Open Writing

Gay and I were living in Lenoir City, Tennessee when Al Qaeda struck on September 11th of two-thousand and one. We were the guests of Professor Don Brown who was spending his customary summer months in Maine where he sailed and remembered his late wife Chrissie. His home stood on an eminence called Magnet Point from the roadway that ran to its end and then looped back on itself to form a horseshoe.

Don’s home was a thesaurus of treasures and curiosities that exposed it as the dwelling of an educator. It is my experience that most educators accumulate things that are appealing for what they are rather than for any pecuniary value they might hold. If I want further confirmation of that fact, I need only remind myself that I am married to a schoolteacher.

My custom is to watch the news with breakfast so that I can know what is going on in the big wide world. That fateful morning the picture riveted me to the chair. One of the World Trade Centre towers in New York had flames and smoke billowing from its upper floors. The reporter said that an aeroplane had crashed into the tower.

I called Gay out of the kitchen to see it. I assumed that the pilot of a small plane had got into difficulties and hit the tower. Then I watched in disbelief as a passenger jetliner flew deliberately into the second tower, and knew in the pit of my stomach that the world had changed forever. As the towers came crashing down the horror of the cost in human life became apparent.

After catching its breath, the government hurriedly pieced together a strategy of retribution, and ordinary Americans looked for something to do to assuage their helplessness and vulnerability in the face of the attack.

The residential community of Magnet Point held a block sale to raise funds and arranged that on the one-week anniversary of the attack every house would fly the Stars and Stripes and place lighted candles on their porches to show solidarity in suffering and uncertainty. We joined with our neighbours in their efforts to reassure ourselves that we would all get through whatever it might be that our uncertain future held. Like whistling in the dark, it provided comfort to those most in need of it.

Shops sold out of flags as they were bought to adorn homes, cars, and workplaces. Old patriotic songs played non-stop on the radio, and new ones were written overnight to swell the tumult of nationalism that guaranteed to make everything all right again if everyone would sing “God bless America” loudly enough and fly the Flag. But Dorothy had been blown far afield from Kansas.

The ugly side of this understandable upsurge in nationalism was the suspicion and hatred directed to anyone who looked as if they were maybe, conceivably, even vaguely, connected with the Middle East, which, in the minds of most Americans, means that they must be Muslims, and at this time all Muslims were regarded as terrorists or potential terrorists. A Punjabi Sikh petrol station owner was shot dead, and other brown-skinned citizens and residents attracted thugs and gunmen who either shot them dead, seriously wounded them, or beat them up, often to the point of permanently disabling them.

It was as if that portion of the population that was most afraid had immediately to take out their anger, frustration and fear on someone, and anyone who looked as if he might have had a great-grandfather who could have ridden a camel became the innocent victim of the amorphous hate of the lynch mobs that festered on prejudice and ignorance.

American citizens, permanent residents, foreign students, and tourists presumed by their appearance to be of Middle East origins and potential terrorists, were detained at airport and other security checkpoints, and almost a thousand were detained without charge or access to legal counsel. Elderly Japanese-Americans remembered how it felt.

Today as I drive down the broad sunny streets of Mesa Arizona, it is hard to tell that this is a nation at war. National flags are much less evident than they were four years ago, and radio stations are back to dishing out Country, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Classical and the many varieties of music that are more conventional than the welter of a mandatory patriotism too often marred by jingoism redolent of nineteenth century British gunboat diplomacy.

Petrol prices are up, and that has a knock-on effect on the cost of everything else, but America has enjoyed cheap petrol for years and even at today’s high prices it is a mere fourth of the price of fuel in the United Kingdom.

There is no food shortage, no rationing, no one carries a gas mask, children have not been assigned billets near their schools in case the enemy launches aerial bombardments, and sweets have not disappeared from retail shelves.

There is no blackout, no Air Raid Wardens, and no wailing sirens to rouse the populace from their beds to scurry half-awake and half dressed into non-existent air raid shelters.

Inviting but stagnant reservoirs of ‘Static Water’ have not mushroomed around the city, no houses announce on their doorposts that they have a stirrup pump, no “‘V’ for Victory” painted in Morse code on the lintels, no one is urged to ‘Dig for Victory,’ and the ponderous and ominous opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony do not propel eager listeners to wireless receivers with bated breath for the latest ‘News From the Front.’

How different is this place from the England at War of my childhood! No kind of light was permissible after dusk, street lamps were doused or dimmed, motor vehicle headlamps were masked allowing scant light to be directed downward by louvres, hand held flashlights had to be masked with brown paper with a hole no bigger than a sixpence letting out just enough light to avoid the worst of the blackout.

Blackout curtains or blinds were fitted to doors and windows, and doors opening into the street had to have a heavy curtain draped over them so that not a chink of light escaped when the door was opened at night.

Air Raid Wardens who had condign power scoured the blackness for negligible dribbles of amber glim. When detected by their photophobic eyes the stillness of the night was broken by a strident shout of “Get that light out!” in a manner that conveyed without the possibility of misunderstanding that the matter was not open to debate, and with the certainty that unrepentant infractors were either criminally negligent or traitors and as such were open to arrest and shame. The Luftwaffe was sure where they wanted to discharge their deadly cargoes, but it was not wise to encourage them to deliver surplus ordnance down your chimney or that of your neighbours.

Iron railings around public and private homes and facilities were cut off and sent to support the ‘war effort.’ Aluminium saucepans and kettles were piled into sacrificial heaps, supposedly to make something or other to help win the war, but no one knows what they were.

We were commanded to “Make Do and Mend,” rather than buy almost unobtainable new clothing. Luminous lapel badges were sold so that we could “Wear Something White in the Blackout,” to reduce the risk of bumping into people, or having motor cars bump into us.

Shop windows had massive clamps fitted inside and outside to hold the pieces together in the event of a bomb blast so that flying shards did not maim or decapitate people. Our homes had brown paper parcel tape stuck to them in criss-cross patterns for the same purpose. The whole of our lives was geared to and informed by the War.

Sleep was frequently interrupted by the banshee of a siren that crowned the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry drill hall a furlong distant from my home in Fitzwilliam Street. Main streets had six-inch diameter cast iron pipes as permanent hoses running along their gutters to save the fire brigade precious time in case a deadly phosphorous incendiary bomb set fire to anything.

German bombs fell from the skies in and around Huddersfield and every schoolboy had lumps of pocket piercing shrapnel mixed in with his piece of string, his conker, and his lump of gas tar. Live bullets appeared in toy drawers and some fingers, hands, and eyes were offered up on the altars of Mars.

Strange artefacts bearing ancient symbols revived by political madness found their way into childish hands. One of them, a German officer’s dress sword with a magnificent swastika mounted either side of its hilt boss sliced the top of my right shoulder to the bone as if it were a slab of warm butter.

Mortar shell sand grenades in their dead and alive varieties, and an astounding assortment of cannon shells, machine gun ammunition, and small arms bullets multiplied as objets de guerre were carried back, early by the wounded and late by the demobilised, from Europe’s battlefields to invade local culture.

While West Yorkshire did not have bombing on the scale of more important and therefore less fortunate parts of the Mother Country, but it played its part in the war effort. Besides sending the pick and flower of its men, its factories were hard at it by day and by night manufacturing military clothing, munitions, Spitfire gearboxes, and midget submarines.

Wounded soldiers from Dunkirk were carried still sleeping into houses in the next street to mine, and the house next door was taken by a couple who had fled the Channel Islands in the wake of the German occupation.

There was a substantial dearth of men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, the demographic of conscription into the armed forces. My real father was in the British Eighth Army in North Africa’s Western Sahara under Montgomery when they played Irwin Rommel’s team.

Unless they were the tail-enders of a large family, it was common for schoolchildren to have their father, uncle, and older brothers out there somewhere in the midst of this awful evil that touched every life, and every aspect of individual and communal life, an dour leader Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, affectionately called “Winnie,” was a hero in everyone’s eyes.

My experience of total immersion in war and its corollaries is why I say that from what I see and sense around me now it is easy to forget that the United States is a nation at war, because life seems so cold bloodedly normal.

Yet if one lifts the curtain in the right places, a much different picture emerges. There are homes where banners hang on porches or in windows with a centred blue star on a white field framed in red, signifying that a soldier daughter or son is presently serving from that household.

The blue star is both a symbol of pride and a sign of the anxiety parents and families experience when one of their own is in peril. The tragedy is that every blue star can be transformed into a gold star if the soldier so remembered is killed, and then a flag will lie forever furled into a compact triangle next to the picture of the loved one.

Today there are over two thousand gold stars hanging in the sadness of families who have empty places. Favourite chairs that will be taken no more, beds that will not feel again the weight of a beloved child, souvenirs and mementoes sit untouched by the hands of their non-returning owners, a bleak reminder to grieving families that they shall not see their loved one again on this side of the veil of mortality.

There is an indecency understood by all who have lost loved ones to the embrace of death when life goes on around them as if nothing had happened. In grief, we need the understanding of our fellows. When Mortality strikes down one of our own, we need it to be known. We hunger after consideration from our friends and communities because it confirms our humanity and establishes us still among the living as experiencing that that is the common lot of all, sooner or later.

I would see a different America if I could look into the red rimmed eyes of a broken-hearted mother whose child was taken on a field of blood in a faraway country that until a few years ago was almost as unknown in location and custom as it is now. It is sad that we cannot share their feelings and sense of loss, yet that same emotional distance that the bereaved find irritating could also be necessary for us to hold onto our own sanity.

Supplying surrogates in suffering, and the substitutionary sacrifice of the lives of the few for the many are part of the machinery that drives human society and, as imperfect as it is, keeps it as perfect as it is. Nevertheless, we should share the suffering of others not only out of gratitude but because it humanises us through the character of the empathy that comes to pass when one individual consciousness enters the soul of another to comprehend its anguish. It is a characteristic of the completely human to bear one another’s burdens.

Compassion unifies and binds each to the other, breaking down all obstacles between people so that colour, creed, nationality, political philosophy, education, profession, economic circumstance, nor any other consideration that habitually divides people, groups, and populations can stay the outreach of one good heart to a disadvantaged one.

As we remember a nation at war, it is essential that we count its cost in the lives of those most affected by it and remember that while life may look normal, it is not, and Peace, though too late for some, cannot come soon enough.

Copyright ©

Ronnie Bray

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED