled low in his throat. “Come on out with your hands up!” an officer yelled. Railrunner walked upright towards the entrance. He then pushed the doors off their hinges and stood in the line of fire. “It’s a - roller coaster?” One of the police said baffled, the gun shaking in his hand. Railrunner crossly walked up to the police. They began to fire, their bullets simply bouncing off of him. He then grabbed the front bumper of the cruiser, and tossed it like a toy. It smashed into another car. Railrunner flung an officer out of his way and roared in sheer amusement. Within a blink of an eye he obliterated the small police force.

He wondered what O'Brian would have been like in a real war, one in which he actually had to fight rather than just take pictures. Then he wondered what he would have been like. Most of the men he knew asked themselves that question, as if never having fought somehow made them incomplete - left a hole in their lives where a war should have been. Was it possible that this absence of war - marvellous though it was and so forth: that went without saying - was it possible that it had actually trivialised people? Because everything was so bloody trivial now, wasn't it? This was The Trivial Age. Politics was trivial. What people worried about was trivial - mortgages and pensions and the dangers of passive smoking. Jesus! - is this what we've been reduced to, worrying about passive smoking, when our parents and our grandparents had to worry about being shot or bombed? And then he began to feel guilty, because what was he implying here? That he wanted a war? ... He was glad it was over, of course, in a way - but at least while it was on people like him had known where they stood, could point to something and say: well, we may not know what we do believe in, but we don't believe in that.

An aurora swirled in the night skies above Bataan, radiating around the smoke-shrouded peaks of the Mariveles Mountains. Intermittent flashes from phosphorus bombs and incendiary shells bathed the jungle in blinding bursts of white light. The rumbling, subterranean tremors had scarcely subsided when American stockpiles of TNT and ammunition dumps were detonated, causing the peninsula to convulse. Thousands of rounds of projectiles, from artillery and mortar shells to rifle bullets, streaked across the sky in arcing rainbows. "Never did a 4th of July display equal it in noise, lights, colors or cost," observed one officer.

How hard would it be to repurpose the old smoking lounges and designate a space where people can go to break down for whatever reason? A crying lounge could be stocked with cold beverages, soft chairs, windows to stare out of, large sunglasses in a range of sizes, fresh waterproof mascara, and friendly, quiet dogs of varying fluffiness. It could be centrally located but closed off, separate from the rest of the airport, just like time and space in the air are separate from time and space on the ground. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a place where we could privately fall to pieces and then get ourselves together? Instead, we have to do it out in the open.

She kissed him kind, and hard, and desperately, and the Colonel could not think about any fights or any picturesque or strange incidents. He only thought of her and how she felt and how close life comes to death when there is ecstasy. And what the hell is ecstasy and what’s ecstasy’s rank and serial number? And how does her black sweater feel? And who made all her smoothness and delight and the strange pride and sacrifice and wisdom of a child? Yes, ecstasy is what you might have had and instead you drew sleep’s older brother. Death is a lot of shit, he thought. It comes to you in small fragments that hardly show where it has entered. It comes, sometimes, atrociously. It can come from unboiled water; an un-pulled-up mosquito boot, or it can come with the great, white-hot, clanging roar we have lived with. It comes in small cracking whispers that precede the noise of the automatic weapon. It can come with the smoke-emitting arc of the grenade, or the sharp, cracking drop of the mortar. I have seen it come, loosening itself from the bomb rack, and falling with that strange curve. It comes in the metallic rending crash of a vehicle, or the simple lack of traction on a slippery road. It comes in bed to most people, I know, like love’s opposite number. I have lived with it nearly all my life and the dispensing of it has been my trade. But what can I tell this girl now on this cold, windy morning in the Gritti Palace Hotel?

Now am I daring to accuse American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in order to smoke out the girls who would have little choice but to sexually service the same boys who bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or merely forcibly evacuated said villages? I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

I have never been able to believe that human affairs were serious matters. I had no idea where the serious might lie, except that it was not in all this I saw around me - which seemed to me merely an amusing game, or tiresome. There are really efforts and convictions I have never been able to understand. I always looked with amazement, and a certain suspicion, on those strange creatures who died for money, fell into despair over the loss of a 'position,' or sacrificed themselves with a high and mighty manner for the prosperity of their family. I could better understand that friend who had made up his mind to stop smoking and through sheer will power had succeeded. One morning he opened the paper, read that the first H-Bomb had been exploded, learned about its wonderful effects, and hastened to a tobacco shop.

Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on his way to work seem more like rocks rising out of the earth than like products of human hands. He considers the work he does in his office or factory as essential to the har­monious functioning of the world. The clothes he wears are exactly what they should be, and he laughs at the idea that he might equally well be wearing a Roman toga or medieval armor. He respects and envies a minister of state or a bank director, and regards the possession of a considerable amount of money the main guarantee of peace and security. He cannot believe that one day a rider may appear on a street he knows well, where cats sleep and chil­dren play, and start catching passers-by with his lasso. He is accustomed to satisfying those of his physio­logical needs which are considered private as dis­creetly as possible, without realizing that such a pattern of behavior is not common to all human so­cieties. In a word, he behaves a little like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, bustling about in a shack poised precariously on the edge of a cliff. His first stroll along a street littered with glass from bomb-shattered windows shakes his faith in the "naturalness" of his world. The wind scatters papers from hastily evacuated offices, papers labeled "Con­fidential" or "Top Secret" that evoke visions of safes, keys, conferences, couriers, and secretaries. Now the wind blows them through the street for anyone to read; yet no one does, for each man is more urgently concerned with finding a loaf of bread. Strangely enough, the world goes on even though the offices and secret files have lost all meaning. Farther down the street, he stops before a house split in half by a bomb, the privacy of people's homes-the family smells, the warmth of the beehive life, the furniture preserving the memory of loves and hatreds-cut open to public view. The house itself, no longer a rock, but a scaffolding of plaster, concrete, and brick; and on the third floor, a solitary white bath­ tub, rain-rinsed of all recollection of those who once bathed in it. Its formerly influential and respected owners, now destitute, walk the fields in search of stray potatoes. Thus overnight money loses its value and becomes a meaningless mass of printed paper. His walk takes him past a little boy poking a stick into a heap of smoking ruins and whistling a song about the great leader who will preserve the nation against all enemies. The song remains, but the leader of yesterday is already part of an extinct past.

In the weeks leading up to the Detroit rebellion, three incidents exacerbated racial tensions. On June 12, a mob of more than eighty whites waged a miniriot and smoke-bombed the house of an interracial married couple—a black man and a white woman—who had moved into a suburban white neighborhood. On June 23, a black couple—Mr. Thomas, who worked at a local Ford plant, and Ms. Thomas, his pregnant wife—went to Rouge Park in a white neighborhood. A mob of more than fifteen whites harassed them, threatened to rape Mrs. Thomas, cut the wires on their car so they could not leave, and then shot Mr. Thomas three times, killing him and causing Ms. Thomas to miscarry. Six of the whites were arrested, but only one was charged, and he was eventually let off by a jury. In fact, at that time, no white had ever been found guilty of murdering a black person in Detroit.

Except when Yankees are around,” Moss said. “Then they’ll swear up and down that they didn’t know what was going on. Some prick will probably write a book that shows how they didn’t really massacre their Negroes after all.” “Oh, yeah? Then where’d the smokes go?” Goodman asked. “I mean, they were there before the war, and then they weren’t. So what happened?” “Well, we killed a bunch of ’em when we bombed Confederate cities.” Moss was a well-trained attorney; he could spin out an argument whether he believed in it or not. “Some died in the rebellion. Some went up to the USA. Some died of hunger and disease—there was a war on, you know. But a massacre? Nah. Never happened.” Barry Goodman’s mouth twisted. “That’s disgusting. That’d gag a maggot, damned if it wouldn’t.” “Bet your ass,” Moss said. “You think it won’t happen, though? Give it twenty years—thirty at the outside.” “Disgusting,

Berkman and Goldman had met three years earlier, in the dim, smoke-filled dining room of Sachs’ Café on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Sachs’ was the regular hangout of Yiddish-speaking radicals, poets, and free spirits. Goldman had found her way there after escaping a loveless marriage and oppressive relatives. She had felt that no one in her family understood her, and she couldn’t fathom why they weren’t as angry as she was about the injustices of American society. She seethed with anger over the highly publicized hanging of four anarchists. They had been wrongly convicted of conspiracy following the detonation of a bomb thrown by an unseen assailant at an 1886 labor rally for the eight-hour day on Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The executed men had been made into scapegoats. They were rounded up because of their views and given a sham trial to placate a disquieted public agitated by a yellow press who saw bearded, fiery-eyed foreign revolutionaries behind every strike and workers rally. The Goldmans had fled oppression in their native Russia only to find that capitalists were no better than czars.

After two weeks came the first letter from Alexander. Tatiasha, Can there be anything harder than this? Missing you is a physical aching that grips me early in the morning and does not leave me, not even as I draw my last waking breath. My solace in these waning empty summer days is the knowledge that you’re safe, and alive, and healthy, and that the worst that you have to go through is serfdom for four well-meaning old women. The wood piles I’ve left are the lightest in the front. The heaviest ones are for the winter. Use them last, and if you need help carrying them, God help me, ask Vova. Don’t hurt yourself. And don’t fill the water pails all the way to the top. They’re too heavy. Getting back was rough, and as soon as I came back, I was sent right out to the Neva, where for six days we planned our attack and then made a move in boats across the river and were completely crushed in two hours. We didn’t stand a chance. The Germans bombed the boats with the Vanyushas, their version of my rocket launcher, the boats all sank. We were left with a thousand fewer men and were no closer to crossing the river. We’re now looking at other places we can cross. I’m fine, except for the fact that it’s rained here for ten days straight and I’ve been hip deep in mud for all that time. There is nowhere to sleep, except in the mud. We put our trench coats down and hope it stops raining soon. All black and wet, I almost felt sorry for myself until I thought of you during the blockade. I’ve decided to do that from now on. Every time I think I have it so tough, I’m going to think of you burying your sister in Lake Ladoga. I wish you had been given a lighter cross than Leningrad to carry through your life. Things are going to be relatively quiet here for the next few weeks, until we regroup. Yesterday a bomb fell in the commandant’s bunker. The commandant wasn’t there at the time. Yet the anxiety doesn’t go away. When is it going to come again? I play cards and soccer. And I smoke. And I think of you. I sent you money. Go to Molotov at the end of August. Don’t forget to eat well, my warm bun, my midnight sun, and kiss your hand for me, right in the palm and then press it against your heart. Alexander Tatiana read Alexander’s letter a hundred times, memorizing every word. She slept with her face on the letter, which renewed her strength.

Okay, then. Let’s win you a wish.” He takes out his phone and pulls up Google Maps. “I looked up Gen’s address before I came over here. I think you’re right--we should take our time, assess the situation. Not go in half-cocked.” “Mm-hm.” I’m in a sort of dream state; it’s hard to concentrate. John Ambrose McClaren wants to make it unequivocally clear. I snap out of it when Kitty jostles her way back into the living room, balancing a glass of orange soda, the tub of red pepper hummus, and a bag of pita chips. She makes her way over to the couch and plonks down right between us. Holding out the bag, she asks, “Do you guys want some?” “Sure,” John says, taking a chip. “Hey, I hear you’re pretty good at schemes. Is that true?” Warily she says, “What makes you say that?” “You’re the one who sent out Lara Jean’s letters, aren’t you?” Kitty nods. “Then I’d say you’re pretty good at schemes.” “I mean, yeah. I guess.” “Awesome. We need your help.” Kitty’s ideas are a bit too extreme--like slashing Genevieve’s tires, or throwing a stink bomb in her house to smoke her out, but John writes down every one of Kitty’s suggestions, which does not go unnoticed by Kitty. Very little does.

It's a parade of flawless tuna deliciousness! But by far, the most dangerous piece... is the one that looks like a bomb of pure tuna goodness, the straw-grilled, seared noten sushi! The noten- a cut of meat from the top of the tuna's head- is one of the priciest cuts. Extravagantly fatty, its richness melds with the fragrant searing into a powerful duo! Yet there isn't the first hint of fishiness! Searing it using aromatic straw burned it away, leaving only pure savory flavor behind to please both nose and palate!" "His Trace was dead-on. Looks like it really will be his arrangements on that Gunkan Maki that decide this card." "I can't even begin to guess what it tastes like." What's this on top of the minced tuna and leeks?! Is it... meringue?! "Aah! Now I see! I know what Subaru Mimasaka took out at that moment! It was the same smoked soy sauce he passed to Kuga!" The mellow, full-bodied aroma of smoked soy sauce has seeped into every crevice of the minced tuna... ... while the differing textures of the meringue and the negitoro create deeper, more complex layers to the flavor! If I were to name it, I would call it the "Ultimate Negitoro Eggs-over-Rice Gunkan Sushi"! Minced tuna rib meat mixed with leeks and smoked soy sauce, topped with quail-egg yolk

And then England—southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from seasickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage underneath you, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can't read. You can't see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain — everyone is as badly off as you. It's hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love. If you are a teenager, you seem halted in time. If you are critically ill — with cancer, for instance — there is no chemotherapy for you. If you can't leave the country for treatment, you stay and die slowly, and in tremendous pain. Victorian diseases return — polio, typhoid and cholera. You see very sick people around you who seemed in perfectly good health when you last saw them during peacetime. You hear coughing all the time. Everyone hacks — from the dust of destroyed buildings, from disease, from cold. As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few who remain have nothing new to talk about. You can't get to their houses, because the road is blocked by checkpoints. Or snipers take a shot when you leave your door, so you scurry back inside, like a crab retreating inside its shell. Or you might go out on the wrong day and a barrel bomb, dropped by a government helicopter, lands near you. Wartime looks like this.

Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said, “That’s not it. That’s an after-image.” So I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange. Clouds form and disappear again—from the compression and expansion of the shock wave. Finally, a big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it’s a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out, the heat. All this took about one minute. It was a series from bright to dark, and I had seen it. I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn thing—the first Trinity test. Everybody else had dark glasses, and the people at six miles couldn’t see it because they were all told to lie on the floor. I’m probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye. Finally, after about a minute and a half, there’s suddenly a tremendous noise—BANG, and then a rumble, like thunder—and that’s what convinced me. Nobody had said a word during this whole thing. We were all just watching quietly. But this sound released everybody—released me particularly because the solidity of the sound at that distance meant that it had really worked. The man standing next to me said, “What’s that?” I said, “That was the Bomb.

Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes—an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan—the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa—and stunt fliers were used for the more dangerous scenes. Wellman asked a lot of his airmen. One pilot was killed, another broke his neck, and several more sustained other serious injuries. Wellman did some of the more dangerous stunt flying himself. All this gave the movie’s aerial scenes a realism and immediacy that many found almost literally breathtaking. Wellman captured features of flight that had never been caught on film before—the shadows of planes moving across the earth, the sensation of flying through drifting smoke, the stately fall of bombs, and the destructive puffs of impact that follow. Even the land-bound scenes were filmed with a thoughtfulness and originality that set Wings apart. To bring the viewer into a Parisian nightclub, Wellman used a boom shot in which the camera traveled through the room just above table height, skimming over drinks and between revelers, before arriving at the table of Arlen and Rogers. It is an entrancing shot even now, but it was rivetingly novel in 1927. “Wings,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt simply in The New Yorker in 1971, “is truly beautiful.” Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman, however, wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.

Six or seven minutes past 2 P.M. on September 11, 1973, an infiltration patrol of the San Bemardo Infantry School commanded by Captain Roberto Garrido burst into the second floor of the Chilean Presidential Palace, Santiago's Palacio de La Moneda. Charging up the main staircase and covering themselves with spurts from their FAL machine guns, the patrol advanced to the entrance of the Salon Rojo, the state reception hall. Inside, through dense smoke coming from fires elsewhere in the building and from the explosion of tear gas bombs, grenades, and shells from Sherman tank cannons, the patrol captain saw a band of civilians braced to defend themselves with submachine guns. In a reflex action, Captain Garrido loosed a short burst from his weapon. One of his three bullets struck a civilian in the stomach. A soldier in Garrido's patrol imitated his commander, wounding the same man in the abdomen. As the man writhed on the floor in agony, Garrido suddenly realized who he was: Salvador Allende. "We shit on the President!" he shouted. There was more machine-gun fire from Garrido's patrol. Allende was riddled with bullets. As he slumped back dead, a second group of civilian defenders broke into the Salon Rojo from a side door. Their gunfire drove back Garrido and his patrol, who fled down the main staircase to the safety of the first floor, which the rebel troops had occupied.
 Some of the civilians returned to the Salon Rojo to see what could be done. Among them was Dr. Enrique Paris, a psychiatrist and President Allende's personal doctor. He leaned over the body, which showed the points of impact of at least six shots in the abdomen and lower stomach region. After taking Allende's pulse, he signaled that the President was dead. Someone, out of nowhere, appeared with a Chilean flag, and Enrique Paris covered the body with it.

Fish at breakfast is sometimes himono (semi-dried fish, intensely flavored and chewy, the Japanese equivalent of a breakfast of kippered herring or smoked salmon) and sometimes a small fillet of rich, well-salted broiled fish. Japanese cooks are expert at cutting and preparing fish with nothing but salt and high heat to produce deep flavor and a variety of textures: a little crispy over here, melting and juicy there. Some of this is technique and some is the result of a turbo-charged supply chain that scoops small, flavorful fish out of the ocean and deposits them on breakfast tables with only the briefest pause at Tsukiji fish market and a salt cure in the kitchen. By now, I've finished my fish and am drinking miso soup. Where you find a bowl of rice, miso shiru is likely lurking somewhere nearby. It is most often just like the soup you've had at the beginning of a sushi meal in the West, with wakame seaweed and bits of tofu, but Iris and I were always excited when our soup bowls were filled with the shells of tiny shijimi clams. Clams and miso are one of those predestined culinary combos- what clams and chorizo are to Spain, clams and miso are to Japan. Shijimi clams are fingernail-sized, and they are eaten for the briny essence they release into the broth, not for what Mario Batali has called "the little bit of snot" in the shell. Miso-clam broth is among the most complex soup bases you'll ever taste, but it comes together in minutes, not the hours of simmering and skimming involved in making European stocks. As Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat explain in their book Japanese Hot Pots, this is because so many fermented Japanese ingredients are, in a sense, already "cooked" through beneficial bacterial and fungal actions. Japanese food has a reputation for crossing the line from subtlety into blandness, but a good miso-clam soup is an umami bomb that begins with dashi made from kombu (kelp) and katsuobushi (bonito flakes) or niboshi (a school of tiny dried sardines), adds rich miso pressed through a strainer for smoothness, and is then enriched with the salty clam essence.

Few grown humans can normally survive a fall of much more than twenty-five or thirty feet, though there have been some notable exceptions—none more memorable perhaps than that of a British airman in World War II named Nicholas Alkemade. In the late winter of 1944, while on a bombing run over Germany, Flight Sergeant Alkemade, the tail gunner on a British Lancaster bomber, found himself in a literally tight spot when his plane was hit by enemy flak and quickly filled with smoke and flames. Tail gunners on Lancasters couldn’t wear parachutes because the space in which they operated was too confined, and by the time Alkemade managed to haul himself out of his turret and reach for his parachute, he found it was on fire and beyond salvation. He decided to leap from the plane anyway rather than perish horribly in flames, so he hauled open a hatch and tumbled out into the night. He was three miles above the ground and falling at 120 miles per hour. “It was very quiet,” Alkemade recalled years later, “the only sound being the drumming of aircraft engines in the distance, and no sensation of falling at all. I felt suspended in space.” Rather to his surprise, he found himself to be strangely composed and at peace. He was sorry to die, of course, but accepted it philosophically, as something that happened to airmen sometimes. The experience was so surreal and dreamy that Alkemade was never certain afterward whether he lost consciousness, but he was certainly jerked back to reality when he crashed through the branches of some lofty pine trees and landed with a resounding thud in a snowbank, in a sitting position. He had somehow lost both his boots, and had a sore knee and some minor abrasions, but otherwise was quite unharmed. Alkemade’s survival adventures did not quite end there. After the war, he took a job in a chemical plant in Loughborough, in the English Midlands. While he was working with chlorine gas, his gas mask came loose, and he was instantly exposed to dangerously high levels of the gas. He lay unconscious for fifteen minutes before co-workers noticed his unconscious form and dragged him to safety. Miraculously, he survived. Some time after that, he was adjusting a pipe when it ruptured and sprayed him from head to foot with sulfuric acid. He suffered extensive burns but again survived. Shortly after he returned to work from that setback, a nine-foot-long metal pole fell on him from a height and very nearly killed him, but once again he recovered. This time, however, he decided to tempt fate no longer. He took a safer job as a furniture salesman and lived out the rest of his life without incident. He died peacefully, in bed, aged sixty-four in 1987. —

Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be-without exaggeration-a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man...-no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty-...there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts-the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic-hydrogen-neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we'd expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless-that last faith lost-the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we're fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another-coming-making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There'd be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot for speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we'd hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we'd see the last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we'd feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we'd be witnessing a world that's come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we'd hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place-well-not of rest-of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.

The Beck seemed to feel that if she let her guard down for an instant, she would die. Kidnappers lurked in every public bathroom, you got cancer if you caught a whiff of secondhand tobacco smoke, bombs and handguns proliferated in high schools everywhere, you caught AIDS if you even kissed you boyfriend. God forbid you got a sunburn of forgot to fasten your seat belt.

July" Explosions pillaging the night From the fireworks on the fourth of July It's just my lady, our friends, and I Smoking cigars and yelling at cars as they drive by We scaled a ladder ascending to the roof While five years ago I weeped and no one knew Holding my guitar, I strummed a tune I sang "I love you but I have to cut you loose" As the neighbor lights off the small bombs we watch from the rooftop safely, so safely If I had never let go, then only God knows where I would be now I made a bridge between us then I slowly burned it Five years ago, in my backyard I sang love away Little did I know that real love had not quite yet found me

The Bombay Chronicle asked Mohandas Gandhi what he thought of the fact that the United States was now in the war. It was December 20, 1941. 'I cannot welcome this entry of America,' Gandhi said. 'By her territorial vastness, amazing energy, unrivalled financial status and owing to the composite character of her people she is the one country which could have saved the world from the unthinkable butchery that is going on.' Now, he said, there was no powerful nation left to mediate and bring about the peace that all peoples wanted. 'It is a strange phenomenon,' he said, 'that the human wish is paralysed by the creeping effect of the war fever.' Churchill wrote a memo to the chiefs of staff on the future conduct of the war. 'The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs will bring home in a most effective way to the people of Japan the dangers of the course to which they have committed themselves,' he wrote. It was December 20, 1941. Life Magazine published an article on how to tell a Japanese person from a Chinese person. It was December 22, 1941. Chinese people have finely bridged noses and parchment-yellow skin, and they are relatively tall and slenderly built, the article said. Japanese people, on the other hand, have pug noses and squat builds, betraying their aboriginal ancestry. 'The modern Jap is the descendant of Mongoloids who invaded the Japanese archipelago back in the mists of prehistory, and of the native aborigines who possessed the islands before them, Life explained. The picture next to the article was of the Japanese premier, Hideki Tojo. In the Lodz ghetto, trucks began taking the Gypsies away. They went to Chelmno, the new death camp, where they were killed with exhaust gases and buried. It was just before Christmas 1941.

the fighter pilot words to Petula Clark's song Downtown.   When you get up at two o'clock in the morning You can bet you'll go Downtown, Shaking in your boots, you're sweating heavy all over, 'Cuz you got to go Downtown. Smoke a pack of cigarettes before the briefing's over, Wishing you weren't bombing, wishing you were flying cover, It's safer that way the flak is much thicker there -- You know you're biting your nails and you're pulling your hair, You're going Downtown, but you don't wanna go, Downtown, that's why you're feeling so low, Downtown, going to see Uncle Ho, Downtown, Downtown.

Crumpling it in my hands, I then dropped it into one of the trashcans built into the wall. “Where are you?” I asked softly as I walked down the hallway. Taking the same path as the day before, I found myself in the science wing of the school again. The thief dropped his smoke bomb off here, and then disappeared into Mr.

There is no longer any denying that this country is in the throes of a historic national crisis. Its ramifications are so vast and frightening that even now, shocked into numbness and disbelief, the American people have not yet fully grasped what is happening to them. The grim data are clear enough and still coming in. Since this summer began, thirty of our cities, big and small, have been wracked by racial dis-order; scores of citizens, almost all of them black, have been killed, thousands injured, and even more arrested. Property damage has exceeded a billion dollars; total income loss is incalculable. As a people, we are not unaccustomed to violence. Frontier lawlessness, Southern vigilante-ism, Chicago gangsterism : these are images and themes embedded in the American tradition. We have only just lost a President to an assassin's bullet. But, having escaped the bombs of two world wars, we are not familiar with the horror of burned-out buildings, smoking rubble, tanks in our streets, the blasts of Molotov cocktails, the ring of snipers' bullets from rooftops. Today we look at sections of Detroit and think of war-torn Berlin. We see rampaging, looting mobs and think of the unstable politics of underdeveloped countries. A nation's identity has been overturned. In our own history we can find no precedent in this century for the massive destruction the past three years have brought to our cities—no precedent since the Civil War. But the greatest toll is not in property damage or even in lives lost. Nor is the greatest danger that the violence will go on in-definitely, any more than the Civil War did. It is that the aftermath of that war will be repeated, that as in the Compromise of 1877 the country will turn its back on the Negro, on the root causes of his discontent, on its own democratic future.

♪ Go, Teen Titans, go Go, Teen Titans, go ♪ Go, Teen Titans, go Go, go, go, go, go ♪ T-double-E-N-T-I-T-A-N-S ♪ We the real heroes Takin' down the big menace ♪ Teen Titan flows ♪ Teen Titan knows ♪ Where there's real trouble, baby ♪ Teen Titans go ♪ Go, Teen Titans, go Go, Teen Titans, go Ugh. Morons. ♪ Beast Boy I can turn straight up into an animal ♪ Animal? ♪ Animal? ♪ Yes, any animal ♪ Boom, pow Yeah, I'm a kitten now Aw! ♪ Check out my kitten meow ♪ The star, the fire The live, the wire ♪ The alien princess in my alien attire ♪ The energy blasts The supersonic speed ♪ Is she down with the Titans? ♪ Oh, the yes indeed ♪ Booyah, booyah Go my cannon blaster ♪ Cyborg, whoo, baby Mr. High Tech Master ♪ What, what, what? ♪ Mr. Meatball Disaster ♪ What, what, what? ♪ Mr. Boom Boom Blaster ♪ Teen Teen Titans The Titans, the Teen Titans ♪ Teen Teen Titans The Titans, the Teen Titans ♪ Teen Teen Titans The Titans, the Teen Titans ♪ Teen Teen Titans The Titans, the Teen Titans ♪ Boom with the smoke bombs and birdarangs ♪ Bow staff hittin' steady Doin' my thang ♪ Robin, Robin, the leader Robin, Robin, in charge ♪ Show 'em your baby hands! ♪ No Robin, Robin's are large Nah, but for real, man. Those some super-small baby hands. No, they're not. Whatever. Just keep going, just keep going! ♪ Go, Teen Titans, go Go, Teen Titans, go ♪ Go, Teen Titans, go Go, Teen Titans, go ♪ Raven is here to drop it On you even harder ♪ There's no darker than me I'm as dark as can be ♪ Check it Azarath Metrion Zinthos ♪ Teleportin', magical powers We adios ♪ Teen Teen Titans The Titans, the Teen Titans ♪ Teen Teen Titans, the Titans The Teen Titans ♪ Teen Titans Go! ♪

The zombie fell over the generator, too, and laid on the ground next to me—its eyes seemed to glow in the dark. I was so scared, I almost lost it. Shaking, I sprayed it in the face and rolled away. It started smoking the same way the other zombies had, but then did something unexpected—it caught fire. Instantly, the entire area went up in flames. I stepped back, and still standing, jumped up and down, kicking my gas-soaked pants and shoes off. The flames sprouted up as if they had a life of their own.  I shot them with the Super Soaker, but it didn't do any good. The flames spread up the side of a rack of cheesy Hawaiian shirts. I knew I had to put the fire out fast. I ran to the aisle with the fire extinguishers and stopped. I'd dropped my flashlight back by the generator. A couple aisles over, something moved in the shadows. I started to lift my Super Soaker when I got hit in the face. "Oww, it burns," I cried, "Darn it. It burns." My eyes started watering like a busted drinking fountain. "Nathan, is that you? Were you bit? Did I kill you?" "No, no. I'm fine, it's just the lemonade; that stuff burns." "What's going on? You're burning the place down." I could hear panic in her voice. "Grab a fire extinguisher and follow me." My eyes dribbled lemonade-flavored tears as I grabbed two of the largest fire extinguishers and ran back. It took four extinguishers, but we managed to put the fire out. "Wow, the generator's still running," I said. Charred clothes were everywhere. Smoke filled the place—it smelled like fresh-roasted zombie. And I'd thought my day couldn't get any worse. "What the heck happened?" Misty held her nose and looked around at the blackened remains. "Security zombie in the bathroom; it was a close call." "I'll say. We're lucky the fire sprinklers didn't come on." "If this is lucky, I'd hate to see cursed." "Umm, Nate?" "Yeah?" I exhaled in relief. It would have been embarrassing if I'd burnt the place down. "Where's your pants?

I killed it, all right, just not how I expected. Its head burst into flames and then went out just as quickly, leaving behind a smoking corpse. "Behold, the awesome power of the zombie juice Super Soaker!" I waved the gun above my head in triumph.

As we advanced up the ridge, what a sight met our eyes — the whole area strewn with the smoke-blackened carcasses of the 29th Brigade’s Sherman Tanks which had ‘brewed up’ and burnt out, some with their turrets blown off, other still ‘brewing’ with gouts of orange flame shooting skywards from turret hatches as the ammunition exploded, dead bodies hanging from escape hatches at grotesque angles; dismounted crews were glimpsed trying to rescue wounded comrades from the wrecked vehicles while others were attempting to mend broken tracks amid the swirling black smoke from burning fuel and the flashes of mortar bombs raining down.

ON A WARM, drowsy afternoon in early September, Ed Murrow, Vincent Sheean, and Ben Robertson, a correspondent for the New York newspaper PM, stopped at the edge of a field several miles south of London. The three had spent the day driving down the Thames estuary in Murrow’s Talbot Sunbeam roadster, enjoying the sun and looking for dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Their search had been fruitless, and they stopped to buy apples from a farmer. Stretching out on the field to eat them, they drowsily listened to the chirp of crickets and buzzing of bees. The war seemed very far away. Within minutes, however, it returned with a vengeance. Hearing the harsh throb of aircraft engines, the Americans looked up at a sky filled with wave after wave of swastika-emblazoned bombers that clearly were not heading for their targets of previous days—the coastal defenses and RAF bases of southern England. Following the curve of the Thames, they were aimed straight at London. In minutes the sky over the capital was suffused with a fiery red glow; black smoke billowed up into a vast cloud that blanketed much of the horizon. When shrapnel from antiaircraft guns rained down around the American reporters, they dived into a nearby ditch, where, stunned, they watched the seemingly endless procession of enemy aircraft flying north. “London is burning. London is burning,” Robertson kept repeating. Returning to the city, they found flames sweeping through the East End, consuming dockyards, oil tanks, factories, overcrowded tenements, and everything else in their path. Hundreds of people had been killed, thousands injured or driven from their homes. Under a blood-red moon, women pushed prams piled high with their salvaged belongings. That horrific evening marked the beginning of the Blitz: from September 7 on, London would endure fifty-seven straight nights of relentless bombing. Until then, no other city in history had ever been subjected to such an onslaught. Warsaw and Rotterdam had been heavily bombed by the Germans early in the war, but not for the length of time of the assault on London. Although

traditional weapons of the samurai Dim Mak Death Touch doku poison dōshin Edo-period police officers of samurai origin (low rank) endan ninja smoke bombs fugu blowfish or puffer fish Fuma Wind Demons gaijin foreigner, outsider (derogatory term) geisha a Japanese girl trained to entertain men with conversation, dance and song haiku Japanese short poem hamon artistic pattern created on a samurai sword blade during tempering process hashi chopsticks horagai conch-shell trumpet horoku a spherical bomb thrown by hand using a short rope itadakimasu let’s eat! kagemusha a Shadow Warrior kamikaze lit. ‘divine wind’, or ‘Wind of the Gods’ kanji Chinese characters that are used also by the Japanese katana long sword ki energy flow or life force (Chinese: chi) kiai literally ‘concentrated spirit’ – used in martial arts as a shout for focusing energy when executing a technique kimono traditional Japanese clothing kissaki tip of sword koban Japanese oval gold coin

A Rationale for Violence At first, I thought I was merely witnessing the shocked aftermath of a shocking election. The Left did not expect Trump to win. As late as October 20, 2016, the American Prospect published an article, “Trump No Longer Really Running for President,” the theme of which was that Trump’s “real political goal is to make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to govern.” The election result was, in the words of columnist David Brooks, “the greatest shock of our lifetimes.”25 Trump won against virtually insurmountable odds, which included the mainstream media openly campaigning for Hillary and a civil war within the GOP with the entire intellectual wing of the conservative movement refusing to support him. Initially I interpreted the Left’s violent upheaval as a stunned, heat-of-the-moment response to the biggest come-from-behind victory in U.S. political history. Then I saw two things that made me realize I was wrong. First, the violence did not go away. There were the violent “Not My President’s Day” rallies across the country in February; the violent March 4 disruptions of Trump rallies in California, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Florida; the April anti-Trump tax rallies, supposedly aimed at forcing Trump to release his tax returns; the July impeachment rallies, seeking to build momentum for Trump’s removal from office; and the multiple eruptions at Berkeley.26 In Portland, leftists threw rocks, lead balls, soda cans, glass bottles, and incendiary devices until police dispersed them with the announcement, “May Day is now considered a riot.” Earlier, at the Minnesota State Capitol, leftists threw smoke bombs into the pro-Trump crowd while others set off fireworks in the building, sending people scrambling in fear of a bomb attack. Among those arrested was Linwood Kaine, the son of Hillary’s vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine.27 More of this, undoubtedly, is in store from the Left over the next four years. What this showed is that the Left was engaging in premeditated violence, violence not as outbreak of passion but violence as a political strategy.

Gory frontline memories from war in the Philippines returned to Mitch as he submerged himself in the brush. He sunk deep into the leaves and mud, and stayed there. He remembered scenes from the jungle. The tremors of falling bombs. The smell of smoke.

By 8:10 a.m., just fifteen minutes after the first bombs and torpedoes had struck the ships lying in Pearl Harbor, the main battle force of the Pacific Fleet was crippled. Along the eastern shore of Ford Island, in the anchorage known as “Battleship Row,” the battleships lay smashed, burning, and blackened, their masts and superstructures leaning over the harbor at 45-degree angles. So much thick black smoke was billowing out of the stricken ships that observers could barely tell which had been hit.

The drama hollow was to be avoided. These were hard little bastards, twelve-, thirteen-year-old chain-smokers; they didn't give a shit. They really didn't give a shit–your health, their health, teachers, parents, police–whatever. Smoking was their answer to the universe, their 42, their raisin d'être . . . . One fag could be split in myriad ways. It worked like this: someone (whoever had actually bought a pack of fags) lights up. Someone shouts "halves." At the halfway point the fag is passed over. As soon as it reaches the second person we hear "thirds," then "saves" (which is half a third), then "butt!," Then, if the day is cold and the need for a fag overwhelming, "last toke!" But last toke is only for the desperate; it is beyond the perforation, beyond the brand name of the cigarette, beyond what could reasonably be described as the butt. Last toke is the yellowing fabric of the roach, containing the stuff that is less than tobacco, the stuff that collects in the lungs like a time bomb, destroys the immune system, and brings permanent, sniffling, nasal flu. The stuff that turns white teeth yellow.

who, with binoculars to his eyes, was watching the encounter. One of the bombers, hit by a six-inch shell, disappeared in a puff of smoke. Yet the others held on, pressing home their attacks. Bill saw a black egg spilling from the leading 109’s belly. ‘I think they’ll miss,’ Fiji’s Captain retorted calmly. ‘It’s a beautiful attack to watch.’ Warspite was under full port rudder when the bomb struck. There was a flash from her starboard 4-inch and 6-inch batteries, and then a gush of steam and white smoke enveloped the battleship. ‘My God,’ Bill heard the Officer of the Watch exclaim. ‘She’s badly hit.’ A silence gripped the impotent watchers on Fiji’s bridge. Bill held his breath as the old lady swung out of line: her bows emerged slowly from the smoke and steam as a swarm of Stukas waited, poised above her, for the kill. Then they peeled off for the final act. Across the water Bill heard the cheering of men’s voices: Warspite’s guns had not ceased firing for an instant. Still they blazed away, red tongues spitting from their barrels. Warspite shook herself, picked up her skirts and, apparently undamaged, resumed her station. ‘Good for her,’ Captain William-Powlett said. ‘But her starboard batteries are knocked out — and so are her boiler room intakes, I reckon, judging by the steam and the white smoke.’ Rear-Admiral King’s Squadron was now coming up fast over the horizon, Naiad’s signal lanterns working overtime as, being the Senior Officer of the forces present, King took over the command from Rear-Admiral Rawlings. ‘It’s an impressive sight,’ Bill murmured to himself. ‘Shall I ever see anything like this again?’ Men sighed with relief as the forces reunited. Naiad and Perth, Carlisle and Calcutta wheeled into station ahead of the battleships, Kandahar and Kingston fitting into the starboard wing of the destroyer screen. The fleet could now concentrate its anti-aircraft fire in these narrows. Bill watched Greyhound. She seemed to be engaging two caiques: the destroyer’s guns flashed, then suddenly one of the caiques blew up. She was probably full of Germans and ammunition. A flight of JU 87Bs, on its way

The reality of life on sidewalks is it was a lot easier to imagine grandeur than to actualize it. There was no ceremony to any given second. There were patches of gray concrete. Moving machines. People who looked impossible to interrupt. So much unconquerable space in the air. It was as if an alien species dropped a smoke bomb poisoned with monotony and anywhere a man goes, he suffocates in idleness along with every element in his immediate universe. The most important event to take place was the red crosswalk signal switching to green pedestrian travel. The closest chance of romance was playing at 5:30 p.m. in the theatre. Happiness was making it to one’s destination without embarrassment. Nothing appears achievable to a singular, puny ghost who is not aided by alcohol, a camera team, or a cheering crowd—only more sidewalk and sky.

I had recently completed several extremely dangerous test flights in the F-4C trying to determine why eight aircraft flown by Tactical Air Command pilots had crashed while maneuvering at low altitude. In preparation for flying combat, F-4C aircraft were loaded with twenty-five-pound smoke bombs, and pilots dropped them on simulated targets in Air Force gunnery ranges. With a full load of fuel, the aircraft was being flown out of balance. As a result, the flight controls were so light that some pilots maneuvered the F-4C through airframe buffet and into a full stall, ending in loss of control and a crash.

The decision of the bomb is final: there will be nothing here but air, and the clear space left behind. The lights go out. The ceiling collapses onto the dance floor. The Café de Paris is open to the night sky. Smoke rises from the rubble.

When I was 18 I gifted my 11-year-old step cousin a copy of Rancid's "...And Out Come the Wolves." Because of this her side of the family blamed me for many things. Caught her smoking at 15? Rancid. Disappeared for a long weekend? The Girl's a Time Bomb. Posed nude for a magazine 3 days after turning 18? They just disowned me. I'm a bad influence it seems. I've been a bad influence for a long time.

My dad loved to drive, but more than that he hated to stop. This made him at best a questionable tour guide. The hours would drone on as we crisscrossed the country in the dank and ever more malodorous car. The four of us would grow restless and cramped in the backseat, perennially arguing with each other and inventing games to fight off the monotony. My dad would press forward relentlessly, trying to make six hundred miles a day, every now and then invoking the three shut-ups rule and lashing out into the noise and cramped restlessness of the backseat. In the front seat my mom would patiently act as his navigator, reading the map, periodically making Wonder Bread and lunchmeat sandwiches, and now and then twisting the dial on the radio to try to find some music and local news. I finally figured it out. My dad’s mind had been shaped by flying a B-29 bomber on long-range missions. As he drove, my mother became the navigator, and we were the crew, although it wasn’t clear whom he wanted to bomb. You could see the business in his eyes. He smoked constantly, the strong odors of his Camel or self-rolled cigarettes or of his weird metal-stemmed pipe piercing our nostrils and often bringing the rear windows down, even in the most brutal heat of the day. His eyes were intent, never leaving the road in front of us. But every now and then an alert for a coming historical marker would pop up along the side of the road, causing my dad to suddenly snap out of his trance and remember that this was not actually his air crew sitting in the backseat. A teachable moment had arrived, giving him a quick opportunity to exercise his parenting skills and a chance to shower us with some much-needed cultural immersion. “Okay, guys, historical marker coming up on the right. I’m going to slow down to forty-five miles an hour. There it is, here it comes! Jim, read the SIGN!” I

Sometimes these guns were actually audible, or we fancied they were; every weekday there was a rush to the newspapers, every Sunday a batch of names read out to stilled listeners. The careful assessments of schoolmasters were blotted out by larger and wilder markings; a boy who had been expelled returned as a hero with medals; those whose inability to conjugate avoir and être seemed likely in 1913 to imperil a career were to conquer France’s enemies better than they did her language; offenders gated for cigarette-smoking in January were dropping bombs from the sky in December. It was a frantic world; and we knew it even if we did not talk about it. Slowly, inch by inch, the tide of war lapped to the gates of our seclusion; playing-fields were ploughed up for trenches and drill-grounds; cadet-corps duties took precedence over classroom studies; the school that had prepared so many beloved generations for life was preparing this one, equally beloved, for death.

The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009. I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010. In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian. I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.

Bosun Calhoun then launched into an account of the attack the day before and reviewed the damage suffered by the sunken battleships. He said the USS Nevada was berthed astern of the Arizona when she was struck by a torpedo in her bow. She managed to get under way with her guns blazing, the only battleship able to do so. As she rounded the southern tip of Ford Island, she was smashed with an avalanche of bombs, which started intense fires. When the thick, pungent smoke from the fires poured into the machinery spaces, the black gang, or engineers, headed for topside and fresh air. This forced abandonment left the pumping machinery inoperative. The forward ammunition magazines were purposely flooded to prevent explosions from the fires, but the after magazines were also flooded by mistake, which caused the ship to sink lower and lower in the water. In addition, ballast tanks were flooded on the starboard side to correct a port list. As more water entered the ship, many fittings that passed through watertight bulkheads began to leak, flooding all machinery spaces and causing loss of all electrical and mechanical power. Nevada was sinking in the ship channel.

The time had come to deploy for the attack, and Commander Fuchida had a difficult decision to make. The plan provided for either “Surprise” or “Surprise Lost” conditions. If “Surprise,” the torpedo planes were to go in first, then the horizontal bombers, finally the dive-bombers, while the fighters remained above for protection. (The idea was to drop as many torpedoes as possible before the smoke from the dive-bombing ruined the targets.) On the other hand, if the raiders had been detected and it was “Surprise Lost,” the dive-bombers and fighters would hit the airfields and antiaircraft defenses first; then the torpedo planes would come in when resistance was crushed. To tell the planes which deployment to take, Commander Fuchida was to fire his signal gun once for “Surprise,” twice for “Surprise Lost.” Trouble was, Commander Fuchida didn’t know whether the Americans had caught on or not. The reconnaissance planes were meant to tell him, but they hadn’t reported yet. It was now 7:40 A.M., and he couldn’t wait any longer. They were already well down the west coast and about opposite Haleiwa. Playing a hunch, he decided he could carry off the surprise. He held out his signal pistol and fired one “black dragon.” The dive-bombers began circling upward to 12,000 feet; the horizontal bombers spiraled down to 3500; the torpedo planes dropped until they barely skimmed the sea, ready for the honor of leading the assault. As the planes orbited into position, Fuchida noticed that the fighters weren’t responding at all. He decided that they must have missed his signal, so he reached out and fired another “black dragon.” The fighters saw it this time, but so did the dive-bombers. They decided it was the second “black dragon” of the “Surprise Lost” signal. Hence, they would be the ones to go in first. In a welter of confusion, the High Command’s plan for carefully integrated phases vanished; dive-bombers and torpedo planes eagerly prepared to slam into Pearl Harbor at the same time.

The second wave of Japanese attackers was less than an hour behind the first. This time, knowing the defenders would be on the alert, slow-flying, low-altitude torpedo planes were judged too vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and were not included in the attack. Only Val dive-bombers and high-altitude Kates delivered the punches, but they reversed the targets of their comrades an hour earlier. Instead of the battleships, the Kates dropped their bombs on planes and installations on Ford Island and at Hickam Field. Eighteen struck Ford Island, although the billowing smoke from the Arizona and other fires was so intense that it obscured much of the target. Twenty-seven bombers hit Hickam, while the remaining nine Kates pummeled Kaneohe Naval Air Station on the eastern shores of Oahu. The eighty Val dive-bombers largely sought targets of opportunity among the undamaged ships throughout the harbor. Judging that resistance from American fighters had been suppressed by the first strike, the thirty-six Zeroes accompanying the second wave broke into two groups and went after their own targets. Eighteen hit Kaneohe and Bellows Field, while the remaining Zeroes strafed service buildings and parked aircraft at Hickam Field. Even if few American planes were flying, a barrage of antiaircraft fire from ships in the harbor shot down six Zeroes and fourteen Vals in this second wave.

8:06 A.M. A great sucking sound, like a whoosh, rocked the ship and everyone in it with concussive force. A 1,760-pound, armor-piercing bomb, dropped from ten thousand feet above, had penetrated four steel decks to the ammunition magazine. The blast blew the No. 1 turret into the air, where it came crashing back onto the deck. A plume of black smoke spewed out of the forward smokestack, and an expanding fireball shot five to six hundred feet into the air, engulfing those of us in the director.

Bernstein poured his unfulfilled ambition into stupefying powerful performances of the Mahler symphonies, freighting them with the themes that he should or would have addressed in his own music if only he had the time or the energy or whatever it was that he ultimately lacked: “It is only after fifty, sixty, seventy years of world holocausts, of the simultaneous advance of democracy with our increasing inability to stop making war, of the simultaneous magnification of national pieties with the intensification of our active resistance to social equality—only after we have experienced all this through the smoking ovens of Auschwitz, the frantically bombed jungles of Vietnam, through Hungary, Suez, the Bay of Pigs, the farce-trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the refueling of the Nazi machine, the murder in Dallas, the arrogance of South Africa, the Hiss-Chambers travesty, the Trotskyite purges, Black Power, Red Guards, the Arab encirclement of Israel, the plague of McCarthyism, the Tweedledum armaments race—only after all this can we finally listen to Mahler's music and understand that it foretold all. And that in the foretelling it showered a rain of beauty on this world that has not been equaled since.” Bernstein's enthusiasm for Mahler was infectious, but his claims were exaggerated. In twentieth-century music, through all the darkness, guilt, misery, and oblivion, the rain of beauty never ended.

The Curse works like this: Memory arrives in lockstep with sentience, with self-awareness. It arrives all at once, boom. A detonation. I'm a newborn handed this sudden bomb-blast of identity, this explosive memory of all previous lives lived all at once. Even as synapses struggle to form, neurons connecting with muscle cells.

This cramped little space that stank of earth and smoke and sweat, that dripped water during every hard rain, and whose floor was often a half-frozen soup of mud and sunflower seeds and straw, now seemed to him more comfortable than Ketterling’s HQ could ever be, and he knew why. Here, surrounded by the weapons hanging from nails by their straps, the boxes of hand grenades, the cut-down artillery shells filled with cigarette butts, the crumpled moisture-bloated magazines and greasy playing cards, one lived an honest life. You couldn’t get that back home anymore. The radio and the newspapers were full of lies that would have been insulting even if the streets hadn’t been full of rubble and the air with the shriek of air-raid sirens, and it wasn’t enough for the government that the people merely endure it all, bombs and lies, without objecting. They had to believe the lies, had to parrot them back with sickly smiles plastered on their faces, lest they be branded defeatists and be taken away. It wasn’t like that here. Nickolaus wanted it to be, but it wasn’t. Here, a man might be hungry, he might itch with lice, he might sting with pain from cuts that never healed, he might be empty-headed with fatigue and half-deafened from noise, but he always knew precisely where he stood—with his comrades and with the enemy. There were no intrigues, no politics, no flag-waving. A man never looked you in the eyes and told you black was white, or worse yet, demanded that you agree that black was white. There was no need because he had already asked you to die for him, and once you had agreed, what need was there for words?

smoke bomb.

drug even shows up. That’s because the drug itself is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem. The drug is the culmination, the final step—not the first. The very first time I smoked cocaine in Robin’s apartment, I was already an addict, I just didn’t know it. I was a silent bomb waiting to go off, my brain looking for the right drug to

The shouts continued to sound at the bus stop across the street. A shirtless man wearing a backpack was going around and grabbing women, stumbling here and there, and yelling with hostility. Everyone at the bus stop backed away. A group of able-bodied humans paralyzed by violence seemed incomprehensible. But that was the smoke bomb of monotony entering terrified lungs, lungs alive but too shocked to act. They were afraid of getting harmed themselves to rescue those who cried out in front of them. It was amazing that regardless of how much anger was in someone, the character they might have, and what adventure films they had seen, their body did not want to move when a monster ate in front of them.

Booker exhaled another cloud of smoke, watching the ash drift up into the sky.  “I ended up with serious lung damage.  VA told me they couldn’t afford the treatment.  Budget cuts, they said.  We can spring for cash to buy tanks, and bombs, and guns.  But healthcare be damned.” He let out a bitter chuckle.  “Save the troops!  No soldier left behind!  All that bullshit while you’re out there risking your life… until you get home.  At which point, your ass gets forgotten.  Shut up, sit tight, and suffer.” Booker crushed the stub of his cigarette against the ground, lighting another.  “You know the irony, though?  They can’t afford to treat me.  But they also can’t afford the PR of letting me die.  That would look bad, you know.  So, they hooked me up to a fucking ventilator to keep pumping oxygen into lungs that are functioning at maybe 10%.  Imprisoned me in a tiny white box.  Don’t even have the strength to take my own life.  It’s a life-fucking-sentence – no judge or jury.  Justice truly is a cold, blind bitch,” Booker ground out harshly. A

In his 1999 book, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, Robert B. Stinnett, a navy photographer who served in the same World War II aerial group as former President George H. W. Bush, used documents acquired from a Freedom of Information Act request to demonstrate definitively that FDR knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and let it go as part of his larger strategy to provoke the Japanese into war.185 The smoking guns included several declassified, U.S.-decoded Japanese naval broadcasts, and spy communiqués which set forth a timetable, a census, and bombing plans for U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor, at least the contents of which were relayed to FDR and his aides.186 In large part, the book discussed a particularly damning piece of evidence called the McCollum Memo, a six-page document written in October 1940—fourteen months before the attack on Pearl Harbor—and addressed to two senior FDR military advisors outlining the steps for provoking the Japanese into making an overt act of war.187

He saw a small, secondary explosion in the mushroom column. A yellow sphere flared in orange and then smoke swamped it. It had to be chemical, but what— Ah, he thought. All the iron in the buildings and soil has been thrown up in fine particles. Hot, too. It met the oxygen. “A rust bomb,” he whispered. Weird, but probably right. And nobody had thought of it before. Karl

The building was a sniper’s heaven; it was long with dozens of windows and many points of view. Three floors. Someone had put cardboard in each of the panes, dozens of cardboard boxes, making it almost impossible to see inside. The marines kept firing, thousands and thousands of rounds. The barrels of their machine guns glowed and sagged. “Get me another barrel,” one of the kids said. More firing commenced. “I don’t know who he is, but he is very well trained,” said Lieutenant Steven Berch, another one of the platoon leaders. Omohundro was downstairs. He listened to the commotion and called in an airstrike. “Just blow the building to shit,” he said. First a 2,000 -pound bomb, then a 500 -pounder flew into the building and burst. A cloud unfolded upward and revealed a gigantic fire. It rose through the ruined ceiling. Part of a wall collapsed. Crack! Crack! Crack! The marines ducked, cursed loudly and returned fire. No one spotted the sniper this time. The sniper fired back. The marines responded with another blast of gunfire, many thousands of rounds. I stood with some guys at the back of the roof, behind a shed. A blue and green parakeet fluttered out of the sky and hovered in tight circles. Bullets flew past. The parakeet landed on a slumping power line. The marines stared in amazement. “Someone’s pet?” a marine said. I ran across the top of the roof and the sniper took a shot. Crack! The bullet whizzed by. An artillery barrage began. First came the 155 mm shells, each filled with fifty pounds of high explosives. One after the other the shells sailed into the building. Fire swept through the three floors. What was left of the ceiling collapsed in the smoke. Cardboard sailed out of shattered windows. Twenty shells, then thirty, each one large enough to end the world. The shelling ceased and the shooting stopped. The building burned. Remarkably it still had a frame, and parts of its three floors still stood. Suddenly a sound rustled from a storefront on the first floor. The marines tensed. A cat sauntered out, dirty yellow, tail in the air. It walked like a runway model in front of a construction site. “Can I shoot it, sir?” a marine asked his squad leader. “Absolutely not,” came the reply. Crack!

Hours of bombing with the possibility of being blown to bits, buried alive, or being blown off their feet paralyzed many with fear. It is estimated that seventy percent of all casualties on the Western Front were from shellfire. As the shells fell, Roy tried to think of home, shake the hysteria with flippant humor, or just light a cigarette with shaking hands. Being shelled was like a nightmare. One soldier described it as “distant thunder, countless shells falling like rain, towers of smoke, fire, explosions, confusion, cries of help, all of it madness.

Building with Its Face Blown Off How suddenly the private is revealed in a bombed-out city, how the blue and white striped wallpaper of a second story bedroom is now exposed to the lightly falling snow as if the room had answered the explosion wearing only its striped pajamas. Some neighbors and soldiers poke around in the rubble below and stare up at the hanging staircase, the portrait of a grandfather, a door dangling from a single hinge. And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed by its uncovered ochre walls, the twisted mess of its plumbing, the sink sinking to its knees, the ripped shower curtain, the torn goldfish trailing bubbles. It's like a dollhouse view as if a child on its knees could reach in and pick up the bureau, straighten a picture. Or it might be a room on a stage in a play with no characters, no dialogue or audience, no beginning, middle, and end– just the broken furniture in the street, a shoe among the cinder blocks, a light snow still falling on a distant steeple, and people crossing a bridge that still stands. And beyong that–crows in a tree, the statue of a leader on a horse, and clouds that look like smoke, and even farther on, in another country on a blanket under a shade tree, a man pouring wine into two glasses and a woman sliding out the wooden pegs of a wicker hamper filled with bread, cheese, and several kinds of olives.