Words of War

As a young girl I could never get my mind around the concept of war.

After all these years I can’t really remember what would have brought the thought to my young mind – maybe the newsreels at the Saturday matinee, some overheard snatches of adult conversation, comic books or some war movie on the television – maybe it was all those things. It really doesn’t matter how I first became aware of war, what was real and stayed with me was the horrific fear that awareness brought to me. I would envision a faceless body rushing towards me with a bayonet fixed and ready to run me through or hate-filled eyes locking into mine as a gun was pointed at my belly. I could almost feel my head snapped back by the hair on my head, exposing my throat to a gleaming knife blade. I recall my throat constricting and gasping for breath as I wondered what I would do, how I would survive, where I could put the fear. I finally determined that I would lie down and pretend to be dead. So much for heroism and the grand call to glory. I would play dead. That’s how I dealt with the fear of war as a child.

As a young adult I worked on a large military base where one of my co-workers came in to work one morning with the announcement that her Green Beret husband had shipped out that morning for some small and insignificant country I had never heard of. “He’ll only be gone for six weeks or so…they’re just going as advisors to the revolutionists.” That was my introduction to Vietnam. Later I would lose a cousin there – just out of high school and blown to bits the first day he arrived. As recently as last year I discovered that someone I had once been very close to had also lost his life in that small and insignificant country.

I worked closely with the reservists called up during the Berlin Crisis in the early 1960’s when tents stretched in all directions on post once all the available barracks space was filled. These men had been unceremoniously pulled from their roles as husbands, fathers and sons to fulfill their part of a bargain made. I got to know some of them and called them friends – Sgt. Vito Rizzi, Denny Scalpone and many others with mysterious mafia-sounding names and a confident streetwise New York and Jersey way of talking. They spent their days in training to become part of the large battle-ready force being readied to become our line of protection against the evils of the world.

I saw and got to know the young ones just out of boot camp and jump school. They were so easy to pick out with their shaved heads, shiny new paratrooper wings, spit shined boots and crisp starched fatigues. They were proud to be part of something bigger than themselves and heroes to their parents and girlfriends back home. They walked with a swagger and their eyes twinkled when they talked of girls, cars and drinking beer.

There was the Cuban Crisis with thousands of troops deployed to Florida and guns lined on the beaches facing our neighbor to the south. The base on red alert and more and more homes losing husbands and fathers as the bulky troop carriers lumbered up into the clouds. I remember a nation glued to their television sets as President John Kennedy kept us advised with carefully chosen words. I was one of the young wives left behind.

I think of those times and those people – we were all so young and knew so little. Vito Rizzi’s daughter, the one he laughed about loving english muffins, would be in her mid-40’s by now and surely Denny Scalpone married that nice Italian girl whose picture he carried. My cousin’s parents are gone now and his younger sister is a grandmother. Those young paratroopers would be much wiser now and I feel sure they are less arrogant and far more reverent. I wonder how many of them have sons, daughters or grandchildren whose feet tread their old paths. For myself, I have come to realize that we cannot lie down and play dead and I have lived this life being thankful that my sons have not gone to war.

The world goes on and everything changes…and everything stays the same. As a middle aged woman I cannot get my mind around the concept of war.