Fairy Tales

The world had become a dangerous place. The Russians were knocking at our door. Missiles were aimed and ready, atom bombs hung in the sky. One of our spy planes, a U-2 they called it, was shot down and its pilot was captured by the Russians. We watched as Francis Gary Powers was paraded on TV and put on trial in the Soviet Union.
I remember watching Fidel Castro, that guy with the beard who wore army clothes and smoked cigars was making friends with the communists and shaking his fist at us every chance he could.
Nikita Kruschev, the Russian leader with the bald head and ugly face was telling the world he was ready to go to war with us if we didn't leave Cuba alone. Nuclear war was coming, he threatened, and he looked like he meant it.
We didn't have to worry they told us. As long as we knew how to protect ourselves. They taught us in school. They showed us movies and had us practice all the right moves. Duck and cover, we were told. Hide under your desk and cover your head with your hands. That will protect you from the blast of an atom bomb. They took us to the basement of the school where we stood facing the concrete wall with our hands covering the back of our heads. We'd be safe there, the radiation wouldn't get us deep inside the building.
Our town, like every other town now had an air raid siren. It wasn't like the firehouse; it was a single steady blast, a low moan that was a different sound; the sound of death. Whenever a siren went off you stopped to make sure. A few seconds to listen and make sure that it wasn't the end of the world coming, just a fire or an ambulance call, just life going on.
I read about fall-out shelters you could build in your back yard and how to stock them with food and water so you could survive after all the bombs and missiles had exploded. Your own little bunker out behind the garage or added to the basement.
Our Fourth of July parade would have a Nike missile in it, from one of the batteries in Pitman or Swedesboro, to show us we had nothing to fear, that we were ready to strike back.
Once there was a national air-raid readiness day. The sirens were to go off and everyone was to stop what they were doing and to take cover wherever they were. I was walking home from school when the siren went off. I was only half way home, just getting to the lake, the only soul outside. I was going to run as fast as I could the rest of the way when I spotted a police car coming down the street. I didn't want to get in trouble, so I laid in the gutter of the street and covered my head with my hands just like I'd been taught and waited for the police car to pass by.I felt stupid lying there in the street like that, and I was sure that the policemen were probably having a great big laugh at my expense, what a story to tell when they got back to the station! I waited for a minute or two then got up and ran the rest of the way home.
I wasn't dumb. I had seen the newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whole cities wiped out, and not a building left standing. I saw the people with their skin burned off and I'd read about radiation and how it killed slowly and silently for years and years and years. I saw the movies where the buildings blew apart and the air itself had caught on fire. We had all seen it and read about it and we all knew the truth. We all knew that if nuclear war came our part of the world would be gone in seconds, vaporized like the Japanese.
So we stood in the basement of our school. Me and Nancy and Richie and Linda and Joyce and Greg and Paul and all the others: facing the wall and covering our heads and playing the game.
We knew we were being lied to by the people we trusted and we were scared.
Scared to death.