Before I Was Born

Before I was born, my family was huddled in a basement praying that the bombs falling above them would not blow them to smithereens.

I don't know how many other families were in their basements praying or what happened to them, but my family survived.

This was in Germany during World War II. My father was in the German army. Suffice it to say it wasn't his idea, but he was German and there was this godawful war.

I came along years later, after the family moved to America, and my parents almost never talked about the war when I was growing up. Only if I asked them something and only enough to answer my question.

All wars are awful but this one was especially bad, and my family had been on the wrong side. I guess I didn't really want to talk about it either.

When I was growing up, America went to war again, this time in Vietnam, where our purpose was less clear, and when I was 18 I was among the last Americans to receive a draft card. What would I do? I waited to see if my number came up. It didn't, and so I didn't have to decide.

My older brother Harry did have to decide. He decided to lie, twice. He lied to the army so they would declare him morally unfit, and he lied to the family so we would think he had flunked the physical.

Many years later he told me the truth and it didn't matter. Either way, I was glad he didn't have to go.

Anyway, he decided and acted, and that took more courage than I seemed to have.

I'm told that one of the first things my nephew Mike learned to say was "Peace in the Middle East." He grew up in a hopeful time and the phrase was on the TV so often he just picked it up.

That was more than 30 years ago.

Lately things have been much worse, from Baghdad to Beirut, and it feels as if the bombs that were falling before I was born will never stop falling.