All war is not created equal: another YA novelist responds to 9/11.

   If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?
   But if I am only for myself, then what am I?
   And if not now, when?

  --Hillel, 1st century B.C.

Without a doubt, the year 1968 was a turning point for America. Two of my personal turning points happened that year, too. One was a day. The other was a book.

The day: October 15th. The first Vietnam moratorium. From coast to coast, Americans of all sizes, colors, and ages came together in vigils and demonstrations against a war that had come to defy explanation.

That evening, my parents and I joined a march that snaked along River Road in suburban Teaneck, NJ, culminating in a rally at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Seared in my mind is the image of hundreds--thousands!--of hands thrust skyward against the stars; second and third fingers split in a "V" peace sign. As my own hand joined theirs, I understood for the first time what it was like to be part of a righteous cause bigger than me.

The book: They Were Expendable. It could not have been many days after the October 15th moratorium that I discovered this forgotten volume on the family bookshelf. I was the kid who read cereal boxes when there was nothing else around. Nothing else was around. So I picked it up.

They Were Expendable is reporter W.L. White's 1942 account of an American torpedo boat squadron in the Philippines during the dark months after Pearl Harbor. The military situation was hopeless. These unarmored vessels were outflanked, outmanned, and outgunned. But the squadron fought on heroically.

At the book's outset, White recounts a conversation with one of the squadron's few survivors:

   'You don't understand, [Mr. White],' said the young naval officer.
   'We were expendable.'

   I admitted I didn't understand.

   'Well, it's like this. Suppose you're a sergeant
   machine-gunner, and your army is
   retreating and the enemy advancing. The
   captain takes you to a machine gun covering
   the road. 'You're to stay here and hold
   this position,' he tells you. 'For how long,
   you ask?' 'Never mind,' he answers, 'just
   hold it.' Then you know you're expendable.... They
   are expending you and that
   machine gun to get time. They don't expect
   to see either one again.'

   You know the situation--that those few
   minutes gained are worth the life of a man
   to your army. So you don't mind it until you
   come [home], where people waste hours
   and days and sometimes weeks, when
   you've seen your friends give their lives to
   save minutes. (White, pp. 1-2)

They Were Expendable made a big impression on me. When I finished it, I understood for the first time how the unity of purpose needed to stop an unjust war is just as crucial to fight a righteous war ... on the home front as well as the battlefield.

Fast forward to Friday, September 14th, 2001. Cut to the opposite coast.

Three days earlier, I'd awakened in Los Angeles to news of the strike on the first World Trade Center tower. Instantly, I telephoned my not-so-young-anymore dad at his Manhattan office, five blocks south of the WTC. We were naive enough to assume it had been a terrible accident, shared our sorrow, and hung up.

You know what happened next. My father was lucky. He made it home. But Cherie (Bennett, my wife and co-author) and I are but one degree of separation from five victims.

That Friday, at the end of a surreal work-week, Cherie and I left our office at Warner Brothers and headed home via Ventura Boulevard, the San Fernando Valley's main drag. We'd earlier received the mass e-mail asking us to join others in public places that night as a memorial to the 9/11 victims. We hadn't thought much of it. I mean, we get mass e-mails all the time, just like everyone else.

Imagine our shock to find, in perhaps the most disconnected locale in urban America, thousands of people lining the boulevard. Many were middle and high school students, and many had their fingers split in the familiar "V."

I had the weirdest deja vu.

But these kids' "V" didn't hearken back to my "V" of 1968. Their antecedent, whether they knew it or not, was Winston Churchill's "V" in 1940. My "V" had been a call for peace. Theirs was a call to arms.

   Violence is no option!
   Increase the peace!
   No more war!

Pro-social messages like these are not confined to school hallway posters. Recent YA fiction features a slew of titles that make real the hell of violence and war. From much of Chris Crutcher's work to John Ritter's Over the Wall to Gary Paulsen's Soldier Heart to Dean Hughes' Soldier Boys ...

I'm sure you can think of a dozen others.

On an individual level, the messages are sound. Shots fired by Person A at person B are as lethal as shots fired by Person B at Person A. At the level of a single soldier, war is hell. But what happened on 9/11 isn't about individuals. It's about an assault aimed at the social and moral glue of our nation.

Is it time to update the message?

In prep for this piece, I contacted my friend Diana Tixier Herald, a 2002 ALA "Best Books for Young Adults" committee member and keeper of the outstanding YA Web site, www.genrefluent.com (I love it for its no-pulled-punches teen reviews of ALA-nominated titles). Here was my question:

   Diana: Are there any recent YA novels that
   you know of that look at military service to
   America or another nation as a positive
   (and sometimes even a necessity), or that
   posit favorably any alternative response to
   violence other than a pacific one?

Diana volunteered to post this question on YALSA-bks, the popular listserv for teachers, librarians, and other YA lit professionals (www.genrefluent.com tells how to subscribe).

She got two--count 'em, two--responses, which seems to underscore my notion about the thematic thrust of recent YA fiction. Both mentioned a title not really on point. However, Diana and your KLIATT editors recommended M.E. Kerr's Slap Your Sides (HarperCollins, 2001).

Set in rural Pennsylvania during WW II, Kerr's narrator is Jubal, age 14. Jubal's older brother, Bud, gets drafted in late 1942. A practicing Quaker, Bud refuses to serve on pacifist grounds. He's sent to a government labor camp and then to work at a mental institution. At home, the family faces opprobrium and even vandalism, especially when other kids start coming home in flag-draped coffins.

Jubal shares his brother's pacifist stance. However, when Jubal is confronted by immediate violence against a loved one, he doesn't hesitate to use force to defend her. Then he's wracked with doubt about whether he did the right thing.

I like this book a lot. But it still seems to me like Jubal's moral agony is a little misplaced. More on this, later.

Cherie and I write about a different sort of moral agony in Anne Frank and Me (Penguin, Putnam, 2001, adapted from our 1997 Dramatic Publishing Company play). It's the story of a Jewish teen girl, Nicole Bernhardt, living in Nazi-occupied Paris. Since her family is both French and privileged, it faces no immediate threat. (Fact: ultimately, about 10% of native French Jewry perished in the Holocaust, compared with more than 40% of France's refugee Jews.)

Nonetheless, Nicole's father, a well-known doctor, joins an armed Resistance cell in the autumn of 1942. The military impact of his unit is negligible. They are outflanked, outmanned, and hopelessly outgunned. There was also the Nazi policy of reprisals against hostages to consider.

Dr. Bernhardt's wife, Renee, challenges his decision:

   "What happens when your bombs go off
   and kill some Nazis, eh? There are
   reprisals ... For every Nazi you kill, they will
   shoot one hundred Jews."

   "They will shoot one hundred Jews anyway,
   Renee. And one hundred more, and
   one hundred more, until there are no more
   Jews." ...

   "Do you not see the lunacy of this?"

   Nicole watched her father's shoulders sag.
   For a long moment, he didn't speak. Then,
   finally, he said, "In a war, many things happen
   which do not make perfect sense,
   Renee. Perhaps I am foolish. But I must do
   it."

   (Bennett and Gottesfeld, pp. 148-149)

Dr. Bernhardt's decision places at risk not only his own life, but also that of his family, for a cause bigger than any of them. Ultimately, Nicole also becomes a Resistant--not with a gun, but with pen and paper. The outcome, on the individual level, is tragic: none of the Bernhardt family survives the war. But because of how they live, and how they die, the world is made better.

It's funny. I didn't realize until right this moment how much W.L. White influenced our own novel.

Just like the Navy sailors of They Were Expendable, Nicole and Dr. Bernhardt accept that they too are expendable. What breaks their hearts is when the majority of their countrymen simply muddle through the Occupation. Writing of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Anne Frank's protector, Miep Gies said in her 1987 memoir, "There had been just two types of Dutch people: those who collaborated, and those who resisted." In other words, doing nothing is a kind of collaboration, too.

Nicole and Dr. Bernhardt would say, "Bien stir!" Of course.

Let me make my position clear: Every book I cite in this article is a worthy piece of literature. In the pre-September 11th world, I honestly never contemplated a downside to kids reading novels whose sole point of view on conflict is anti-violence, anti-anger, even pacifist.

But, tragically, September 11th was as big a turning point for our students as my two personal turning points of 1968. Even if we are fortunate and they do not have to become soldiers, they certainly could be the equivalent of passengers on a future United Flight 93, being urged by Todd Beamer and company: "Let's roll."

God forbid they should refuse on pacifist grounds, influenced by their literature.

Wait a sec.

That's too easy. Were they aboard Flight 93, I am confident that every author I've cited would urge our students to take the fight to the terrorists. In fact, they'd lead the charge to the cockpit. (Knowing Mssrs. Crutcher and Ritter personally, and having met the rugged Mr. Paulsen, woe be to the opposition.)

But the situation is not always so simple as Flight 93, or the crime of violence that Jubal thwarts in Slap Your Sides. Sometimes it is much closer to the choice faced by Dr. Bernhardt in Anne Frank and Me, or that faced by our nation in the aftermath of 9/11.

My preference is always for non-violence. But it makes sense to me that we also have the courage to teach and write that some causes--the current war against global terror among them--are worth fighting for; that force can liberate as well as subjugate, and that violence is not always wrong.

Kids are smart, and they care passionately about these issues. I know they're smart because we got the most amazing emails about 9/11 from our readers ([e-mail]; we answer all reader mail personally). I know they care because we passed hundreds of them on Ventura Boulevard.

When we educators and authors explain in the classroom and posit in our literature that all war is not created equal, we respect our students' hearts and minds. In return, they will respect us for appreciating their capacity to understand.

I close my eyes now, and visualize the "V" of River Road, 1968. It melts into the "V" of Ventura Boulevard, 2001, and back again. I see nothing inconsistent: one "V" was right for one time, one "V' for another. To paraphrase the great Jewish scholar, Hillel:

   When our nation is directly attacked and
   our way of life is threatened, if we are not
   for ourselves, who will be for us?

   But if we are only for ourselves, what are
   we?

   And if not now, when?

Jeff Gottesfeld, with Cherie Bennett, is the author of Anne Frank and Me (Penguin, Putnam, 2001), an IRA-CBC 2002 "Children's Choice" award winner. They are part of the inaugural writing team for the WB television drama, Smallville. For more information: www.cheriebennett.com