Just a thought on war

 

I wrote most of this post in June 2017. I don’t remember what was happening in the news to bring my thoughts to war at that time, but when I decided to return to blogging, this post was the only one of that prior batch that seemed relevant to today.

 

War has a heavy hand that bruises everyone it touches no matter how slight and passing the touch. Even those who never experienced more than the Cold War grew up marked by that experience. "Duck and cover" were words carved into children's hearts across America, perhaps across Russia as well. In my childhood people built bomb shelters underground in their backyards and openly discussed whether to shoot neighbors who tried to enter their shelters, making no attempt to hide those   discussions from their children. 

I went to one school that required students in k thru 8 to wear military style dog tags on chains around their necks. We were inspected for those metal tags every morning and those who forgot them were sent home. We all understood that the tags were intended to identify us if we died in school. My father explained that those tags would be jammed between the front teeth of the dead children to ensure the tags would not be lost.
      That same school made me responsible for taking my sister home if we were going to be bombed. We lived on the other side of the city's main evacuation route, so I believed that I would never get my sister across the street to the empty apartment awaiting us. I was made responsible for her survival and I knew I couldn't save her. It never occurred to me that strangers might open their car doors and take us to safety--we weren't allowed to talk to strangers.     

Although I didn't know it then, I was bruised by that Cold War long before I experienced a real war. That Cold War made me an adrenaline junky without giving me recognition that I craved the uncertainty of life on the edge.   I didn't go looking for war. I didn't go looking for cheap thrills. I merely went to work abroad and war found me there.

I came home from Israel determined to write up my fascinating experiences to share with other young Americans. America had a war going on in Vietnam, but that war didn’t touch most of us. I wanted to touch the untouched. I sent out query letters to New York editors and agents and, surprisingly, received a fair number of personal rejections rather than form letters. The rejection letters basically said, point blank, that no one in America was interested in Israel anymore. They’d won the military battles of 1973 and lost the sympathy of America’s leftwing.

Eventually I realized I could tell my tales just as well in fiction. And in fiction the story was even more interesting since I could include romance and Walter Mitty adventures as well as recounting my actual experiences.

Today The Expat’s Wars is available on Amazon as a paperback or ebook if you’d like to read it.