Shadows of War

To my beloved grandson Markus:

Here is the continuation of our family chronicle I promised, picking up in the winter of 2014. It seems like only yesterday that this all took place — and yet the time before it seems buried further in the past than ancient Rome. So much has changed, and nearly all of it caused by the conflicts that erupted that year.

In the year 2014, the violent changes in the weather and climate began to take their toll on the world in ways that many had feared, but few had spoken of. Violence increased everywhere — in the cities, in the suburbs, even in farm country, where our family lived. But it was the violence between nations that came to dominate our thoughts and nightmares that year.

Our family had been one of the lucky ones. Like most of our neighbors, we had benefited greatly from the rising crop prices. Our corn was worth twice what it had been less than five years before, and the yields, due to the latest genetic advances, were practically three times as high per acre. Best of all, there were ready markets for anything we could grow.

Prices for nearly everything were shooting up fast, but we were still far ahead of the game, especially when compared to the people on the East and West Coasts. My parents had cut back quite a bit, but mostly on things that as a kid you hardly notice — eating out, new clothes, extras. For us, the fact that we couldn’t go see friends after school was probably the biggest impact. They cut back on the gas they used, though our four-year-old hybrid got what was considered decent mileage then. The real savings came with the fuel cell engines that had only just come out; we couldn’t afford one yet.

We saw on television and read on the Internet about what was going on in Europe and Asia. There were riots in Europe, but Asia seemed to be hit even harder. I remember downloading pictures for a class project that showed more than a hundred bodies floating in a narrow stream — or what looked like a narrow stream, since according to the caption it was really a road. The picture had been taken in China, of a flash flood in a village in a northwestern province. If I remember correctly it was particularly ironic, because the area hadn’t seen rain in several months. Then suddenly in two days there was a deluge, twenty-some inches inside forty-four hours.

What I didn’t know then, being only ten, was that China was in much worse shape than those pictures revealed. Their rice-growing regions in the north and east — for centuries the mainstay of the population — had been racked by devastating typhoons. The overcrowded population in the smog-filled cities near the coast was suffering tremendously. Unemployment was nearing 50 percent, a sharp contrast to just four or five years before, when China’s rapid industrialization had transformed the old Communist society into one of the most productive on earth. Every day there were food riots, though news of them got out only by chance. The Chinese were in free fall.

I doubt I would have understood all of that then, even if I’d known it. A ten-year-old’s world has very strict boundaries, and mine were at the edge of our farm. So when my older cousin Joshua — the man we call your uncle Josh — told the family he was leaving for Vietnam, it was as if he were going to outer space. In fact, I probably knew more about outer space and some of the planets there than I did about Vietnam, or even its neighbor China. But what happened in China and Southeast Asia, to Josh and to the people there, would affect our family greatly in the end, and the whole world. Ignorance, it turned out, was anything but bliss…