Duck, Cover and Kiss Your Butt Goodbye

  I grew up in a time when they told us "If you hear the air raid siren get under your desk and cover your head."  The idea was if The Russians nuked us we'd be protected.  

Um, yeah...about that.

  

  The Russian President was in the news a few days ago.  He announced that his country now had a new generation of “super nukes,” missiles that are so fast that interceptors are useless against them, undersea nuclear tipped drones that can travel fast and undetected to their target and long-range cruise missiles that can deliver their atomic payload accurately.

  “Sure,” I yelled at the TV, “Let’s blow up the passengers in one section of the spaceship, it won’t hurt the rest of us at all.”

  The Lady of the House put down her knitting.

  “What are you on about now?” she said.

  “Here we are in the future and we’re still coming up with new and creative ways to blow us all to hell,” I said.  “Doesn’t anyone appreciate where we are, how cool it is that we zip around the cosmos on this organic spaceship…this planet we live on?  We should just appreciate where we are and live in harmony.  But I ain’t stupid, I know how the world is.”

  “Oh, this Russian nuke stuff bothers you,” said The Lady of the House.  “That’s right, you went through all that ‘duck and cover’ stuff when you were a kid.”

 “You didn’t?”

  “Nope,” said The Lady of the House. 

  “You’re saying that because we had these atom bomb drills in school and you didn’t that that’s why nukes bother me.”

  “Exactly,” she said, returning to her knitting.

  The Lady of the House was referring to a time in America long ago and far away when we used to have nuke drills.  I thought it was across the land but as time has gone on I’ve come to believe the government carried out these drills in areas that were considered targets…or…some local governments saw no need to practice such a drill because if your town got hit by a Russian nuke you were going to die anyway.

  But “they” didn’t tell us that.

  The first drill I remember was when I was an itty bitty boy living in a big ol’ hotel in downtown Buffalo, New York.

  The air raid siren would go off and even though I was itty bitty somehow I knew the streets were supposed to be cleared and you were supposed to pull your shades down.

  The pulling the shades down thing was so that the flash of the atomic bomb wouldn’t ignite your draperies or furniture.

  I was too young to know that this stuff didn’t matter because if there WAS a flash just a few moments after that you’d be blown to smithereens.

  I think my mom knew this.  Mom was practical like that.

  Mom was never in any hurry to participate in the air raid drills in Buffalo.

  These things usually happened while my dad was at work and my brother and sister were in school.  It was just mom and me in our hotel apartment.

  “Mommy!” I’d yell.  “We have to close our drapes, the man on TV said that.” 

  “You go ahead, honey,” she’d say from the kitchen as the air raid sirens wailed outside.

  I’d go from window to window and lower the Venetian blinds.

  Then I’d peek outside.

  You weren’t supposed to do that.

  I imagined that there was someone watching somewhere who, if they saw me peeking out the window, made a phone call and the police would come and scold me for looking out the window during an atomic bomb air raid.

  Anyway I’d be looking out the window and there I’d see a lone vehicle driving down the boulevard several stories below where we lived.

  “Mommy!” I’d yell out, “There’s a car driving down the street.”

  “That’s not our concern,” she’d say from the kitchen.

  “Well, THAT’S WRONG,” I’d say.

  “Yes dear, I know,” she’d say, “But it’s not our concern.”

  Then the “all clear” siren would go off and I’d go around the apartment and pull up the blinds.

  “Mommy, I pulled open the blinds.”

  “That’s nice dear.”

  Then we moved to Hawai’i and air raid drills were part of school.

  “Now class,” said my teacher.  “When you hear the air raid siren go off you are to get under your desk and put your head between your knees.  Then wait for the ‘all clear’ siren.”

  Years in the future in college we would talk about the “duck and cover” drills and the preposterousness of thinking that if you got under your desk it would protect you from an atomic blast.

  “Seems like all our teachers forgot one thing,” said one snarky guy at the university.  “After you put your head between your knees you were supposed to kiss your ass goodbye.”

  When the family moved back to the states I don’t remember going through air raid drills in school in Virginia.  I never gave it much thought until recently when it occurred to me that maybe our city in the Blue Ridge Mountains wasn’t a strategic target.

  Buffalo might’ve been as probably a lot of the northeast for manufacturing and such.  Hawai’I for the naval base at Pearl Harbor, but our mountain city?  Probably not.

  The atomic bomb was real to me.

  There was that time while living in Hawai’i that the family was a-buzz about going to the beach in the middle of the night to watch an A-bomb test.

  I was just a kid but I understood that the blast would be about a thousand miles away.

  I went to bed.

  Next thing I knew my big brother was rousting me from a sound sleep and I was on the beach with the family and hundreds of other people.  Must’ve been 2 or 3 in the morning.

  Not long after I woke up there were “oohs” and “aahs” from the assembled multitude as the sky turned green in various hues and waves.

  I went back to sleep.

  It was good I was a kid.

  If I was older or smarter it might’ve occurred to me that hiding under a desk wasn’t going to protect you from something that could change the color of the sky from a thousand miles away.