Meet my metaphors #3: World War II

     If I had to point to one history book that completely changed my thinking, the first one to come to mind would be Studs Terkel's "The Good War." Not as a famous as his classics like "Division Street America" or "Working," "The Good War" is a oral history of the Second World War.

      Of course I knew about the war already. Growing up in the '60s, I was brought up on it. My father had been 12 when the war ended, the prime age to absorb all the romantic details of battle without running the risk of getting killed. Though I doubt he was guiding my education, not pressing the tales of men, battle and equipment upon me, so much as I was living in the post-victory air of triumph.
     So I read books like "Air War Against Hitler's Germany" with crippled B-17s fighting off the German Messerschmitts on their way to bomb the ball bearing plant at Schweinfurt. (And the fact that I can unspool that sentence without checking 50 years after reading the source tells you something). On my bedroom door I had, not a rock star poster, but one from the Air & Space Museum called "Know your enemy" show the silhouettes of military aircraft. I knew what a diherdral is (the upward angle of a plane's wings). I not only knew the name of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb, the Enola Gay — everyone knew that — but the island in the Marianas it took off from on its run over Hiroshima, Tinian, and the name of the pilot, Paul Tibbets.

     All of this thanks to "Hear it Now," a boxed set of 45s of Edward R. Murrow's aural history of 1933-1945. I played it so much I had it memorized.
     I start reading "The Good War" and met an amazing crew of pacifists, war resisters, deserters, factory workers — the cream of Terkel's leftie world. And I realize that yes, we won the war, but humanity was then as humanity is now, a broad spectrum of belief. I had bought a story that was somewhere between a fantasy and a lie. We defeated the Nazis — that was good. But it didn't make us saints, before or after.

     Even seeing the truth, or the truth as curated by Studs Terkel,  I was slow to surrender the romantic myth.
     When I wanted to say I was outnumbered, I'd evoke the pair of Navy pilots who raced to a small airfield at Pearl Harbor and took off in two fighters, rising to meet the onslaught. Here I am in 2002 writing about remodeling our decrepit farm house:

     The actual buying of the house wasn't precisely a surprise attack — I mean, we knew what we were signing. But the repercussions certainly were unanticipated, with wave after wave of repairs and set-backs and projects sweeping over us, while we dove behind barrels and tried to get our pathetically inadequate remodeling forces off the ground at Hickham Field.

     Note that, 61 years after the fact, I assume the reader will know what I'm talking about or, more likely, didn't pause to consider they might not. Although, in those pre-Google days, I should point out that George Welch and Kenneth Taylor got their P-40s off the ground at  Haleiwa Field, 11 miles away from Hickam, no "h." Their squadron was originally based at Hickam, but had moved to a smaller field, which is why the planes weren't destroyed in the opening attack.
     Ten years later I was still at it, commenting on Chicago's response to a front page pan of my Chicago memoir and two others in the New York Times Book Review, posting this on Facebook: 

    There are other examples — in 2019, I began my South American diary this way:

     The solidly-built young man had a full red-beard and was dressed all in black, from his watch cap to his sneakers. His new bags — hip, if luggage can be hip — were also black, as were the clothes and luggage of his friend, who wore a Dutch cap.
     A quip occurred to me.
     "Are you lads on your way to blow up the bridge over the Remagen?" I thought, but did not say. Shutting up is an art form, and mentioning obscure bits of World War II trivia — capturing the Remagen bridge over the Rhine was vital to the Allies forces drive to Berlin in the spring of 1945 — to young strangers is not a practice embraced by those aspiring to be au courant. Okay, hipsters try to look like commandos when they're not aping lumberjacks; deal with it.

     Notice that I felt the need to explain what I was talking about. That is considerate, but leaches the power from a metaphor. If you say, "I was in hell — which is very hot and unpleasant," maybe you need to find another way to describe where you are. I believe it's time to retire all World War II imagery, put it on the shelf along with the Civil War and the Battle of Hastings. A third of millennials can't say who won World War II, and I assume a significant number don't realize the war occurred.  One duty of a writer is to be understood, and while it may be satisfying to deploy a well-worn, well-loved metaphor, if it's met with a puzzled shrug, what have you accomplished? Nothing.

     That said, as with Lord Jim, freeing my mind of the Good War might not be so easy. After I wrote the above, I needed a headline for a column about Ozempic, and my first, immediate thought was, "Praise God and pass the Ozempic."  Another Pearl Harbor reference. Chaplain Howell Forgy, on the USS New Orleans, despite his non-combatant status, encouraged the line of sailors passing ammo to gunners with "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," which became a 1942 patriotic song by Frank Loesser.

    And yes, when I saw I'd mis-remembered "The Lord" as "God" I did fix it. Though there was no need. Nobody other than myself was ever going to notice.

    Not quite true. The very next day, Facebook memories served up a column from 2018: "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition to Beto O'Rourke," about the need to support Democratic candidates, such as the guy who for a moment seemed like he'd defeat Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas. Well, that's one headline trope I'm never using again. I hope.