January 2011

“I looked down at my foot,” Joseph Merrill said, “and saw a white substance the size of a golf ball. As I watched, that golf ball expanded and took features: arms and a head. It was a woman. She passed through me and through my friend Harry. She turned and put her arm around Harry’s shoulder and kissed him on the forehead. Then she passed through the wall.”

Merrill, a dignified nonagenarian, was describing one of the seminal experiences that had confirmed his choice of religious faith. A president emeritus of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, he had served its cause for more than fifty years. He was a revered elder statesman at the 150th anniversary of the founding of modern spiritualism, an event that was held in March 1998 in the western New York village of Newark.

They are armed. They are dangerous. They are our children.

These sentiments sound chillingly up-to-date, as current as the latest suburban high school massacre or big-city gang killing. In fact, youth crime —and especially adult fear of youth crime—has been a perennial American concern. An apprentice rapes his master’s ten-year-old daughter in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. A son shoots his father and mother with a rifle on the Kentucky frontier. Street gangs terrorize neighborhoods in nineteenth-century New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. Indeed, though the word teenager is about sixty years old, and adolescent has been used in its current sense for about ninety-five years, Americans have been speaking of and fretting about “juvenile delinquents” for nearly two centuries.

Editor's Note: Riding on the current tide of alternate history as well as raising it, Putnam is publishing a new book, edited by Robert Cowley, called What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. Among other speculations, Victor Davis Hanson has Western culture strangled in its cradle by a Persian victory at Salamis, Geoffrey Parker charts the fortunes of a successful Armada, David McCullough follows the Battle of Long Island to the likely capture of George Washington, John Keegan shows how Hitler could have won the war with a drive on the Middle Eastern oil fields—and James M. McPherson gives Lee the final victory in the essay excerpted here.

People have been writing alternate history since at least the early nineteenth century, but for most of that time, it was a tiny sub-genre of popular fiction. Now it’s being produced in industrial quantities. If you use Amazon.com to browse books by category, you will find more than twenty best-selling titles, and the best website on alternate history, Uchronia, lists thousands. Many nations have produced it; one of the first was France (a novel written in the immediate aftermath of Waterloo celebrating a Napoleonic world-empire), and today the franchise has expanded to include British, German, Japanese, Swedish, Italian, Brazilian, Finnish, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and Spanish examples. Americans, however, write most of it.

In the summer of 1943 I was a 1st lieutenant serving in the station complement of Fort Bragg, an immense artillery post in North Carolina. Each day we had two Officers of the Day, a senior one from the field and a junior one from us peasants. At the end of our normal day’s duty we had to report to post headquarters to man the desk and phones until duty hours began the next morning. If all was quiet, the senior OD could take off for his quarters about 10:00 P.M. , leaving the post and the war in the hands of a single lieutenant. The quiet allowed the junior OD to undress down to his Skivvies, snuggle under a blanket on a folding cot in the office, and catch whatever sleep he could.

April 17, 1975, at 0100 hours, Utapao Air Base, Thailand. I’m a staff sergeant in the Air Force Security Police, supervising fifteen GIs and twenty-five Thais. Guardians of the night, we’re strategically posted throughout this sprawling air base, one of the last B-52 heavy-bomber ports in Southeast Asia.

I roll slowly past the shack guarding the entrance to the fenced storage area near the passenger terminal, returning the salute of the Thai guard. Headlights darkened, I maneuver my truck warily through the dark corridors of banded wooden shipping crates, on the lookout for thieves rifling the stacks of equipment.

My tour of the containment area complete, I circle back to the shack to exit. The guard motions for me to turn off my engine.

“Listen,” he says, pointing to the starless, overcast sky. “Not B-52.” Necks craned and eyes searching the gray morass overhead, we finally hear the faint drone of propeller-driven planes. He’s right; it’s not the familiar, reassuring roar of the eight-engine B-52 Stratofortress, the only sound that should be heard here at night.