The Luckiest Generation

(Disclaimer: This probably should have been a Thanksgiving post, but you know - I'll likely forget about it, so you're getting it now.)

Masters of the Air, Apple TV

I've been watching Masters of the Air.  It's been a hard watch for me because my father was a B-17 and B-29 bomber pilot.  For any of you who saw Godzilla Minus One (and if you haven't: do because even if you're not into monster movies like me, it's a genuinely great film) the devastation Kōichi Shikishima returns home to...well, my dad did that.  He was one of the pilots on the fire raids over Tokyo trying to bomb Japan into submission. He was 27 at the time.

It haunted him until the day he died. He was pretty open about talking about the war unlike a lot of veterans, but he fashioned it the way he wanted us to hear it, not the way it really was. He always told my mom it was the safest of the armed services. He told me stories about the war as if he was narrating an Indiana Jones movie - he made it seem adventurous almost. I remember watching a war movie with Mom one night that I hadn't seen before. It ended up being particularly brutal to the point it made me uncomfortable thinking of her watching it, knowing she knew young men in those shoes who didn't come back. At the end of it I turned to her and apologized.  I'll never forget her telling me it was okay, she was just glad my dad had been a pilot. I nodded like I knew that was right. It wasn't until I read Andy Rooney's autobiography My War many years later and after Dad's death that I realized the extent to which he had lied. Rooney set me straight about the mortality rate of bomber pilots and what even the ones who survived endured. They called my dad's type of plane the Flying Fortress. It was a flying coffin for so, so many. My dad was incredibly lucky.  He suffered one minor wound, a tiny scar to show for it. But the horror he must have seen. The fear every time they left the runway. The anxiety. And he did it anyway. And then to live with the horror of what he was ordered to do over Tokyo. My heart breaks over and over and over again as I watch what seems to be a pretty accurate telling of the 100th Bombardment Group (a few issues here and there but overall it fits with what I know), and they're pretty frank about it being a brutal, deadly war. I never stop thinking of my dad.  But all from the comfort of my living room because never - not at 27 or now at 63 - did I have to face the things he did.

Credit: Joseph Louw

And that's made me think that for all my gritching about aging, I have a lot to be thankful for, having grown where and when I did. I was too young to have any of my classmates serve in Vietnam, and too old for the Gulf War.  I was alive during the Civil Rights Movement and remember the day Dr. King was shot, but sheltered in the bosom of the Rockies where the population was about as white as the snow in December I had no idea what really went on to try and secure basic equality for people of color.  I was in college in Texas before I realized there had been segregated bathrooms in my lifetime. Pardon the pun but I shit you not. I was WAY too young to sweat out the Cuban Missile Crisis. I became a Godzilla fan because he symbolized the threat of nuclear annihilation we all lived under growing up but I can't tell you I led a traumatized childhood because of it (I did have some intense dreams of trying to find shelter during various weird attacks though). But all in all I grew up in a time where we still accepted that things progressed in an upward trajectory, each generation righting some of the wrongs of their forefathers and making the world a better place. Talk about naïveté!

But I am thankful I lived in a time and a place where we seldom worried about locking the door at night. Where I could wander anywhere in the town my bike or legs could carry me and my parents didn't worry (there was a serial killer who lived on Sourdough Rd for a time however - David Meirhofer - and I had friends who lived on that street, so...yeah, maybe they should have).

I am thankful that I met many of my father's friends, most of whom were also war veterans, when they were middle aged and still full of life and generally willing to tell me their stories, glad I suppose that someone my age was interested. 

I am really glad I lived in a time before social media. I use it now like just about everyone, but it would have been so destructive to an immature soul like mine when I was young, and I would have been so destructive with it.  And while I would've been happy to have had a cellphone when I was very, very pregnant and stuck in traffic in Austin wondering what I'd do if my water broke while I just sat there going nowhere fast, I didn't appreciate at the time what a relief it was to just disconnect when the workday was done and should have. Now I answer emails and texts at hockey games.  You're never really off.

Don't get me started on the environment, or how crazy and divisive politics is now. Our great scandal was Watergate, which broke when I was in the sixth grade, my friends and I just starting to get interested in party politics.  It seemed so awful to us; that a sitting President would do such a thing! I wonder what those young girls would've thought of the January 6th Insurrection. 

Bozeman / MSU

While the world was far from perfect, it was a peaceful time in Bozeman, Mt. Later I would find that peace stifling, but I can be grateful for that time and place, and if I have any idealism left in me it was fostered there. I was indeed so lucky to have grown up when and where I did.

Now, of course, I worry about the time and place my grands are growing up in, and want to use my time left to make my childish belief that each generation leaves things better than they found them a reality.  Not sure I'll make much of a difference in a world so polluted, so full of hate, but they're worth fighting for so it's worth trying for.