By Harry T. Cook

11/12/10

As wars and rumors of wars have been always with us, I can say that, never having
been given a choice about whether to have one, I was able to tolerate our longest
war best. It was the one that lasted about 45 years, roughly from 1945 to the early
1990s.

It was called the Cold War because neither the Soviets through their client countries
nor the U.S. deployed nuclear weapons during the wars in Korea and Vietnam — as
much as both sides must have been tempted from time to time to do. The strange
thing about the Cold War was our enemy. He was, as Walt Kelly’s Pogo said of the
human race on the first Earth Day, us. And more than once we all but shot ourselves
in our collective foot.

In that regard, I refer you to the 1966 slapstick movie “The Russians Are Coming,
the Russians Are Coming,” in which a Soviet submarine, with no hostile intent whatsoever,
is depicted as running aground on an island somewhere off the New England coast.
Its crew comes ashore and fans out to “borrow ‘bott’,” as the character played
by Alan Arkin says, to assist in freeing the sub marooned on a mud reef.

The results are hilarious, and the ending of the movie is a goofy parable of peace
on earth.

My favorite character in it is a hapless town cop played by Jonathon Winters who
repeatedly says with as much frustration as his pea brain can manage: “We gotta
get organized.” Had it been a real Soviet invasion, it would have succeeded because
the islanders, far from ever getting organized, turned their idiotic response into
a circus. They were their own worst enemy.

The Russians weren’t too swift, either. They were barely one step ahead of the chicken-with-their-heads-cut-off
islanders, as well as fewer in number. In a real war, the wise person would have
bet a dime or two on the Russians and nothing on the natives.

The islanders’ weapons in the movie war included an ancient motorcycle with a side
car, several fishing trawlers and a gaggle of rusting cars and trucks, farmers with
pitchforks, shotguns — and a horse. The Soviet submariners had their wits, their
threatening accents and, only at the end, their well-armed ship.

The film’s plot was helped along by a post-adolescent crush shared by a Soviet sailor
and a summer vacationer’s blond, teenaged daughter. Its denouement was the rescue
of a young boy who tried to climb to the steep roof of a church, the better to see
over a gathered crowd, and ended up hanging precariously from an eave. He is rescued
unhurt in a joint effort of Soviet submariners and islanders.

A flotilla of fishing vessels piloted by grateful villagers escorts the sub out
to sea. Air Force fighter planes, summoned by an island alarmist to kill the Russians,
turn away without firing — pilots scratching their heads in confusion — allowing
the Soviet craft to submerge unharmed and head back to its own waters.

Would that we could find, as the makers of “The Russians Are Coming” found, a cause
for even a moment’s humor in a seemingly endless war — the one we’ve been in now
for almost a decade out of fear of al-Qaeda, the Taliban and our own shadow.

I have this dream of a squad of U.S. Marines approaching an Afghan village, infantry
men and women wearing Mickey Mouse ears and waving white flags and bubble wands,
others pushing wheelbarrows full of fresh fruit. The risk would be no greater than
Jonathon Winters’ rabble of paranoid islanders defying the sub captain’s threat
to vaporize them and their village with the ship’s rocket gun.

Peace might break out amongst the floating soap bubbles. Afghan kids could sink
their teeth into juicy apples and beg to wear the Mickey Mouse ears. Totally nuts,
of course, but it’d be worth a try. Were the Pentagon to allow it, I would go to
Afghanistan myself, put on the ears, wave the white flag, make the bubbles appear
and pass out the apples.

In any case, the U.S. military needs to follow the example of the Soviet submarine:
disappear and go home.

But as the Jonathon Winters character said, and rightly so, “We gotta get organized.”