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1980 that the particle beam weapon received another pulse of life as part of the hotly debated but ultimately successful strategy of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars. " Amid the guffaws from some political quarters and the hand wringing from people who thought the thing simply cost too much money, President Reagan managed to prevail. Just the strategy of Star Wars itself and the limited deployment and testing of some of the components were enough to put the United States on a wartime footing with the EBEs and show the Soviets that we finally had a real nuclear deterrent. The full story behind the SDI and the way it changed the Cold War and forced the extraterrestrials to change the strategies for this planet is a story that's never been told. But as spectacular and fantastic as it may sound, the story behind the limited deployment of the SDI is the story of how humanity won its first victory against a more powerful and technologically superior enemy who discovered, to whatever version of shock it experiences, that there was real trouble down on its farm. CHAPTER 17 Star Wars Toward the spring of 1962, General Trudeau told me of his intention to retire. He was not going to be the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, he'd been told. The old man had charged up too many hills during his years in the army, rifle in hand, and fired back in the face of the enemy. Whatever he felt inside him, and General Trudeau was only human and nothing more, he never showed fear. He was unrelenting in the execution of his orders, unyielding when people opposed him, and he never ducked away from a fight. Those who knew him either respected or feared him, but they never discounted him. A West Point graduate, he was born into a generation of U.S. military officers who had absolutely no doubts about what was right and what was wrong, and he marched through two wars and a series of commands, including the head of U.S. Army Intelligence, secure in the knowledge that he was on the right side. These were great qualities in a wartime commander, but, as both General Trudeau and | found out, they could be the very things that make you vulnerable in a Cold War army of politicians angling for power as they fought an enemy who could not be seen and whose presence was only indirectly felt. "There are no more Pork Chop Hills, Phil, "General Trudeau told me after he had learned that General Maxwell Taylor with the support of the army leadership had passed him over for the South Vietnam command. It meant that this was his last command and that he would retire as lieutenant general. "And |'m afraid this is a war the army's going to fight by means of a political process instead of on the killing field. " "We would win it if we were going there, General, "| said, fury welling up in my chest. "You and | know what we learned in Korea. " Maybe the general could see my face getting flushed because he said, "No, we probably would have gotten court martialed because of what we learned in Korea. Just think what they would do to us if we were to win the war." Then he laughed in a way that told me he was looking forward to his retirement. "We would have made the Communists look bad. You know you can't do that, Phil. " Even as we were speaking that afternoon toward the end of the summer, another Soviet trawler was heaving to at the entrance to the port of Havana, awaiting instructions for the off loading of its cargo while another one of our surveillance planes was circling high overhead snapping away its photos of the tarpaulins coming off the ICBMs laid out on the ship's afterdeck. | didn't know it yet, but a sequence of events was unfolding that would swirl me into one of the biggest controversies of my life just as the chilling truth about the attempts to colonize our planet and the harvesting of human beings and animals that were still going on made itself all too clear. A showdown was coming. It was just over the horizon. No one could see it, but a handful of us knew that something was stirring the waters just below the surface. General Trudeau was saying his good-byes and started counting the days until he would change his uniform for civilian clothes and his office in the Pentagon for a corporate executive suite that befitted his experience as the commanding officer of some of our military's most important divisions. He had been at the helm of R&D for six 107