Iqra’i

I’ve only just got out of Georgia. I’m glad I went — the National Guard is too depleted to do much down there, and the guns I was running might make a difference for the militias — but I’m really thankful to be back. For a while I wasn’t sure I’d make it.

It’s a long drive from DC, but by the time the bombs were falling on Macon I was on I-85 near Atlanta. Traffic was totally blocked up coming out of the city, and Governor Perdue came on the radio to tell us to turn around. When I started heading the other way, I could see the explosions in the rearview mirror. I found out later that the Russians bombed Robins AFB and Fort McPherson before they moved ground troops into Atlanta.

All the Georgia stations went dead on the radio, but by the time I was near the coast I could pick something up from Charleston. The Air National Guard was saying they’d shot down nine Russian planes, and that the Russians were bombing civilian infrastructure and moving east. I made it into Savannah just before they started shelling from the harbor.

That was the first I really saw of the war. I never made it into Atlanta, and I swung all the way around Macon when I was driving east. From the road it was just a matter of staying under under a certain speed and away from any big towns, and at Russian roadblocks I had a story about going to find my grandparents (the Pennsylvania driver’s license helped). But Savannah had gone mad.

Everyone told me it used to be a beautiful city, and you could still sort of see it in the historic district, but they were building barricades in the squares and boarding up the windows of the gorgeous old houses. The Russian broadcasts all claimed that they were only attacking military installations, but I saw firemen pulling bodies out of the rubble of apartment buildings.

There was smoke everywhere, and refugees from the suburbs fighting with reservists for somewhere to sleep. The guns went to a militia that used to be the Savannah Police Department, and I used the car as an ambulance for a couple of days to get people to the hospitals. They were filling up, though, and running out of supplies, and finally I realized I had to get out. They’d bombed the bridges, and the roads out of Savannah were clogged, but I sold the car for a boat across the harbor into South Carolina. It was at night and a couple of times I thought the Russian patrols were sure to get us, but we made it across okay.

The Russians are still bombing Georgia. The BBC says they took out the Atlanta airport and might be about to march on Savannah. I hope to God the people I met there can hold out. An armful of M16s might not be much against a Russian fighter jet, but if they want to take the whole city they’ll have to do it on foot.

I’m glad I could get my hands on the guns to take south. Imagine what would have happened if the District hadn’t respected the ruling in Heller!