Duty by Bob Greene

Author:Bob Greene
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2000-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Sometimes, when we went on family vacations when I was a child, I would hear my father and mother discussing whatever hotel in which we were staying, and commenting on whether it was “American Plan” or “European Plan.”

I didn’t know precisely what those two things meant—I still don’t—but from the way my parents talked about them, it was clear that the words referred to whether some of your meals came with the price of the room. When you’re a kid, though, you pick up certain messages underneath the words—and the message I got from the American Plan/European Plan conversations was that my father must be a pretty worldly fellow.

How else would he know these things—the hotel plan that was used in Europe, the hotel plan that was used in the United States? He had to have an awfully sophisticated understanding of the ways of the world—at least to the ears of his son, that’s the way it sounded.

And of course whatever worldliness he really did have—knowledge of the way things were done in Europe, knowledge of the way things were done in Africa—came almost entirely courtesy of a long trip that his employer, the United States Army, once sent him on.

It’s a little-noticed aspect of what happened to the men of my father’s generation and Tibbets’ generation—but they were boys who grew up during the Depression, when there was absolutely no hope of going on any kind of a long vacation anywhere, much less across the Atlantic Ocean. And then, because of history’s violent jog in the road, these small-town Depression boys were seeing places that even the most fabulously wealthy international travelers of previous generations never got to. These children of the Depression were—under the worst possible circumstances—cast to the most far-flung corners of the globe, to countries and cities that only a few years before they had been looking at on color-plate maps in their public-school geography books.

The man-made globes—the little globes, the ones that spun in the dens of American homes—must have looked so different to them when they got home from the war. Italy, Africa, Germany, France…Japan…these impossibly distant places were now a part of their lives forever. These young men had gotten out of town, all right—they had gotten about as far out of town as they ever might have dared to dream.

With a twist that even O. Henry might not have been able to come up with. See the world? You want to see the world, young man? All right, if you insist…

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