No one seemed to know if there had been any firing at all from the house.

The White House released the first official video after one A.M. It was the usual battlefield mess. People advancing, things getting blown up, lots of tracers scratching into the darkness. Then it cut to the aftermath—everything seen through a green night-vision haze. People in hazmat suits were moving cautiously through debris as small fires still popped up, and wisps of smoke curled into the air like geysers, making it look like they were strolling through hell. If anything in the wreckage was recognizable, I sure couldn’t pick it out.

I was looking at it for maybe the fifth time, trying to make some sense of it, when Cher interrupted. “The White House is calling, boss.” I had placed several calls to administration officials. When I started writing, I wanted to be able to include the fact that I had reached out to various people for comment. But I hadn’t really expected any response.

It was the secretary of defense, Rip McCord. That didn’t completely surprise me. McCord and I went back to the sandbox. In the desert he was considered a wild man, an officer who never cut corners, just smashed through them, bringing along anyone with enough guts to take the risks and, if necessary, the blame. A lot of people didn’t like his methods. But I did. He did whatever was necessary to protect his people, even if sometimes his methods weren’t exactly by the book, and that mattered to me. We had done several missions together that remained classified. After he retired, he’d tried to take me with him into his post-military wonderworld. I’d decided to stay in and, as Robert Frost had written, that had made all the difference.

Mostly we’d communicated by rumor and bar tales. But once you spill blood with a guy, that bond never goes away. “How they hangin’, my man?” he asked.

“Still rolling along,” was always a good answer.

We exchanged the necessary banter for several minutes; then he set the rules. He would be identified in any story as “a knowledgeable White House source” but would not be quoted directly. As he began filling in the gaps, it became obvious to me that I was being fed A#1 superspecial White House bullshit. Everybody was a hero, brilliant work, just the beginning. He gave me a few details, the types of weapons the “terrorists” were firing, the guesstimate that there had been as many as eight people in the house, the fact that license plate numbers of every vehicle in the area were being checked and there had been some “interesting” results. He kept shoveling. Mighty Chair recorded it all. I knew it was all bullshit, McCord knew I knew it was bullshit, and both of us knew I was going to have to write it anyway. I wasn’t going to forgo the opportunity to quote “a knowledgeable White House source” even if I knew he was lying. The story would be picked up and reposted nationally, with my byline—good for me, good for the Pro, good for the administration.