War Stories

One of the things that I always hated about elderly people was their propensity for living in the past. In my experience, this manifested itself in the form of the elderly person telling stories about bygone episodes in their life. Usually, very, very bygone episodes.

Now that I’m eligible to eat off the senior menu myself—and I must confess I have been eligible for some years now—I’ve found that I myself have that same propensity to tell boring old stories that I so disliked in older people when I was younger.

I justify it this way. You see, I’m almost 63 years old, and by use of elementary math—and using even the most optimistic of assumptions—I have already lived way over half my life. Yes, I might conceivably continue to live thirty or so more years, but any more than that is just not going to happen short of some really miraculous medical breakthroughs.

When you live as long as I have, you live through a lot of stuff. Stuff that the twenty-something or thirty-something crowd have only read about in the history books.

I can remember the overcast November day when Ike was elected President for the second time in 1956. I remember the political conventions leading up to JFK’s election in 1960, and watching on live black and white TV as he stood—wearing a top hat that was still worn at inaugurations at that time—making his inaugural address. Then in late 1963, a very young version of me sat sadly watching another black and white TV picture, this time of seven gray horses drawing the caisson carrying his coffin down Pennsylvania avenue followed at a short distance by a rider less, caparisoned horse.

I remember Vietnam and nightly –now broadcast in color—TV images of the dying and wounded in south-east Asia. Neal Armstrong landing on the moon, the near-disaster of Apollo 13, bombing Hanoi and Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger traveling to China, images of helicopters depositing Vietnamese refugees on the decks of Navy carriers only to be pushed overboard into the South China sea to make room for the next wave, and … and…I’m only up to about 1973, there were lots more big important events—desegregation, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Woodstock, the Beatles, and many, many more. Just a tiny fraction of what I can remember in sixty-three years.

Recently, I visited an old friend at her home in Davis for dinner, and one of her other guests was a retired professor emeritus at UC-Davis. This delightful gentleman—I’ll call him Dr. G—is a few years older than me. As we got acquainted, we began to reminisce about what it was like when we were growing up. Almost inevitably it seemed, the shadow of the Cold War and the insane but coldly logical doctrine of MADD—mutually assured destruction crept into our conversation.

As I talked with Dr. G that evening, it was clear to me that even though we had just met, we had a bond of shared experience. We hadn’t just read about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis in some history book, we had lived through it! We each personally experienced the intense, overwhelming, almost paralyzing fear that was everywhere at the time. As a young airman in the Air Force, Dr. G recalled how he had been ordered to standby in readiness to deploy civil defense gear in the event of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the US; I recalled how as a young high school student, I had been afraid to go to sleep for fear that nuclear war might begin in the middle of the night.

I suppose that it is the remembrance of how it felt to live through these events that makes elderly people bore their kids, grand kids, and younger colleagues with old war stories.

We older people can tell the younger ones about the history that we have seen and lived through, but the challenge is to get them to feel it. We tell ‘war stories’ in the vain hope that we can get the younger generations to feel in their gut what we felt in ours about events that we lived through.

For the most part, it’s a futile exercise. The younger people may listen to us out of politeness, but they can’t understand how it felt to be alive then. How silly and naive of us older people for feeling we can get them to.

You had to be there.