Life in Black Mountain, NC is tender, if also a bit tragic, for the Masterson family. John, a widower, bravely combats sorrow in the years after his wife's death while he cares for his two daughters and mother-in-law. This in itself could be the foundation of a poignant story about life, death, and love.
But One Second After, by William Forstchen, is much more ambitious in its scope than a simple survey of one family's suffering and hope. It consider the very reality, but rarely discussed, possibility of an attack against America using an EMP (electromagnetic pulse). Nuclear weapons inevitably carry with them an EMP, but the power and placement of such a weapon, if used, perhaps makes an EMP more dangerous and destructive than the nuke itself. As chronicled in numerous studies and congressional reports, if a nuclear devise with a strong EMP is set off at a certain height in the atmosphere, it can send a society back to the stone age.
That is the terrifying scenario that unfolds in this book, with the focus paid to one small town's effort to survive in the aftermath. John, a retired Army colonel who gave up his promotion to general in order to care for his cancer-stricken wife, must rise to the fore and try to hold his town together. The affect of an EMP on a society that relies so heavily upon technology is devastating. Cars stop working and people have no way to return home. All communication is cut off. With emergency generators immediately wiped out as well, retirement homes and hospitals quickly turn into morgues.
With worthless currency and paralyzed transportation, supplies of every sort quick vanish. Within weeks, survival is the only thing that most care about. In Black Mountain, thanks to the decisive actions of John and others, maintaining one's humanity is made paramount as well. Martial law is quickly declared, with many freedoms taken for granted quickly curtailed. But this curtailing of freedom is done with public consent, not as a principle, but as a price willingly paid for survival. Justice is swift and severe. An alliance with a connecting town produces greater trade and collective security (with a small militia raised from the local college).
But the line between stability and chaos is a thin one indeed. Particularly on the East Coast, where functional jobs and skills gave way to theoretical ones long ago, and where self-sufficiency was outsourced to government and a global economy, society unravels. The Midwest loses half of its population, but fares but better (the West Coast is largely ignored in the book). With an absence of governance and sufficient law enforcement, cults and gangs quickly fill the vacuum and are unchecked as they run amuck--pillaging, raping, murdering, even cannibalizing. Like America in her brief history, Black Mountain forms an island of humanity amidst a rising tide of utter depravity.
One depressing, but undeniably important, aspect of this book is its realism. Even for those who come together in Black Mountain, their race holds no hope of victory--only the delay of absolute defeat. In a bloodbath, they're able to withstand the assault of a vicious force that attacks them and wipe out the opposing force. But the thousand casualties they suffer merely compounds the loss of the thousands more who die before and after for lack of food, medication, and hope. First family members die, leaving empty hearts. By the end, most families are dead, leaving behind only empty homes.
And death does not keep its grizzly hand from the Masterson family. John suffers loss after unspeakable loss--the last of which (too obviously foreshadowed) squeezes the reader's heart like a sponge. The author knew the power of presenting a heroic father and leader who is simultaneously helpless to protect those who need and love him the most.
Mixed into this ordeal is the author's own psychological involvement within the plotline. The main character clearly is a manifestation of the author himself (a retired military officer, professor, and military historian, with a long career but not combat experience). In the book, the retired officer and professor who never had a chance to pull the trigger in combat now finds himself having to pull it often to protect his town and family. With an egotism that I have displayed in some of my own writings, the author lionizes himself through vicariously living through his main character.
While this egotism is uncharming, it is also understandable. I had good conversation with two of my friends within the unit a few weeks ago (I have done over a hundred military funerals with one or the other of them). One of these soldiers is prior infantry and kicked down doors in Iraq. He has seen ample combat and will happy to never see it again. The other works in personnel and desires to go active in order to "be more of a soldier." The former soldier was incredulous at such a desire. But I understood.
Many soldiers, particularly males, are thoroughly disoriented in modern society. Contrary to what neo-feminism and popular culture espouses, men are wired to protect and provide, fight and defend. That instinct plays out in the war games (like cops vs. robbers) of young boys, though such virtuous activities are quickly being banned in our public education system. We now live in a predominantly white collar, feminized, cubicle culture. Sacrifice is no longer honored, as much as it is parceled out through coercive, mandatory requirements from school system and office place alike.
The military provides one of the last refuges for men to do what they were wired to do--stand in the gap between chaos the women who so valiantly provide the incubator for continued humanity and civilization in the home. That noble desire becomes twisted into egotism for many of my soldiers, for the author of this book, and for myself. Men so desperately want to be valiant, to be heroes.
And what men like me need to realize and remember, and what is notably absent from this book, is that Jesus Christ is the eternal hero who accomplished the most heroic of deeds that can never be replicated--He rescued sinners from the guilt of sin, the pain of eternal death, and reconciled them to their God and Father in heaven. Though a man is called to love his wife as Christ loved the Church, he will never be able to do so. That is why the other half of the analogy is given. In our inability to ever be the hero that people, including those we love, truly need, we look with hope and overwhelming gratitude to the God-man who entered human history and became that hero.
The book ends with glimmers of hope that are still entombed in unmistakable grief. The pastors and chaplains in the story offer Christ the placebo, not Christ the hero. The heroic role is left for the main character--the novelesque embodiment of the author himself. But, captive to his own well-intentioned conceit, the author cannot help but leave his main character impotent in the face of the most crippling and intimate of tragedies. He cannot wipe away tears, let alone their cause, death, nor its cause, sin. But Christ can do these things. He did do these things. And even if survival is measured by days rather than years, if are lives are bound to Christ as our hero and savior from sin, then we are safe.
