VJ Day & Thor

A normal hot Florida summer day, Tuesday, August 14, 1945, the screen door of her back porch slamming behind her, our hotheaded neighbor runs out into her backyard shouting at the top of her lungs, "The Japs surrendered!! the Japs surrendered!!!" Mrs Smith, the vitriolic German woman married to an American, who, in frequent violent fights with her husband, used to burst out the same screen door angrily screaming, "Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!!", ostensibly to have the last word and further enrage him; always shocking us neighborhood kids.

There in East Hill, the Smiths lived on 14th Avenue, one house south of the southwest corner of 14th Avenue and East Strong Street, and their backyard backed up to the side-yard of my Gentry grandparents' home on East Strong Street, our driveway side. It was the age before even window air conditioners in homes, a lot of summer life was spent in swings and rocking chairs out on screen porches with hand fans, all screened windows were always open, and the Smiths had no secrets from us.

Mrs Smith had just heard the news over her radio, himself President Truman speaking, I reckon. We were just days past his approving the first use of nuclear weapons, atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing about almost instantaneous end of WW2, and Harry was our hero. I remember my essay of rage at my Ethics professor at the University of Michigan seventeen years later, for his position condemning the U S for that, historic first and only use, the death and unspeakable horror it brought to so many Japanese people.

There are negatives and positives, and every act, especially every act of war, aggression or holding back, has its costs and determines history. We owe no apologies for Hiroshima and Nagasaki: already in process, the scheduled alternative was the U S invasion of Japan, expected to cost hundreds of thousands of lives, most unacceptably the lives of thousands more of that generation of young Americans in a war that we did not start, but successfully ended. Our relief and celebration began that moment as Mrs Smith broke into our day with the Good News.

Victory over Japan and the end of World War 2. Thirty years on, the last helicopter out of Saigon, as we run in shame and failure, saying we've learned our lesson. VJ-Day seventy-six years to the month, our second failure of foreign policy by war, as the Taliban rapidly retakes Afghanistan and we rush sufficient military forces into Kabul to cover our hasty retreat. The word is ignoble. My, how warfare has changed over the centuries. From battlefield war, nation against nation, to knowing that the barber who shaves your neck this afternoon will crash the compound gate and slash your throat tonight; to a world in which roadside IEDs are more to be feared than ICBMs.

We no longer know how to wage and win war. The fear we are leaving behind in Afghanistan: for women, a return to the Stone Age, where the greatest evil under the sun is fundamentalist religion, that asserts its will, its notion of right and wrong, to control other people. Speaking from the Bible Belt of America, the Taliban are not alone in their absolute self-certainty, cause to revere and hold to our national tradition of separation of church and state.

Quite a magnificent summer afternoon thunderstorm we were offered as our VJ-Day display from 7H, as the Storm God begins to demand that we take Him seriously.

Sooner or later. We have half of August, and all of September, OCTOBER, and November to go.

ABC,ETC,RSF&PTL