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What I
possessed was a capacity to absorb and retain great quantities
of words, a skill useful in spelling bees, Latin conjugations,
and, for one shining moment, onstage. My dramatic talents were
confined mostly to a deep second alto, but I snared the lead in the
sixth-grade school play simply because no other child could
memorize the lines. Dressed in a red, white, and blue flowing
gown that my mother had painstakingly sewn, I was cast as the
small embodiment of the American flag. Like a one-girl chorus in
a Greek drama, my role was to deliver great swatches of truth and
beauty from a pedestal on high. "I am the American flag!" began
my soliloquy, then marched on through the ages to the rockets'
red glare.
Such
fervor must have met with a forgiving crowd in those
Cold War and Camelot years. With the native-son exception of
Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964, Amarillo would vote overwhelmingly
Republican in every presidential election for the last
half of the twentieth century—a conservatism that displayed its
colors everywhere from Sunday-morning sermons (where might
was always right) to young girls camouflaged as American flags.
My father had been a master sergeant in the Eighth Air Force
during the Second World War, stationed for three years in a
supply-command base in Blackpool, England, until months after
the European theater was over. A tall, brown-haired man with
pool-dark eyes and a slow, trustworthy grin, he had the type of
young-Jimmy-Stewart physical stature that Hollywood had lionized
in its soldier-heroes. I was born five years after his return, in
1951, and I grew up cloaked in the sweet mysteries of his having
belonged to such an exotic mission. This aura of intrigue was
heightened by the stories he told and the ones he wouldn't: the
poker games he'd played and won throughout the war, the scar
on his chest he refused to explain but that I imagined was a knife
wound. Mostly, though, I had a notion of my father as a soldier in
charge of a company of men, where his physical strength and
bluster-rough camaraderie must have been on full display. For a
child, these heroic images were part of a larger dimension that included
physical warmth and the smell of coffee and Camel cigarettes;
taken together, they offered a portrait of a dad who was
already larger than life. When I stood on that stage in my patriotic
garb, delivering my lines to a full house, I knew the audience held
a man who had come back from the war to take care of me. I must
have believed myself at the very center of the home of the brave.
The war
novels were housed in the basement of the library,
within the larger territory of Adult Fiction, where I wasn't supposed
to be. So this was where I headed, preferring the remote
aisles of the last rows of the alphabet, where I was less likely to be
apprehended. There was a vague warning, issued by mothers
and librarians both, to be on the lookout for strange, non-reading
men—the ones who smelled of whiskey, nodded off at the reading
tables, or seemed too interested in children. I was far too young
to consider that most of these dispossessed were veterans of their
own wars, real or illusory, and were, like me, simply looking for
shelter. They never bothered me and I hardly noticed them, for I
was curled up on the lineoleum before the rows of Leon Uris and
Herman Wouk—men whom I followed, without anyone's permission,
into battlefields and drop zones of untold danger and intrigue.
Did other girls love war novels the way I did, in those years
when the national mythos was still dizzy with the aura of Allied
victory? I know only that my passion for the genre was probably
the beginning of a tragic worldview—that Uris's Battle Cry and
Mila 18 would send me on to the grittier likes of James Jones and
Norman Mailer; that the moral ambiguities of Wouk's The Caine
Mutiny may have prepared me for Dostoyevsky in adolescence. If
The Yearling had been my first literary instruction in grief—in
the
unalloyed pain of love and separation—then the messy heroics of
fallen soldiers only secured that terrible lesson: the idea that
valor could face off with evil in a field of mud, and lose.
Excerpted from A Strong West Wind by Gail Caldwell Copyright © 2006 by Gail Caldwell. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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