l i f e
Bomber's Baedeker
A woman at the National Air and Space Museum once said, "Nobody should ever be bombed." To which Kurt Vonnegut replied, "Nothing could be more obvious." He has a lot of things to say about being bombed. He was bombed a lot, bearing witness to a firestorm in Dresden, Germany that killed more people than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He said, "...clean, decent young men in enourmously expensive and complex flying machines are, when viewed from the ground, no different from the practice of the world's worst police departments..." He also said he made about five bucks per corpse in the Dresden attack. I did my math and that works out to $675,000. Kurt Vonnegut and my site don't have much in common except in title.
In the early part of WWII Jimmy Doolittle lead a daring and pointless attack againt Tokyo lasting all of thirty seconds in which he himself was shot down, innocent people were bombed, and America scored its first strike back at a supposed heartless enemy in the form of propaganda. It was a success. Doolittle wrote a book praising bombing. Vonnegut wrote a book condemning it. I named these pages after it.
Why?
Because of all the people I've talked to, folks who have flown the planes and been under them, they all have the same thing to say. They're all scared as hell. So am I. Not of being blown to bits in a literal sense, nor of falling from the sky in a flaming coffin of metal and wood, but I'm scared just the same. I'm scared in my thirty seconds I won't make the right choices. That I will crawl from the rubble alive, but saying, "What if?"
That maybe my happiness could be made happier if only...
Life all comes down to such simple and quick decisions. The ones that catch you off guard. The ones you remember forever. Perhaps I carry things a little too far when I compare what it must be like to really be bombed with my everyday bombarment through what has become a not so simple existence, but if you've ever cowered under the sheets at night like I have it matters very little if there are airplanes overhead or not.
If you've ever walked the tracks of a deserted trainyard kicking rocks and feeling more than terribly alone you know what it is like after the raid sirens go quite.
You let the dust settle. You breathe. You go blank and wait.
Just thirty more seconds...
goodnight 11.18.97
