Our War

We were born in or around 1975, the year Gerald Ford declared publicly that the war in Vietnam--the last grand conflict by which an American generation could define itself--was "over."

*

When we boys grew up, we left America for Europe and Asia and Africa. We went as students and as tourists--never as soldiers. We doffed our ballcaps in the reconstructed cathedrals of France and Germany, peered at the grainy black-and-white photos of their ruins and tried to reconcile these with the new stained glass and reinforced vaulted ceilings. We walked the grounds at Dachau, snapped somber photographs, then rode the train back into Munich and spent the night dancing on tables and drinking beer from giant steins. We smelled the stink of simulated trenches at the Imperial War Museum in London, saw shadows burned onto the ground at Nagasaki, and watched the sun sink below the smoky skyline of what is now known as Ho Chi Minh City.

We knew, though, that the dried brown blood of history was insufficient, and we came home to America without any excuse for the sorrow and alienation that had descended on us. So we left again, most of us, and came home again, still short of the epic violence which would serve to excuse our malaise.

Things got worse. We all played the part of disaffected youth, which is to say we drank and drank and didn't do much else unless we were forced to. Many of us, myself included, dropped out of college.

Our fathers, who had fought in Vietnam, could not understand. After all, they were the only American generation ever to lose a war; yet they'd managed to get on with their lives. My own father still does not understand, even though, in an effort to bridge the gap between us, I subjected him to the great indignity of discussing how we felt about each other. This was in the hospital. Our conversation was set up and mediated by a case worker on the psych ward. My father and I sat facing each other in molded plastic chairs in a room which was otherwise empty. I cried. He did not.

Shame, shame!

Give me a German machine-gun nest, a Viet Cong tunnel complex, a cave teeming with angry desperate North Koreans, anything, ANYTHING but my father and I alone, in a room empty except for the chairs we sit in, with me wanting to die for no damn good reason, and without a war of my own.

Shame, shame!

*

We knew, at a very young age, that war was our fate and our inheritance. The mythology of the American fighting man, from Rickenbacker to Rambo, was in our hearts. We played our games with great seriousness, for we knew they were preparation as much as recreation. Four-square and sandlot baseball were life-or-death, and sometimes we were bloodied.

We absorbed patriotic rhetoric like sponges. We recited daily our Lord's Prayer and our Pledge of Allegiance. We did not know-no one could have-that we'd been born on the cusp of a long period of peace, unprecedented in American history. We did not know-no one could have-that we would pass our best fighting years at the water cooler and watering hole, in neckties and soft shoes, overfed, well-rested, fat and healthy.

Too late, we realized that we'd become, in Hitler's words, the cowardly children of Democracy.

Nothing can produce so shameful and weak a generation as a few decades of peace.

*

In the early nineteen-eighties, when we still believed we would someday be men, we had Libya as a primer. We heard the adults saying war on the telephone and at the dinner table, and we were ready. We had no way of knowing that Libya was a small and comparatively powerless country, no real threat to us. So we prepared for an invasion. We photocopied encyclopedia entries on Libya, took our Boy Scout knives and canned goods pilfered from our parents' kitchen cupboards, and headed for ravines and backyard groves all over the country. We built lean-tos and crude tiny ramparts. We dug in and waited for the Libyan invaders.

While we waited, Reagan rained steel and fire down on Tripoli. He buried Quadaffi's children alive, and that was that.

When the tuna fish and canned green beans ran out, we went home untried, our bones stiff and aching with the cold. *

We had reached an age, too, when we began to appreciate the fighting legacy our fathers and grandfathers had created. How impressed we were with the framed photos of familiar-looking young men in uniform! How their medals shone! How colorful and enchanting were their ribbons and epaulets, hidden away in attics, then unearthed again by us on dull rainy Sundays!

We found pictures of dead friends, love letters from girls who'd come and gone long before our mothers and grandmothers, boot camp yearbooks, photos of London and Paris and Guam and Hong Kong and Saigon. We didn't feel guilty for snooping, because all these things were ours by rights. Our legacy. Our inheritance.

Not to be, not to be. Peace reared its head and stayed a while, and we were left to find a new path to manhood.

*

Desert Storm was a wash--too soon for most of us, who were still sophomores in high school. The Mother of All Battles turned out a lame duck, and we entered our late teens with no war, no more Evil Empire--nothing but quiet prosperity.

We never stood a chance. We see that clearly now, and it explains a lot.

*

There are nights even now, on the other side of twenty-five, when we lie awake and plead with our fathers, and our grandfathers' ghosts:

Please, we beg them. Give us our war. We need to find you, and this is the only way.

Give us our USS Maine, our Pearl Harbor, our Gulf of Tonkin-make us believe.

Give us our Tojo, our Mussolini, our Hitler and Ho Chi Minh--help us hate righteously.

Give us our Iwo Jima, our Omaha Beach, our Tet--let us die heroes, and mount our photos on the wall next to yours and remember us with pride.

We are cowards. We want only to be, like you, one of the Few, the Proud.

Time is running out. Already we are past the age when you killed and came home, eyes fixed, mouths forever silent. And yet we have done nothing.

With what is left of our meager will, we demand you give us our war.

It is the only thing a man ever truly owes his son.

§ § §


Ronald F. Currie, Jr. is a native of Waterville, Maine, where he still lives with his dog.

His work has appeared/is forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, Carve Magazine, InPosse Review, and other publications. He received the 2002 Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship in fiction.

He can be reached at rcurriejr@hotmail.com.

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