Warday

Since the war I have seen a tremendous change in our country.

It has been terrible for us all, but nevertheless it has revealed toughness and gristle and fellow-feeling that we didn’t even know we had. There was a time when I might have said, “If a nuclear war will toughen us up, let it come.” Having lived through one, I would not say that now. I was a damned fool ever to have thought such a thing. By 1984 there was a substantial body of opinion in the military that a nuclear war was possible, and that we should therefore devote our attention to planning methods that would encourage the Soviets to engage in a limited rather than an all-out exchange, or reduce their ability to project their warheads into U.S. territory. This is an error.

Not a day passes that I don’t wish for the soft old America with all its faults. But everything has an end, and that world and way of life ended.

Those were good times. May God grant that we remember them always, but also give us the strength not to torment our children with tales of what has been denied them.

Documents from the Lost City

who created great suicidal dramas on the

apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under
wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their
heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion…

—Allen Ginsberg, Howl

THE MECHANICS OF ABANDONMENT

It is hard to believe silence in relation to so big a place as New York. You can hear a single truck coming for miles on the New York State Thruway. And that is usually a military truck. I cannot help wondering what it will be like here when even the soldiers are gone.

The documents I have gathered for this section are related to the management of the human withdrawal from New York. In an odd way I find their crisp tone reassuring. After the first panic, we did our leaving well. We were told that the city picked up tens of thousands of shoes in the days after Warday. But later there were staged withdrawals and organized retreats from Dead Zone to Red Zone to Orange Zone to elsewhere.

Beyond those early assessments, there really isn’t much documentation about New York. I would have liked to include some sort of a list of paintings or books or valuables still in the city, or perhaps an evaluation of the present condition of buildings. Such documents did not present themselves.

I could have listed the orders of the day for the New York Military District, for every day since they have been here.

But those orders aren’t important. The remaining valuables aren’t even too important. There is no document that describes the emptiness of this city, no more than there is one to describe the immense complexity of the mind that caused it.

Nineveh. Babylon, and Rome each bustled a time in the sun. So also, New York. Nobody ever called it an eternal city, it was too immediate for that.

But we all thought it was one.

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