Tonica Days #2–NightTerrors
October 1962….
It was over 75 miles to the center of Chicago, so we were going to be the survivors.
How much can a ten-year old understand about the end of the world? My father had lost the woman who would have been my mother in London, killed by a V-2 rocket as she left her job at the Windmill. He told me and my brother about the rockets and bombs then and that we’d have to stay in the basement for a few days while the dust settled, then we could come up and figure out what to do next.
I had been reading two serials in the Saturday Evening Post–Fail-Safe and Triumph, both explaining in detail the events leading up to a nuclear exchange. In my Uncle Joe’s library in Oglesby, I had read Level 7 and Alas, Babylon so I knew what to expect. The cover of Level 7 had a blurb–”the story of a society hell-bent on nuclear destruction.”
That certainly summed up the world I was seeing on the set in the living room. Each night, Huntley and Brinkley would show photos of ships blockading Cuba and read the announcements by the Soviet head of state and the American replies.
The Chicago Tribune had diagrams, concentric circles centered at State and Randolph with a legend describing the extent of destruction that would occur within each of them in the case of a 50-megaton explosion. There were listings of times that the USAF would be making sonic booms above the city, as they practiced for possible attacks on the Baku oil fields adjoining the Caspian Sea.
It was Indian Summer, the leaves has already turned and fallen, and we were burning the ones that my grandmother had removed from her yard. A pall of smoke hung in the still air over the farm. My father would tune between the stations on the radio listening for new information while he milked. The sky was filled with contrails since as many planes as possible were kept in the air to avoid being surprised on the ground by a first-strike.
Fifteen minutes from detected launch to detonation–that’s what was expected. We waited for the CONELRAD symbol to come up on the television. The radio had two frequencies marked by the manufacturer that we were to tune to when the announcement was made of the attack.
I read, went to school–tried to get all of this off of my mind. It was easy sometimes, when Billy from down the road would clown on the bus. Still, part of my mind waited for the flash and my body would tense as I looked for a spot that would provide shade from the searing heat of the fireball.
The month drew to a close. The newspapers announced that Khrushchev had backed down and that the missles would be withdrawn. The flights overhead were less noticeable, although they never disappeared completely. The exercises at school returned to fire drills instead of students collecting in the halls and sitting against the walls in the interior hallway.
The anticipation didn’t go away completely, either. As I grew to adulthood, there was always that little air-raid warden in the back of my head that cautioned me to look for a safe spot, perhaps under that desk over there. Occasionally, I would jerk uncontrollably when an unexpected flashbulb went off, then shake my head with embarrassment.
Twenty-seven years later, I watched on a television as the Berlin Wall was hacked to pieces. Some of our nuclear missles were going to be dismantled and their silos filled with concrete. As that evening progressed, the tension in my shoulders that had first appeared in the Missle October finally went away. I hoped at the time that it would be forever. As it was, the danger retreated for a decade, then returned from a different direction.
There are many idealistic projects that we can work to promote. There are hungry and hopeless people that we see every day. There are those scarred by violence that need the righteous to seek justice.
Being a child can be hard enough as it is. For the future of humanity, it is essential that no child on this planet needs to wake weeping from a dream in which they are startled to consciousness just in time to be burned alive.
Tom
Comment by kittent on 2 August 2007 at 6:31 am:
you did it again, darling!
Comment by Augurifious Augur on 2 August 2007 at 5:29 pm:
Were people in middle America really this freaked out? I can’t help thinking you’re overstating it a bit…maybe that’s b/c you were so young then.
Comment by tet on 2 August 2007 at 6:19 pm:
No. That’s the reason that boomers are all more than a little nuts. We were trained to dive under our fucking desks when we saw a flash.
The big city kids were lucky–they were expected to die instantly. The rest of us were destined for survival in a world that might be habitable, might not.
If anything, I’m understating how freaked out we were. I’ve spent most of my life waiting for the sirens.
Tom