The “Perfect Day” — The day of total terror

By Lt.Col. Dave Grossman, USA, ret.

Author of On Killing, and On Combat

The “Perfect Day” and our terrorist opponents’ possible plans for future attacks

I have been told (by those conducting interviews with captured enemy combatants) that when we ask them “What is coming next?” they sometimes refer to the “Perfect Day.” You cannot understand what they are talking about if you do not understand the historical reference.

The Sepoy Mutiny in India, in 1857, is an example of a Perfect Day. This was a spontaneous uprising by Muslims (and Hindus), with everyone giving the British their “best shot.” Nannies killed the kids, cooks poisoned the food, and shop owners murdered the British ladies as they came into the shop. And soldiers (sometimes complete units) killed their British officers and then used their weapons to attack the British.

The current politically correct term for the Sepoy Mutiny is “The First Indian Rebellion.” (You can look it up on Wikipedia, where the event has been completely PC filtered and revised.)

The First Indian Rebellion is, to them, George Washington, Abe Lincoln, and the Alamo all rolled into one. And 99% of Westerners have never heard about it.

In their dreams and fond imaginations, this is what will happen across all of the “Crusader nations” who are in Afghanistan. Pick a day, and everyone gives it their best shot. If just one in 1,000 of the Islamic people in our nations answer the call to Jihad, it will still be thousands of attackers … Some will opt for a “John Muhammad/Malvo,” whacking people from the trunks of cars, others for a Virginia Tech lone gunman in the school. Others will attack school buses, nannies will kill the kids, clerks will kill customers, cooks (in the elementary school?) will poison the Kool-aid, etc., etc.

The enemy thinks big, and we (with wishful thinking compounded by ignorance of their history) keep thinking small. The goal of this Perfect Day, in addition to terror, is to make us imprison (intern) our Islamic populations (as we did to the Japanese in WWII), thus making this a “war against Islam” instead of the current war against terrorist groups and Islamist fundamentalists.

The idea of the Perfect Day goes way back in their culture. Look at the Book of Esther in the Bible. It takes place in Iran (ancient Persia), where the Jews are in captivity. Haman gets permission to kill all the Jews on a certain day. The whole book is about how they turned that around and killed all of Haman’s people on that day.

This is the terrorists’ dream. Our goal is to prevent it through careful study and understanding of their history and culture, assimilation (the French are an excellent example of what not to do in this area), and (most importantly) deterrence and detection, which is what I teach in my classes.

The enemy can be deterred! They fear one thing: They fear failure! They are not afraid to die; some of them want to die. But they desperately do not want to die for nothing! And our goal is to win a battle in the minds of millions of potential terrorists in our nation, who are asking the key questions: Can I succeed? Can I get a body count?

The key question we should ask is, Why don’t they do this to Israel? The answer is that the terrorists would love to! But Israel is an armed society. The terrorist is largely deterred from this action by Israel’s level of preparation. Until we reach the level of armed citizenry represented by Israel (and the sooner the better!) we are very vulnerable to this kind of attack.

In particular, we can see that states like Illinois (the only state with absolutely no concealed carry for anyone, anyhow, ever), or California, Massachusetts, Hawaii and others (with very stringent and limited concealed-carry laws) are the most likely targets for this kind of attack.

The time may come when, like Israel, we need armed riders on every school bus and armed guards in every school and every day-care center. And the only way that we can do so is, like Israel, to depend on armed citizens and armed teachers to protect their children.

The millions of Americans who are buying guns are not foolish. I would submit that they are doing the one thing that individual citizens can do, and that is to arm themselves.

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