Europe's media is still abuzz with the extraordinary story of three Americans who tackled a suspected terrorist on a train in northern France on Friday. The question being asked is this: were they displaying a distinctly American can-do spirit? That's probably inevitable, but a better question would be: should Western countries consider reintroducing compulsory military service to spread some can-do spirit around?
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An article published on Monday by the French newspaper Le Monde focused on the attitude of the three Americans, exemplified when one, Oregon National Guard specialist Alek Skarlatos, said to his friend, US Air Force Airman First Class Spencer Stone, "Let's go".
According to Stone's account, he saw the gunman, widely reported to be Moroccan Ayoub El-Khazzani, struggling with his rifle and ran to tackle him. Stone put El-Khazzani in a choke hold; Skarlatos disarmed him. When El-Khazzani then pulled a pistol, Skarlatos wrestled that from him, too. Then El-Khazzani pulled a box cutter and stabbed at Stone. The two young men pummelled the Moroccan until he was unconscious, aided by their friend, Anthony Sadler, a student, and Chris Norman, a 62-year-old Briton. They tied him up.
The quartet weren't the first to try to stop El-Khazzani, however. A man reportedly threw himself at the gunman when he was still in the train's toilet, strapping on weapons. He was overpowered. A US-born university professor from Paris, Mark Moogalian, then wrestled the semi-automatic from El-Khazzani, only to be shot with a pistol. The gunman retrieved his rifle.
The bravery of all six men is overwhelming, as is the power of their recognition that if they failed to act, everyone in the train carriage was probably going to die. So, too, is the concern that El-Khazzani, who appears to have lived in Spain and France and was on a terrorist watch list in both countries, presages more such attacks as hundreds of jihadists return to Europe from Syria. El-Khazzani says he was just trying to rob people on the train and found the weapons abandoned in a park.
Soft targets – from trains to buses to bars to shopping malls – can be attacked. No police force can protect them all, and no intelligence service can monitor every suspect. So if this incident tells us anything useful about defending against terrorism, it is that ordinary people will sometimes be the only defence. The key to making ordinary people effective isn't the American spirit, it's training. Because they knew what to do, Stone and Skarlatos were confident enough to say, "Let's go", and empowered to succeed.
Moogalian is still alive, his wife says, thanks to Stone. The American says he saw the professor was bleeding profusely from his neck, realised a tourniquet would do no good, and plunged two fingers of his undamaged hand into the wound to cap a burst artery. Without military-level first-aid training, I doubt he would have had the knowledge or confidence to act so effectively.
Conscription-based militaries are out of vogue in most of Europe and in the United States, and for good reason. They're expensive, inefficient and unpopular. Reinstating the draft would as yet be a vast overreaction to the scale of the threat. Even so, it's worth considering that the most effective defence against a certain kind of attack that appears increasingly part of the jihadist tool kit, might be to make the training Stone and Skarlatos had much more widespread.
