world war iii

From childhood, I think I had some eerie sense of just how bad it could get in America. After all, in junior high and high school, I was riveted by this country’s Civil War. Among all my toy soldiers — cowboys and Indians, British marching troops in red jackets, and plastic Army-green World War II soldiers (from my father’s war) — and those Landmark Books on American history that I piled up on my floor to create hills and valleys where I could play out the cowboy and Indian ambushes and battles I had seen at local movie theaters, my favorites were always the blue and grey lead soldiers of the Union and Confederacy, including Commanding General Ulysses S. Grant on a horse. (He’s still in the saddle on a small shelf beside the computer where, almost 70 years later, I’m writing this.)

In those days, thanks to my parents, I also subscribed to the history magazine American Heritage, whose editor was Bruce Catton, while, in my spare time, I feverishly read the Civil War histories for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. (I still have my ancient copies of Glory Road, This Hallowed Ground, and A Stillness at Appomattox.) At some point in those youthful years, my father even drove me to Gettysburg to see firsthand the site of perhaps the most crucial and devastating battle of that war.