esrosedotblog

INFAMY

December 7th, 1941. I was four years old.

I am sure that we had been to church and maybe had the Sunday noon day meal.

All I remember, really, is that my Mother was on the couch lying down and sobbing.

Had she fainted?

The radio was on and my Dad was listening intently.

That is it.

I didn't know what had happened but I think that I had it figured that our lives had changed somehow.

I was right.

In two years, my Dad would be off in the Navy serving as a radar man on a destroyer-escort across the North Atlantic and then in the Pacific.

My mother and I would do the wartime thing; saving grease, flattening cans, saving up ration coupons.

I look at those years and see that I was kind of fat and bloated. We ate a lot of starch.

The war itself? I don't think that I really got any of it except the home stuff.

I sure remember when it was over.

There were two celebrations; the war in Europe and then the war in Japan.

The inside stuff—the runup in Europe—is coming to me now as I read the novels of Alan Furst. As to the war itself, we had lots of picture books. My Dad relived every minute hundreds of times. He could not let go of it until his last years.

We are now longer in Iraq than we spent on a world wide war involving virtually all nations; even some neutral ones on the side.

And no progress.

Imagine. We started from a dead stop in 1941 and had them by the balls in 1945.

Those were the days.

Then we had leaders and followers. Now we have neither.