My father may have died in 1999 at the age of 80, but every day I see him unlined at 25, looking handsome and happy in his soldier's uniform. I've always loved this old-fashioned photo that I keep in my room. On his way to war in 1942, he was sent unmarried to a base in Tampa, Florida, to await being sent overseas.
My mother quit her job and went to be with him at the army base. She never worked again. Their wedding picture is typical of a hasty marriage -- no wedding dress and only strangers to sign as witnesses. But they were together. My mother hated the humidity and bugs of Tampa, but she endured it because she loved my dad.
I was unplanned, but there I was only 13 months after they were married. As family myths go, I saved my dad's life. How? He was scheduled to be shipped overseas, but was given more time stateside to await my birth. The ship he had been scheduled to go on was sunk and all aboard perished. Whether true or not, I choose to believe that story.
As a war baby, I grew up on war movies. My dad didn't talk much about being in the war after he got back, but in his older years he talked warmly and nostalgically about being a soldier. His eyes had always been bad, so he had been assigned as a medic.
I'm not sure where he served, but I know it wasn't in Thailand. Yet, when I visited Thailand many years later, I was drawn to visit the bridge on the River Kwai. The original bridge doesn't exist anymore, but there's a museum there that re-creates life in those prisoner of war camps. It was very graphic. We then were taken to visit a cemetery for American soldiers that was kept in excellent condition by the Thai people. Among the many crosses, I found a few Jewish stars. Even though my dad had been sent to Europe, I had never felt closer to my father's war experience than I did there.
Among my father's papers, I found his dog tag and his certificate of honorable discharge kept long after they served any purpose. But he was proud of them, and so was I.
I have grown up surrounded by war, and the threat of wars. There was the fear of being attacked by the U.S.S.R. in the cold war. There was the Korean War, and what child of the 1960s doesn't remember the gut-wrenching Vietnamese War? When I lived in Israel, I stood in silence every year during the sirens of Remembrance Day. When I lived in China, and in Taiwan, and in Korea, I heard about the wars suffered there and the cruelty of the Japanese. Back in America, there has been the Iraq War and still the Afghanistan War.
I once tried to read a book that promised a short history of the world. Compressed into the space of a book, it was a chronicle of one war after another. I quickly tired of it. Was there nothing else that mattered in the history of our world other than wars?
But our world, our human species doesn't seem to tire of wars. They go on and on and on, minutely detailed, adored, and remembered in truth and fiction on movie and television screens.
Would there be fewer wars if women were in charge? Or computers?
