April 02, 2003
The Largest Sheikdom in the Persian Gulf
When I was three years old my parents and I lived in an apartment building near Cheesman Park in Denver. I remember small things about it-- the smell of the tar on the roof, the swimming pool downstairs. And I remember looking in the closet one day and discovering my dad's rifle from the war.
Shortly after I found it he got rid of it, partly because it's bad news to have guns and kids in the same apartment, but also, I think, because he was letting something go.
At dinner parties my dad would carry me around while he talked to the people there. "Did I tell you my son's a genius?" he would ask them in his friendly patter. "Of course he is!" they would say, and he would say, "Seriously…” then turning to me, “Look here. Alex. What's the largest sheikdom in the Persian Gulf?"
"Abu Dhabi!"
"That’s a fact!”
He got rid of the rifle, but he kept his infantry jacket and his medals, and sometimes I would try them on and play at fighting.
"Tell me about the war." I used to ask, and he would describe the basics of his story, as if reciting his name rank and serial number. “Six weeks of basic training, two weeks on a troop transport boat, a dinner in France, four days on a train, and the next thing you know I’m in Germany getting my ass shot at."
This was not what a little boy raised on GI Joe and the A-team wanted to hear. Where were the epic battles?
"Did you kill anybody?"
"You don’t always know. Everybody is shooting at once.”
“What was the scariest thing that happened?”
“We were going house to house once and we heard a noise downstairs. I went down and pulled the pin on a grenade and turned the corner and there was a family there with their hands up. Thank God you could put the pin back in.”
And that was about all he ever told me.
But he did say things that I later realized were his way of talking about the war. Whenever he would take me to some action movie starring muscle-bound men with precision machine guns he would take me aside afterwards and say, “The problem with war, Alex, is that it doesn’t matter if you have the best gun in the world, a fourteen year old kid with a rifle can kill you."
The fourteen-year-old kid, I suspect, is not rhetorical.
My dad was lucky. He was with the last of the replacement troops sent to the war, and he spent his last two years in occupied Japan, where he picked up a fondness for tempura and rice wine. When he came back home the GI Bill sent him to college, where he studied art. His service in the war kept him out of Korea, where he would have served at the beginning for longer and under worse conditions. And it also gave him a rhetorical trump card, which I’ll freely fess up to using here for ideological ends: He shot goddamned Nazis, which is about as sacred an act as we can apply to warfare in this century.
My dad is quick to point out that his experience was not heroic, he didn’t storm any machine-gun nests, he didn’t carry a wounded buddy through the muck for a week. He didn’t know about what was happening to the Jews until the war was over. He experienced what most soldiers experience: waiting interrupted by moments of fear, gunfire, and sadness.
And it is mostly sadness. When he arrived in Europe he spent four days in a boxcar traveling through the ruins of the western front on the way to Germany. Once there, his platoon would go into the devastated towns, never quite sure if there was any fight left in the enemy. I think this experience of fighting at the end shaped his way of thinking about war. “The children would wait at the train depots for our garbage,” he said. “We hung it out in bags on the train and they would come and take it away… " It is a very difficult thing to watch your father’s eyes darting away when he talks about such things, and to realize that the hopelessness you have sometimes felt is something he feels too -- because if he feels it then it really is out there, like a fact or an earthquake. So you don’t talk about it because you are a family and sometimes silence is the only thing that will keep the house from falling down around you.
The largest Sheikdom in the Persian Gulf is Abu Dhabi, which is a fact that my father picked up from doing the New York Times crossword puzzles in the early seventies. Apparently one day I was running around saying “abudabadabada” and my father said “Abu Dhabi?” and I said “abudab” and he said “Abu Dhabi?” and I said “Abu Dhabi” and he said “the largest Sheikdom in The Persian Gulf, that’s a fact.” This is how children learn to speak.
I called my dad the other day and told him that I had been bringing him up on this site recently, and would he write a little something. We started talking about the war and we were yelling good naturedly into the phone to each other.
“They are lying, the bastards, all of them.”
“Weapons of mass destruction my ass, where are they?”
“Goddamn criminals”
“They are carpet bombing Bagdad! Can you imagine how many people they are killing for this?”
“Where are the Goddamn Democrats in all this?”
“How can you justify going to war to enforce a UN resolution when by doing so you’ll be violating a UN resolution?”
“I’m telling you, you’re going to have to come bail me out of jail. I’m not too old to do civil disobedience.”
“Bastards!”
“Criminals!” back and forth through the phone and “you’re right dad, you’re right” and “that's my boy” and yelling and laughing and angry all at once because we are determined not to let this house fall down.
