Full C&C.  (Firethorn has been a regular commenter on my own
fics.)

The most noteworthy feature of this narrative, IMO, is the tone
of the first-person narrator, which struck me as both militarist
and chauvinist to an extent which probably turns off some
potential readers.  I assume this is intended, and
will remark on ways to both strengthen and soften this tone.
(If more readers are desired, suggest a second, alternating
narrator with a different viewpoint.)

Firethorn wrote:

November 23, 2003.  That was the day of the first published, confirmed
incident in the United States.  The day the beings later known as youma
first hit San Francisco, California.  One hundred and fifty-seven people
died that day.  The monsters just teleported in and went on a rampage.

A previous reviewer remarked that this is not consistent with the SM series,
where youma had a goal.  I'm not sure that this matters, necessarily,
particularly given the tone of your narrator, who arguably wouldn't
care what their goal was anyway.  Might, however, be even MORE effective
if the monsters took something (a pure heart, a purple "life energy"
vapor) from each body:  this would make it clearer what's at stake.

 It
ended up taking a SWAT team, some citizens with heavy rifles, and a brave
EOD man who improvised a large mine attached to his truck to take five of
them down.  Suddenly the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan took a back
seat.  

Don't know "EOD".

Not sure why current foreign affairs would take a back seat
to 157 deaths in an unrepeated incident without an obvious target to
take retribution on.  For instance, Oklahoma City killed 169.  If that
were repeated today, in what sense would the WOT, Iraq, and Afghanistan
take a back seat (other than headlines for a week or so)?  Your narrator
is certainly allowed to be unreliable, but this doesn't seem (to me)
consistent with the tone.  Wouldn't THIS narrator assume that the youma
were Al Qaeda operatives, ignoring any evidence to the contrary until
after follow-on attacks, similar to the way many radio commentators
assumed that Oklahoma City was due to Al Qaeda or other Arab terrorists
for the first day or two?  Suggest that the attack is linked to Japan
very early, and confirmed to be a new enemy.

Might also help to have some idea how much later your narrator is
recounting events.  One or more decades later, for instance, nobody
would expect the narrator to be accurate.

Sure, the attack killed less than Pearl Harbor or September 11 did.
It didn't matter.

???  Both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 had "immediately"-known culprits.
You don't here.  To me, the comparison would be with Oklahoma
City in the absence of obvious evidence that this is a NEW, EXTERNAL
enemy.

 Sure, the mullahs whined that the 'Great Satan' was
reaping his just rewards.  They soon learned differently.

Suggest, given your narrator, "those damned ayatollahs over in
the mid-east".

It would probably only be the official Iranian ruling clergy
actually using this language, given these circumstance (to the
best of my knowledge, calling the U.S. the 'Great Satan' or
'Great Tempter' is not that common elsewhere), but your
narrator wouldn't be precise.

 I had recently
read an essay about the "Jacksonian Tradition".  It rung a chord in me.  It
was to ring a greater one later.

Me, I took stock of my finances, and ordered a .50 BMG sniper rifle.  Cost
me close to $8,000.  Took every cent I had saved in my career.

After one attack on the west coast?  Didn't this narrator still
have the sniper rifle she or he bought after Oklahoma City?  Or
was this narrator too young back then?

On the plus side, this DOES effectively characterize the narrator
for us.  This is financially reckless behavior given very slight
reason.  The choice of an expensive sniper rifle is interesting,
though:  it wouldn't be the first choice of an untrained hothead,
suggesting that this narrator has a prior military or SWAT
background, where she or he could have had sniper training.
You might want to amplify on the narrator's background early on
(later it's clear that the narrator is in the military; this
should be stated every close to the beginning, IMO).

 Fortunately,
the same day, Barrett had announced that they were going to sell at cost,
plus tool-up costs.  They were going to expand.  Precipitously.  The next
attack came three days later in Tuscan, just long enough for the public to
start wondering if the attack was a once-only event.

An arms manufacturer announces a precipitous expansion after the first
attack?  And the FBI didn't investigate whether they were responsible
for the attack?

BTW, the site of the second attack confuses me.  Did you mean "Tucson"?
But, if so, it is in Arizona, not Nevada.  I'm not aware of any
"Tuscan, Nevada", so presumably it's a small town.

 Aliens, monsters,
radioactive mutations, all the theories expressed in the movies were
proposed.  The fact that the bodies decomposed to dust so quickly didn't
help.  We didn't know anything but that it took large amounts of damage to
kill them.  Until then they were a nightmare out of hell.  How little we
knew, and yet, how right we were.  The second attack was with six of the
suckers.  But Nevada was a different proposition than California, and they
had some warning.  Only seventy-eight people died that day.  Eight civilians
opened up on the youma, delaying them long enough for many people to escape.
Curiously, one man was more effective that what seemed right.  Pastor Jack
Newman's bullets, from a unimposing .38 revolver, did more damage than the
.45's fired by several others.  But it was several weeks before this news
came out.

At this point, President Bush started calling up military forces.

 From where?  Aren't we straining to keep up force levels in Iraq?
Suggest "Congress rapidly reinstituted the draft and" inserted into
above sentence.  Or, alternatively, "This would have been difficult,
but that tens of thousands of young, patriotic Americans rushed to
enlist."

 Every
base was in Charlie, with west coast bases in Delta.  We were scared.
Troops overseas were clamoring to come home and help.
 

Now that one rings VERY true to me (especially the ones in Iraq) ;).

The attacks accelerated and spread.  We learned that Japan had been
suffering from them, and some 'Sailor Scouts' or 'Sailor Warriors' had been
fighting them.

This really ought to have been announced after the first attack.  It
would make many of your narrator's descriptions of the sequence of
events more plausible.  It also sounds to me that your narrator,
from a vantage point of decades later, would remember this being
discovered earlier.

 It was discovered that blessed bullets, especially from
certain pious individuals, were more effective.  It certainly resulted in
certain priests being, well, marked as fraudulent.

This implies an "either/or" effect rather than a "strength
of faith" effect.  (In either case, your average television
evangelist would simply hire some simple saint to bless the
bullets BEFORE the televangelist does so on camera.)

It would further characterize your narrator to pick out one
or two American frauds here as standing out in his or her
recollection:  a southern televangelist, a Catholic pederast,
a main-street Protestant cleric of thin and insubstantial
faith, whatever.  Might want to tell us which denomination
your narrator belongs to, possibly at the same time.

Alternatively, could mention that the narrator was surprised
by some of the frauds uncovered.  Maybe personally disappointed
by one or two?

 Our reaction was, well,
extreme.  This was a HOLY fight.

That WOULD make a difference!  :)

 Many mullahs were torn apart after their
'blessings' proved less than effective in killing the beasts.

Again, suggest you add either country where this occured, or further
characterize your narrator by vague "somwhere in the mid-east".
"I remember reading somewhere along in here about some
popular mullah torn apart by an angry mob in some mid-east country
when his 'blessing' proved less than..."

 After Fort
Carson was attacked, killing 12 soldiers, I was issued an M-16.  But that
was discovered to be capable of little more than harassing to the youma.
They had gotten tougher.  Well, so did we.  You quickly started seeing
weapons worn openly by people.  First it was mostly handguns, but people
started carrying the heaviest rifle they owned.

Might want to add a remark here about "the American frontier heritage,
when every man carried his rifle" returning, (never mind the historical
reality). 

 I started carrying my
Barrett instead of the M-16, and nobody questioned me.  Anti-firearm laws
were repealed at a local level as a fast rate if they weren't ignored
completely.  The youma mostly hit population centers, but anywhere people
gathered was a target.  We, the military, just couldn't cover everywhere
sufficiently.  The NRA and other groups started setting up carefully staged
'parties', complete with .50BMG machinegun demonstration centers...  It was
the rebirth of the militia.  In Colorado Springs, the local Class 3 arms
dealer happened to be close to a youma attack with his... vehicle.  He
managed to dust 3 youma in short order with the two machine guns mounted on
his SUV. This, to me, marked the start of the full restoration of the 2nd
amendment.
 

Suggest you add something about how your narrator thinks it's been under
attack:  ", which had been under attack by those commies for decades."
or ", which had seen steady infringement ever since the frontier closed."
or whatever.

Meanwhile, every scrap of evidence about the attacks were gathered up and
analyzed.  I heard rumors of new weapons, even as precision-guided artillery
was being set up in strategic points in and around cities.  Police were
given GPS devices and hasty training in calling in fire support.

The analogy seems to be with the Afghanistan use of Special Forces calling
in precision attacks.  But didn't they use lasers too?  And weren't the
attacks they called in aerial, using smart bombs?

I tend to agree with other reviewers that actual artillery use in
cities seems improbable.

 I still
remember the how the youma looked shocked when they were hit with the first
artillery strick.  For all of six seconds, when the second shell hit.  Heck,
at Minot AFB we had a B-52 flying at all times armed with JATO laser guided
bombs.  And people around with radios and pointers.  Washington D.C. had
alot of the protection, of course, with an A-10 constantly circling between
the white house and congress building.

"Capitol"  And White House should be capitalized.

 The 30MM rounds from the GAU-8 don't
need any blessings to kill youma.  Hotlines were set up so people could call
in attacks.  Fast reaction heavy weapon patrols were formed.  They usually
finished up what the citizens didn't kill.  Youma started to learn, but they
didn't have much of a learning curve, that's for sure.  They had a hard
time, even when they popped up in the dozens, learning to keep out of view
of rooftops and towers.  Most of them had snipers firing blessed ammunition.
One round usually wouldn't kill one, but they would do rather serious
damage.  Three or four rounds would finish most of them off.  Of course, it
would be all over when the FRHWP, or 'FRAP', showed up.  Heavy machine guns
would keep the youma from charging the HMMWVs long enough for the others to
nail them with RPGs and wire-guided missiles.

Construction codes have been revised again.  What, with the attacks, most
public places are guarenteed to be attacked sooner or later.  We refuse to
 

"guaranteed" (sp)

give up our lives for the youma.  And that includes gathering.

Might want to remark here on a (further) resurgence in church-going,
especially if most churches are immune from attack (I guess that can't
be true, though:  youma in SM attacked the Hino Shrine successfully).

 Anyways,
public places have all been reinforced.  After all, they have to take
monsters, and the high-caliber response to them.  The highest-risk sites
have guards armed with machine guns just in case.  Crime has dropped to just
about zero.

"Armed robbery" has dropped to just about zero.  Conmen and fraud
would be doing a booming business.  Of course, your narrator might
not care or know.

 Everybody's armed, and any gunfire attracts an overwhelming
response.

Sure, we still take casualties.  But we're in a fight for HUMANITY.  Many of
us view it as the preview of the final coming.  Praise god and pass the
ammunition type of thing.  Even now, less than a year later, there's talk of
a monument to all those who've fallen to the monsters.
 

Wouldn't take a year; it would start a few days after the first attack.

And the talk about pulling out of the other countries evaporated once we
learned that other countries were suffering attacks as great, if not worse
than us.

Not clear to me why this would be.  Wouldn't the prevalent mood be
"Now those free-riders have to spend what we do on defense"?  And
you wouldn't get that many US volunteers to stay (some, of course,
mostly those already there who can see the suffering in front of
them, but without family at home to worry about).

 China was direly struck, and became our ally once more.  They were
unable to maintain their state as it was under the assault.  Everybody had
to be armed to hold back the tide, and you can't oppress an armed people.
 

The average Chinese doesn't think of him- or herself as exactly
"oppressed" today, more simply as poor and getting richer.  And I'd
think the conditions described would actually strengthen the
authoritarian capabilities of the regime.  The Chinese already have
a LOT of people under arms, far more numerically than the US does, but
has sophisticated social control mechanisms to avoid trouble with
their weapons.  And, under these circumstances, I'd think that
Cultural Revolution-era practices (mutual workgroup inquisitions)
would quickly return.

You can't fool all the armed people all the time, but you CAN
fool all the armed people some of the time, and you can fool
some of the armed people all of the time, and the Chinese rulers
have always been very good at the latter two.

It does seem to me realistic that your narrator would not view
China as an ally of the US at present, and might do so under the
circumstances presented, though a remark about how little
help China sent to US might be appropriate (allies actually
fight together, not just share an enemy).

The USA showed once again how much war material it could produce when
threatened.  We're the largest arms exporter in the world now.

"Now"?  Suggest "We were already the largest arms exporter in the
world, but now we make three times more than the rest of the world
put together" or some such.

If you're curious about the essay, it's at:
http://denbeste.nu/external/Mead01.html
 

It is an interesting essay (though you might want to mention that this
is the essay on the Jacksonian tradition; I didn't connect this note at
first with your mention at the front of the story).

Hope this helps.  I'm sure my own political biases crept through,
but hopfully you'll find some useful comments in here anyway.





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