So why, as a generation, are we so drenched in adrenaline? What could explain the $3.4 billion that Pfizer made in 2004 by selling its antianxiety drug Zoloft? For the war virgins, the adrenal cortex should be an obsolete piece of biotechnology. Our lives are safe, pampered, and free from almost every kind of stress that troubled our ancestors. Perhaps, I often wondered during my treks to Dr. Ruth’s clinic, the human body will produce adrenaline regardless of the circumstances. And perhaps, without mortal danger, our adrenal glands get bored and start firing at random. It’s not so much a disorder as a malfunction—a trip to the mall becomes as fraught as a tiptoe through a minefield, a new job as terrifying as trench warfare.
There is, however, a more troubling explanation: that the adrenaline is coming from our subconscious. The war virgins, after all, know that our lifestyles can’t last: that our comfort and safety is unsustainable. At school, our teachers were the first to break the news—about the dwindling oil reserves; the leaking ozone layer; the Third World. Even rock stars, those icons of the short term, started lecturing us about starving Ethiopians and disappearing rain forests. Our parents, it seemed, had not thought things through. In fact, they’d really fucked up. Cheers Mum; thanks Dad. And so, as much as we enjoy our modern invincibility, we wait for it to end. We wait for the inevitable. Even war, we know, will eventually come—probably from those at the wrong end of the First World’s consumption binge. Technology will one day turn against us. The Moore’s Law that gave us cheap PCs, video games, and iPods will also make possible the homemade atomic bomb, detonated in Trafalgar Square.
The nineties, of course, were an attempt at denial. With our graffitied chunks of Berlin Wall on the mantelpiece, we stopped worrying about global politics. The Cold War was over and, as one of the most influential books of the decade said, it was The End of History. Our Greenpeace subscriptions lapsed; we bought luxury German SUVs. As for our unsustainable lifestyles, we convinced ourselves that the New Economy would solve everything. Oil? It was so Old Economy. We took jobs in advertising and marketing, and tortured ourselves with images of the nearly, but not quite, obtainable. We blamed our anxiety on money, or sex. We stopped thinking; we bought shares in dot-com companies; and we skimmed through the stories about missing suitcase-sized nukes and titillated ourselves instead with Bill Clinton, the intern, and the cigar. We were distracted, borderline delusional. But it wouldn’t last.
“It’s fight-or-flight,” Dr. Ruth told me during one of my hypochondriac workouts. “It’s also called the ‘acute stress response.’ You’re a journalist, you should look it up: Walter Cannon, born in Wisconsin in 1871, went to Harvard Medical School. He said animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system: in other words, with the release of epinephrine and norepineprhine from the medulla of the adrenal glands. So your muscles tighten, the heart rate increases, and blood vessels constrict. Young men used to need that on the battlefield, Christopher. And as much as your problems might seem, well, completely trivial, they are still causing the same animal fight-or-flight response. We call it an anxiety disorder. Which is why you come here so often. And why I tell you to take Zoloft.” The word “trivial,” I remember noting at the time, was emphasized rather too heavily.
My malfunctioning body, concluded Dr. Ruth, was permanently stuck in “flight” mode. It was telling me to empty my bowels, turn on my heels, and run as fast as possible: away from the West Village.
I was a clinical coward.
While we’re on the subject of war and virginity, I should probably tell you about my other granddad, on my mother’s side. Ross Selkirk Taylor was a smart and particular young man with black-rimmed spectacles and rather too much Brylcreem in his hair. His idea of a good time was a pack of full-strength Players, a date with my future grandmother Florence (or Flo, as he sometimes called her), and Tommy Dorsey on the record player. Unlike my father’s father, granddad Taylor had no problem gripping a rifle. And so, at the age of twenty-one, he was drafted into the Royal Army Service Corps and handed a rifle, six rounds of ammunition, and the keys to a three-ton Bedford truck. The first order given to 121357 Dvr. Ross Taylor was to drive to Boulogne, northern France, where he would help the British army fight off a German invasion—if one ever came. The date was February 1940. My grandfather had never been abroad before. That might explain the entry he made Saturday, March 2, in the brown leather Automobile Association diary that my grandmother had given him as a Christmas gift: “Not very impressed by France at present. Although it may get better.” He wrote this in pencil, being careful not to make a mistake or use up more than the square inch of space allocated to each day. France, of course, did not get better. It got a lot worse.
In the diary, Driver Taylor went on to disclose that he had tasted his first glass of champagne in France and was “confined to barracks” for smoking Players in the Bedford’s cab. In fact, Driver Taylor’s incarceration in the barracks was ended only by compassionate leave, when he was ordered home to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to visit his dying mother. “Doesn’t seem much hope for mother,” he wrote on the weekend of March 23, “said nothing to nobody though!” Two days later, my great-grandmother, Margaret Taylor, died from a kidney infection.
After returning to France, my grieving grandfather was cheered up by good weather and a football match with the French, which, against all the odds, the British won. He even spent a day at the Berck Plage seaside resort—later to became the subject of one of Sylvia Plath’s bleakest poems. Looking back, the day at the beach was a terrible omen. That night there was a terrifying air raid. Then, on May 15, Driver Taylor was ordered to drive southeast to pick up the 7th Battalion Royal West Kents, an infantry unit. That was when Hitler invaded. My grandfather and the West Kents were ordered to meet an advancing Nazi panzer division, head-on.
These were Driver Taylor’s diary entries after leaving the Boulogne barracks:
Saturday: Set off at 1.30am to proper hellhole. Found we were in front line. Machine gunned. Discovered we were surrounded all night. Enemy know nothing of us. Luckiest people on Earth to get out.
Sunday: What a morning. Expecting enemy to move in on us any minute. Retreat 3.30am, 20 miles back.
Monday: Moved up to Albert. Got blasted to hell. Captured in Afternoon. Rode on horseback to village.
Each diary entry, of course, tells only one square inch of the story. The West Kents had met the German army near the town of Albert, come under heavy fire, then retreated. It was then that my grandfather realized he’d never been shown how to fire his rifle and that its barrel was still full of grease. After being told by a commander that the Germans were moving backward, the West Kents motored forward again, only to run into an ambush in Albert’s village square. The square was famous for its church, which had been flattened by the Germans during World War I, leaving only a wobbly statue of the Madonna standing. The West Kents were standing near that statue, smoking cigarettes, when a German Messerschmitt fell out of the sky and started spitting out lead. My grandfather managed to stomp on the Bedford’s accelerator pedal before being hit. He swerved down a boulevard only to meet a German blockade with a machine gun in the middle of it. He threw himself out of the truck before the gun opened fire. Then he ran, eventually meeting up with three other surviving West Kents. The shell-shocked soldiers tried to hide in a line of French refugees, but with their British army uniforms and bloody faces, the French shooed them away. Later the Luftwaffe opened fire on the unarmed civilians anyway. The West Kents had nowhere to go, and soon enough my grandfather and his friends were captured.