Youthful influences

One facet driving this experiment is my belliphilia. This peculiar feeling is neither overwhelming nor universal, as anyone who knows my opinion regarding the Gulf Wars can attest. Rather, while growing up, several major influences converged to make me idolize World War Two, more precisely the history of the Pacific theatre.

The first movie I remember seeing on the silver screen was Star Wars. When that movie came out, it's like the whole world became obsessed with both the story and the storytelling. There were magazines, comic books, toys, radio plays, puzzle books, drinking glasses with character biographies and much more. Even The Price is Right had at least two showcase showdowns that mentioned the movie: one highlighting the cinematic career of Sir Alec Guinness, and another two-parter retelling the adventure with cars as spaceships and a washing machine gussied up to resemble R2-D2.

But the simultaneous publicity that I remember involved reading every newspaper article or watching every documentary about HOW the movie was made and the development of the special effects. I devoured every piece of information I could discover about Star Wars. Time and again in interviews, Lucas and Dykstra would discuss how the climactic dogfighting scenes over the Death Star were based on footage of actual aerial combat from WWII. Maybe their point was how cool are these effects and the story they got to tell. I kept thinking how cool are dogfights.

Between Star Wars and Empire, I discovered Star Blazers early on Saturday mornings, before the official Big Three networks started their cartoons at 8 AM. The continuing storyline captured my attention and built tension (the constant count of how many days were left to save Earth being a major factor). I did not understand the broader issues of post-colonialism or the blow taken by Japan's collective psyche by the massive destruction wrought by the atomic blasts that ended the Second World War. The challenge to rescue the planet by uniting the best & brightest adventurers spoke to something in me as a young boy. Battle of the Planets came out in the United States around the same time, but that shows episodic format never grabbed me. (Even to my young sensibilities, the weird 7-Zark-7 interludes seemed strangely disconnected from the rest of the adventure; maybe subconsciously I felt I was being pandered to.)

I grew up in Virginia Beach, VA, with F14 Tomcats flying constantly overhead. While not a military brat, most of my friends were (meaning I'd lose touch with them after two years) and my father worked as a Navy contractor with a company that designed weapons systems for cruisers, battleships & destroyers. As a family we'd regularly visit the launching of new warships from Newport News in whose development my father had a hand. I understood that my father built the modern successors to the battleships that sailed in WWII and I was so proud of my father

We also vacationed in Wilmington, NC, and visiting the USS North Carolina was a regular summer ritual along with July 4th fireworks. Between these fond memories and my father's vocation, these giant grey technological marvels became inextricably linked to patriotism.

Additionally (and you might not believe me) television used to have only a handful of channels. (I know it strains credulity - just go along with the idea for a bit.) In the post-Vietnam era, TV stations often ran/reran romanticized and sanitized views of warfare: The Rat Patrol, Black Sheep Squadron, even Hogan's Heroes. (Hogan's Heroes was the show that my dad liked that I could stay and watch even as a young kid. I've never revisited this show to avoid evaluating my opinion of my dad as the original arbiter of good taste.) Additionally, the cinematic fare (both on television or in theatres) reinforced a glorified version of war where the good & just won, the valiant died nobly, and the evil or cruel suffered in the end. While this youthful remembrance/understanding of the narratives was not completely accurate, classic movies like Dr. Strangelove, Tora, Tora, Tora, The Great Escape, Where Eagles Dare, Run Silent, Run Deep, Sink the Bismark, The Man who Never Was, The Longest Day, Von Ryan's Express, and Stalag 17 cemented my belliphilia. Contemporary films like The Final Countdown and Top Gun, while not as good as the earlier offerings, also helped establish my tastes. War was awesome and one of the best things America ever invented!

Both my grandfathers (who will get their own entries) served during WWII in the Army in widely different capacities. Their stories (and Grandfather Jones' constant gifts of C-Rations) reaffirmed my concept of war as good and necessary. If so many men (real and fictional) supported war, who was I to disagree?

Looking back today, I find it very strange that, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, I held such a positive view of war  Much of this naivete came crashing down when I upset more than one friends' father with my glib & worshipful attitude to war. I knew only one officer, an uncle in the Marines. He was the epitome of an officer: polished, physically impressive, and deft enough to produce half-dollars from the ears of credulous nephews and nieces. The vast majority of veterans I met as a teenager had served as ground troops, either drafted or enlisted because the draft was imminent. These men came back with horrible stories and a fierce reluctance to talk. Only if prodded (usually by a vocalized misconception on my part) would they relate their experiences. As a knowitall teen, getting dressed down for my ignorance produced anger and humiliation immediately, with introspection and understanding coming only much later.

In the short term, these discussions had the immediate impact of making me hate the military. During high school, I took the ASVAB because everybody in the Norfolk area took the ASVAB. I scored well enough on the test that the recruiter wanted me on a submarine pronto tending its reactor, and tried to sweeten the pot with a promise of a full ride to UPenn's engineering program after serving two tours (four years). I said no. As a rebellious teenager, I was learning what science had done to war, including some vague idea of what my father contributed, and I wanted no part.

Yet as I got older, I couldn't help watching movies like Full Metal Jacket or Raiders of the Lost Ark or reading Tom Clancy novels without feeling some nostalgia for war. My emotions towards armed conflict remain ambivalent to this day.

Wow, that's probably way more that I intended to share, and maybe it will help explain this meandering journey. Or maybe it will just prove that I'm a hypocrite. Regardless, I hope this essay has served to explain a portion of my formative experiences as this experiment continues.

Fair Seas ~ Adm. Wolff