I was about two months shy of my eighth birthday when the Gulf War began in January 1991, but my memory of it, and of my father’s stern admonition against war-making in general and that war in particular, left me with enough antiwar spirit to last a lifetime.
As improbable as it may sound, given how young I was, I still remember the eruption of the war on the television in my family’s living room. The personages on our side were rather memorable: Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, TV reporters Peter Arnett and Arthur Kent, singer Whitney Houston, who performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the near-concurrent Super Bowl.
I remember, too, my excitement at seeing the news accounts of the United States armed forces achieving their aims so efficiently, so assuredly. It shames me to write of how I thrilled to this war-making, but in my defense, I came from what I considered to be a military family: My father was an officer in the Air Force in the 1960s. That was the time of the Cold War; he had been a navigator. After seven years, he decided to return to civilian life because, he said, he was newly married (to my mother) and had developed doubts about the Vietnam War, which he had managed to avoid.
It would be years before I arrived on the scene, but despite the remoteness of his military service from my life, I lived with daily reminders of it. He retained the schedule of a man in uniform (“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” he was fond of quoting), and his bearing—firm, direct, pithy—was clearly a product of his training. I played with his Air Force wings, and he took my brother and me to a military surplus store. A prized possession was a birthday gift of a Swiss Army Knife, which I associated with his Air Force background.
Yet if I expected my father to ratify my childish elation at the might of the U.S. military in an actual conflict, I was sorely mistaken. During those opening days of the Gulf War, when I said something to him about the war that must have struck him the wrong way, he did not hesitate to correct me.
“We”—by which he meant our family, not our country—“are never for war, Peter,” he told me.
That stopped me in my tracks. Almost instantly, I remember, I quieted my rhetoric because I knew my father knew whereof he spoke. He had volunteered to serve in the military, he had excelled in his job, and he was about as far from a countercultural figure as one could imagine. Thus, when he spoke about the folly and tragedy of war, he did so with a certain authority.
As I grew older, I learned that my father was a curious mixture of patriot and peacenik. I have no memory of him reading military history, but he did introduce me to the folk music that he had listened to as a young man, especially songs with an antiwar bent. I fancied these tunes so much that I insisted on buying cassette tapes to be played on car rides. When we went on a family outing, it was to the sounds of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” or “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” the last ideally performed by the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul, and Mary. Surely I was the only 10-year-old in the early 1990s who wore out a cassette of a live concert with Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, or who knew who those men even were—thanks to Dad.
By then, of course, the Gulf War was a distant memory. Thus, my antiwar sentiment was theoretical; were there another war, I was sure I would be opposed to it. I channeled all my feelings into the antiwar art I consumed—not just folk tunes, but Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five and Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove, both of which my father recommended to me. Once, I found myself at a performance of an excerpt or series of scenes from Kurt Jooss’s antiwar ballet The Green Table, and at the end, I applauded so vigorously that my father had to tell me to dial it down a notch.
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Then came the Iraq War. Out came my cassette tapes, though—by then in my very early 20s—I traded “Blowin’ in the Wind” for John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”. More provocatively, as the designated family conservative, I leaned on our formidable intellectual tradition to fashion my antiwar stance. I read books by Pat Buchanan, and I took out a subscription to his explicitly antiwar magazine, The American Conservative, then published, as if to emphasize its urgency, biweekly on newsprint.
I relished those figures outside of liberal orthodoxy who opposed the war. Among their ranks was novelist Norman Mailer, who, in an interview in the pages of TAC, characterized himself a “left-conservative” and drew a distinction between “value conservatives,” whom he admired, and “flag conservatives,” who sought empire. “Behind the whole thing in Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the near-East as a stepping stone for eventually taking over the world,” Mailer told TAC in 2002. He said Taft and Eisenhower were his ideas of value conservatives. This sounded good to me then; it still does today.
But I had already learned this lesson from my father when I was not even eight years old. Now, facing the horror of another war in the Middle East, I find myself turning not to songs nor books nor interviews with famous public intellectuals. I simply remember the words of my father, gone now for 16 years: “We are never for war, Peter.”
