Christmas, 1983

A Larry story about getting caught in a lie while in Beirut, care packages for the troops, and the spirit of Christmas.

Hi! I originally published this Christmas story in 2020, which means the majority of situation normies haven’t had a chance to read this one. It’s a Larry story—my favorite genre. If you’re not familiar with the stories I tell about my dad, Larry, you can read one about the time he tried to talk the Sultan of Oman into hosting my Bar Mitzvah, and how that irreverent request set in motion a joke that pissed off Bob Hope. Or, you can check out my dad’s bio here. Spoiler alert: he was the world’s best sound man. While some parts of this story are specific to 2020, I’m sharing it today because I think it’s still relevant, sadly.

OK, so this story takes place in 1983, around Christmas time. I was six, Allison was four.

One day, Dad announced that he was going to Beirut on a USO show with Bob Hope. Lebanon was in the middle of a civil war, and U.S. Marines were on the ground in Beirut. There were important geopolitical considerations here about empire, ideology, power, humanity, and the absurdity of “peace-keeping” with heavy artillery, but none of that was a priority for Dad. He was a sound man. He was Bob Hope’s sound man. Beginning in the late 1960s, Dad was a regular on Bob Hope’s crew, traveling to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and various classified locations to entertain the troops.

“Are you crazy?” Mom asked. “You can’t go to Beirut. You could get killed.”

“Linda, it’s perfectly safe,” Dad said. “I’ll be with Bob the whole time, and we’ll be surrounded by Marines. Very safe.”

Mom didn’t like the sound of that. In October, the Marine barracks in Beirut had been bombed. Nearly 300 people had been killed. Mom called Dad’s boss, a producer named Sil, who also happened to be my godfather.

“Don’t worry, Linda, they promised we aren’t going ashore,” Sil said. “I’ll make sure Larry gets home safe because if he doesn’t, my wife will kill me. Besides, Bob is getting too old for the crazy stuff.”

Mom knew all about the “crazy stuff.” Back in the day, they’d schedule shows at big U.S. bases, far from the fighting. But once they were “in theater,” they’d go anywhere they were needed, which meant they’d chopper into some firebase and put on a show while the war raged all around them. Picture Apocalypse Now, but with really corny jokes.

“Listen, Sil, I don’t care what kind of shit you guys did when Larry was single. That was before we got married, before Michael and Allison were born. He’s a father now, and if you think I’m raising these kids alone because he got killed in Beirut, you’re meshuga.”

“Linda, I swear, Larry will be perfectly safe.”

“You’re staying on the ship?” Mom asked.

“Yes, we’re staying on the ship,” Sil promised.

“He’ll call everyday.”

“Everyday,” Sil promised.

Turned out, Dad didn’t call everyday. But not for lack of trying. The Navy puts the best communications gear on its ships, but it captains those ships with people who do things by the book, and the book says, you don’t let civilians phone home from a war zone. Not that Mom had read the Navy’s book. Everyday Dad was gone, she’d worry, watch the news, then worry some more.

Then came Christmas morning. Our phone began ringing off the hook. Friends and family called, and they all asked the same thing. Have you seen the paper yet?

On the front page of the paper, there was a story about Bob Hope entertaining the troops in Beirut. There was also a photo of Bob Hope, some other people, and Dad going ashore in Beirut. Dad was busted, but half a world away, he just didn’t know it yet.

A few days later, the USO team jumped on a military transport plane and flew home. They landed at an airbase near Los Angeles. Their families gathered to meet them.

Dad came bounding off the plane, smiling from ear to ear. He was excited to see us, but I think the smile was also the residual high he always got from doing a show. In any case, we hugged and kissed Dad on the tarmac. Then he noticed that Mom was furious.

“Linda, what’s wrong?” Dad asked.

“You said you weren’t going ashore,” Mom said.

Dad didn’t lie, but he didn’t come clean either.

“It made the front page of the paper, Larry. There’s a picture of you and Bob Hope in fucking Beirut.”

“Oh…”

Dad looked down at us. He had a sheepish smile on his face, the same expression he made whenever Mom caught him sneaking cookies from the cookie jar.

“Kids, go play on the plane,” Dad said.

Allison and I raced toward the plane, where a tired Air Force crew let us play in the cargo hold. Mom yelled at Dad, and Dad explained that while neither he nor Sil had broken their promise to her, the same couldn’t be said for the U.S. military. It was total bullshit. But what did it matter? The show went great. Dad was home safe.

Over the years, Dad retold this story hundreds of times. Whenever he got to the part about Mom catching him in a lie, he’d grin a giant shit-eating grin. Mom would egg him on, telling whoever happened to be listening to Dad’s story that she couldn’t believe “the shit he pulled,” adding that she must be “crazy” for marrying him.

That was Christmas for the Estrin family in 1983, but like the saying goes, past is prologue. NBC aired Bob Hope’s Christmas in Beirut the following year. I don’t recommend it, but you can watch the show on YouTube, here, here, here, and here. Over the next two decades, Dad would go on to do dozens more Bob Hope shows, often at Christmas time, often in dangerous places. Dad always came home safe, and Mom always worried about the “crazy shit” he promised never to do.

I think about my dad everyday, but around Christmas I think a lot about his work with the USO. I’m proud of him, proud that he would go to such great lengths to bring a little holiday joy to those who serve our country.

This year, Christina and I had the opportunity to honor the spirit of my dad’s USO work by sending care packages to soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. We jammed treats, snacks, personal hygiene products, books, and holiday messages into U.S. mail boxes and shipped our care packages off to a war zone.

It felt great to send a soldier a box of holiday joy. Really great. But as I packed the boxes, I couldn’t tell if the idea of deploying joy was a good Christmas story, or a rotten one.

I’m an agnostic Jew, so what do I know about Christmas? But I’m also a human being, and so I ought to know that no matter how much joy we send to the troops overseas, the best Christmas is one they spend safe at home with their loved ones.

Here’s where I part company with my dad. He saw his USO work as part of his civic duty. He was right about that. But I take a more expansive view of civic duty. We The People are supposed to decide matters of war and peace. It says so in our Constitution. Congress has the power to declare war, although every Congress in my lifetime has moved gladly delegated that power. Congress also has the power to spend money, but again every Congress in my lifetime has glanced at the bills for our wars and decided to keep writing blank checks.

While a dysfunctional Congress explains our war machine, political dysfunction doesn’t relieve us of our moral responsibility. That’s the thing about our democracy—when we make war, the blood is always on our hands, whether we’re hawks, doves, or simply unquestioning consumers of whatever bounty those wars bring.

If We The People don’t get serious about making peace, we aren’t truly supporting our troops, no matter how many care packages we send, or how often we thank them for their service. Just as important, our failure to make peace means we aren’t living up to the democracy our service members have sworn an oath to defend.

I’ve marched against war. I’ve bored / annoyed / enraged anyone who would listen to my little soap box speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Every election cycle, I scan the field for genuine peace candidates. But elected officials who have the courage to take lonely stands against America’s war juggernaut are rare. War is bipartisan, although each hawk has their own motives.

Spoiler alert: none of my actions worked to stop, or even disrupt the march of war. The U.S. anti-war constituency is at turns disorganized, atrophied, and half-assed. We mean well, we really do, but when it comes to WAR!, the doves are the Washington Generals, and the hawks are the Harlem Globetrotters.

We’ve been at war half my life. And for the other half of my life, we’ve had intermittent wars, conflicts, military actions, peace-keeping operations, and countless other euphemisms for the wars we fight. Here’s another picture of my dad working on another Bob Hope USO show, in another war, during another Christmas.

America has fought a lot of wars throughout its history, and Christmas has been part of the American war experience since the very beginning. George Washington crossed the Delaware river on Christmas night in order launch a surprise attack against Hessian mercenaries and British soldiers who were hungover from their Christmas celebrations. A couple years later, Washington and his army spent a miserable, cold, and deadly Christmas at Valley Forge.

Afghanistan is the longest-running war in our nation’s history. Historians call Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.” Sometimes the media calls Afghanistan the “forgotten war,” but that only proves how unreliable our collective memory is. Korea used to be called “the forgotten war,” and it had its on “Christmas miracle.” It also had its own sitcom—MASH.

MASH ran for 11 seasons. They made multiple Christmas episodes, but the one that sticks with me is called “Death Takes a Holiday.” In the story, the surgeons work tirelessly to prolong the life of a dying patient so that his family won’t have to live with the trauma of losing a loved one on Christmas day. I’ve never been to war, and it’s just a TV show, but damn if the futility of that beautiful gesture doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the madness of war. Art is funny that way; you make up a story to reveal the truth about something.

Here’s a revealing poem from America’s war files.

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

I’m sure you recognize the line about peace on Earth, good-will to men. We say it every Christmas, although we rarely acknowledge its origin. The line is from a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem called “Christmas Bells.”

Longfellow wrote the poem in the middle of the Civil War, on Christmas Day 1863. His son was away from home, fighting for the Union army, and Longfellow was heartsick by the cruel juxtaposition of a holiday that celebrates peace coinciding with the madness of war. You might find that juxtaposition ironic. But as Stanley Kubrick demonstrated with just about every shot of his anti-war masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, the futility of war is its greatest irony. And just like a GIF, war is an endless loop.

Some of the soldiers who received our care packages are fighting a war that began before they were born, dodging bullets fired by men who were born into a war kicked off by their fathers and grandfathers.

Right now, a comedian—hopefully, one with better jokes than Bob Hope—is entertaining soldiers, trying to bring just a little of that Christmas spirit to Afghanistan. Hopefully, the sound person who booked the gig didn’t lie to their loved ones about the “crazy shit” they’re doing to make sure that holiday cheer can be heard over the sounds of bullets and bombs.

I hope the soldiers, the comedians, the crew, and everyone else gets home safe to their loved ones.

I hope you share my Christmas wish for Peace on Earth. Let’s say peace on Earth this Christmas. Let’s say it loud, so it can be heard over the fighting. Let’s keep saying it after Christmas. But most of all, let’s say it to hold ourselves accountable. We The People are making war, but this Christmas, let’s find the courage to make peace.