The sound war makes strikes at our hearts

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 16, 2001

When I was a child, airplanes were loud things. They flew closer to the ground. Their rumble made me run under a tree, to the shelter of a doorway. Childish fears are like that, inexplicable and bigger than even the sky.

I became a woman who lived as if under a bubble. I no longer believed a threat could fall from above.

Strangers could mug me or smack into my car. But the threats I faced were mostly closer. They had to do with just me -- cancer -- or people I knew. I could lose my job. I could get divorced.

When it came to storms, I knew The Big One came along just once. Other hurricanes were calmer, drier by comparison. They blew through fast, like Tropical Storm Gabrielle.

It knocked over the outsized bougainvillea with its blood red blooms in my front yard.

We'll tie the tree back up. We'll pick up the stubs of old oak that fell and sweep away the clutter of leaves.

Even to the south, where Gabrielle struck harder, insurance will pay to mop the soaked floors of the beach motels. The sand driven across the beach roads can be put back in place.

All these threats, I comprehend.

This other threat, the threat born in flames last Tuesday, I do not. I am almost again the child who heard the rumble of the airplane overhead.

What does it mean when even the president cries?

In that bubble I came of age in, there was no such thing as war. Not really. War was what happened in other countries, even if Americans were among the dying.

So we didn't pay attention to even the name Osama bin Laden.

He was a story on the front page we never read, a millionaire many times over whose name we couldn't pronounce, a believer in a religion we kept at fearful bay, the bearer of a grudge of unimaginable consequence.

We were so careless.

Every airport has its X-ray machines, and we dutifully used to send our luggage through, although we didn't believe in it. Being carefree, or at least unimpeded, was a civic right. We were used to being able to tell each other to get out of the way.

Now we're frozen in the moment, whispering prayers and solemn oaths.

War. I try to accustom myself to the word. I say it over and over. The word pops up repeatedly in the stream of stories on television and always bounces off me. I am in the same state of suspended belief that hits when you learn a family member has unexpectedly died.

My pictures of war are sweet. I think of my father's World War II greatcoat of scratchy green wool. His small box of ribbons. An old bullet he prized. But just one.

Even now the uniform my husband wore when the Army shipped him out of Vietnam is in our closet. He wore it for just a day.

I live in the shadow of MacDill Air Force Base. The sound they make is nothing short of a roar. Yet before these events, I rarely heard the planes, and if I did, I paid no heed. It was like ignoring that name, Osama bin Laden.

Now the sound is overhead, insistent, even as I write.

I am that child again. All I want is to be able to stand in the doorway until the roar of that loud thing passes. All I want is safety.

What's that, anymore?

And what's coming?

Military callups. Families stretched apart. Arrests of people who should be arrested. Arrests of people who should not. A campaign to protect a nation that I had never before heard called a homeland.

We live in a permanently altered country. There is no bubble overhead. The psychological map has been redrawn, and the ground has hardened.

- Mary Jo Melone can be reached at mjmelone@sptimes.com or at (813) 226-3402.

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