Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (21 page)

THE INVASION VACATION
August 19, 1990

We didn’t want to take this vacation. It was the president’s idea. I figured we should just call August on account of invasion, hunker down, and wait for the price of gasoline to reach the foie-gras mark. The president would have none of this. “The American people want to see life go on,” he said.

This was not as easy as it sounded. As a patriotic gesture, we bought charcoal briquets and went to the middle of nowhere. The middle of nowhere was in the middle of the Middle East mania. News followed us to the outdoor art show and the Farmer’s Market.

The Village Grocery became Democracy Central. First thing in the morning the bread-delivery man, the milk-delivery man, and the man who runs the place would be clustered around the cash register, trashing Saddam Hussein and tracking troop deployments. “I think the president is right on the money,” they said. This is the kind of place where the president is usually right on the money.

The gas station was raucous with gas-line lore, much of it macho and apocryphal. Testosterone filled the air. War will do that. You know the drill: “Remember in ’79 when you punched out that guy who tried to cut in line to put air in his tires, Phil?” someone says. “Hell,” says Phil, “I never punched him out. I ran over his foot. And it was ’73.”

At the mall, teenagers in heavy-metal T-shirts sullenly absorbed current events. “Saddam Hussein, man,” they would say, if they could talk. “He’s toast.”

America has rallied round, and it is something to see. There’s a local angle, no matter what the locality—American kids in khaki, folks like us held hostage to empty gas tanks. The story is writ large: friends, foes, a big bad guy with the sinister mustache of a James Bond villain. The Iraqis have replaced the Soviets in the “evil empire” role, much missed since we began playing “I’m O.K., you’re O.K.” with the Russians. Polls show that Americans are more possessed by this story than by any in years.

People say it’s hard to get away from it all because of the magic of cable television, fax machines, computer modems. But this time around it’s democracy that’s doing us in. Now that election campaigns bear more of a resemblance to MTV than to statesmanship, we’ve got two ways to reaffirm what this county stands for. One is the jury room, with its miraculous ability to turn twelve bumbling United States citizens into paragons of diplomacy, objectivity, and thoughtfulness.

The other is crisis management. Iraq invades Kuwait and—bingo!—all Americans become experts on the Middle East, dependence on foreign oil, and chemical warfare. It’s one of the enduring strengths of the country that the average guy at the corner store believes he has some small influence, and some great responsibility.

“That Iraq fella is going to get what’s coming to him,” said the man waiting in the barbershop to get his short hair cut shorter. “That’s my prediction.”

There’s something for everyone here. The word “Vietnam,”
which keeps cropping up in discussions about troop strength and the American involvement, speaks to the collective memory of one generation of Americans. The word “Hitler,” which has been used profligately in discussions of the Iraqi leader, speaks to another. (The public-opinion mavens who’ve been asking people how Hussein compares with Hitler should be prosecuted for carrying a loaded question.) The angle for kids: Saddam Hussein is Bart Simpson cubed. Bad attitude, dude.

Life goes on, but not on its usual track. Even the president couldn’t keep up the illusion of normalcy. He vacates well, but he has to watch appearances. People still remember that he went hunting at the tail end of the Panama invasion.

He told the rest of us to go on with our lives, and then instead of staying put in Kennebunkport, with the phone in his golf cart and his cigarette boat, he took a short trip back to Washington. It was a Daddy vacation. A couple of days in a business suit, a couple of days in a vest with lots of little pockets and hooks and feathers all over it. Takes me back.

This all takes me back. Gas shortages, double-digit inflation, trouble in the Middle East—these are the things that shaped my formative years. I thought someday we’d gather around the Weber kettle and pass them along to our children in stories and song. Now they’re experiencing them firsthand. All they hear about is the Middle East, and Lyme disease. “Are we having a war?” one asked, and in the fashion of my times, I answered, “Sort of.” Then we toss a Frisbee around, and wait to hear the news from around the world at the roadside produce stand.

SUMMER’S SOLDIERS
September 13, 1990

At the county fair the armored personnel carrier stood between the pony rides and the dart game. Boys passed through it all afternoon, poring over the controls, running their hands along its camouflage-colored body. “It is not a tank,” said a soldier sternly each time a boy raised on G.I. Joe mislabeled the thing. It seemed to fall somewhere between a Trans Am and the Tilt-A-Whirl in the minds of the kids, to have as much to do with death as the John Deere tractor exhibit.

Soldiers go to war, and sometimes they kill and die. We all know this. And yet, in some peculiar sense, it slipped our minds. In the last fifteen years, we have slowly lost our perception of the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines as groups whose primary goal is to defend our country. The peacetime armed forces have become the largest vocational training school in the nation.

The average age of a new recruit this year was twenty, and many of them joined up for reasons that had nothing to do with
combat, or even with patriotism. The stories take on a kind of Main Street sameness: dissatisfaction with a dead-end job, in a factory, a fast-food restaurant, a small office. Enlisting has become part of a great American postadolescence for some men and women not smart, not rich, or not directed enough for college. Looking to learn computers or communications, attracted by tuition grants, egged on by parents, they signed up.

The military knows this. Its appeals now have little to do with patriotism, no stern Uncle Sam with an
I WANT YOU
! above his inexorable index finger. They speak largely to self-interest, a kind of yuppie armed forces.

There’s a moment in the movie
Private Benjamin
, about a spoiled rich girl who becomes a better person in boot camp. “Excuse me,” she says to a sergeant, “but I think they sent me to the wrong place. You see, I did join the Army, but I joined a different Army. I joined the one with the condos and the private rooms.”

Last week in the same magazines that carried accounts of troop deployments, there were recruitment ads for women. “If you’re looking for an experience that could help you get an edge on life and be a success,” the ads say. They even suggest that the Army is a good place to meet guys, which I have to assume is correct.

Can the families of our soldiers be blamed if the events of the last month have left them dazed and confused? Can a father who wrote an opinion piece saying that he will not forgive the president if his son is killed in Saudi Arabia, who wrote of his son’s companions that “they joined the Marines as a way of earning enough money to go to college” really be blamed for his blind spot? Can a nineteen-year-old woman saying good-bye to her baby son who tells
People
magazine, “I never thought of anything like this when I joined up,” really be blamed for a statement that sounds so painfully naive?

Can grandparents who find it incredible that any employer would send both parents of young children simultaneously on a
long and dangerous business trip be blamed for their distress? Those who see the world in black and white reply that the military is not just any employer. But that is precisely how it has positioned itself in recent memory.

It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.

There is a schizophrenic quality to American feeling about this military action in almost every quote you read from average people. On the one hand, they say that we should be there, making short work of Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, they say they want no American lives lost.

Some of this is the natural sentiment surrounding war, and some is skepticism over our reasons for being in the Persian Gulf in the first place. But some is occasioned by modern military recruitment, recruitment that, under current circumstances, smacks of deceptive advertising. In times of conscription no soldier’s mother could fool herself about his ultimate purpose. We always knew that purpose was still there, but somehow it slipped our minds, the fact that “Be all that you can be” could be transformed into “to be or not to be” overnight.

Ever since the United States sent troops to the Middle East, American citizens have publicly yearned for decisive victory without bloodshed—that is, war without war. It would be nice to think that this reflects faith in the power of diplomacy, but it would not be entirely true. Thousands of American homes were unprepared for this eventuality. Thousands of parents sent their twenty-year-olds away to learn a trade. Now they find that they really sent them into battle. And I cannot blame them if some of them find that unreal, or even unfair.

NEW WORLD AT WAR
November 15, 1990

When the police arrived they found the three children alone. They were wearing dirty clothes because they hadn’t figured out how to do the laundry, and their father had tacked a note to the wall, telling them how to get cash with his automatic teller card. They were eight, twelve, and thirteen, and they were hungry. There was no food in the house. Their father had been gone a week.

He’d left for the Persian Gulf.

The case of Staff Sergeant Faagalo Savaiki is a worst-case scenario, an extreme illustration of the collision between a changing American way of life and the demands of war. He is divorced, his ex-wife lives in Hawaii, and she couldn’t manage to pay the airfare to Tennessee, which is where the children were living with their father. He’s back in the States now, charged with child abuse; the children are in foster homes, and the 101st Airborne Division, to which Sergeant Savaiki belongs, is still in the Middle East.

The world has changed since this country was last at war. It’s not simply the shifting sands of geopolitics. In the waning years of Vietnam we were approaching our two hundredth birthday, an adolescent country still devoted to muscling any comers aside and being the undisputed champion of the world. We’ve grown up since. And there is nothing quite so sobering as becoming adult and discovering the real world.

The if of war in the Middle East has turned in many of our minds to a when. We know that once upon a time there were formal declarations of such developments, but that seems so idealistic now. We remember, too, that once we believed we fought wars for reasons straight from the side of some marble monument. We are realistic about this conflict as only a grown-up, slightly world-weary country can be. We are going to war for oil, and, by extension, for the economy. The president trots out his Hitler similes to try to convince us otherwise.

The military is as changed as the rest of us. A support group in California reports that many of the soldiers writing home ask about public opinion, about whether we’re for them or against them. They remember Vietnam; they know that uncomplicated patriotism is no longer our style. Eleven percent of our armed forces personnel are female today, more than a tenfold increase over twenty years ago. If heavy fighting begins, a significant number of casualties will be women. People who yearn for the good old days are sure that women in body bags will convince us that women have overstepped their bounds.