The Question

Posted on March 25, 2003 in Childhood War

Note: Today, I wanted to move beyond the immediacy of the war and back into memory. It seems, however, that some wanted me in the box that they devised for me. I fought for myself. Now I am finished doing that. This article is an attempt to set myself back on track.

A boy I know, of about eight years of age, asked his father this question: “Daddy, did you kill anyone in the war?”

The boy lived in an Air Force town. His father worked for an aerospace contractor located next to the base. Other fathers in the neighborhood worked for the Air Force. Once a week, they flew their gargatuan Galaxies over to Vietnam, where they picked up soldiers coming home and body bags, and brought them back to San Bernardino, California. A few of the less honorable ones made extra income importing thai stick and, perhaps, heroin. Most, I believe, were decent men whose jobs, in their minds, did no more harm than those held by truck drivers and the railroad men who worked the yards west of downtown.

The boy watched them coming in some evenings. They looked like orange guppies hovering and then descending to the bottom of the tank. When he first spotted one, the boy ran inside and said that he’d seen a flying saucer. His father corrected him. “It’s just a plane”. And so it was.

There were evenings when the boy was being driven to Riverside. As they passed the sewer plant and caught its odor, he could see the planes over his head. They were giant things, fat steel grasshoppers in flight. Should he fear them? he wondered. He imagined them to be heavy with bombs: it was later that he learned that they were heavy with body bags.

He thought that he knew what war was all about. The school library had multiple copies of books for boys about Guadalcanal, the Battle of the Bulge, and other American adventures of the Second World War. His father had served in the Second World War. He knew of another father who’d lost an arm in that war. When he came walking by without his shirt, the boy stared at the slit where the arm had been.

Everyone played war. At least all the boys did. There was a big field, up the street, which had until the boy was five, been a horse ranch. He remembered feeding the horses. Boys went there and hid out in the ruined stables, pretending that they were fighting the Germans house to house. Everyone was the Americans and everyone else was the Germans. It made sense to the participants.

When you shot at someone, they were supposed to die. A stick went up, the mouth shouted bang!, and the other boy was supposed to fall. Except no one liked dying, so they often had fights.

The boy had heard that his father had been in the war, that he’d missed the battle of Anzio by 21 days. The father never told his son about that day when he and a company of Texans were ordered to charge up an Italian hillside, when the father came back as one of only three survivors. The boy wanted to know only one thing: Did his father kill any Germans? That was a mark for pride.

My father answered “I kept missing.”