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“We are not used to associating our private lives with
public events,” writes Susan Griffin. “Yet the histories of families cannot be
separated from the histories of nations.…
“There are so many strands to the story.… I begin to suspect
each strand goes out infinitely and touches everything, everyone. I am reminded
that nothing stands alone. Everything has something standing beside it. And the
two are really one.” (A Chorus of Stones)
Yes, you and I have observed history-in-the-making—sometimes
as bystanders and other times as the movers and shakers—and our personal
histories are intertwined with our world’s history.
When we include the historical settings of our stories, we
place ourselves into a bigger story, a story that includes our city, school,
religion, nation, ethnic culture, gender, industry, or profession.
When we link ourselves with the history that surrounded our lives,
we anchor our stories in time and place.
Our stories can make history come alive—they can make history
personal—for our readers.
Below is a module I wrote about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
(Do you remember what a module is? It’s a short account—in contrast to a
stand-alone story that has a beginning, a plot, and a conclusion. A module is
only part of a story. Read more at Modules Add Zing to Your Memoir.)
This module is still in rough draft form. I welcome your feedback.
Feel free to leave your response in the comments section below.
Cuban Missile
Crisis
Against a black
velvet autumn sky, the American Flag glowed brilliant, like diamonds and rubies
in the spotlight, but my tears blurred its radiance.
Our high school
band played The Star Spangled Banner while my friends and I stood, singing
along, in our football stadium. But I was choking on the words:
“O say, does that
star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of
the free and the home of the brave?”
It was Friday
evening, October 26, 1962. All I had ever known of being an American—and even
of being alive—hung in jeopardy.
Our nation
trembled at the forefront of the most dangerous point in recorded history:
America was engaged in a nuclear face-off with the Soviet Union.
From my earliest
childhood memories, our nation’s people had been gripped in fear over a
potential nuclear attack. Fallout shelters, and stocking them with survival
supplies, were common topics of discussion. Weekly, usually Wednesdays, every
community and school conducted air raid drills. When the siren screamed, we
students practiced hiding under our school desks until we got an all-clear
signal.
So now, in
October, 1962, it had come to this: On Sunday, October 14, US reconnaissance
flights revealed that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had installed nuclear
warheads in Cuba, just off the Florida coast.
From there,
Hiroshima-sized bombs could destroy American cities up to 1,550 miles
away—virtually all of the US’s southeast states and beyond—beyond Chicago,
beyond Kansas City, beyond Dallas.
Soviet missiles
could deliver three-megaton bombs to Washington, DC, within five minutes.
Not only America,
but the entire world, stood on the brink of nuclear war and, no doubt, World
War III. It would be annihilation. Armageddon.
By Wednesday,
October 17, the US had begun Operation ORTSAC (Cuban dictator Castro’s name
spelled backwards), with a mock invasion of Cuba carried out in nearby Puerto
Rico.
The next day, US
forces started mobilizing for an invasion of Cuba.
Friday, October
19, news agencies reported military activities in Florida. The 81st and 101st
Airborne were placed on alert.
In response, on
Monday, October 22, Nikita Khrushchev said he’d use nuclear weapons to thwart a
US invasion of Cuba, and he put Soviet forces in Cuba on alert in readiness for
a US paratrooper drop.
That same day,
President John F. Kennedy announced a naval blockade of Cuba.
The next day,
Tuesday, October 23, American F-8 Crusaders flew low-level reconnaissance
flights over Cuba and took close-up photos of Soviet missile sites.
Wednesday, Adlai
Stevenson, US Ambassador to the United Nations, put forward evidence of those
missiles.
US military
forces were ordered to the highest state of military readiness.
Friday, October
26, the day of our high school football game, US intelligence discovered
evidence of short-range nuclear missiles ready to target US forces invading
Cuba. Khrushchev was following through on the threat he had made a few days
earlier.
As children, we’d
been educated about the effects of a nuclear attack, but it was my junior high
science teacher, Mr. Serwald, who drove home raw truths in the event that we
never got that all-clear signal. As I recall, he said if our town came under
nuclear attack that within a certain radius, humans would be vaporized. A
little farther away from the blast, bodies would have all flesh burned off. A
little farther away, bodies would be covered with blisters. Any remaining
vegetation and water would be contaminated. The list of horrors went on and on.
Those images
filled my thoughts that night at the football field while I sobbed through The
Star Spangled Banner, eyes glued to the American Flag sparkling against the
night sky.
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