Unthinkable

9/11, not a day when much need be said. Regardless of preferring to forget, 9/11 returns vividly as stunners do. August 14, 1945, spending the week with beloved Gentry grandparents at 1317 E. Strong Street, Pensacola. Mrs. Smith next door running out of her house shouting, “The Japs have surrendered,” and let history take it from there. First, last and only good use of nuclear weapons, historians saying it saved the lives of a hundred thousand young American soldiers from dying in Operation Downfall the imminent invasion of Japan; judgement of latter ages quarterbacks is thin and shallow. Running out of the house was nothing unusual for Mrs. Smith, a native German nut case. Mrs. and her husband Smitty often fought, all recorded by neighbor kiddiewink ears in the days of no A/C and open windows, as she would run out of the house furiously screaming, “Heil Hitler.”

April 12, 1945 next door in Bill Guy’s back yard, someone shouting out of the house, “President Roosevelt is dead.” The only man elected to four terms and thus the later cause of the two-term constitutional limit, the personification of who and what America was in the war against Germans and Japs, it stunned a nine-year-old that Roosevelt could die. He was dead. A haberdasher from Missouri was president, now we would lose the war. Truman who? As people stood by the tracks waving and weeping, a funeral train carried the Real President home from Georgia to Washington. Melodrama? Eleanor Roosevelt fuming, “Was that woman here?” upon arriving at Warm Springs and learning that FDR’s mistress Lucy Mercer had just discretely left the “Little White House.”

Winecoff Hotel fire, Peachtree Street, December 7, 1946, Atlanta’s absolutely fireproof hotel ablaze, 119 people dead, many jumping to death. I say, Moralists, is jumping to death suicide?

Saturday morning in Yokohama, Malinda and Jody watching Tetsujin on B&W TV. Phone rings, Linda answers, Bev Hatchett from across the cul-de-sac. “Kennedy’s been shot” Linda says at me. Stunned confusion, run toward radio, realize TV is blaring, run and switch off TV, run back to radio, turn on AFRaTS: he is dead and our CinC is no longer JFK but LBJ. Funeral dirge music takes over AFRaTS for remainder of the weekend. Sunday morning, English vicar of our Anglican parish in Yokohama laments the world’s loss and prays for America and Kennedy as the congregation sits stunned. War against VC goes on, eventually to taunts “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” running him out.

March 1968 photos of dead infants in My Lai revealing that America was not at all what all my life I had believed and believed in, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” becoming for the moment a standard of evil doubletalk.

9/11. Driving up the back driveway in our brand-new-that-very-morning cherry red Chevy Tahoe to see Linda running out the back door, waving me in to the house to see a burning skyscraper and watch as a jetliner plowed into the skyscraper next to it, momentary eyewitness to the deaths of thousands and beginning of witness to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more innocents and exponential explosion of hatred.

Pearl Harbor not on the list? A six-year-old first grader was preoccupied. For one, all other memory of December 1941 is blurred by the brand new 1942 Chevrolet arriving at Cove School to pick me up. BWBB.

Of vehement hatred and the unthinkable. Seventy years ago it was "Japs" from whom Americans now peacefully buy more Toyota Camrys than Chevrolet Impalas. In seventy years by Grace may Americans peacefully buy -- ? -- from -- al-Qaeda? -- Taliban? -- ... ?

Or may God's kingdom come.