Battle Fatigue by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online

and the Communist world wants to make us not free. But a lot of dictators are on our side, including the one in Spain who used to be a friend of Adolf Hitler.
    There are only two facts about Khrushchev that I know are true. One day at the United Nations, in front of television cameras, he took off a shoe and banged it on his desk to drive home a point. They show this on television from time to time and it always makes us kids laugh. But adults want us to take it more seriously. One day in school Mr. Shaker says we all have to write essays about Russia, and Stanley takes off a shoe and pounds it on his desk. We all laugh but Stanley is sent to detention.
    The other thing I know about Khrushchev is that he was not allowed to go to Disneyland. I am not sure if this was punishment for pounding his shoe. I find that hard to believe but I wouldn’t have believed he really did pound his shoe if I hadn’t seen it. I only know that he was visiting the United States and he wanted to see Disneyland and they turned him down.
    But now something else has come up with the tough bald Russian leader. It turns out that he is ready to use nuclear weapons to destroy the world because of Cuba. For an instant I think I finally know why I am supposed to hate the Communists. The problem is that Kennedy is ready to do the same thing.
    The Russians started it. They put nuclear missiles in Cuba. Now we have to make them take the missiles away. We could get their nukes in Cuba with our nukes, but then they have more nukes to get us and we have plenty more to get them. It sounds like the games we used to play as kids.
    So now I go to bed at night wondering if I am going to wake up in the morning. Or will I be “the last man left,” like in a movie I saw about the only survivor of a nuclear war, wandering the earth finding nothing but dead people. Or would it be like another movie I saw, in which lots of people survived but they were all dropping over, one by one, from radiation.
    I know that I am angry probably because I am scared and because I don’t want the world to end over Communists. Kennedy is ready to blow up the world, but he has already gotten to do a lot of things. He has gotten to marry Jackie and drive a PT boat and be elected president. But what do I have to show for my life now that the world is about to end, now that “life as we know it”—they always use that exact phrase—is about to end? I have held hands with Kathy Pedrosky and have been punched in the stomach by Tony Scaratini. I am thirteen years old so I have barely gotten to be a teenager. I want more time than that. Even if it means leaving missiles on the island of Cuba.
    And what about that island? Isn’t Cuba a little island? What would it be like to be on a small island with all the world’s nuclear weapons pointed at you? The kids in Cuba must be even more scared than we are. They really do have nuclear weapons pointed at their school.
    Nobody talks about the Cubans. It is only about the Americans and the Russians. Everything is about the Americans and the Russians. No one else matters. As for the Cubans—the Cubans are Communists, so everybody figures they have it coming just like the Japanese had it coming because of Pearl Harbor.
    What is it all for? We fought the Germans and the Japanese because they were evil. But as soon as we beat them, they were our friends. So couldn’t we just skip ahead to that point? Couldn’t we say, right now, “The Communists are our friends,” and skip the part about the nuclear war?
    I say this to Stanley and Donnie. I even say that President Kennedy is going to get us all killed. But they are not listening. They take out their green stones and talk about “getting the Russians.” I click my stone with theirs. I am promising to get the Russians too.
    We talk about the situation a lot in school. I don’t say much. I might if someone else was saying things that sounded