
It
was 1953 in the white newly prosperous suburbs of Arlington, Virginia,
just outside the Yankee Capital. I was eight, having been born, like so
many of my small compatriots, nine months and fifteen minutes after our
fathers got home from the war. These men, my father anyway, had spent
years in the Pacific, being torpedoed at and watching Hellcat fighters
screaming off wooden decks, and seeing ships sink. What they wanted now
was lawn mowers, lawns, children, and a life as boring as possible. They
got them.
We
kids did not know that we were at the cusp of an explosion of
technological mastery. We were, though. In addition to me there was
Michel Duquez, dark-haired, raffish, and of Frog extraction, who would
later die fighting for the French Foreign Legion in the Silent Quarter
of Arabia. Or if he didn’t, he should have. And there was John Kaminski,
or Mincemeat, blond and crewcut, who could spit out of the side of his
mouth with casual aplomb the way Humphrey Bogart did, or would have if
he had spit much.
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