[Seven Wonders Book 1 The Colossus Rises Epub Download
Kody Coste
A long time later, years after my father died, my mother and my wife found the box when they were clearing out some old family junk. My wife knows how much I like big cats and all other varieties of predators and raptors, and she painstakingly glued the tiger back together and gave it to me as a present. It's roaring at me again as I write this: it stands on a shelf in my study, surrounded by what I hope is more congenial company -- grimacing windup monsters, maddened dinosaurs, a couple of snarling dragons with their wings outspread, and a sullen rubber shark opening wide to take a bite at passersby. The tiger seems to fit right in, but I sometimes suspect it feels shanghaied. My father hadn't got it because he was fond of tigers or because he had any interest in nature. He'd bought it in Korea, where he'd been a fighter pilot during the Korean war; his squadron had been called the Flying Tigers.
My wife hadn't known that; I barely remembered it myself. My father didn't like telling war stories. He'd accumulated fistfuls of medals over there, and he kept them stashed in an anonymous little plush case at the back of his closet, where they went unseen for decades. That was all part of the past, and he had no use for the past. He used to wave off any question I asked about the world before I was born, irritatedly dismissing it as if all of that were self-evidently too shabby and quaint to interest a modern kid like me. "It was a long time ago," he'd always tell me, which was as much as to say, "It's meaningless now."
And yet every night, whenever he'd sit down in his easy chair, he'd be confronted by the tiger glaring at him. What did he think about when he saw it? Did it remind him of the distance he'd traveled from that war, or of how incongruously bland and safe his life was now, now that he'd amassed a commercial-perfect suburban family in the depths of the American heartland? I don't know, because he wouldn't say. Whatever patina of private associations the tiger had for him is gone for good.
If my wife hadn't rescued the tiger it would have been cut loose to make its own way in the world -- to languish in rummage-sale boxes and end up with new owners who'd never suspect how far it had wandered through the world to reach them. But I have the feeling my father wouldn't have minded that; he never liked other people knowing his business.
That's the common fate of mementos. They're never quite specific enough. No matter what their occasion was, they sooner or later slip free and are lost in a generic blur: a Day at the Carnival, a Triumph at the State Finals, a Summer Vacation, My First Love. It's particularly true, I think, of the mementos of soldiers, because nobody other than a soldier remembers the details of any war once it's safely over. What really happened in Korea? I don't have the slightest idea; war just isn't an experience I'm up on. I was barely young enough to miss the Vietnam draft, and I'm old enough now that the only way I could figure in a future war is as a victim. The tiger can't preserve the memory of the bombing missions my father flew. Its odd rippling surface doesn't correspond to the landscape of North Korea, terrain my father knew by heart -- which had once saved his life: on one mission his plane malfunctioned, and he'd had to find his way back to his base with no instruments, no radio, and fuel fumes filling his cockpit. Nor does that frozen roar speak to the complex of murky policies that had sent my father into battle in the first place, thousands of miles from home. To me, the tiger is just a platitude -- if it means anything, it's a symbol for all the violence in life I've been spared.
People my age and younger who've grown up in the American heartland can't help but take for granted that war is unnatural. We think of the limitless peace around us as the baseline condition of life. War, any war, is for us a contemptible death trip, a relic of lizard-brain machismo, a toxic by-product of America's capitalist military system -- one more covert and dishonorable crime we commit in the third world. All my life I've heard people say "war is insanity" in tones of dramatic insight and final wisdom, and it took me a long time to realize that what they really meant was "war is an activity I don't want to understand, done by people I fear and despise."
But there've been places and times where people have thought of war as the given and peace the perversion. The Greeks of Homer's time, for instance, saw war as the one enduring constant underlying the petty affairs of humanity, as routine and all-consuming as the cycle of the seasons: grim and squalid in many ways, but still the essential time when the motives and powers of the gods are most manifest. To the Greeks, peace was nothing but a fluke, an irrelevance, an arbitrary delay brought on when bad weather forced the spring campaign to be canceled, or a back-room deal kept the troops at home until after harvest time. Any of Homer's heroes would see the peaceful life of the average American as some bizarre aberration, like a garden mysteriously cultivated for decades on the slopes of an avalanche-haunted mountain.
In our own culture the people who know what war is like find it almost impossible to communicate with the children of peace. In the last election Bob Dole was defeated in large part because of World War II -- what he thought it meant, and what he didn't see it meant to people of a later generation. To Dole, World War II was a teacher of positive values: courage, self-sacrifice, respect for authority, dedication to a common goal -- values he thought were signally absent in the soft and cynical selfishness of Clinton's generation. But it was just that cynicism that Dole couldn't crack. Everybody knew that if those values had ever really existed in America, they were only the result of some Norman Rockwell collective delusion. We're smarter now -- smart enough to see through war, anyway. We think it's a sick joke to suggest that war could ever teach anybody anything good.
Out of idle curiosity, I've been asking friends, people my age and younger, what they know about war -- war stories they've heard from their families, facts they've learned in school, stray images that might have stuck with them from old TV documentaries. I wasn't interested in fine points of strategy, but the key events, the biggest moments, the things people at the time had thought would live on as long as there was anybody around to remember the past. To give everybody a big enough target I asked about World War II.
I figured people had to know the basics -- World War II isn't exactly easy to miss. It was the largest war ever fought, the largest single event in history. Other than the black death of the Middle Ages, it's the worst thing we know of that has ever happened to the human race. Its aftereffects surround us in countless intertwining ways: all sorts of technological commonplaces, from computers to radar to nuclear power, date back to some secret World War II military project or another; the most efficient military systems became the model for the bureaucratic structures of postwar white-collar corporations; even the current landscape of America owes its existence to the war, since the fantastic profusion of suburban development that began in the late 1940s was essentially underwritten by the federal government as one vast World War II veterans' benefit. (Before the war there were 3 suburban shopping centers in the U.S.; ten years after it ended there were 3,000.)
Then too, World War II has been a dominant force in the American popular imagination. In the mid-1960s, when my own consumption of pop culture was at its peak, the war was the only thing my friends and I thought about. We devoured World War II comic books like Sgt. Fury and Sgt. Rock; we watched World War II TV shows like Hogan's Heroes and The Rat Patrol; our rooms overflowed with World War II hobby kits, with half-assembled, glue-encrusted panzers and Spitfires and Zeroes. I think I had the world's largest collection of torn and mangled World War II decal insignia. We all had toy boxes stuffed with World War II armaments -- with toy pistols and molded plastic rifles and alarmingly realistic rubber hand grenades. We refought World War II battles daily and went out on our campaigns so overloaded with gear we looked like ferocious porcupines. Decades after it was over the war was still expanding and dissipating in our minds, like the vapor trails of an immense explosion.
So what did the people I asked know about the war? Nobody could tell me the first thing about it. Once they got past who won they almost drew a blank. All they knew were those big totemic names -- Pearl Harbor, D day, Auschwitz, Hiroshima -- whose unfathomable reaches of experience had been boiled down to an abstract atrocity. The rest was gone. Kasserine, Leyte Gulf, Corregidor, Falaise, the Ardennes didn't provoke a glimmer of recognition; they might as well have been off-ramps on some exotic interstate. I started getting the creepy feeling that the war had actually happened a thousand years ago, and so it was forgivable if people were a little vague on the difference between the Normandy invasion and the Norman Conquest and couldn't say offhand whether the boats sailed from France to England or the other way around.
What had happened, for instance, at one of the war's biggest battles, the Battle of Midway? It was in the Pacific, there was something about aircraft carriers. Wasn't there a movie about it, one of those Hollywood all-star behemoths in which a lot of admirals look worried while pushing toy ships around a map? (Midway, released in 1976 and starring Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, and -- inevitably -- Henry Fonda.) A couple of people were even surprised to hear that Midway Airport was named after the battle, though they'd walked past the ugly commemorative sculpture in the concourse so many times. All in all, this was a dispiriting exercise. The astonishing events of that morning, the "fatal five minutes" on which the war and the fate of the world hung, had been reduced to a plaque nobody reads, at an airport with a vaguely puzzling name, midway between Chicago and nowhere at all.
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