Epic Fury

“Body bags.” The two words ricocheted like bullets. Memories of another war, when body bags, products of the Vietnam conveyor belt, arrived on tarmacs. I sat in my Davy Crockett coonskin cap, cross-legged on the floor of our living room, yearning to be “king of the wild frontier,” watching the evening news while I waited for dinner to be served. Marching uniformed soldiers carrying coffins, presenting thirteen-folded flags to grieving parents. “Day is done, safely rest”; the bugle soaring over it all creating a canopy of military honor. Then came the exciting part, the nightly tabulation of soldiers killed. I waited for the score—would we still be winning? Would our death count tally be lower than the Viet Cong tally? Night after night, the American side was always “winning,” with a lower death count score than the Viet Cong. Even though thousands of lives were lost on each side, in my mind this was still a victory for my team. Walter Cronkite’s sign-off anchored my smug supremacy: “And that’s the way it is.”  

After dinner, I donned my B-15 bomber jacket and red cowboy boots, strapped my holstered toy Colt single-action revolver around my waist, and plopped onto the family room sofa. I spun my favorite 45, a recording of “The U.S. Air Force,” on our Ward’s portable record player and sang along: “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder.” I fancied myself a heroic cowboy/bomber pilot. As the bombs dropped and my squadron advanced, I, too, soared into some glorious future, far from my home and unburdened by a sense of concern for the victims of my fantasy killing game.    

And then another memory surfaced, of the time Dad drove me to McDonald’s, Denver’s newest fast food dining attraction, where my cousin had landed a job bagging burgers. As we pulled up in our finned ’57 Plymouth Fury, my hungry eyes were snagged by a sign placed strategically under a single golden arch tracking the number of 15-cent burgers sold: over 200 million to date. I ordered my burger and begged to eat outside on the lawn. When we finished our burgers, I expected the tabulation to magically advance: “Over 202 million sold.”

It was a time of epic excitement as the conveyor belts of burgers bagged and selling, of bodies bagged and arriving, enthralled me. As the numbers rose beneath the arches and on the evening news, Cronkite’s refrain cemented the count, and with it the assurance of American triumph.

“And that’s the way it is.”

I spent many summer vacations trapped in the back seat of that same winged Fury inching across the endless Nebraska plains on Interstate 80 to visit family. As Paul Harvey’s conservative commentary blared on the radio, Mom and Dad occupied the front seats, enveloping the three of us in cigarette smoke. I gazed out the back passenger window as we passed the never-ending line of cattle trucks being driven to feedlots in Denver or Cheyenne or to “the world’s greatest” stockyards in Omaha. I became curious about those cattle, some only calves, as we looked into each other’s eyes. They were on their way to slaughter, I to insufferable family gatherings consisting of groups of adults drinking, smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and eventually arguing, shoving each other, perhaps throwing plates, while I tucked myself away in a bedroom with a book. I felt the suffocation of a restricted life with no clear way out. I felt my soul being slaughtered. I realized I was not going to be a cowboy riding the range fighting off the Indians, nor an Air Force bomber pilot. Those roles were restricted—only males need apply. Gradually, I made a plan to get off of the many conveyor belts that sought to determine my life. I was a good student; I would save the money I could earn at odd jobs and maybe get a scholarship and escape to college. The grip of the body and burger tallies loosened.

I was a junior in high school in 1968, when the song “Rawhide” (“Count ’em up, rope ’em in”) was superseded by Walter Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam.” I watched as Cronkite described his observations from a reporting trip to Vietnam: the failed Tet offensive and deception in the body-count tally. Huh … our team was definitely not winning this war. Cronkite had realized, and in his reporting convinced a significant number of US citizens, that “the way it is” had turned out to be a manufactured view. The crack in my own ideological view that had begun as I saw the cattle cars and encountered the realities of my female body, and the strict limitations applied to me due to being a girl, now widened. 

In her bedroom, dressed in her cotton housecoat and sipping from her coffee cup, cigarette dangling from her lips, my mother listened to speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., her radio on low. “I know he stirs up trouble, Debbie, but I love the way he speaks.” I was surprised, and tried to reconcile that with the prevailingly racist views of Dr. King in my peer group. Two months after Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam,” in April 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed. Two months later, in June 1968, Bobby Kennedy, Democratic candidate for president, was assassinated. My buddy Mark celebrated (“It’s about time somebody killed those Commies”) but other friends worried and wept. Tendrils of thinking multiplied in my mind as the conveyor belt of singularly-focused American bravado was collapsing.  

One Thursday evening in June 1969, I arrived home after my evening shift as cash register clerk at our local grocery store. My father stood in the doorway as I pulled up to our house, waving an envelope in his hand. The envelope was from my first-choice college and I yelped with pleasure as I read “Congratulations, you have been accepted….”  I’d been offered an escape route: admission with enough scholarship money that made it possible for me to attend. Weeks later, I watched Neil Armstrong emerge from the Eagle lunar module and proclaim another type of victory: “One giant step for mankind.” I was sure that a new conveyor belt was going to whisk me off to a different kind of future life.  

Two days ago, 

Sixty years after I wolfed down my first bagged burger,

Fifty years after the first Earth Day and the Kent State shootings,

Forty years after Ronald Reagan was elected president,  

Thirty years after the first McDonald’s opened in Russia,

Twenty years after 9/11, 

Ten years after Trump 1.0,  

One year after Trump 2.0,

I viewed another body-count ceremony on tarmac—six bodies arriving in dark caskets, greeted by uniformed soldiers. Trump received six dead American bodies, the first of Operation Epic Fury. USA was embroidered in fake gold stitching on the white fabric of his MAGA merchandise cap.

That same week, McDonald’s rolled out a new half-pound burger—the Big Arches. Impossible to digest. Yet, under the Golden Arches, the burgers keep selling. At massive rallies, some Americans keep counting, enthralled by bodies and burger bags interweaving.  

“And that’s the way it is.”