War Time

“We have all the time in the world!” said the salesperson as he glowed, his bald head glistening as his hands expanded.

All over the counter, the watches sprawled and jostled in their cases, the cream-colored one tipping so near me that if I caught it, I thought I should be allowed to keep it. If only my father would let me. Which he never did.

“This one,” my dad said.

Black. With a plastic face and rubber strap. No kid had a watch like that at school. Least of all me, or so I hoped.

“I don’t like it,” I said as loud as I dared.

“I’m tired,” my mom said. “Could we just go?”

“Timmy, your watch will be bigger than mine!” my sister complained.

I hoped Mom would never ask if I wore it. Dad said it looked like the one he wore in the Black Forest when he went on maneuvers—fighting a Soviet invasion by hiding among rocks and trees. He described how if his CF-100 were shot down, no one would ever come looking for him. It would be a matter of survival: escape and evasion. So I became terrified of the wild German boars that would hunt for food, whether it was military provisions or men like my dad stuck alone in a forest.

“Never leave a man behind,” was an American armed forces saying. Such care and attention for each soldier was a luxury that only the greatest military power in human history could afford. It made my dad laugh to speak of it. Everyone was expendable in the Canadian Armed Forces. The Soviets would steamroll over everything so fast—three tanks for every NATO tank—two fighter jets for every one of ours.

If the Soviets came, we would hide under our German-made school desks and wish it was over quickly! Such as we were, all of us expendable. The plan was that we would do a holding action until reinforcements arrived. If reinforcements ever did come before a nuclear ICBM exchange.

So, I started up in the car—liar talk, like usual.

“I like the watch, Dad! I can be just like you! Gee, does it glow in the dark?”

“You are stupid, Timmy!” chimed my sister. “Only the expensive watches glow in the dark. Yours is too cheap for that!”

Little did I know that if that watch glowed, I might too someday, especially if I held it to my face with my head down at my desk in class, crying again. Kept in at recess because everyone teased me so much that I slugged a boy. I forget who it was.

#

When exactly do you go off your head? Does it happen by degrees or suddenly? Hard to say. The scientists back then weren’t too bright. They raised their kids to tune the black and white TVs that showed more snow than pictures: rabbit ears and twisty cables everywhere.

Timing one of those old TVs to the incoming analog signal was an art form. The vertical hold button was frequently used, and the screen image would roll and get scrambled if the transmitting station was too far. Or if mom decided to use the mixer. Or Dad ran the generator. Or a car started next door.

TV repair shop windows might display a dozen or more televisions simultaneously. Having one, even a little one, was a burning need, like wanting a cell phone.

“No use getting a TV, Timmy,” Dad said as we stood outside a TV repair shop one day.

"Why not?" I asked.

“All the TV programming is in German!”

“But all the pictures are in English!” I replied, grinning at him.

Dad laughed so hard he had to steady himself by touching my shoulder. Then the joke he wrote from how I answered him was sent to Reader’s Digest, who promptly sent back $10.00 for letting them print it. Ten whole dollars. Could that money be used to rent a TV? Either that or a slew of Sgt. Rock comic books!

#

Maybe it was because he was away so often that my dad would take any opportunity to expose me to life in the military. And it didn't matter which military it was, either. Those two German soldiers who got into our VW bug nearly tipped the suspension of our car. They were so tall that I had to sit on one of their laps. The soldier I sat on was kind, giving me candy and trying to speak English. It was all I could do to stop staring at his fingernails. His lunulae, to be exact. They were so huge! I never wanted fingernails like that.

So that’s when the scratching started. No lunulae for me! Fingernails and teeth were there to be scratched. Grooves down my front teeth and fingers that made those white semi-circles go away! Which they didn’t. But the fight was on.

I could never get enough of our aviators. Dad would serve them drinks, and I would listen in as they told stories and talked about life in the military.

"The wife good?" asked my father of a lanky man who dropped by one day. I never did catch his name.

"Oh, with that cashier job at the PX, not so much!" he replied.

He was dressed in a grey flying suit and was sunburnt from high-altitude flying. Even though he was prematurely old-looking and wrinkled before his time, I liked him.

He made a huge fuss over my birdhouse coin box, which pleased me to no end. I asked him to put a coin into a slot. Then, I would crank a mechanical bird out of the box to steal the cash with its beak, dropping it into my coin box! He used quarters instead of dimes, nickels, or even pennies! Mom would gasp each time, warning me that it was too much money and that she would take those coins away for "safekeeping." Taking a drink from his rum and coke, Dad resumed his conversation after I put my coin box away.

"Yeah, the C.O. got you that job." my father continued. "After he heard about your financial problems. Tightening your belt might have been a better choice."

"Life's short!" he said, grimacing. "Hey, remember how Jim described his flat spin?" he asked. "Falling out of the sky like a leaf?"

"Like having twins? Babes in the cockpit?" my dad joked.

"Yeah. Even worse! All the way down, all he could say was, "Jesus...Jesus...Each word at the end of a new gyration. Of course, we only know this because he survived."

I couldn't imagine how even a ride at an amusement park could equal falling out of the sky! I jumped off a wall near my house just to see how hard I might land. I only tried it once.

#

Mom had her own stories. She was a radar technician before she met Dad, part of the "Women's Division" in the Royal Canadian Air Force. She wore a sharp blue uniform and played a lot of women's softball. They only pitched underhand in those days, but that didn't stop her from snagging Dad. The joke was that any woman who enlisted was there to get a man. An officer, preferably. Even the most talented women had minimal career choices back then. Mom was discharged when she married Dad, her career ending abruptly. It was the way things were for all the serving women back then.

Mom took our trip to Europe in stride. Being a military wife was like everyone says it is—all glitz and glam on the surface. Sure, there were parties every weekend, with trips to castles along the Rhine, and everything was so cheap, the Canadian dollar stretching incredibly far. But it was the little things like never being able to speak the language and having limited choices about where to live that made things difficult. There were few magazines to read and no daily English newspapers either. No English language cinemas, no English restaurants. To say nothing of the constant fear of the unknown. The dreaded knock on the door heralding unexpected visits from men in uniform with somber faces. Apparitions that made their presence known, if only through everyone's fears. It was the quick gasp of someone who, while not listening, still perceived that the sound of a passing jet was not quite right. Or a tank wheezing instead of grinding through the streets. Passersby would not notice these little things, but the people I knew did. A hundred unspoken shared understandings made me feel special. We were a force to be reckoned with that wielded incredible power, like an extended family with guns.

I would wake up to go to school, knowing that my father could be hurtling through the sky above me, practicing how to kill people we would never meet. And Mom would stare at me over the breakfast table, her face as uncomprehending as mine. This life, so fleeting yet incredibly real, shot through and through with life and death decisions that made our dreams take a backseat.

But kids can't reason this stuff out. I only knew that Mom was tired all the time. Our trips to all the places we could go that were only a few hours away would drain her.

“Look, it's exactly on the hour; the sentry is changing!” my Dad said one day. “They will salute, and one man will be relieved while the other will take his place.”

We were on one of our many weekend trips, peering across a burned-out bridge, cut neatly in two with lots of barbed wire on one side.

Those binoculars were bumping against my eyes, and it didn’t help that my sister was poking me, impatient to have her turn. Poke, bump. Poke, bump. Dad and Mom never noticed, of course. And I knew not to complain because neither of us would see the Soviet soldiers so far away on the other side of the river!

"Couldn't we go now?" my mom asked. "The children are cold. It's getting dark. You have to go to work tomorrow!"

“It's part of the Iron Curtain..." my dad's voice drifted away, sadly taking the binoculars from my near-frozen hands. My sister laid one last kick into me, but I knew what I would do. I would torment her later when my parents weren’t around, describing the amazing things I saw.

“Why can’t the people leave East Germany?” I remember asking as I skipped to the car. I never walked anywhere back then.

“The soldiers and walls keep them in,” my father replied, my constant hopping around making me yank his arm.

When we got to the car, I got angry. I don’t know why. “I didn’t ask that! Why are there walls and soldiers at all!” I demanded.

Mom turned around when she sat in the front seat. Her eyes were horrible to see.

“Don’t you dare talk to your father that way!” she yelled. “The Soviets could quite happily kill us all! Your father is helping to keep them locked up in the prison they made for themselves!”

Later, they had to stop the car when I started bawling.

#

It was just a drill. At eleven o’clock, the C.O. would give us a speech. A CF-100 had plowed into a farmer’s field. One of the deceased was the man I met only once who so happily told me a story and fed my coinbox with quarters. I was so upset that morning.

The first thing we did in our classroom was to pray for them. That was no problem for me. But when the teachers asked us to bring donations for the families, I cried! I couldn't help myself. The boy's disdainful looks were so hateful. There he goes again, such a crybaby!

I had to hang my head in shame. One girl came up to me later at recess. She was sympathetic. I told her through my tears that I didn't want to return those quarters in my coinbox, my apparent selfishness making me feel horrible. She said it was my duty to give back the coins.

I had seen that word before. On a crest with the four wing squadron's colours. The inscription read: "Truth, Duty, Valor." I felt better. I could be a part of everything. Four wing was my home too. It was my duty to return the coins.

I tried to imagine what the deceased men went through. Can you eject when you are upside down and spinning? In those long minutes, as their jet screamed and tumbled its flaps and rudder to shreds, they followed emergency procedures and did everything they could to survive. What might they have been thinking? Was there final clarity when the wings tore free, and the fuselage became fixed in its terminal trajectory? A release from wondering about their fate; unlike the rest of us, who would still carry the burden of not knowing?

They were mercifully asleep, flying free of any worry or pain. Anything that could tear a hardened combat jet apart renders far more fragile aircrew unconscious. But I was still here. I could carry on. Truth, Duty, Valor.

For obvious reasons, we kids liked the stories where no one died; many of our fathers were potential victims of such a tragedy as we experienced that day. Stories like when my Dad got lost over East Germany and Soviet MiGs were chasing him. Or the one Dad told about how when he was on NATO night watch, he, a lowly lieutenant, put NATO on yellow alert when President Kennedy was shot. Any story was better than stories about dying service members.

Finally, eleven o'clock rolled around, and the whole school trooped into the gym for our assembly. I imagined the hardwood floor, already dissected by colored lines, was ready to be broken up to make coffins. I pointed that out to the boy near me, who grimaced, got up, and went to a teacher, pointing at me.

I had to sit beside a teacher I didn't know as the C.O. started his speech.

“Don’t fight with your husbands before they go to work!” I remember him saying to all the military wives in the assembly, a teary-eyed woman at his side. “They might not come back to us afterward,” he added.

Then, it was the teary-eyed woman's turn to speak. She was dressed up like she was going to church, looking pale and unsteady on her feet as she took the microphone from the C.O. For a long while, she stared at the microphone like it was a foreign object.

"Ladies," she began, the mike too close to her face. "Our job is to keep the home fires... burning," her voice boomed. "Is that too much to uh...ask?"

It was way too loud. We held our hands to our ears when the inevitable microphone feedback noise started. She seemed helpless, looking around like she didn't know what to do. Then the podium wobbled as she lost her grip, the women nearest her shrieking as they sprang up to support her. She left the assembly in their arms, bent over and sobbing, barely able to walk.

The C.O. watched her go and then waited until we settled down. Now, it was our turn. We had a price to pay.

"War could break out at any time!" warned the C.O. “All you children must behave and give your parents as little trouble as possible," He looked tired by then, and no one clapped when he left. I don't even think the principal thanked him for coming to see us.

I don't know what scared me the most. I played war games with my friends to the beat of hundreds of helicopters that filled the sky, like nightmarish black bugs dancing with the jets that would boom by us.

I never had a best friend, but I moved from place to place, never staying anywhere longer than needed. Too many heroes were on my mind. Heroes who had no names—living and dying for what never happened. What never would be.