Photo Credit: from Shaun Noonan’s photostream on Flickr.com

I know our antebellum innocence
Was never meant to see the light of our armistice day
– Vienna Teng Antebellum

One of the stories in our family is about my husband’s foster-father, who joined the Army in WWI by lying about his age (he was around 16 at the time). His unit had been given orders that they were to go over trenches and meet the enemy (more likely the enemy’s machine gun) early in November 1918. This assault was scheduled to begin on the morning of November 12th. The difference of 24 hours and a piece of paper agreed on by people far away from the trench-bound Leroy Hinkles in ways more significant than mere miles was likely the difference between life and death, and a very different life for my husband who had the fortune to grow up in the same, stable foster home for almost all of his childhood.

A friend of mine at college was a late in life “surprise” for her parents. Her father survived a firefight with Germans by jumping into a cast iron tub in the post-D Day offensive of WWI. The rest of his unit was killed.

My son’s other grandfather, my father, avoided “selective” service by joining the California National Guard during the Vietnam War. While this was not without risk, and as my mother tells it, they were under constant threat of being called up for duty “in theater” he survived. I had two friends while I was growing up whose fathers had died in that war. That was not my fate or my father’s.

All of these men knew they had been spared, whether by random fate, or something else and I think it shaped who they became later in ways both obvious and subtle. I think they also likely paid a price for that survival.

The lyrics of the song refer to a conflict of the heart, but in all conflicts there is an innocence that is lost. I remember the story a famous musician told of studying during the early 1940’s under one of the greats of the classical field, and having him tear up as he played “Clare de la Lune” and described life before the Great War and the horrific loss of that innocence.

As Jose would say, there is no going backwards.