WAURIKA — My fellow Americans, as heroes have learned throughout history: You don’t always choose leadership; sometimes, leadership chooses you and says, “You’re up.” At that moment, you must step to the plate and take your swings.

As you’ve discovered in the past two weeks, leadership was thrust upon me in 2007, when I was cast into the fight to protect all we hold near and dear from the threat of Islamocommie gophers.

When the vile rodents first appeared in the back yard, declaring a jihad guided by their convoluted Khomeini/Marxist philosophy, I swung into action,

First, I tried to disable the duplicitous critters with poison-laced peanuts, and then I embedded kill traps around the burrows.

Nether method worked.

I considered bringing in some barn owls, but that wasn’t practical, and as the battle continued, at one point I enlisted the help of our two cats.

That turned out, uh, really well. After I let them out, both felines strolled casually over to the gopher mounds and took a couple disinterested sniffs. Then they decided it was too hot out and started begging to come back inside. Instead of warriors, the cats were wimps.

As my failure rate rose, so did the number of gopher holes. And so did my temper.

One afternoon, I started to snap.

I grabbed a shovel and began to furiously dig up tunnels and do a version of stomp dancing on the gopher mounds. Someone (neighbors insist it was me) was also reported to be frantically and loudly muttering, “C’mon out and fight like men, you terrorist furballs!”

Karen tried to calm me, suggesting I might be getting a little “over the top.” But her attempts to reason with me only added gas to the fire.

As the Islamocommie Gopher War of 2007 drug on, I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t eating. All I could think of was a way to recapture my yard from the invading horde.

At one point, I thought about bringing in a backhoe and just scooping up the offensive ground rats, regardless the damage to the yard.

I also flirted with the idea of plastic explosives, but I started having visions of Bill Murray in Caddyshack, and although I’d streaked my face with camo paint, in a moment of clarity I decided C-4 might be a tab bit extreme.

Three weeks into the struggle, I finally took a deep breath.

I recalled that in previous dealings with gophers I had some success by strategically placing pinwheels on their mounds and tunnels. Sounds odd, I know, but the sound and vibration created as the pinwheels spin apparently drives gophers crazy.

So, I headed to a local everything-is-a-dollar store and snagged a dozen plastic pinwheels.

As I stood in the checkout line, the cashier took a gander at my arm load and said, “Got gophers?”

“Yes,” I replied. “In fact, fellow American, my yard’s been overrun by Islamocommie gophers, and I’m desperately trying to save the country and our way of life.”

While the cashier looked back at me suspiciously, a woman behind me joined the conversation.

“If you want to get rid of gophers without killing them, use Tabasco sauce,” she interjected.

The cashier and I were skeptical, but the woman responded by saying, “Yeah, I saw it on ‘Animal Channel.’ You soak some cotton balls in Tobasco sauce, stick ’em down the gopher holes, and in a couple of days, they’ll be gone.

“Me and my husband did it, and it works.”

Thus it was that, on the way home, I devised what seemed to be a foolproof battle plan: I’d put a double-whammy of shock and awe on the Islamocommie gophers by setting up the pinwheels AND lacing their tunnels with Tobasco-soaked cotton balls!

When I got home, I soaked four dozen cotton balls in hot sauce, and my youngest son, Chris, risked his life by stuffing the incendiary cotton puffs into the gopher mounds.

While Chris did that, I began inserting the pinwheels. It was sensitive work, side-stepping tunnels to avoid breaking an ankle, but soon the pinwheels were twirling in the breeze and the yard looked like a wind farm in the Panhandle.

When I went to bed that evening, for the first time I felt the momentum had shifted in the Islamocommie Gopher War. I became more resolved that the humans were going to win this struggle.

(Next week, the silence settles over the battlefield. The war comes to a conclusion.)