> National Journal

> Saturday, November 23, 2002

America's Secret Weapon in the War on Terror: Americans

by Jonathan Rauch

> As everyone knows, today's Americans are pampered, cynical, and

> self-absorbed. The Greatest Generation served nobly, but then the mold

> broke. After 9/11, the government asked Americans to give but little, and

> little is what they gave. As everyone knows.

> Suppose what everyone knows is not actually true. Suppose President Bush

> called for volunteers in the war on terror, and thousands of people came

> forward. Suppose they created volunteer networks for disaster relief,

> emergency preparedness, and civil defense. Suppose they did most of this

> work at the community level, under the radar of the national media. And

> suppose it all happened not in the massive, militarized, top-down mode of WWII but in

> the networked, decentralized, bottom-up manner of WWW.

Well, brace yourself. Americans have heard the call.

> WASHINGTON-In his office a few blocks from the White House, Leslie

> Lenkowsky waves a magazine editorial lamenting America's post-9/11

> complacency. Then he fills me in on things the editorialists probably did

> not know.

> Lenkowsky heads the federal Corporation for National and Community

> Service, a dinky (by government standards) agency that runs the AmeriCorps

> national-service program and makes grants for volunteerism. Two months

> after 9/11, Bush gave a speech challenging the public to volunteer "in our

> own communities" to make the homeland more secure. The national-service

> agency responded by rummaging through its budget and coming up with $10.3

> million in grant money for 9/11 volunteerism. Five worthy proposals poured

> in for every one that the agency could fund. Nonetheless, by July the

> corporation had approved 43 three-year grants to nonprofit and public

> agencies in 27 states.

> Some of the programs, Lenkowsky explains, are relatively conventional:

> money to place AmeriCorps workers with the Red Cross or to enlist

> volunteers in cities' homeland security efforts. Some, however, break new

> ground. Milwaukee will teach public-housing residents to patrol for

> suspicious goings- on, use two-way radios, coordinate with police, and so

> forth-skills that, not coincidentally, will also be useful against

> ordinary crime. A program in Manhattan's Chinatown will create an

> immigrant network to communicate with non-English-speakers in time of

> crisis.

> Then there are the hams. "If you had told me we'd be giving a grant to a

> ham- radio group," Lenkowsky says, "I wouldn't have believed it."

NEWINGTON, Conn.-America boasts 650,000 licensed ham-radio operators.

> About 1,500 of them are certified in emergency communications and are

> prepared to rush to the scene of a forest fire, flood, or hurricane with a

> "jump bag" full of portable radio equipment. "Amateur radio has been doing

> this for decades, with their own equipment, at no cost to the government

> or any corporation or community," says Mary M. Hobart, of the American

> Radio Relay League. When there is a major train wreck or chemical spill,

> "sometimes hams will show up and not be needed, but hams will show up."

> That can be crucial. When phone lines, radio towers, and even satellites

> go down, hams-broadcasting each to each, and operating self- sufficiently

> on batteries or generators-stay on the air. After September 11, when New

> York's cell phones turned into paperweights (remember that giant antenna

> atop the World Trade Center?), hundreds of hams, some from as far away

> as Texas and California, turned out to provide radio lifelines for

> emergency workers and relief agencies.

> Not all of those people had been trained, and, says Hobart, "during an

> emergency is not the time to train someone." So, with its government grant

> and some private money, the Relay League has embarked on an effort to

> increase the country's supply of emergency-ready hams from 1,500 today to

> at least 6,500 in three years. Just since last month, 600 hams have begun

> the training.

> "We have the ability to create a national platform for emergency

> communications," says Hobart. "If, God forbid, something were to strike in

> both Virginia and California, we have the mechanism to connect those two

> together."

> On 9/11, of course, all commercial air travel halted. If that happened

> again, how could hams, and other urgently needed personnel, be rushed to

> the site of an attack?

> VIRGINIA BEACH, Va.-You may have heard of Angel Flights. Under the

> auspices of a national nonprofit called Mercy Medical Airlift, 4,500 or so

> private pilots around the country volunteer themselves and their planes to

> fly patients long distances for specialized medical care.....

> FALLS CHURCH, Va.-Those people swarming around the Pentagon after 9/11?

> Many of them were volunteers, too. The American Red Cross, according to

> Susan Aarhus, is 97 percent volunteer......

> One could go on. Maryland's Frederick County-home to Camp David and the

> army's Fort Detrick biowarfare lab, among other potentially juicy

> terrorist targets-is readying an Alpha Squad of police, fire, and medical

> units to respond to a bioterror attack. I missed their joint

> decontamination drill a couple of weeks ago, but later I caught up with

> Alan E. Imhoff, a retiree who is helping organize hundreds of the county's

> retired doctors, nurses, and other health personnel into a volunteer

> medical-reserve corps. "Basically," says Imhoff, "our whole focus is on

> what we do locally for the first 72 hours, until state and national

> assistance reaches us." He adds that preparedness programs are sprouting

> in Maryland so fast it's hard to keep up with the acronyms.

The jihadists of militant Islam are reported to believe that as they

> toppled the Soviet colossus, so, in time, they can topple the American

> one. What they do not understand is that the Soviet state made war on

> civil society for most of its 70-year rule. Americans, meanwhile, have

> nurtured their churches, charities, and clubs. The Soviet Union fell

> because it was brittle as well as brutal. America, with its countless

> nodes of activity and authority, is somewhat more vulnerable than the

> USSR, but it is infinitely more robust. More robust than Al Qaeda

> realizes. More robust, even, than many Americans realize.

> "Through this tragedy," Bush said in November of 2001, "we are renewing

> and reclaiming our strong American values." So we are. This Thanksgiving,

> Americans have much to be thankful for-beginning with each other.