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Show preparing for war. The possibility of war, then, was the ordinary in my military childhood. Bomb shelters sat in backyards next to tire swings, memorials marking the graves of sunken ships dotted the view from our front lawn, and explosion devices were hidden in the speed bumps we crossed on our way home. No landscape existed outside the military one, its signage, its threats, the sanctity of shiny surfaces and the chain of command. In the quiet evenings, when we walked, a Hawaiian sun sinking behind the mountains, Vietnam and the late Cold War never seemed remote. My father, home from work, would swing me on the roots of the banyan tree, my legs scratched by the bark and sore from holding on. We would collect monkey pods and stink pods, pull plumeria blossoms from the trees, hide treasures in the weeds, and run along concrete pedestals of a hospital that had been bombed to its foundations. A year after the bomb shelter incident, the same two boys trapped me in the bushes that ran next to my house, my back against the cool walls that usually kept me safe but now offered no protection. They blocked the only paths out and leaned in toward me demanding that I strip naked. A familiar echo. Cotton underwear at my knees, I stood in the red dirt, ants crawling over the tops of my feet, while they looked my body up and down, not touching or poking, though that fact barely mattered when measured against their gaze. Bearing into me, t-shirts smudged with Hawaiian clay, hair bound in sweaty clumps, their stance threatened violence and ensured I would not cry out, would not move, would only drop my pants. 47 |