Farewell to an old friend

A couple months back I posted about an article I was working on regarding my grandfather and his good friend, Ed Cassidy. The two were longtime friends, served in World War 2, and later purchased a piece of lakefront property together in Andover, NH. In the mid-1950s they helped each other build a pair of summer cottages on the land that still stand today. I've been going there every summer since I was a kid, just like my mother before me, and now my two daughters are enjoying the quiet peace of the lake, too.

There they are at right--Don Teschek, my grandfather (left), and Cassidy, right, standing on a beach in Leyte during World War 2.

Well, two things have transpired since then:

1). I finished the story and it was accepted for publication at The Andover (NH) Beacon. Part 1 ran last month and part 2 is due out soon.

2). Ed Cassidy, my primary source for the article, passed away today at age 93. He was living in La Mirada, CA, at the time. He will be cremated and his ashes flown out for internment in a cemetery in Andover, NH, alongside his wife, Kay. The Greatest Generation has lost another.

It's a sad day for me, though I'm glad I had the opportunity to sit down with Ed for a couple interviews and get the piece written. As a kid I thought of Ed as the nice old guy who lived in the cottage next door. As I grew older and learned what the War was all about, my respect and admiration for him grew steadily deeper. While he wasn't an infantryman in the thick of combat, his story and the sights he saw were pretty darned amazing. He also taught me more about my grandfather than I ever knew, for which I am eternally grateful.

Anyhow, a couple people expressed interest in reading the article, so I'm including the text of Part 1, below. Part 2 to follow.

I'll miss you, Ed.

---

ANDOVER — From the firestorm of the Pacific Theater to the quiet shores of Highland Lake, Ed Cassidy and Donald Teschek lived a life of hardship and sacrifice, good friendship, and shared memories. Although Teschek passed away 25 years ago, their unique relationship lives on in a piece of lakefront property that three generations of family continue to cherish as a treasured summer retreat.

A single, tree-shaded driveway serves as the lone access to a pair of cottages that the two men built in 1954-55. Beyond the paired structures, a sloping, grassy hillside leads to a shared beach below.

Somewhere in between is an invisible property line that neither side seems to care too much about. The fact that no one can say exactly where the land is divided is proof of an enduring bond between the two World War 2 veterans, and a unique, good-natured relationship between their families.

“We used to say, if we got mad at each other, they [Cassidys] weren’t going to let us down the driveway, and I said that they weren’t going to use the water,” jokes Eleanor Teschek, 84, Don’s widow. “We have a saying, ‘If you get the Cassidys, you get the Tescheks—we come together.’ It’s just kind of always been that way.”

Work and the call of war
The friendship of Ed and Don began in 1938. Cassidy, a reconciler in the accounts department at Employers' Group Insurance Company in Boston, had been on the job for a year and was asked to provide training for Teschek, a new recruit. The two also became quite friendly with Bob Williams, another Employer’s Group colleague who worked in the same department.

The three hard-working young men poured their energy into their careers and set their sights on making a good living. They took classes three nights in week at Bentley College after work, often getting home after 10 p.m. They paid their tuition and expenses out of their own pocket. But they also managed to find time to hang out and enjoy each other’s company.

“The three of us spent a lot of time together, camping, going to Canada,” says Cassidy. “We were all single then.” Cassidy got married in June 1941, and he and Williams later transferred to another office, but the trio remained good friends.

But their personal and professional lives would soon be interrupted by the drum roll of war. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Eleanor, then a high school senior, was stunned along with the rest of the country.

“We had no TV and I can still remember President Roosevelt and his words over the radio, ‘Today the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor,’ she says. “We were all shocked.”

Not long after in early 1942 Cassidy and Don Teschek were alerted by the draft. The three men knew that it was only a matter of time before they’d be drafted, so in order to avoid a poor assignment they enlisted. On a Saturday morning Cassidy and Williams took the air force pilot written examination and passed. But when they got called in for the physical, Cassidy flunked the eye test (he had 20/30 vision in one eye).

“I told them I worked at night, so they told me to rest up, try again in a couple weeks. I even went to a specialist, but it didn’t help,” Cassidy says.

Cassidy later tried to enlist in civilian pilot training under jurisdiction of the army but was again denied entrance. Shortly thereafter he was drafted into service as an air force quartermaster in the fifth air force, reporting to Fort Dix in New Jersey. His 100-man unit was responsible for feeding and supplying 10,000 troops, so there was no downtime. In fact, in three years in the service Cassidy says he had only 10 days off on a short furlough back to the states.

In April of 1942 Teschek reported to Fort Devens with the 14th Anti-Aircraft Command. Williams meanwhile became a pilot of a B-25 bomber.

In the thick of conflict
In 1943 Cassidy left from San Francisco on a ship to Australia. Teschek’s unit was assigned to New Zealand and he saw action there and on Guadalcanal. After Australia Cassidy went on to New Guinea, following the ladder as U.S. forces fought and regained Japanese-held territory in the Philippines. Though he was serving as a quartermaster behind the lines, combat was swirling all around him.

“We were lucky, in the type of outfit we were in, we were sort of in back of what was going on,” Cassidy recalls.

But sometimes the action drew close. The Japanese frequently attempted to get at the U.S. supply lines and ships in the harbors of the Philippine islands. On New Guinea, Cassidy says that the Japanese bombers would come in every night at 11:30 p.m. for a bombing run. “You could almost set your clock by it,” he says. “That’s what they were after, the harbor and all the ships there.”

During the day, Japanese fighter planes flew in low and fast on strafing runs. “They had a lot of Zeroes, very fast and maneuverable,” Cassidy says. “You might shoot at them, but they were going so fast and so low, the chances of hitting them were rather remote.”


Teschek kept a copy of The Guadalcanal Herald and Examiner that showed that the U.S. was winning the battle in the air. The June 21, 1943 issue recaps a battle for air supremacy over the island in which the Japanese suffered 94 planes destroyed, 17 of which were knocked down by anti-aircraft guns. In comparison only six U.S. planes were lost.

Cassidy recalls seeing a number of heavily damaged U.S. planes limping back to the runway during these hard-fought days in the Pacific. “I’d see fighter planes half shot-up, you wondered how they could fly,” Cassidy recalls. “The planes that we made were not as manueverable as the Japanese planes, but our planes were made to protect the pilot, the Japanese planes were not. So those planes would take a hell of a lot of punishment.”

An unlikely reunion
Cassidy’s next stop was the East Indies where the U.S. forces staged for the invasion of Leyte. When he got to Leyte Cassidy wrote home and asked his wife, Kay, and his family to see if they could find out where Teschek was stationed. “I had an idea he was in the Pacific, but I didn’t know where,” he recalls.

With their aid Cassidy tracked down Teschek’s APO number (a number used by the army for mailing purposes). It was 72, the same as Cassidy’s. “I figured there was a good chance he was in the area somewhere,” Cassidy says.

As it turns, out, Teschek was very close—barely a mile away, in fact. One sunny day Cassidy strode up to Teschek’s tent and tapped him on the shoulder. It was a highly improbable reunion of two friends, who—thousands of miles from home and in the midst of the largest war the world had ever seen—were now standing face-to-face on an island in the midst of the war-torn Pacific ocean.

“It was just a case of walking over to his tent,” Cassidy says. “We went in such diverse directions, and ended up in the Phillipines side by side, how did that happen?”

Being an Air Force quartermaster, if there was any good food around, Cassidy had it. He recalls that his unit used to give the pilots ice cream powder and get the finished product in return. “They [pilots] had the machines to make it, and they’d give us ice cream,” he says.

Cassidy helped set up Teschek with some decent food, which the latter never forgot in the years after the war. “He used to walk over to our area and eat in our mess hall at night,” Cassidy says. “If there was anything good we got it, one way or another, either legitimately or by swapping.”


Cassidy also found out that Bob Williams (pictured, above) was on the nearby island of Luzon. Excited by the news, he wrote his friend a letter urging him to fly on over. “I wrote to him and told him, ‘Don and I are on Leyte, right on an airstrip, so fly down and we’ll get together.’”

But Cassidy’s letter came back with a bitter message: Williams had been killed in action. He had crashed on takeoff with a load of bombs.

Teschek and Cassidy were too busy to dwell on their grief, however. Japanese planes were buzzing the harbor and attacking ships. Cassidy remembers one attack that struck a nearby ammunition dump and hearing the huge roar of an explosion. On another night, just as dusk fell, some Japanese cargo planes came in low over his outfit and paratroopers began to bail out overhead. It was an elite outfit, armed and equipped with the best supplies the Japanese army had, and they were intent on taking a nearby airstrip.

Armed with a carbine, Cassidy spent the night hunched in a foxhole with a friend from New York. The man wore glasses which were knocked off in the scramble, leaving him near blind and helpless.

“I had to nursemaid him through the night,” Cassidy recalls. “He always said I saved his life, but all I did was be a seeing eye dog for him.”

Later that night U.S. infantry moved in and worked for several days to roust out and kill the attacking troops.

The war reaches its conclusion
During Teschek’s tour in Leyte he eventually found time to engage in one of his favorite pastimes—gardening. An article in the Employer’s Group newspaper picked up the story and reported it back home. “He moved them in cans from island to island so they had fresh vegetables,” says Eleanor. “He loved gardening.” It was an activity he would continue in the years after war.

Meanwhile Cassidy went on to Luzon, Okinawa, and then finally to Japan. En route to mainland Japan he stopped on the island of Fukuoka and it was there that got a first-hand look at the zealotry of the Japanese defenders.

In a bombed out aircraft factory where his unit was staged, Cassidy recalled seeing a long pool of water used to test Kamikaze boats. The boats were made out of very thin wood and were intended to be driven by a single soldier or civilian. The noses of the boats were loaded with explosives.

“They were really getting for invasion and they would do anything they could to stop our boats from coming in,” Cassidy says. “That was going to be the name of that game.”

Okinawa was another memorable experience for Cassidy. The invasion of the island was in full swing, and as his ship approached the island he awoke to the sound of attacking Japanese planes and antiaircraft guns pounding away at them. U.S. planes were dropping bombs on the island and ships fired their big deck guns on the dug-in Japanese soldiers ceaselessly.

“The Japanese had orders not to surrender and they didn’t. That was one of our worst invasions—we lost a lot of men,” Cassidy recalls. “That’s why the veterans look at dropping the atom bomb as saving thousands and thousands of Americans that would have been killed in an invasion of Japan.”

After the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan finally called for an end to the war, surrendering Japanese officials passed through Okinawa where Cassidy was still stationed on August 20, 1945. “That was a special night I won’t forget,” he says.

Cassidy also served briefly on mainland Japan. On the way to Tokyo he passed through the wreckage of Hiroshima, site of the first atomic bomb blast. “If you looked out, everything was flat, there was no recognizable structure,” he recalls.

In December of 1945 Cassidy left Japan to come back home, arriving home in early January. Teschek had beaten him home by a few months. Of his 40 months of service time, Teschek spent 33 in the southwest pacific. For his service in New Caledonia, New Zealand, Guadalcanal, the Northern Solomons, and the Philippines, he earned four bronze combat stars, the Good Conduct Medal, and the Philippine Liberation ribbon.

Part two includes life back on the homefront and building the cottages.

Cimmerian sighting: Karl Edward Wagner's contributions to the horror genre

Horror fiction has held a universal appeal throughout the ages. Every culture has had its myths of demons and ghosts and were-beasts. If Stephen King is read by millions today, so did Victorian readers line up in the streets to buy the latest chapters of the penny-dreadfuls, and eighteenth century readers shivered beside their candles over the pages of the newest Gothic novel. People like to be frightened, whether by a movie or a book or just a good spooky story told by firelight.

—Karl Edward Wagner, Introduction to The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series X

There are many reasons to admire the horror anthology, among them the strong argument that horror fiction works best in the short form. There’s something to be said for the slowly simmering terror of novels like Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, but the nasty, bloodletting jabs and hard, short, terrifying hooks of Stephen King’s “The Boogeyman” and Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd” are just plain icy fun.

In addition, I’ve always admired the utility of the anthology, which serves to gather the best material from a daunting range of publications and publish it in one place, saving readers an enormous amount of time and effort (and money) from having to track it all down.

Though my collection of The Year’s Best Horror Stories is incomplete, I have enough volumes on my bookshelf to state that the late Karl Edward Wagner did some fine work during his time at the helm. KEW took over editorship of The Year’s Best Horror Stories in 1979, starting with series VIII. He remained as its editor for 15 issues until his death in 1994, when the anthology ceased its run with series XXII. Though he loved swords and sorcery, KEW had an obvious passion and erudite eye for horror as well.

KEW’s great enthusiasm for the genre was apparent from his introductions to The Year’s Best Horror Stories. In a pre-internet age, KEW provided a comprehensive overview of the year in horror publishing, from large magazines like Amazing and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, to small but evocatively-named small press outfits like Nyctalops, Cryptoc, Skullduggery, and Ogre. Horror was exploding in the late 70’s and early 80’s and KEW served as a shrewd and tireless surveyor of a broad, diverse field of anthologies, large circulation magazines, semi-pro publications, and the amateur press. Like the late Steve Tompkins, KEW was exceedingly well-read, almost disturbingly so.

KEW was quite outspoken and wasn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers—or even extend a few middle fingers—in his introductions to The Year’s Best Horror Stories. In the introduction to 1993’s Series XXI—KEW’s and the series’ second-to-last entry—he fired a wicked shot across the bow of splatterpunk, a movement in the horror field that began in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Splatterpunk works were noted for their graphic violence and sex, which was initially shocking but soon grew repetitive, tiring, and empty. Said KEW:

Sexual themes are now being used intelligently and are crucial to the story, as opposed to the teenage wish-fulfillment jerk-off exercises too often seen before. I have often wondered how many of the exuberant sex-and-gore writers are actually virgins and are incapable of cutting up a chicken or cleaning a fish. Or peeling a potato.

Ouch, that drew a little blood.

Like all anthologies, The Year’s Best Horror Stories was not perfect. More than once after finishing a story my reaction was, “Surely there must have been something more worthy of inclusion from 1982 than that.” But it’s a matter of taste, I suppose, and I’ve yet to read an anthology of short stories in which I enjoyed every entry. And the majority of entries in The Year’s Best Horror Stories were good.

In addition to his work as editor, KEW could pen a fine horror tale of his own. Although fellow blogger Al Harron very eloquently stole my thunder, I too would like to take a moment to recognize his fine tale “Sticks,” as well as mention a few of his other tales.

“Sticks” won an August Derleth Award from The British Fantasy Society as the best short fiction of 1974. It’s a deeply disquieting story, rendered even more so as it is based on a true account.

KEW obviously drew inspiration for “Sticks” from Lovecraft, whose works he deeply admired. “Sticks” contains an old but still active cult, cyclopean structures from an ancient age, and an evocation to awake the “Great Old Ones” from the earth. It even takes place in the heart of Lovecraft’s Arkham country, with references throughout to upstate New York, New Hampshire, and western Massachusetts. This is my neck of the woods and I always experience a thrill knowing that I’ve wandered some of the same streets and hills from Lovecraft’s and KEW’s tales. While this area is certainly far more developed than it was in the 1920s and 30’s (or the 1940s-1970s period described in “Sticks”), there’s enough wooded and desolate patches around to get you thinking that, yes, perhaps, something old and unspeakably evil may still lurk in these ‘here woods.

“Sticks” was inexplicably passed over for inclusion in The Year’s Best Horror Stories (it would have qualified for Series III, back when Richard Davis was editing the anthology), but has been widely published elsewhere. It first saw publication in the March 1974 issue of Whispers magazine. Since then it’s made appearances in the revised edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and The Mammoth Book of Zombies (its inclusion in the latter is a bit of a head-scratcher—a lich, though undead, ain’t a zombie), as well as the first Whispers anthology, which I own.

The landmark horror collection Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley, contains another fine KEW horror story, “Where The Summer Ends.” It bears some resemblance to “Sticks,” but instead of arcane bundles of tree branches, the disquieting motif is a heavy growth of kudzu, a climbing, coiling, pestilential vine that’s become a nuisance in the southern United States. Wagner set this story in a run-down section of his native Knoxville, Tennessee, where in between shabby, run-down Victorian houses and an abandoned ghetto a lurking fear threatens to overwhelm the cracked and broken sidewalks, “a green pall over the dismal ruin, the relentless tide of kudzu.” Beneath the vines, something even more evil waits, watching.

I own two additional books containing works by KEW, including Whispers III, edited by Stuart David Schiff, which includes “The River of Night’s Dreaming.” In this tale of madness and dark eroticism, KEW draws inspiration from Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow, a book which also impressed Lovecraft. It’s a beautifully written and powerfully evocative story of dreamlike, hallucinating horror.

Night Visions: Dead Image, edited by Charles L. Grant, features works by David Morrell, Joseph Payne Brennan, and KEW. It contains three tales by Wagner: “Shrapnel,” “Old Loves,” and “Blue Lady, Come Back.” Dead Image also includes a wonderful introduction by Grant which casts a good deal of illumination on KEW the writer and The Man:

By now, it’s a tired comparison—“he looks like a Viking having a holiday in Carolina.” Maybe he does. But he’s not as big as he looks—he gives the illusion of size, carried the illusion of intimidation, but to hear him speak is to hear a quiet man who tends to consider his words before they’re out, who knows the field, and who cares about it and the writers who are trying to make their marks before they’re smothered by the competition.

He is the creator of Kane, my favorite barbarian because he is a barbarian and not a Lancelot (or worse, Gawain) in furs; and he is the author of not enough short fiction for any of his fans’ tastes. He does not write fast. He does not, on the other hand, write slowly either. He writes deliberately. There are few who care about the language as much as Wagner does, fewer still who care, or even realize, that dark fantasy must deal first with people, and only then with whatever fantastic element is to be included in the piece … there is thunder, to be sure, and there is also a delicacy of touch and genuine emotion that is particularly, and specially, his.

Like Al, I highly recommend that readers of The Cimmerian and The Silver Key track down a copy of “Sticks,” “The River of Night’s Dreaming,” and KEWs other work in the horror field. And while you’re at it, hunt up some back issues of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, too. Hours of chilling reading await, courtesy of the late, great KEW.

May he rest in peace in a quiet grave.

The scariest movie you've ever seen? Cast your vote

I'm one of those people who compulsively votes on polls when I find them on the internet so I've been throwing a few up here on The Silver Key. The latest is over to the left and is pretty self-explanatory. It's October and Halloween is creeping up, so I'm starting to get the horror film itch again.

If you selected "other," please post the name of your scariest film here in the comments section, and explain the reason why the film scared you or left you unsettled. If I haven't seen it, I'll add it to my Netflix queue.

Cimmerian sighting: Reveling in the slaughter of Agincourt

Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt (2009, HarperCollins Publishers) does not tell the story of a battle, but rather of a terrible red butchery. Englishmen poleaxing French men-at-arms like cattle. Nobles, men of dignity and fine lineage and status, lying kicking in the mud, screaming, as low-born archers pried open their visors and thrust daggers through their eyes and into their brain. Gruesome stuff.

True, Agincourt was a great victory for the English in the Hundred Years’ War, one that has resounded through the ages. The events of October 25, 1415 are an incredible tale of a few (6,000 English soldiers) prevailing against many (an estimated 30,000 French knights and men-at-arms). The battle has gained additional resonance by Shakespeare’s magnificent play Henry V. But its actual events were not glorious.

In other words, it’s a tale that historical fiction writer extraordinaire Bernard Cornwell was born to tell. And tell the story he does, quite faithfully and well, although it does come off as a bit formulaic.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site .

Wherein I win swag, and get to ask Steven Pressfield a question

Now this is cool. Author and overall cool guy Scott Oden of Echoes of a Forgotten Age recently held a contest that involved readers posting a writing-related question for historical fiction novelist Steven Pressfield. Oden selected the three best questions to forward to Pressfield and plans to post his answers on his blog.

How awesome is that? This is Steven-freaking Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire, one of the best pieces of historical fiction I've ever read (if you haven't read this tale of the legendary stand of 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, what the hell are you waiting for?) I'm thrilled to say that my question was one of the three selected!

As if the opportunity to ask Pressfield a question wasn't award enough, I'll also be getting a "bag o' swag" containing a copy of Pressfield's non-fiction treatise on writing, The War of Art, as well as another unnamed goodie. I have been meaning to buy The War of Art for quite some time and I'll certainly be reviewing it here.

Thanks Scott, I tip my horsehair-crested Spartan helmet to you.

A trifecta of links

Cross-posted fromThe Cimmerian, here's some interesting links from around the web.

The second issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is out. The guys over at HFQ put out a very enjoyable first issue, and they're back with three more short stories and two poems (love that!) for issue no. 2. It's free, so what are you waiting for? Go on over and do some reading.

A review of the Tantor Media audiobook, The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian . Hey, the author really seems to really know his REH :). Seriously though, SFFaudio.com, a cool Web site that you should be checking out, allowed me to post a review on their web site. I'll be very happy if it brings a few more REH readers into the fold.

How to Arm a 14th Century Knight. Great video and very instructive, if you like this sort of thing. I'm in the midst of reading Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell and had my interest in armor piqued. It's a good read so far, but I'm not sure whether I buy Cornwell's assertion that a longbow--even firing a bodkin-tipped arrow--could penetrate that type of protection with ease.

A Prayer for Owen Meany—A review

While my reading tastes are heavily weighted toward fantasy, horror, history, and military non-fiction, one cannot subsist on a diet of magic, mayhem, and combat alone. At least I can’t, which means that I occasionally dip into other genres as well.

John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989, Ballantine Books) had been on my to-read list for some time. Now that I’ve completed it, I’m very glad I made the effort. At first I debated reviewing it here on The Silver Key, which is dedicated to “all things fun and fantastic.” But a few things led me, in the end, to do so: 1) It concerns miracles, so it kind of fits; 2) It’s a great book and worth talking about; and 3) This is my own ill-defined blog and therefore have license to write about what I want to :).

I typically treat the books I’m reading with zealous care. But since my copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany came pre-beat up and creased (I bought it for pennies at a church fair), I took the rare, luxurious, and lazy opportunity to dog-ear those pages that I thought contained a memorable passage or were otherwise worth returning to or writing about. By the end of A Prayer for Owen Meany I had bent the corners of more than a dozen, and could have marred many more, but I started feeling badly about the wanton damage I was inflicting. It really is a great book.

A Prayer for Owen Meany tells the story of two classmates and good friends growing up in the late 1950s/60s in the small New Hampshire town of Gravesend. It’s told from the viewpoint of John Wheelwright, a smart but self-conscious kid struggling with his identity and trying to find his way. Wheelwright grows up not knowing who his father is, and when his mother dies early in the book from a tragic accident he’s left parentless and drifting, in the care of his grandmother and stepfather. He vows to discover his biological dad’s true identity. Both in a literal and spiritual sense, it’s a trip to find his (and the) father.

But the main character of the book is Meany. He’s a precocious, diminutive boy-genius with an oddly high-pitched voice (Irving uses a CAPS LOCK style to convey his dialogue). And he’s not just physically different, but morally and spiritually special as well. Meany is convinced that he is God’s instrument and believes he knows the date and details of his own death. Because of his faith and his precognition, he’s blessed with a wisdom far beyond his years, and he knows that his life has a purpose and a meaning. He does not fear the end. His favorite passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me the most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.

Meany’s charisma and ability to unsettle with his spiritual insights invites comparisons with Christ, though in other ways he remains firmly grounded, an out of place kid struggling with odd parents, girls, a demanding job in a granite quarry, and the difficulties of academic life. In short, he’s a wonderfully drawn and memorable character.

Through Meany, Irving explores the nature of religious faith, which ultimately requires that we put ourselves in the hands of a higher power, one we cannot see with our own eyes on this earth. It’s a hard thing to embrace. “Faith based on evidence is no faith at all,” Meany explains. And also: “Faith takes practice.” Wheelwright constantly struggles with his own faith, but Meany makes him a believer.

In addition to its spiritual themes, A Prayer for Owen Meany is firmly a “baby boomer” novel. Irving uses it to explore the grand events of that generation, including the sweeping optimism surrounding the election of John F. Kennedy, JFK’s subsequent fall from grace (his rumored affair with Marilyn Monroe), and his eventual assassination. Of central importance to the novel is the Vietnam War. Wheelwright is a bitter, dyed-in-the-wool liberal who loses his faith in America due to the war and eventually flees to Canada to evade the draft. Though Meany is also skeptical of our ultimate objective, he accepts his duty to his country and enlists, much to the dismay of his anti-war friends. Later in his life (Owen Meany is told through a series of flashbacks), Wheelwright voices a similar disgust for the presidency of Ronald Regan and that administration’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.

The carnage of Vietnam and Kennedy’s unfortunate fall represented a loss of innocence for the U.S. Framed by these larger events, Wheelwright and Meany suffer the smaller but equally poignant losses of their childhood, including the death of loved ones, and the revelation that their idols and role-models—parents, teachers, priests, even Presidents—are deeply flawed, weak, fraudulent, and all too human. But the miracle of Meany’s life gives us hope that something better awaits in the hereafter.