i am a writer, a creator of worlds if you will.
Nobody thought for a second that the war might come home. That the oversea enemies might find their way across our borders again. I still remember being twelve and in the quiet suburbs of Riverside, standing out in the middle of the streets with all the other kids in the neighborhood. We could see in the distance Los Angeles standing underneath a brown haze. And we saw perfectly as the jet planes, having come from some place further south, glinted against the mid-afternoon and spring sun. When those planes, so far off as they were, sent out glitter across the horizon, silver streams following, we leapt up and down, cheering on the show. Before it occurred to us what was really going on, I think we had believed that we’d become the stars of an action flick. That maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris would roll up in a tank and ask us to point them in the direction of the terrorists. But when our mommies and daddies rushed out across the neatly trimmed lawns and onto the black pavement to sweep us off our little feet, and we all watched together as the city went up in flames like one big bonfire, and we felt the succession of reverberating grumbles in our chests from those bombs, I think that’s when it occurred to us. The whole city was swallowed up in black smoke that day. And when the torrents of wind sprung out from the succeeding explosions, a grey haze of ash began to fall. It wasn’t long after that the government initiated the draft.
It was like we hadn’t just lost a whole city of people. They needed more soldiers, more men to rush out into the ashy streets of Los Angeles with their tanks and machine guns ready to die for the great American flag. We had lost brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers to the war overseas. Now it was time to lose them right at our doorstep. And to the same enemies we’d been so sure of defeating.
