Shadows of an Afternoon

War is civilization’s rendezvous with the moral good. War is generational, and causes great collateral damage, invalidating any victory that might be achieved. Ares, son of Zeus and Hera, was a Greek Olympian who tinkered in war with all its distasteful aspects. When sifting through the dustbins of history, one may find it questionable if Ares was seeker or bungler when it came to the moral good. In a more recent era, Groucho Marx’s infamous cliché may be a better assessment of war as it applies to the moral good: “Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.” Shadows of an Afternoon, War and its Aftermath presents two geopolitical pieces of generational conflict. Part one, After Anzio, finds Corporal Darryl Asquith plunged into the North African and Italian theaters of World War II as a member of the 1st Armored Division (Old Ironsides). After surviving a retake of Dante’s Inferno near Anzio’s beachhead, Asquith happens upon the wreckage of Porta Maggiore, a hamlet near Rome. Here, he experiences the contradictions of war when he falls in love with an Italian woman who has survived the German occupation of her village. In part two of Shadows of an Afternoon, The Peter Pan, we find wounded Vietnam War veteran Eldon Berdette who had been thrust into this controversial war during the Tet Offensive of 1968—an offensive instrumental in causing the Southeast Asian campaign to fall bankrupt of its designed purpose. Berdette, now in civilian life, is suffering wounds that had not required gauze or splints; rather his wounds are from self-reproach in his failure to perform the duties expected of him on the battlefield. As he seeks help from the Veteran Administration, he tests the waters of love with a woman who has her own dragons to slay. The work is fiction based on real places and events.