Sassy Learns About the Six Day War

Sassy tucked her feet under her and opened the latest copy of National Geographic. Marion had made her a deal on the day they bought her that record player—which had been a great idea, by the way. Marion said that if she was going to shell out cash for the machine, Sassy had to do something new as well. And since Sassy had decided on the record player, Marion chose Sassy’s assignment: a one-year subscription to the magazine. It worked out great, because either they listened to music together or Sassy passed along the latest magazine issue when she was done. Sometimes they did both. Sassy loved having Marion as a friend. She was the most intelligent woman she’d ever known, and her ideas were so smart. She knew so much. Sassy practically felt her mind opening up when Marion started out on a new topic.

The front cover of the December issue was a photo of a desolate scene somewhere in the Middle East, with veiled women balancing jugs on their heads and a man walking an overburdened donkey. She flipped to an article entitled ‘Where Jesus Walked’, intrigued. It wasn’t that she was particularly interested in Jesus, despite the fact that Christmas was closing in, but she’d learned a lot from the magazine that she’d never imagined before. So much going on in the world that she didn’t know. All of a sudden she was curious about where Jesus walked.

One of the articles she’d read in National Geographic had taught her about the Six Day War last June. She was so focused on Vietnam, she had missed hearing about that short but intense conflict. Sassy hadn’t known a thing about the Arab-Israeli conflict until she’d sunk into that issue, and she’d felt somewhat shaken afterward. In May, the article said, Egypt had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels, acting on false information from the Russians. Israel was already battling ongoing border attacks from Syrian-backed Palestinian guerillas, so the closure of the Straits of Tiran escalated everything. The vastly superior Israeli forces fired on Egyptian airfields, launched a ground offensive, and eventually occupied all of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and portions of Syria and Jordan. After only six days, the Arab countries withdrew their forces. Ten thousand Arab fighters and almost eight hundred Israeli fighters had been killed during those six days. Hundreds of thousands of people became refugees. In the end, Israel had doubled its territory by taking over those other countries.

The Vietnam war had been raging for a dozen years. Sassy could only imagine the number of people already killed over there. It’s almost over, the media liked to say, but she knew it was propaganda. So did everyone else. No one saw an end in sight. Not six days, not six years. This year actually made it twelve years.

Sassy brought the open magazine to her eyes so she could examine the photographs in the article more closely. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for at first, then she realized she was studying the soldiers’ faces, seeking Joey. Always looking for Joey. But Joey was so impossibly far away. She glanced at the bookshelf where she kept his stack of letters, held together by an elastic band. It wasn’t a big stack. She wanted to see it grow until the elastic threatened to snap. Because if it didn’t grow, that meant one of two things. Either he came home, or he did not.

Please come home, Joey.