Flashbacks: A Deeper Look Into the Past

In arguing that it is too soon to dismiss the 1980s as over, or to give the decade a name, I treated some earlier decades frivolously, or tried to hide them under the rug.

Obviously, in these speeded-up times every decade has its highs and lows, its tragedies and its high jinks, and to label the 1920s the Jazz Age is to overlook some of that era’s more somber aspects.

I don’t apologize for looking backward through rose-colored glasses, but perhaps I should recognize some readers’ complaints.

M. L. Snellen of Vista points out that besides speak-easies, hip flasks, breach-of-promise suits, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Calvin Coolidge, the 1920s also had their mean and heroic events: Lindbergh’s flight, Leopold and Loeb, the Teapot Dome scandal, and the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

Snellen argues that the decade might have better been called the Prohibition Era than the Jazz Age, but he admits that that term “lacks flair.” It was Prohibition, I suspect, that gave the decade its tone of reckless license and produced bathtub gin, the flapper, the Charleston, and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

I was too young to enjoy the madcap pleasures of the Jazz Age, but old enough to feel the oppression of the 1930s, which I said were “better not talked about.” We tend to remember decades by those events that amuse or please us; thus, the “Gay ‘90s” bring Lillian Russell to mind, not the Spanish-American War; but I can’t remember anything joyful about the 1930s except for movies like “It Happened One Night” and “A Night at the Opera.”

Snellen points out that the ‘30s brought Pan American’s flights over the Pacific, Social Security was instituted, radio came of age, and Hoover (originally Boulder) Dam was built. Also, I must repeat, the Nazis came to power, and World War II began. Altogether, not a pleasant decade.

Patrick Flaherty of West Hollywood is justifiably wounded by my reference to the 1950s as “the fun ‘50s,” with “the hula hoop, tail fins, drive-ins and early rock ‘n’ roll,” but with no mention of the tragic Korean War.

One might wish to erase the Korean War from mind, along with its even more unpopular successor-- Vietnam; but Flaherty is right that a war that produced “54,246 dead, 103,284 wounded and 8,177 missing” (his figures) must not be forgotten.

“So it was a hot war that I remember,” Flaherty says, “and the men I lost (two of whom died in my arms) still haunt the sorry thing I call sleep. And so they will until I die.”

The places where they died, he says, are not even on modern maps of Korea. “No wonder, then, that Korea is now known as ‘the Forgotten War.’ No wonder we have no memorial in Washington. And no wonder a man who stormed a beach where ‘Uncommon valor was a common virtue’ fails to list Korea as a memorable event of the ‘50s. . . .”

Evidently he refers to my landing on Iwo Jima. I didn’t exactly storm that beach. I was deposited on it, very much against my better judgment.

Flaherty says, “Good for you that you weren’t recalled to fight in Korea, like so many men who were my seniors. Because if you had been--and lived to tell the tale--the word Korea would have appeared in your column today, as surely as the volcanic ash where your buddies died will forever live in your mind. . . .”

Without demeaning Flaherty and his nightmares, I’d like to forget both wars.

But I didn’t mean to degrade Korea, or to ignore the valor of Flaherty and those who fought and died there. They deserved to be welcomed home as heroes and they deserve to be remembered.

Being the way we are, though, I suspect that a lot more of us will remember tail fins, Elvis, and the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll than will remember such bloodied place names as Inchon, Chosin, Heartbreak and Porkchop.

As for the 1980s, there will be a lot of good things to remember and a lot of bad.

With luck, glasnost may prevail, and it will yet come to be known as the decade in which the unease of the nuclear stalemate subsided.

But let’s don’t be premature.