Every day this week I’ve gone to the computer and googled the same question: “How many attackers Mumbai?” And I still haven’t gotten anything like a straight answer. Of course the official Indian story is “ten.” Right. Ten guys, kids by the look of them in the closed-circuit tv pictures, did all that? Well…that’s not actually impossible. I’m not one of these people that underestimate the bloodlust and craziness of ten teenagers with some basic training, a good plan, AKs with plenty of ammo, and heads full of cocaine’n’Quran. That’s a powerful cocktail, that cocaine/Quran mix. They’ll have to come up with a good street name for it, something like Mecca-chino. Keeps you awake and firing for two days straight.

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For the next week I’m going to try blogging every day. Things have just been happening too fast for the occasional article. Every day there’s something I want to talk about, and that’s how I’m going to do it.

Today’s big news, or comedy skit, however you want to call it, was the news that five Blackwater guards have been indicted on Federal charges of manslaughter and using a machine gun in the commission of a crime. No joke I could make about this could top that great line from Apocalypse Now: “Shit, charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”

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Will India and Pakistan ever finish the cat-fight and get on with a real war? “We live in hope,” like my grandma used to say — but don’t hold your breath. Listening to the Indian and Paki generals shaking their little fists at each other, with their little mustaches going up and down, hearing the Indians talk about how their patience is “almost” exhausted — it just gets me down.

This fag-slapping shit gives war a bad name.

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Well, now we know my pals the Somali pirates are loyal War Nerd readers. At the end of my column saluting them for taking on a supertanker, I suggested they go for a cruise ship next:

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I sure didn’t expect to be spending Thanksgiving morning sucking down instant coffee and flicking channels between CNN and the BBC. But the attacks in Mumbai are so big and, like they keep saying, “brazen,” that I stayed up late and got up early.

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Cop groupies, naval warfare nerds and gas-starved SUV moms around the world all had the same hero last week: the Indian Navy. The Subcontinental squids announced that they had struck the first blow for law’n’order on the high seas by sinking a Somali pirate “mother ship” off Yemen.

Their timing was perfect. The pirates had been looting every ship in the Indian Ocean for weeks with no retaliation. Once again, the Somalis were doin’ it old-school, on the cheap, making the rich countries look weak by facing them down armed with no more than our old friend the RPG. (more…)

Yo ho ho ho time in Somalia! What’s the bestest present kids dream of in faraway Puntland, where piracy is more than a Disney marketing gimmick? A supertanker, that’s what. A Saudi supertanker is the ultimate in stuffed stockings: 100 million gallons of pure crude.

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