The Day I Thought We Had All Died

When World War III Came to Oklahoma

“This is it,” said Bill, pointing toward the sky. “We’re dead.”

He was being literal, and I believed him.

I turned eleven years old in August of 1984, a summer that has been called one of the greatest of all time for American cinema. Just a few of the movies that were released that summer include Ghostbusters, Karate Kid, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, The Natural, Purple Rain, Romancing the Stone, Revenge of the Nerds, The NeverEnding Story, The Last Starfighter, and many, many more.

Another film released that summer was Red Dawn. With films like Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable for a PG film, the MPAA introduced the PG13 rating. Red Dawn was the first film to receive the rating.

Truth be told I don’t think I saw Red Dawn that summer — by then we were becoming a “wait until it comes out on HBO or home video” family — but from seeing the trailer on television, I knew what it was about. A bunch of kids had somehow avoided capture during a Russian invasion of the United States and had retreated into the surrounding mountains where they hid and, eventually, began to fight back.

Red Dawn became a part of the culture. Even if you hadn’t seen it, you knew what it was about. Everybody was familiar with the final shot from the trailer, the one where one of the kids stands in defiance holding a rifle up in the air and shouting “WOLVERINES!” I’d seen every one of my friends reenact that scene — sometimes with a pellet gun but more often with a Trapper Keeper, lunch box, or VHS tape up in the air.

In the 1980s, I worried about World War III a lot. It was the Reagan era, and it felt like every day we might get attacked by Russia. I’ll never forget the time I asked my sixth grade teacher about the possibility of being invaded by Russians, like what happened in Red Dawn. My teacher consoled me by explaining that we lived close enough to an Air Force base that we would most likely be the early target of a nuclear strike. It’s possible that the first wave of nuclear bombs might instantly vaporize us, but if it didn’t, the radiation poisoning would kill us all in a matter of days.

Sweet dreams, sixth-grade me!

So, back to Bill and the end of the world.

Bill was a few years older than I was, the son of one of my mom’s friends. I don’t remember much about him; then again in the 80s, two kids didn’t need to have a lot in common to play together. As a kid, every time I went to McDonald’s friendships were formed on the playground that felt like they would last a lifetime when in reality, if I was lucky, lasted the duration of a meal. As for me and Bill, I’m sure our moms collectively said “go outside and play,” and so we did.

Located directly behind my house was a large creek. The creek was 10’ deep and 20’ across. It was filled with weeds and rocks and overgrown nature. The creek was an overflow that started over a mile away at a local lake and ended a block away from my house, underneath a bridge. Every summer my friends and I caught crawdads and snakes down in the creek and in the winter we would see how far we could walk on the ice before it cracked and someone fell in. The creek might as well have been on another planet. No adult ever entered the creek. Kids played there. Kids ran it.

As Bill and I were exploring the creek, a strong wind blew in. Instantly, the sun changed from its normal yellow to a deep red. I’d never seen anything like it before.

That’s when Bill explained to me that the only possible explanation was that there had been a nuclear explosion.

World War III had begun.

My gut reaction was to exit the creek and go check on our mothers who were, after all, sitting in my house roughly a hundred yards from where we were in the creek. That, Bill explained, was ill advised. The blast had probably leveled my entire neighborhood — maybe even the entire city. The only reason the two of us had survived was because we had been down in the creek, below the surface.

The science checked out.

At the age of eleven, I possessed the following skills: I was good at most Atari 2600 games, and not bad at BASIC programming — both super useful in a future without electricity. I was also good at building bicycle ramps and okay at drawing spaceships and robots.

Oh, you meant survival skills? Oh, yeah — none. Literally, zero. By the age of eleven I had been fishing exactly once. My uncle had taken me wading into a different creek a few years prior and somehow I became convinced that Jaws was going to get me, at which point I climbed my uncle like a tree and spent the rest of the outing perched on top of his head like a bad toupee. Even if Bill and I had access to a fishing pole or some other way to catch a fish in the creek, I wouldn’t have eaten one. The only seafood I would eat at that age was fish sticks.

My life expectancy after surviving a nuclear war would have been however long it takes for a person to die without eating or drinking. When I suggested there was a convenience store half a mile from my house, Bill said maybe the radiation would blow over in a day or two and we could make the trip then.

I tried to imagine what waiting two days to eat would feel like. Also, why the two of us thought the convenient store might still be standing, I have no idea.

The gravity of the situation began to take its toll on me. My entire collection of Star Wars figures? Melted into oblivion. All my video games? Destroyed. My books, my cassettes, my bicycle? Vaporized.

Oh, and everybody I knew or had ever met in my entire like, except for Bill, had just been wiped from the earth. There was that.

There was no time to cry. Starting now, it was just the two of us. Bill, and me. As Bill trekked further down the creek, I picked up a stick I found, held it up in the air, and shouted at the top of my lungs.

“WOLVERINES!”

As I tried to process all that had changed, I hadn’t noticed that the Oklahoma wind that had blown the red dirt up into the sky turning the sun red had now blown it away. The sky faded back from red to the normal blue. Oh, how I had missed the color blue!

In a snap, the world was back! My video games, my computer, my toys — my house!

Oh, and everybody I knew and had ever met was back, too.

As for Bill, I think the most I got from him was a shrug. To this day I don’t whether or not he actually believed what he had been telling me. Did he really think there had been a nuclear war, or was he just messing with the mind of a younger kid? Who knows. What I can tell you is that for a few minutes that day, I thought the world had changed.

I thought I was a Wolverine.