A Good Deal

My great uncle Harry died in World War II in Burma. He was only twenty-one.

His brother Sonny went, but he made it home, or at least the bones of him made it home. He was so traumatised by the horrors that he saw, by the sadism of his Japanese guards,

it broke him. The Sonny who disembarked after VJ Day on the shores of England

in the care of the Red Cross wasn’t him,

not the Sonny who had left just a year ago full of fake breeziness. His grieving parents barely recognised the stammering shell

who stared at his slippered feet for hours, and howled as he stalked the halls of their home when night fell.

I have lived a long, good life

in peace. I hate the atomic bomb. But in their place, I might well have cheered the Yanks, hearing that they had flattened Hiroshima

and buried Nagasaki only three days later. I can see how thousands being pulverised in exchange for my two babies’ stolen lives might have satisfied me, in the heat of war.