Where I Went When the War Began

Posted on March 19, 2003 in Neighborhood War

I went down to Blockbuster Video in Foothill Ranch, on a corner opposite a concrete arch designed to look Neolithic. The store was empty except for two clerks and a couple of other customers looking for stuff that had nothing to do with the war. A single television set was tuned to CNN. The blue and white patch of the 3rd Army — the Marne — flashed on the screen to show where the correspondent was speaking from. The Marne: Dad kept one of these patches in his dresser drawer. Somewhere among the personal effects that I keep of his, I have one of these patches. His Army was going into Iraq. I walked over to the Horror films section and then scoped out the comedies, humming along with the Manhattan Transfer track playing in my head.

The clerks looked bored. The young fellow I see there every week told me that he worried about the draft. I looked down the sunflower yellow and strawberry red plastic lights of the strip mall across the parking lot. “I don’t think the draft will be a problem,” I said. “What you may be saying goodbye to is your way of life.”

I’m not sure that he understood. I thought about the UN peacekeepers that I met in Osijek, Croatia. The sky blue helmets emblemized kindness to me, men who wanted to do their job right. I remembered a Belgium captain who told me how he wanted to do his job well, but that he lacked the proper training for it. “I trained for war,” he said. “This requires that I be a policeman. The jobs are different.” If the pundits were right about our overconfidence, I thought aloud , we’d have foreign peacekeepers in our midst in about ten years.

“You never know,” said the clerk.

I drove home in the darkness. When I got to the top of Saddleback Ranch Road, I saw the moon through a gap in the condominiums. It rested on one of the ridges buttressing Mount Modjeska. It looked lopsided, like it was tilting slightly, rolling along.