My war gone by, I miss it so.

I had two childhoods as a boy. I lived in the day-to-day world of antidepressants and school fights and potential never quite lived-up-to and even would you believe it, little league for a year, wherein, being left-handed something fierce, I was repeatedly walked by pitchers who had trained with the strike zone occupying the space taken up by my buttocks, so it was kind of a wash.

In my other childhood, it was 1940. I can viscerally remember reading that Tobruk had fallen (21 January 1941), seeing the photograph of a captured Italian M13/40 ("self-propelled coffins", their crews called them) with the Australian Kangaroo painted on the side, rolling past a burning building on the perimeter of that fortified town. When the Germans recaptured it in late 1942, I recall the shock, the very physical shock, of British (actually South African) troops surrendering something they had fought so hard for. (200 officers and other ranks of the elite Coldstream Guards refused to surrender, formed a fighting column, and broke through enemy lines to rejoin the 8th Army, fighting a fierce defensive action on the Alamein line.) I didn't know much, if anything, about Churchill then; I had failed to notice his heroic qualities, his essential greatness, his moral courage and decency. (At Yalta, Stalin would joke of the need to summarily execute a few million Germans after the war. Roosevelt laughed. Churchill, sitting with them, the two most powerful men in the world, got up and walked out and would not return until Stalin apologized.) All I knew was that I was captured by this colossal moment in history, so much larger than myself or any single person who was caught up in it, swept away, consumed or spared. (The minutia grips me even now. I could still, if the need arose, vector a squadron of Spitfires into an attack position against encroaching German bombers. "Hello Hunter Leader, this is Top Hat Control. 100+ bandits twenty miles east of you, steering course two-seven-zero. Climb to angels two-zero, and watch out for snappers.")

It's all so much baggage.

In 1951, Winston Churchill look at Lord Moran and said, sadly, "I do grow so lonely without a war, don't you?"

I was never lonely with my war, my beloved war.