Donner started his last year of study at the local high school to get as many math and science courses as he could. By doing so he would graduate a year early. He’d already applied to study aeronautical engineering. Except for price inflation on food and some other goods the war was far away and out of his thoughts.
His fellow students avidly discussed each new bit of news from the battlefield. But when they asked Donner what he thought he usually said, “You know I don’t follow it too much, it will eventually be over and to be honest, I don’t think anything will be settled. I’m more interested in graduating and getting my pilot license. Maybe by then, the war will be over, and we won’t have to speculate. The only thing I’m sure of is that this war will lead to another.”
Donner’s response usually led the questioner to doubt Donner’s patriotism, but it wasn’t as much a lack of patriotism as it was a mature and well-developed realism. Donner knew history as well as his beloved aeronautics. And he knew the nation-state had not existed in the past and no doubt would cease to exist in the future.
What would continue to exist were the men and women that made up that state. Though young he had already learned that a person’s life is well spent providing for others not in the mass but in the particular.
The war ended as Donner was starting his last semester of high school. The US after rebuilding its air and space assets launched a massive assault on the Turkish-Japanese coalition stopping just short of complete annihilation of the opposing forces. It then offered terms of surrender that the Turks and Japanese had no choice but to accept.
Just as Donner had said the war settled nothing, the US was still the reigning superpower after the war as before and the Turks and Japanese still faced the same resource and security problems that they had gone to war to solve. Much destruction and the lives of almost fifty thousand people were the only clear outcomes of the war.
Donner got his pilot license and graduated high school with honors. He was well prepared to study engineering and pursue his love of flying.
After his graduation party, Donner and his dad talked.
“Dad, do you think the world will ever learn that war isn't the answer to its problems?”
“No, Donner I don't, as long as people are as imperfect as they are. And they are not going to change in this world, maybe the next, but not in this one that's for sure.”
“Those that don't want to fight have nowhere to go to avoid conflict.”
“That's true. Except maybe the Mars colonists. They may be far enough from this system of things to avoid the machinations of the world. The moon though is too close.”
“I'd like to go to Mars someday,” said Donner.
“I would too,” said his dad.
THE END
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