ABSTRACT
Not long ago one of my daughters asked me, “Daddy, were you in World War One or Two?” At about the same time, a girl whom I consider as grown-up as myself told me that she remembers my war because she remembers the boots her father wore while washing the car. She was an infant on an Army post. And yet, for those of us who enlisted near our eighteenth birthdays in the early forties, the war is still immediate, our youth is not disappeared, and yet time and history have rolled over us, despite our will to give sense to the present and future in the light of the past. Now I must subjugate the past in order to tell about it. It turns out that I am still its willing groom, moving and mated to it.
