Civic Pride

I refer to the town in which I was born, moved away from, and eventually returned to, as my birthplace. The word hometown is just a little too cozy for me and I think it incorrectly suggests an affection that I do not have. My inability to purge that dumping ground of anguish and depression from my thoughts, conscious and otherwise, is more than disappointing. The dreams spurred by my contempt for that cursed town are always nightmares. I wake from them feeling beaten and raw. I imagine a skirmish with a giant cheese grater might produce the same feeling. I wear my hatred for that place on my sleeve. Those who know me best can only guess at the depth of the grudge that I carry. No casual conversation is immune from digression, no subject matter, however innocent, is safe from exploitation; I will find a way to slander the place of my birth. With few exceptions, I hate every person, animal (wild or domestic), building, street, blade of grass and gust of shit-filtered wind that blows through that loathsome burg. If my regularly scheduled program was interrupted by breaking news that “hometown” was being swallowed by an erupting volcano, I would consider it a prayer answered and grudgingly fulfill my part of the bargain by spreading the word of Gawd’s omnipotence. So, how about it Gawd, the ball’s in your court, shit or get off the pot I say.

I said all of that in order to avoid a misunderstanding. It must be clear that in this context, I have the same regard for civic pride as I have for fecal vomiting and gas gangrene. Now that we have an understanding, we can begin the torturous meandering that will ultimately lead to my point.

I am an insomniac. It is unlikely that there has ever been a historical documentary produced that I haven’t seen on late night television. It was during one of those history-channel marathons that something strange happened. Black and white footage from a circa 1950’s Civil Defense film dredged up a mess of unexpected memories, I was stunned by a wave of something along the order of pride for my birthplace. For decades, I had considered the possibility that… maybe… there was something not altogether evil about that place. It seemed unreasonable to believe that one small town could be as offensive and pathetic as I remembered it to be. Even so, all of my efforts to conjure up fond memories had fallen short, and now, as long buried notions of civic pride stumbled from the gloom like reanimated cadavers, I found myself leaning forward to get a more focused view of the degraded footage. There, rendered in varying shades of grey on the television screen were children with happy faces, heavily greased proto-pompadours, and pressed shirts with button-down collars, dutifully following the example set by Bert the Turtle to “duck and cover” in preparation for the approaching nuclear conflagration. It doesn’t take much to push my gastrointestinal tract into a downward spiral of inappropriate peristalsis. Not least among the pressures growing inside of me was an urge to… reminisce. Excuse me while I do just that.



My birthplace is located in a section of the country known as Tornado Alley. If I learned anything from the periodic tornado drills of my grade school days, it is this, no matter what dark force threatens to separate you from this earthly existence, lying on the floor with an open textbook held firmly to the back of your head will render you impervious to harm. It did not surprise me to learn that the textbook protocol would also ward off the undesirable effects of thermonuclear detonation and radiation poisoning. While the instructions provided by most public service announcements were laughable in their obvious inadequacy, the looming prospects for nuclear cataclysm sketched a credible picture of doom, especially considering that approximately fifteen miles west of our little three-room school, B52 bombers with their bays stacked to the hilt with nuclear weapons, were in perpetual rotation. Being a Strategic Air Command, or SAC base, swarms of heavy bombers flew unending circuits over the West Texas wastelands, their aircrews anticipating a one-way ticket to Soviet airspace at any given moment. In addition to the ever present B52’s, countless nuclear missile silos dotted the surrounding countryside, each programmed with the coordinates of a military base or population center in the Soviet Union. And so it was that our little nondescript parcel of terra firma was classified among the top ten targets in the world for a first wave attack by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. Even so, the aforementioned Civil Defense films were conspicuously absent from the roster of safety videos that were shown to us in school. I understood the logic. It was common knowledge we would likely receive no warning at all before the ground on which we stood would be wiped clean with nothing more interesting than globs of melted dirt and the odd bone shard to show for it all. Regarding the prospects for survival, the old-timers cut to the chase, “you would not want to survive.” Consequently, we never discussed emergency protocols for nuclear war. I never actually verified our position in the top-ten target list. In those days, it was no simple task collecting that kind of information, no internet after all. In any case, I believed that we were important enough to be among the first in the United States to have our skin ripped from our bodies, our eyes popped from their sockets and the whole shebang turned to ash. This knowledge instilled in me a twisted but powerful sense of pride.




There in front of the television so many years later, it seemed odd that I would experience pride in the notion that others would have to wait their turn for annihilation. That’s right, no cutting in line dude, we were here first. I’ve narrowed the cause of these hare-brained ideas down to two primary sources. One is the inclination to accept as normal something that has always been. I was born into the cold war, so it was the natural order of things. The other point of origination was a pear shaped man with stark features, a “widow’s peak” hairline, and a perpetual glower. A World War 2 navy veteran and a survivor of multiple sea battles in the Pacific, he ran our little country school like a battleship, tight and squeaky clean. This squat and oddly shaped man could outrun the fastest kid in school. He was a sight to behold, streaking like a comet across the playground in his black suit, tie and spit-shined black leather shoes. With his arms and legs pumping with logical efficiency and his head and torso held in a mesmerizing state of rock solid inaction, he ran with a wild grin affixed to his face like a man possessed, and he never lost a race. On my first day under his command, the beginning of third grade for me, the Commander plucked me from the middle of a schoolroom altercation and held me aloft by my left arm. In a state of levitation, I left the classroom and flew through the halls with my feet never touching the ground. I finally got a look at the Commander after crash landing on a wood bench that faced his very large and imposing desk. My first impression, the guy was clearly psychotic. While I was confident he was not authorized to engage in the type of violent activity I was accustomed to at home, I nonetheless was dismissed from the Commander’s office that day with the knowledge that I was neither the “king of the hill” nor the “queen of the hive.” We had an understanding, he and I.



Because the Commander would play a major role in building the framework of my attitude towards death in general, as well as the more important issue of how death was to be faced, it is worth the risk of setting this story adrift to get to know him a little better.

Periodically, during regular school hours, an assembly order issued by the Commander had all of the boys scrambling into one classroom. More often than not, these tense and perilous gatherings were part of the Commander’s investigation of some unsolved crime that occured within the boundaries of his jurisdiction. During one of these episodes, we young males were all marched into the boy’s restroom and paraded, single file, to the opening of one of the stalls. There, on the front edge of a bright white toilet seat rested a tiny little turd. For thirty solid minutes, the Commander ran us through the rhetorical ringer, exploring all of the scenarios that might result in such an affront to the honor and dignity of this man’s ship. In a booming voice, each word enunciated to the full capacity of his lungs, lips and vocal chords, the question was asked of each of us individually, “DID YOU LEAVE THIS DOO DOO ON MY TOILET SEAT? When it came my turn, I was sure that I was the guilty one. Never mind that I hadn’t crapped in that restroom…ever, I did my “business” at home. Nevertheless, had he lingered for just a few seconds longer, I would have admitted to stealing the goddamn Lindburg baby, such was the force of the Commander’s personality. It was under these conditions that, on this day, we fifth and sixth graders shuffled into that classroom for the first of several indoctrination sessions to come. Sitting straight and stiff jawed as the last of us took our seats; the Commander glared at each of us in turn and then buried his face in his hands. After what seemed an eternity of silence, I was only seconds away blurting out my complicity in Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy scandal when the Commander drew his hands away like heavy curtains for the first act of Macbeth. I was used to this kind of treatment from the old man, most of my classmates were completely unprepared for the Commander’s bulging eyes, tight clinched teeth, and swollen blood vessels trailing up his forehead like knarled tree branches.



BOOM! Heavy guns were pouring fire onto the decks of enemy ships. Just like that, the Commander began recounting his experiences at the Battle of Midway. Anti-aircraft guns filled the sky with tracer and high explosive rounds. Enemy planes trailed smoke and flames, some crashing into the sea, others penetrating an impossibly thick shield of lead and shrapnel before flying headlong into his sister ships. Sailors worked as feverishly at pushing aside the human remains as they did at loading and firing the guns. Incoming rounds tore holes in steel and flesh. Bombs, he pronounced them “bums,” fell to the port and starboard, occasionally ripping holes and exploding below decks. The Commander took us through the battle in detail, and then the aftermath. He told us how, after the American fleet had defeated the enemy, the Destroyer on which he served set course for the enemy survivors, groups of them were now floating on rafts of oil soaked debris. We listened intently as the Commander described how his Destroyer plowed through the groups of enemy sailors floating in the water, dispatching many with the ships propellers. As a final act in the Commander’s bizarre play, he pantomimed a rifleman, holding his imaginary weapon in his hands as if leaning over the edge of the deck. He pulled the trigger and recoiled repeatedly as he finished off more of the oil soaked enemy, their bodies slipping past the hull, bobbing in the wake of his ship.
“This,” he said, “is your duty.” The Commander continued, “You will go to Vietnam and you will do what has to be done. You will kill the enemy.”



Cut to a room full of slack jawed, wide-eyed fifth and sixth graders. For me, it was self-evident. Of course, this IS what has to be done. I grew up with television news images of helicopter gunships, infantry scrambling back and forth, and body counts, the list of the American dead always countered with much larger numbers representing the enemy killed. As children, we played war, talked about war, and never dreamed that the war would end before we had our chance to make the Commander proud of us. In case you have ever wondered, that my friends is how you grow an army.
It was implicit in the Commander’s instruction that living in a primary target zone without complaint was a patriotic duty. We, my classmates and I, made jokes about Soviet missiles and repeated the mantra, “You wouldn’t want to survive anyway.” The statement, “You won’t feel a thing” was also very popular. The thought of moving out of the target zone, as far as I know, never crossed anyone’s mind. In a childish manner, we wore our disregard for the nuclear threat like a badge of honor. Contempt for Communism was icing on the cake. It all seems a little embarrassing now, but there is an aspect of that pride that I can still identify with, the idea of facing adversity head on.



There you have it; I found something good to say about my birthplace. In terms of tangible benefits, it barely ranks alongside those little wrinkles around a dog's butt, I’m not sure what the function of those wrinkles are, but they are good for a laugh every now and then.