THE HALLOWEEN MASSACRE

On October 25, 2007, nearly three million protesters began flooding into Washington, D.C.,and the surrounding suburbs.The Cheney response was as harsh as it was foolish. With only fifteen hundred National Guard troops and eighteen thousand Danish mercenaries to safeguard Washington, not to mention the increasingly ambivalent mood of the country, the President's plan of using his modest military force to expel the protesters from the city was an invitation to disaster.

The first skirmish broke out early on the 25th when about a thousand protesters marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. A brigade of startled Danish troops, foraging for decent cheese and pastry, met the students with a volley of rifle fire. Twenty-two students were killed; another hundred were wounded.

The relative handful of national guard troops in the city were outraged by the unprovoked attack of the Danes. Half past eleven Amereican soldiers attacked a contingent of Danes lurking outside the Smithsonian. The battle, while inconclusive, caused the entire Danish contingent to retreat to the Capitol where they had previously erected defenses.

Shocked by the violence, the protestors, too, retreated. The next morning, however, buoyed by tens of thousands new arrivals, the huge mob began marching toward the Capitol. By ten thirty the students were joined by nearly a thousand guardsmen and approximately six thousand city police officers (most of the D.C. police went out on strike when Cheney announced he was outlawing unions). Waiting for the crowd were the eighteen thousand Danes, a handful of guardsmen and perhaps three hundred policemen; the Danes were armed with light artillery, heavy machine guns, mortars, hand grenades and military rifles.

At half past eleven news of Cheney's death swept through the crowd. A carnival atmosphere soon ensued with dancing, drinking and drug use filling the rest of the day until six. At that time came the sobering news of Falwell's assumption of the presidency. Dispirited, the mob of protesters slunk back to the suburbs like a huge, wounded snake.

If Cheney had been foolish, Falwell exhibited a totally mindless faith. Early on the 27th he ordered his troops to attack the protesters, most of whom were now in Chevy Chase, Maryland (at the time he claimed he acted on direct orders from Jesus; after the fall of the USC he said he had been duped by Tom Delay). The Danes, unaware of the police and guardsmen with the protesters, sent only two thousand troops after the students. The resulting clash went poorly for the Danes. The Americans had received news of the intended attack and ambushed the Danes just north of the district boundary line. The battle was brief, bruatal and, for the Americans, invigorating.

By two o'clock the first wave of joyous protesters was back in the city and approaching the capitol. At this point the Danes panicked. When the edge of the crowd was still a quarter mile from the Danish lines the troops opened fired with fifty machines guns and artillary fire. Students fell like discarded paper dolls in the attack and the resultant rush to retreat to safety. The massacre was televised from above by the BBC which had managed somehow to get a Canadian heliocopter over the city. Although well over half the American television stations refused to carry the BBC footage, in conformity with a Cheney “request”on the 24th for the media not to ”aggravate” the situation by broadcasting any images of turmoil in the country, the images on the internet of eighteen and nineteen year old boys and girls being chopped down by machine gun fire - from foreigners - galvanized the country. At the end of the day the total casualties on the American side stood at 268 dead and over 1,400 wounded.