Here is a philosophical question for you: How can something with no real beginning ever end?
When I changed the channel the other day I saw President Obama announced an end to the war in Iraq. Then I switched back to Dancing with the Stars. I only have one son who ever went to Iraq, and it has been a long time since he came back. So, other than that, I can’t tell you the way the war in Iraq changed my day to day.
When I was growing up, everyone, including the children, knew we were at war.
Walter Winchell announced on the news that we would all have to tighten our belts and give up things because the soldiers needed our all.
We had to have ration books to buy shoes. Parents would give the children their shoe stamps because the children outgrew theirs.
Before the war, the grocer would call my mother on the phone and say we have some special pork chops today, can I send you some? After Pearl Harbor meat was rationed, so we had what we called meatless dinners with canned tuna or dried chipped beef. That was when we discovered TREET and SPAM. I can say they had their own flavor. My brother Tucker wouldn’t eat anything but tomato sandwiches.
Gas was rationed, and so was sugar.
The government sent us the ration books in the mail. We had different books for each commodity. The ration share depended on the number of people in the family. There was a black market where you could buy things without a coupon, but I don’t think my parents ever did it. There was real spirit of unity and patriotism around the war effort, and no one took advantage like that infamous awful country girl.
On the radio we were encouraged to plant a victory garden. My mother planted our victory garden in a vacant plot beside the garage, where we hired a man down on Lomb Avenue to till the earth and he built beautiful raised rows. Everyone laughed when the vegetables came up because my mother had planted the seeds between the rows, down in the furrows, instead of on the raised mounds, so the vegetables looked like they were growing out of ditches. But we still had plenty of beans, squash, cucumbers, and tomatoes to eat.
We had no toys made of metal. I remember my dad telling me when I was old enough to have a bike that it would not happen. You could not get a new bike, much less a new car. Factories that used to make cars were making tanks and planes. All the metal was going to war.
Even after the war ended you had to get on a waiting list to get a new car. After five years of war, our cars were pretty worn out.
But everyone pitched in and did what they could to help out so that the soldiers could come home safe and sound. But plenty of them didn’t. My cousin Chester went missing in the Battle of the Bulge. We didn’t know anything about what happened to him for almost a year.
That sometimes made us feel pretty helpless. But there was plenty we could do. Almost every day of the week there was some chore for the war effort.
We saved used cooking oil in empty tin cans. Every morning after breakfast my mother would pour off the bacon fat into an empty vegetable can and cover it with wax paper to keep it from spilling. Every Monday we carried the cans to school. There would be hundreds of children walking to school with paper bags holding tin cans full of grease. Imagine that.
I remember disliking taking the grease to school. It was smelly and messy. If it got on anything it left a stain. We left the cans outside the classroom. Someone came and took the grease away. I never saw who. I wondered what we were taking the grease to school for. All I knew is it had something to do with making eplosives for the bombs. Sometimes they showed bombing over Germany in the newsreels and I wondered if that was some of our Birmingham bacon fat exploding in Berlin.
The government promoted war bonds everywhere all the time to raise money for the war effort. There were ads in the paper. When you went to the movies there was an ad in the newsreel asking you to buy war bonds. A cartoon of Lady Liberty or Uncle Sam in a red white and blue suit would repeat over and over: buy stamps, buy war bonds. Posters in restaurants showed Uncle Sam holding them up and hawking the bonds. I heard ads asking people to buy bonds in amounts up to $1000.
This effort even reached into the schools. The teachers would announce at the beginning of every week, “Tomorrow is stamp day.” All the children would go home and get the grease off their hands and bring in their quarters on Tuesday. I remembered thinking how long it would take me to bring enough quarters for one of those thousand dollar bonds I heard about.
But for every quarter we would get a stamp to put in a little book just like an S&H Greenstamps book--though I guess that calls for yet another history lesson for most readers today. When we accumulated $18.75 in stamps we could redeem the book at the bank for a war savings certificate. It was on parchment paper with a border around it with War Bond written across it in big script letters. It would mature at $25 if you held it for ten years. I later used mine to pay college tuition. My brother Tucker still has his war bond certificates. He said he thought they would be worth more than the $25.
In other words we were all involved in the war effort. We did what we were told was helpful. Nobody questioned why we did it.
We were even ready for the war to come to us. There was an air warden on each block. At random times a siren would blow and everybody had to pull down the blackout shades my parents bought at Sears. Then we would all run outside as fast as we could to watch from the heights of Ensley Highlands while they blacked out the 11 continuous miles of steel mills.
We could see the glow of the mills from our house every night. But on the night of the air raid drills the authorities would produce a shroud of smoke and bit by bit the mills would disappear.
We were told Birmingham was one of the spots likely to be bombed because of our industrial might. I always wondered if blacking out the city would not create a big, dark bulls-eye for the German bombers. Even as a child, I knew the Germans were too far away to bomb Birmingham, but we were conditioned to think it was a good idea to be prepared.
It was worse for my aunt in Miami.
There you had to paint your car lights black, leaving only a small sliver at the bottom for the light to shine through, so the headlights could not be seen by bombers above. She had to be able to put a gas mask on herself and her small children within three minutes. They would hold drills and the air warden came around to check.
They announced on the radio and the newsreels that the Germans and Japanese were like the devil, how wicked they were and evil. I knew that Hitler was in charge and you had to stick your arm out to salute him. When we said the pledge of allegiance in school we used to put our hands over our hearts and then extend them toward the flag, back and forth in a repeating rhythm. But we stopped holding our hands out to the flag because it was too much like a heil Hitler and we just kept them over our hearts.
Otherwise, I didn’t know a thing about what we were fighting about. We didn’t know then about the Nazi concentration camps. I just knew all my male relatives had to go away. My cousin Jack was the only one who didn’t go. He was 4-F because he had an injury from playing football that left a steeel plate in his head.
He was miserable because none of the services would accept him. And women would hit him with their purses, and scream at him on the sidewalk outside of Pizitz, demanding to know what he was doing home while their men were off at war.
So when Berlin fell and Japan surrendered, we knew the war was over. When it came over the radio word spread like wildfire. Without any Facebook or Twitter everyone just knew to go downtown. People sang and whooped and hollered up and down 20th Street. Next thing we knew we were rebuilding Germany and Japan under Eisenhower
and MacArthur’s command, and they were no anonymous figures. I don’t know who is in charge in Iraq now.
Quite different, it seems to me, than the war we are fighting now. how can you just declare a war over?
We got rid of Saddam, but I am not sure that has made Iraq our friend, or ended the threat from Al-Quaeda. I am not sure we ever determined who we were fighting, which would seem the place to start and not to end a war.
We are proud of our soldiers and grateful for their sacrifice and effort. We applaud them in the airport. That is another thing that is different--the World War II soldiers did not fly home on Delta for Christmas. I am glad the Iraq veterans did, but at the same time wonder what it is they were fighting for, to lose so many people, almost 5000 soldiers, so far away.
With US troops leaving at year’s end, I am not sure Iraq is more stable or safe or able to govern itself--even though America is always glad to help. And it is not clear that those of us who stayed home will ever know the difference between war and no war. Can we tell the difference when the war is ended? Did we ever notice when the war began? Our lives went on. The goal was for everything including the price of gas to remain the same.
I do wonder what it meant for our own economy to spend over 800 billion dollars, 12 billion dollars a month in the desert sand. It cost $390,000 a year to keep each solder over there. In 2008, we averaged spending $5,000 a second. Lots of people would have been happy to take their share.
That does not count the cost of all the over 32,000 seriously wounded soldier’s medical care, much less the price of oil that went from $25 a barrel when we invaded Iraq to over $140 a barrel when the economy crashed in 2008. Nor does it account for the problem of over $15 trillion in national debt. According to the Pentagon, Dick Cheney’s Haliburton alone had unsupported charges for $1.4 billion. I guess he thinks its good work if you can get it.
The people who lived on my block in Bush Hills, rationing shoes and carrying cooking oil to school for our country, would not have thought so. We all pulled together, and did whatever was necessary every day, for a common goal.
