The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [64]
My mother would make small fretful noises that didn’t really amount to speech.
“I just don’t get it,” my father would go on, staring at the report card as if it were a bill for damages unfairly rendered. “It’s gotten beyond a joke. I really think the only solution is a military academy.”
My father had a strange, deep attraction to military academies. The idea of permanent, systematized punishment appealed to a certain dark side of his character. Large numbers of these institutions advertised at the back of National Geographic—why there I don’t know—and I would often find those pages bookmarked by him. The ads always showed a worried-looking boy in gray military dress, a rifle many times too big for him at his shoulder, above a message saying something like:
Camp Hardship Military Academy
TEACHING BOYS TO KILL SINCE 1867
We specialize in building character and
eliminating pansy traits.
Write for details at P.O. Box 1,
Chicken Gizzard, Tenn.
It never came to anything. He would write off for a leaflet—my father was a fiend for leaflets of all types, and catalogs too if they were free—and find out that the fees were as much as for an Austin Healy sports car or a trip to Europe, and drop the whole notion, as one might drop a very hot platter. Anyway, I wasn’t convinced that military academies were such a bad thing. The idea of being at a place where rifles, bayonets, and explosives were at the core of the curriculum had a certain distinct appeal.
ONCE A MONTH we had a civil defense drill at school. A siren would sound—a special urgent siren that denoted that this was not a fire drill or storm alert but a nuclear attack by agents of Communism—and everyone would scramble out of their seats and get under their desks with hands folded over heads in the nuclear attack brace position. I must have missed a few of these, for the first time one occurred in my presence I had no idea what was going on and sat fascinated as everyone around me dropped to the floor and parked themselves like little cars under their desks.
“What is this?” I asked Buddy Doberman’s butt, for that was the only part of him still visible.
“Atomic bomb attack,” came his voice, slightly muffled. “But it’s okay. It’s only a practice, I think.”
I remember being profoundly amazed that anyone would suppose that a little wooden desk would provide a safe haven in the event of an atomic bomb being dropped on Des Moines. But evidently they all took the matter seriously, for even the teacher, Miss Squat Little Fat Thing, was inserted under her desk, too—or at least as much of her as she could get under, which was perhaps 40 percent. Once I realized that no one was watching, I elected not to take part. I already knew how to get under a desk and was confident that this was not a skill that would ever need refreshing. Anyway what were the chances that the Soviets would bomb Des Moines? I mean, come on.
Some weeks later I aired this point conversationally to my father while we were dining together in the Jefferson Hotel in Iowa City on one of our occasional weekends away, and he responded with a strange chuckle that Omaha, just a hundred or so miles to the west of Des Moines, was the headquarters of Strategic Air Command, from which all American operations would be directed in the event of war. SAC would be hit by everything the Soviets could throw at it, which of course was a great deal. We in Des Moines would be up to our keisters in fallout within ninety minutes if the wind was blowing to the east, my father told me. “You’d be dead before bedtime,” he added brightly. “We all would.”
I don’t know which I found more disturbing, that I was at grave risk in a way that I hadn’t known about or that my father found the prospect of our annihilation so amusing, but either way it confirmed me in the conviction that nuclear drills were pointless. Life was too short and we’d all be dead anyway. The time would be better spent apologetically