Wild Writing Women Issue 10.2003 What Goes Around Essay: Reflections on War Often we remember the pieces our students write in workshops long after the class is over?even some of the sketches hastily scribbled as writing exercises have a grace and power that stick with us. We?ve worked with writers from ages 8 to 88, and many times we feel strange even using the word ?students? to describe them, because we are always learning from them. We?d like to present some of their works in forthcoming issues for you to enjoy, as well. Reflections on War by Linda Robertson My father flew B-24 bombers in World War II. When I was a kid this seemed like no big deal. All the adults in my life had lived through the war in one way or another. Their stories were part of the collective memory of our family?s history, tales told by my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles over coffee and cigarettes at various kitchen tables. Most of what I heard about my dad came from my mother; my father didn?t talk much about the war, except occasionally to tell a funny story at his own expense, like the time he came down with food poisoning on a practice flight. There was nothing particularly exceptional about my father. His name was Ernie Frey; his parents were German immigrants; he grew up in Queens. When he enlisted in the Army, soon after Pearl Harbor, he was twenty-three, a good-looking dark-haired young man with a dazzling smile. After the war, he lived a life not much different from millions of men of his generation: he got married, had kids, worked, bought a house. He worried about mortgage payments and medical bills; he grew older and put on weight. In his spare time he did yard work and fixed things around the house, and for fun he went fishing. After my father died, my mother told me that he had flown over thirty missions over Europe and North Africa. On one, he had to crash-land in water and was trapped in the cockpit. His navigator saved him, risking his own life to pull my father from the sinking plane. As an adult, I?m ambivalent about war and confused by the moral issues it presents. I?m not a pacifist. If anything, I?m one of that large, unoriginal group of people who reluctantly believe that if someone goes to war against you, well, of course to have to fight back?who feel, in a sort of abstract, hand-wringing way, that some wars have to be fought, and try to weigh human suffering we can?t imagine in deciding which wars meet our personal standards of necessity or nobility. But I?m baffled, nonetheless, by the fact that wars keep happening, that the human race seems so ready to kill each other in droves. It makes no sense to me. And I?m mystified that ordinary men, like my father, are so willing to go to war, even so-called "good" wars. I have never been called upon to risk my life for anyone or anything, and I don?t know what I would do if I were asked to. But my father, just another kid from New York, climbed thirty times into the cockpit of a war plane and went out to bomb an enemy?s cities and people, knowing that he might be shot out of the sky and die any one of those times. Somehow it made sense to him, and to a lot of other men. I?d like to think that someday enough people will question why young men (and now, women) should be willing to be warriors and why we send them out to kill our enemies and be killed by them, that we?ll all decide not to do it any more. But I think also that we?re a long way from being there. Linda Robertson is a full-time lawyer and part-time freelance writer who lives in Northern California with her partner, writer Michael Kurland, and an empty-nester's menagerie of dogs and cats. She has written pieces for Salon.com and the San Francisco Chronicle and is co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Unsolved Mysteries. Her mystery short story, "Mrs. Hudson Reminisces," was recently published in the Bay Area bestseller My Sherlock Holmes, an anthology of stories about the great detective. _______________________________________________________________________ Home <../fall_2003/index.html> | About | Features <../features/index.html> | Columns <../columns/index.html> | What Goes Around | Gallery <../gallery/index.html> | Calendar <../../calendar.html> | Contact <../contact.html> A project of the Wild Writing Women, LLC; copyright 2003