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On September 11, I took my two-year-old son on a walk in the woods near our northern Westchester home. At about 9:30 A.M., the roar of F-16 fighter jets filled the sky, quickly growing louder and more intense. They flew so low, I ducked.
Even though I knew that the New York skies were being patrolled that anniversary day and we were spitting distance from the Indian Point nuclear facility, it was scary and the alarm showed on my face — and that scared my son. He said, "Tell Daddy to call the police." Back at our house, my husband was out on the street in his pajamas looking up. Other neighbors appeared, drawn out of their houses by the thunder of a low-flying jet heading straight for Indian Point. Rose, who lives four doors down, grabbed her baby Jennifer and was going to run over to the local elementary school and pull out her two sons. She stopped to ask my husband what was happening and he filled her in. My husband later told our son that the pilots in those F-16's are our friends. And, in our case, he meant it literally. One of our neighbors, another suburban dad, is an Air Force vet named Joe. In 1996, Joe left behind his wife Pennie and their first baby Madison to patrol the no-fly zone in Iraq. He was gone for three months. "I miss the flying and the camaraderie but I like being home with my family," says Joe, who now flies commercial jets and has a baby son, Mason. "People don't want to see, but they're in for a rude awakening," Joe says, referring to Saddam Hussein trying something even worse than September 11. "That's what he's aiming for." "A rude awakening" is a figure of speech for the kind of shock and surprise we experience when something devastating and unexpected occurs. "Bush is making the case," Joe believes. "He's giving Saddam a big shovel to dig a hole and that's what Saddam's doing." Here the shovel is actually a metaphor representing Saddam's continued and defiant noncompliance. To clarify, Bush didn't actually give Saddam a big shovel. That's a metaphor. Joe and Pennie are my neighbors. He's flown the unfriendly skies over Iraq. She waited for him to return safely. They're not interested in metaphors. "I could talk about a lot of F-16 wives right now who are sacrificing," says Pennie. "These families are on alert status with bags packed just waiting and, at any moment, dad could walk out the door." "If it's not wartime, how do you explain being separated from your family, missing your children growing up? Kids know: 'My dad might be leaving and I don't know when he's coming back.' Tell me that's not wartime." — Susan Konig, author of the book Why Animals Sleep So Close to the Road and other lies I tell my children, is an NRO contributor. |
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n September 10, I had my morning coffee with Susan Sontag. Metaphorically,
that is. I sipped while she questioned our country's "pseudo-declaration
of pseudo-war" and called the war on terror a "metaphor"
on the op-ed pages of that morning's New York Times.
