The Sons of War

Johnny cried when the doctor told him he couldn’t fight in his brothers’ war. At 17 he needed both his parents’ and his doctor’s permission to get past the twin battlements of youth and infirmity, and now, as in all his life, those ramparts would not fall easily for him. His older brothers Peter and Carmine seemed never to have to scrap against their age or their own bodies; all they seemed to have to do was crack their knuckles and dip a Lucky into the liquid flame of a Zippo and every barrier seemed to fall before them - whether it be a man or boy who tried to keep them from an opening slot on a ball team or the coy inhibitions of a long-lean girl uncontrollably swooning whenever these tough brothers walked by in their infantry dress. But Johnny’s asthma, his hammer toes, his tiny hands and below average weight had all his life kept him from being both a guys’ guy and a woman’s man and now all this and God knew what else would keep him out of a war that everyone knew would either save or end the world. All the way back from Doc Lyons’s office Johnny held down the grunt of shame he felt by squeezing a rubbery ring of pride tighter and tighter around in his throat. But as soon as his mother cut the ignition on their flat grey 1939 Buick and not five seconds after Johnny saw his father sitting in the hard light of the afternoon porch listening to a Dodgers’ game on the Philco radio he had dragged out there, young Johnny opened his throat and the shutters of his eyes and he let out a quiet fall of tears that nonetheless was heard clear across American and all the way from Anzio to Okinawa to the forest of the Ardennes.

You see, this war was not an advertiser’s war. And, even though the government had more than a stake in it, and even though the powers that be were complicit in shaming a commitment out of every man and boy who could run, walk or crawl to a recruiting station, no man or boy living during this war would need to be conned into fighting nor stopped from doing so. No, this war did not need to be promoted, nor the men who fought it sold on the truth of it. This war was not about manufactured patriotism or a pay check in hard times or the thrill of killing a pixilated enemy, this war was an ancient fulcrum on which balanced the history of the world - as simple and as impossible as that. Though he didn’t quite know it yet, Johnny cried his tears that afternoon for every mangled child lying dead on a pile of bodies at Auschwitz, for every mother in London digging her own aged mother from the rubble of a council house, for every German and Italian and Russian and Chinese family cowed into following the mad goose steps of a lunatic dictator, and most of all for Johnny’s own parents who each night pulled air raid blinds down over their windows as they sat still as death waiting for death to pass. In a year Johnny would outgrown the need for his parent’s permission and outlast his governments rejection of him as its own need became more and more desperate. Johnny would get his chance to fight in this war and some months later Johnny’s tears would be stopped forever as he died in this war. But nobody could ever say that Johnny had been tricked into being there just as nobody could say that he hadn’t finally broken through the gates to be there beside his brothers to fight for truth and country and justice for all.

* * *

Sean often ate his lunch at a fast food joint across the street from a strip mall recruiting station. The strip mall was old, but not as old as the story told by the Marines who stood on the sidewalk in their dress blues snapping military issue gum and winking at Sean whenever he walked by on his lunch hour. “Hey, Killer, you gonna tear up the gym today?” And Sean would slick past them, blow back the definition of muscles in his shoulders, nod his head and smile straight and narrow, bright against his brilliant blackness, sending out a flare that told these Jar Heads that they had the boy pegged just right. Sean was a gym rat and a home boy, a stock clerk in the hood and a kid about to crystallize into the hard and fantastic motivations of a man. He was pumped and he was 18 going on gangster and he loved nothing more than to sit in the front room of his grandmother’s subsidized city flat and splatter aliens and drug lords and poorly rendered Iraqis on the Xbox he had bought hot for $30 out of the delivery truck from which Junior Stephens had boosted it. Sean was a cherry ripe for picking into pie and the Marines watched him day after day until they had him lined up just right and he was the lowest of low hanging fruit and they barely needed to even reach up above their heads to pull him down into their recruiting quota.

Summer was already rotting into fall when they got Sean to literally sign his life away. With two wars in full swing and a pundit-primed cultural buzz of evil jihads and twin towers and homeland security and freedom that wasn’t free already fogging Sean like the smoke used to drug creatures less than human, the Marines were able to nab the boy off the street cleaner and faster than if they had strung a hood over his head and clubbed him into the back of a shack on Pier 19. First they got Sean inside with the video games; those especially insidious pieces of digital magic developed for the Army by socially inept MIT geeks and puerile Hollywood storytellers who had sold their talented souls to Uncle Sam. Then, once they had Sean piloting Blackhawks into Afghani mountain cannons and leading a troop of impossibly armored urban warriors into street battles where only the enemy bled and died, they dangled a sack of money right in front of the kid’s face. “Oh yeah, my man, many, many Benjamins gonna be deposited right into a bank account with your name on it, and nothing for you to spend it on because the chow is free and so is the pussy when those fine German and French mommas sees you in parade dress on your R&R in Paris and Berlin.” But Sean wasn’t stupid and when the African American Marine whipped out a hidden box of Cubans and offered Sean a light - “You a Marine now, my brother, and we Marines is a bunch of mother fuckin’ international law breakers. We gonna smoke up that contraband Cuban shit, if we want to. Ain’t that right, Sarge?” - Sean thought he might have caught a whiff of something slavish and fishy. That’s when the Marines hit him with a full frontal assault on his country that went back through the second war to the Great War to that civil war fought so that Sean himself could be free.

Using a final solution of slow-cooked, honest to god pride and patriotism that old Johnny had bled and died for three quarters of a century ago, the Marines had Sean wet-eyed in no time. It was his grandmother painfully dying from a nuclear bomb attack that did Sean in. The thought of turbaned Iraqis marching through Los Angeles and Brooklyn with tactical nukes bolted into titanium suitcases while flesh dripped like gravy from his Grandmother’s face is what finally got Sean to sign. A year later - just seconds before the IED ripped off his arms as he reached back over the seat of the Humvee to get himself a cigarette - Sean was actually thinking about that piece of paper that he signed. He was in fact thinking about how much it was like something hopeful that you might sign to buy a car, or get a marriage license or a hundred of the other things you might do to start your life in an ideal and honest America that for Sean, like the rest of us, was already long gone.

* * *

Take care you fathers of sons and you sons of war. Do not confuse your duty to fight and die with your duty to live and make a better world. Do not be tricked into putting your fragile courage on the table in exchange for piles of silver or into throwing your bravery onto a bloody heap of other men’s guts because someone told you that this is what we men of country have always done. There was a time when the world was purer and we had the slimmest of chances to save ourselves by dying for others. But that time is long gone and now there are forces at work that would swindle you out of your honest bravery and manly pride just to buy another barrel of oil and steal another seat at the table of power. Never forget Johnny’s emotional courage and Sean’s brainy brawn and use every ounce of all of it inside you to fight your way into a thinking man’s peace.