The Cold War novels I’ve read (you know the ones I mean: with their Ivy League and Oxford spies and nondescript moles, with their black or tangerine or whatever color ops, and with that endless line of flirty girls with their red-painted lips and brass-and-leather-strapped suitcases slipping behind East German or Soviet lines to work their magic) seem to share the same running theme…that humans, in the end, have at least some control over their destiny. Characters may live or die, but differences are made. Small victories are assured, or at least admirably attempted. Dashing tactical skirmishes amidst the inferno, and high-fives for the hero or heroine. However, when, instead, you’ve lain down to sleep at night, your pillowed head only a stones throw from a computerized bank of nuclear missiles embedded into the German hillside above you, things begin to look different. At first you are not so sure. But then you wake up day after day and drive the muddy jeep up the twisting escarpment path to the control-center compound for another day of wargames, knowing the other side is doing the same thing–either side only a single red-button push away from “the big one”–you finally acknowledge the 800-pound gorilla, bumping shoulders, that the world in general seems oblivious, or would prefer not to think about. You realize ordinary humans have nothing to do with it. We don’t really matter in the end. And James Bond or George Smiley or your hero or heroine of choice are all whistling past the midnight graveyard. You learn this slowly and then quickly and then just try and put it out of your mind, telling yourself: “We’re only making movies here, right? None of this is real, got that, slick?” Then all you can do is take your shower after work and seek out Sembach Sam’s standby Gasthaus for that tall stein of basement-cooled brew. All the while remembering the running joke, more prophetic than anyone sitting around the Stammtisch could imagine, that if the nukes don’t get us, the locals surely will.
Ever since I was an impressionable young teen and read THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD I’ve been a ravenous reader of all things historical Cold War. Just far enough in the past to give the stories that gilded glow of another time, but close enough to our own time to make familiar comparisons and understand the eerie similarities. As others have said much better, a year is just a year. In the end, people are people. Nothing much changes except the costumes and modes of transportation. And, of course, our ability to annihilate ourselves and all life as we know it. That is to fathom, as a military buddy of mine was fond of saying, “The thinkable unthinkable.”
As a writer, and after partaking in such lighthearted beach reads as Jonathan Schell’s THE FATE OF THE EARTH, it initially became clear to me there was no easy or obvious way to approach such existential themes, from a literary perspective, that would make much sense at all. How does one make sense of the senseless? The thinkable unthinkable? Because, speaking specifically of pure undiluted Armageddon, no matter what narrative you form, no matter how horrific your words roll out onto the page, there is no way you can approach–scratch the surface even–the reality of the human unreality. For myself at least, it became a subject matter beyond subject humanity. Untouchable. Incomprehensible. To say nothing of general reader response, which, I always imagined, would be something like: “Look, I’m just trying to live my life here, pay my bills, raise my kids, and hope and pray for a little normalcy in the end. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” Still, the unthinkable was always there, swirling about all humanity as the sea swirls about its archipelago. Humanity created this mess, working for Uncle Sam I had come face to face with it, and I finally knew the worst thing I could do was go whistling past the midnight graveyard, hoping it would all go away. There was after all, and as Graham Greene so beautifully envisioned, the human factor to consider.
The human factor. In this case, characters living out their storied lives in spite of the madness surrounding them. They know you can’t fix stupid but you can try to be as human as possible, reaching out to other humans, sharing the Zeitgeist, the collective spirit of your moment in time and even history for those that come after you, unless, of course, that history is soon to be forever erased. Depending upon its makeup and magnitude, you can even try and fight evil when it confronts you. Some do and win. Others not so lucky. So perhaps the best thing, in the end, is to try and seek out that one kindred soul to share your moment in time before it’s too late. As you never feel more human until you hear it from another’s lips, saying so.
Thus my approach in writing my forthcoming novel, SOLDIER IN GERMANY. A handful of 1972 Vietnam-ravaged airmen, jerked from that hot war, only to be thrown without ceremony or salutation into the far greater, far more unfathomable cold one bleeding itself out onto the world stage and the collected psyche of that world. Ordinary people–Americans, Germans, and assorted others–trying their best to lead ordinary lives, all the while preparing for, or perhaps doing their best to ignore, a potentially imminent war that would make the twenty-five-years-gone scuffle initiated by Hitler and the Nazis, Japan, and that deformed little Italian look like a spoiled child’s birthday party. But truth be told, it is, in its way, just another form of graveyard whistling. Sucking down bowls of black-gold Turkish hashish, dropping windowpane or strawberry acid, pretending the ten-dollar seltzer water you just bought the mascara-smeared fishbar Fraulein was actually champagne, riding your hopped-up Harleys with abandon into the German twilight, trying your best to outrun that ominous cloud of dark doom ever-rising into the red sky just behind you. All that, while looking for and finding love in all the wrong places. Just whistling, after all, though now slightly off key.
As Churchill once put it with his supreme, succulent dryness: “If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.” To think otherwise is to believe humans, in the end, will make the right decisions, when my handful of attitude-mottled airmen know better. When perhaps they’ll tell you instead, “Listen, slick, you’d be better off cashing in that winning lottery ticket. Then go build yourself your own private spaceship, double-pronto, and get the hell out of Dodge.”