War!

It's been nearly two weeks since I've written any fiction for my Fiction Writer's Workshop project. Frankly, I've been too busy writing projects for which I get paid to devote time to this "labor of love."

There's another reason I've gone silent, though. Chapter Two in the book is about Settings. In reading the various exercises for the chapter, I really don't find any of them interesting let alone inspiring. I don't remember much about places where I grew up or for the most part, even care about them.

Last Sunday, I was telling a friend of mine about his project, and expressing some frustration at not getting very far. He told me that everything he's read about writing says it has more to do with persistence and developing the habit of writing every day than it does with sudden inspiration or having an idea that "magically" unfolds into a perfect story.

I was reminded of a line from the 1987 film Throw Momma From the Train, "Remember, a writer writes, always." I felt kind of guilty of wanting to "just write" the way some kid who buys a used six-string guitar expects to "just play" the minute he opens his beginner's chord book.

But while I believe setting is important, and a created "world" of one kind or another can take on a life of its own, I'm not sure I can make a setting the main "character" in even a very short story. 

That said, one thing comes to mind. This is the best I can remember of the "incident". It was probably around 1962.

The German soldiers were hiding in a plastic house. It crudely simulated a one room stone structure, but it was clearly plastic. It had been set on fire before, because the roof was partially blackened and melted, with gaping holes showing in several spots.

But that's OK. The soldiers were plastic, too.

Six-year-old Jimmy visited his Grandpa's house a lot now that he and his parents moved back home to Omaha from Spain. Dad was in the Air Force and they moved around every couple of years or so. Jimmy barely remembered living here before they moved to Spain when he was three.  He'd be going into the first grade next month. It would be the first time he was in a school where all the kids didn't have Dads in the service.

He didn't know his older cousin Donny much, but being kids, they played together whenever Jimmy and his folks were visiting Grandpa. Donny played "World War Two" better than anyone.

The plastic house with the toy German soldiers inside was sitting on the cracked, granular sidewalk just in front of Grandpa's house. The sidewalk wasn't smooth like the ones in front of Jimmy's house across the river in Council Bluffs. It was like little rocks had been mixed in with the cement so that it was rough feeling when Jimmy ran his fingers across it.

Tree roots pushed, shoved, and pulled at different places in the sidewalk, so it was cracked and broken, higher in some places, and lower in others. Jimmy's knee still hurt a little because he tripped on a raised part of the sidewalk a little earlier. Mommy put a band-aid on the torn skin, and he proudly wore the rip in his pants as proof he could get hurt and not cry.

Jimmy looked up from the sidewalk as Donny pulled the forbidden model airplane glue and matches out of his back pocket. The two boys whispered like foreign conspirators planning a coup.
"Are we gonna get in trouble," Jimmy whined. "Shut up," Donny commanded. "It'll be fine."

Donny applied a layer of glue from the tube, releasing a nasty chemical stench into Jimmy's nostrils, but he was too scared to complain again. Every warning his Dad sternly delivered about not playing with matches was marshaling his guilt and fear of being spanked. Only the promise of adventure, of playing Americans against Germans with a real burning house kept him from going back inside Grandpa's.

Well, that, and he didn't want Donny to think he was a baby.

Donny smeared the glue with his fingers around the edges of the holes in the dark, gray roof of the toy house. The plastic walls were a lighter gray, almost the same color as the sidewalk, and these bland tones were violently offset by the deep green of the grass on either side of the cement walk.

Donny put the cap back on the tube and wiped the glue left over on his fingers around in the grass. Then he pulled one of the matches out of the match book and scraped the head against the striker. It didn't light, so he did it again, and when it burst into flame, Jimmy involuntarily pulled back a little.

Scene from the TV show "Combat"

Donny's eyes were as bright as the flame as he lowered the match toward the moist airplane model glue glistening on the roof. "Get your soldiers ready to attack," Donny reminded Jimmy.

Jimmy quickly positioned his plastic green "American" toy soldiers in the grass at the edge of the sidewalk facing the front of the toy house, as if they were hiding in a large field.

Each U.S. soldier had a grim and unmoving look in his face. They were posed to attack, but then, they could never change their faces or pose, anymore than they could move their feet from the flat pieces of plastic that let them stand up. Each blade of grass was like an enormous stalk of emerald corn or wheat, offering cover from the enemy who have taken shelter in the abandoned French farm house.

It was like Jimmy was watching his favorite TV show Combat.

The American artillery was firing at the German position. A shell hit the house right on top! Donny lit the glue on fire and quickly dropped the match through one of the holes in the plastic roof. The house was on fire. This was war!

Are the civilians being hurt and killed in Gaza innocent?

According to Steven Plaut on the Israel Forum blog, "there ain't no such animal" as an innocent civilian in Gaza. More accurately, Plaut says, "Let us bear in mind that the years of rocket savagery by the Hamas were a direct result of the vast majority of the residents of the Gaza Strip voting for the Hamas in the elections,such as they were, that were held there". Do I really buy this? I don't live in Israel, so I can successfully be accused of lacking a certain perspective on this matter. While I generally believe that Israel has the right to defend itself against the rocket attacks by Hamas from Gaza, I don't believe that every man, woman, and child in Gaza is worthy of extermination just because some or most of the adults foolishly voted Hamas into power. That would be like saying the children of people who voted George W. Bush into power deserve to have shoes thrown at them by an Arab journalist. Ironically, Hamas is doing more to put Gaza civilians into danger than the IDF, by setting up their operations in civilian quarters, hospitals, and schools. Perhaps Golda Meir's most famous quote, "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us" applies here. If Israel backs out of Gaza now, without definitively stopping the threat posed by Hamas as this CNN story suggests, then they will have spared children in Gaza injury and death at the expense of their own. Yet, it is Hamas who puts children and adult civilians at risk, first by hiding their operations behind the innocents and secondly, by continuing to attack Israel from Gaza, provoking Israeli response. Are their innocent civilians in Gaza? Yes. You can say that voting a dictatorship into power means you are responsible for the results, but how many people have agreed, voluntarily or otherwise, to a particular ruler, without being able to see the future consequences of their actions? Many Germans whose votes allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party control of that country lived (or died) to regret their decision. During the cold war, Americans generally thought all citizens of the Soviet Union were corrupt and "evil", only to find out decades later that those citizens didn't want to be controlled in a dictatorship. Once under the totalitarian thumb however, they couldn't easily escape. What does this say about the citizens of Iraq who are now no longer under the Hussein regime? What does this say of the citizens of Gaza under Hamas? Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident and current Jewish Israeli citizen, dedicated his book A Case for Democracy to the belief that almost no citizen of a totalitarian state voluntarily wants to be there. Although the liberal media machine and those who believe their every word, may consider me at least insensitive and at most a monster for agreeing that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas rockets; I don't actually celebrate the deaths in Gaza. Children are the same the world over; they're not responsible for the decisions of their parents or the adults around them, and they shouldn't have to be maimed and killed because of those decisions. Unfortunately, history teaches that innocent people are always victimized by war. Even when the cause is just, innocent civilians died in the firebombing of Berlin and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Even when the cause is just, innocent civilians are dying in Gaza, and their blood will be on all our hands, especially when we fail to do justice and call terrorism "fighting for freedom". Stop Hamas, and the innocent won't die in Gaza from anyone's bomb. Stop supporting Hamas with "world opinion" and we stop supporting terrorism. Challenge the one-sided perceptions of the news media and U.N. who can't see that allowing Hamas to operate unchecked and preventing Israel from defending itself, won't stop the deaths but instead, will accelerate them. Of course, if you only care about children in Gaza dying and don't concern yourself with children in Ashqelon and Ashdod, I guess it doesn't matter.