THE armoured vehicles were stationed in position, troops in combat fatigues buzzed around and temperatures headed towards 33C.
But this wasn’t a scene from Iraq or Afghanistan. We were standing in Washington DC, the birthplace of American democracy.
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Donald Trump’s decision to send in the National Guard was met with outrage, but a tour of the capital’s streets by The Sun revealed, in just one single night, a terrifying breakdown in law and order.
Washington’s Lincoln Memorial is such a symbol of America that it features on the five-dollar bill.
But the monument now serves as a backdrop to row after row of tents where homeless people are massed in a camp which looks like the cross-Channel migrant “jungle” in Calais.
Rubbish was strewn everywhere, and the occupants were clearly in it for the long haul. One had even somehow set up a washing machine.
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Under a nearby bridge, mattresses and glass beer bottles lay scattered everywhere.
Piercing scream
I have never seen so many homeless in a city.
Within 30 seconds of arriving at the world-famous Union Station, I was confronted by a woman lying on the floor, with her trousers falling down.
More rows of homeless were slumped outside a library just a street away from the White House, and they took no heed of Trump’s warning – telling me: “We are never leaving.”
Some had been smoking what they told me was super-strength cannabis, and were lying comatose on the floor unable to wake up.
A security guard at a nearby Hilton hotel said: “You think this is crazy? You should have seen it last week. There was a shooting nearby.”
He claimed that at the weekend, kids go to party and take fentanyl – a drug said to be more dangerous than heroin – on the rooftop of a nearby hotel.
Its swimming pool sits a matter of yards from the Capitol, home of America’s parliament.
One such get-together ended in a shooting – and when I left town the killer was still on the loose.
Not far away was a posh restaurant where the cheapest glass of wine will set you back 15 dollars.
But diners peering through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows can see the canvas of a tent and half a dozen homeless people shouting and swearing.
Locals say they are a group out of their minds on crack cocaine.
One man verbally abused me as he held a sign condemning “the human race” and another was seen shouting at a little girl that she was a “b***h”, because she didn’t give him a dollar.
Suddenly, there was a piercing scream and a woman had been knocked over by a speeding car.
Later, in scenes straight from a Hollywood disaster movie, we witnessed hundreds of FBI officers being briefed at a base near one of Washington’s most dangerous neighbourhoods, Anacostia.
One by one, their cars left the centre in dramatic fashion. That evening’s mission: A crackdown on “bloodthirsty criminals”.
We attempted to take a leaf out of the FBI’s book and venture into the neighbourhood ourselves but swiftly realised that was a bad idea, as masked gangs loitered on the streets looking for trouble.
As we cruised back to town, we spotted six blacked-out SUVs full of Drug Enforcement Administration officers armed with machine guns stopping a car and arresting a wrong ’un.
Another man was half-naked and trying to dance with scared tourists
Scarlet Howes
A crazed man sat in just his underpants at a bus stop he had turned into a makeshift home, and was terrifying people.
A woman coming home from work was so scared she jumped on the wrong bus just to escape from him.
He had taken fentanyl and, when he saw us, put his middle finger up.
Another man was half-naked and trying to dance with scared tourists who just wanted to see the city’s famous landmarks.
It seemed the men who Trump called “drugged-out maniacs” were lurking around almost every corner.
And his plan was in full force, as nearly every street had a police car parked up, or a special agent.
There were too many of them to count.
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