At a few minutes after 3 p.m., the lines outside the Fifth Ave. entrance to the Empire State Building were still stretched around the corner. They moved past El Torito and Houlihan's and west along 34th St. Men, women and children waited patiently to ride to the observation deck of New York's tallest building. The sky was a brilliant blue. The bombing of Afghanistan had been underway for two hours.

On the 6 train going downtown, a teenage Chinese-American woman talked in English with her boyfriend. The subject was geometry, the secrets of the isosceles triangle. At 28th St., a Latino family boarded the train, dressed in Sunday best: mother, daughter, young husband, small child. The mother carried a handbag with a Canon Sure Shot attached to her strap. Explosions were bursting in the night sky of Kabul.

At Canal St. on the corner of Lafayette, a man was selling Wanted Dead or Alive T-shirts bearing the face of Osama Bin Laden. Tourists examined watches and ashtrays and postcards bearing images of the World Trade Center. Cars honked for passage to the Holland Tunnel. A football game played on a TV set in a shop selling FDNY and NYPD baseball caps. Food was being dropped into the Afghan plains and bombs were hitting Kandahar.

At Broadway and Canal, the cops and state troopers looked relaxed. Pedestrians no longer had to show their identification papers. Trucks and cars were stopped and searched and sent on downtown. In the distance, tendrils of pale smoke rose into the scrubbed sky from Ground Zero and were quickly erased by the cleansing harbor wind.

On this Sunday in New York, almost four weeks after the slaughter of innocents, the American retaliation had begun. Everybody knew it was coming, here and in Afghanistan, but the curious thing was this: There were no visible signs of emotion — at least in my part of the New York parish. No exultation. No waving of flags. And no sign of fear, either. Life was going on. Relentlessly. Fatalistically. The extraordinary had become ordinary.

Fanatics Must Pay

The retaliation was, of course, absolutely necessary.

No nation can allow the killing of 5,744 of its men, women and children without striking back.

If that nation looked the other way, turned the other cheek, mumbled about abstractions and asked for the intercession of God, then the nation would be a joke. It would be a country, but not a nation. If some crackpot sends religious zealots out to kill in the thousands, he must pay. He and his fellow killers should be wiped off the face of the Earth.

Still, we must remember that this is not a movie or a television event. War is a blunt instrument. Intelligent military men know that there are no truly smart bombs. In Iraq and in Kosovo, many bombs went astray and too many noncombatants were killed. As I write, women and children are surely dying in one of the most miserable countries on the planet. In some cases, these starving Afghans, these women abused by the religious police, these children made hungry by ignorant leaders, might even welcome death as a release.

They didn't choose the Taliban to lead them. They didn't welcome Osama Bin Laden to their country. They didn't respond to opinion polls and say, oh yeah, let's have a jihad. Nobody ever asked them a goddamned thing. The Taliban came with guns, and declared themselves rulers. So did all the other guys who came before the Taliban, back into the mists of time.

No Regard for Life

Now people who are not much different from my mother and father are sure to die. An old man with a hobbled leg will be killed on a barren road, because he came too close to a tank. A child will hear silence, think the world is safe and walk into an explosion. A woman will try to scurry across a street to find bread for her daughters and be blown to pieces. The Taliban will not protect them. After all, the Taliban trained for their moment of triumph by killing thousands of other Afghans. They have no regard for Afghan life, not there, on the ground, where people try to live their difficult lives. The Taliban want paradise, and the people on the ground want food. They will die together.

And while they are dying, we will wait for more strikes here at home, more forms of death fashioned by fanatics. Here in America the Vulnerable. We must hope they never come. We must hope that the just, terrible retaliation against the Taliban and Bin Laden is swift and successful. We must hope that our statesmen contain the struggle and limit the horror. It's getting dark out there. We must hope, we must hope.