Well, I suppose it was more like a phone call from Detroit, circa 1960. I was dozing in the brown chair, watching the cable news and watching the new cold air chase away the moisture of the temporary January thaw.
1960 was the year that our Scout Troop (#1032, Methodist Church, Lincoln St, Birmingham, MI) got a tour of the local Nike-Zeus defensive missile battery in the suburb where we lived. Cool field trip. The gear was spit-shined and the soldiers appeared squared-away. Apparently, at the time we were concerned about defending ourselves from attack by nuclear-tipped weapons aimed at what had been, a couple of decades before, something dubbed “The Arsenal of Democracy.”
That is a long time ago, and I had my time later to cuddle with our nukes on the off chance we had to use them. Thank God we didn’t.
Then yesterday.
I was just waiting for football to start, waiting for things to dry out after the rains, thinking of entropy, and particularly that part of the process of progressing from the vigor of young humanity to something less than that. So, then the phone goes off. I am not all there, but close enough to answer the phone. I consider that to be professional.
It was the LT, calling from his new digs high above Ala Moana Blvd in Honolulu. He said they just got the Civil Defense alert that missiles were inbound, and this might be the last time we talked. Having actually lived in the last time we paid any attention to this stuff, it did not surprise me. We used to get alerts on Iraqi Missile activity almost on the intercom at the Pentagon during the Gulf War, and sometimes fifteen minutes is a useful amount of time.
You can get to cover, for example, which can even mitigate the effects of high-yield explosions. On 9/11, I was not far from the impact point at the Pentagon only two cups of coffee before it happened.
But naturally, my son was busy yesterday, having less than a coffee break to get ready for eternity, and I let him go.
I did some immediate searches, but didn’t see anything that indicated the NORKS had anything road-mobile to throw at us, so I was cautiously optimistic my son would survive the morning. But really, here we are again. What did we used to say? “Duck and cover?”
I don’t think we needed to come to this place again, but there it is. I know we made a decision to close down our defenses a long time ago. but maybe we ought to re-think that. I don’t want to lose Honolulu for real.
Copyright 2018 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com