Remember how the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite ended every night for more than a year during the Iran Hostage Crisis citing the number of days the U.S. embassy personnel were held hostage by Iranian goons? Remember the 444 days?
Well, it’s been 16,658 days since a group of Iranian "students" stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 American embassy staff hostage…and kept 52 of them until Jan. 20, 1981 … and tonight the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) got 10-year-old me (and a lot of other Gen X'ers) some long awaited payback.
At age 10, I was aghast that students would kidnap bureaucrats for over a year.
And I was scandalized that after we kicked Carter to the curb, that Dutch Reagan never extracted a pound of flesh from the religious zealots who deposed the Shah and encouraged the "students."
Lots of people have told me that Vietnam was our national unhealed wound of my childhood. That may have been, but it was the wound of the generation just before me … Iran was the unhealed national wound for much of early Gen X … it was national disgrace and shame being broadcast into our living rooms every night at 5 p.m. for 444 days.
The Evacuation of Saigon was quickly replaced by Watergate in the news cycles of the early '70s, but Gen X’s first news event of note was the moon landing! We really didn’t know what it meant when old men shook their heads and muttered about losing a war for the first time…but we clearly understood that America had the closest thing to Star Trek, and that made us pretty awesome!
We were getting a Moon Hilton, we were sure of that much! (And Russia wasn’t).
I don’t know about anyone else my age, but I didn’t pay much attention to the news between Apollo and Nov. 4, 1979 … I tried to sit next to dad and wrap my head around Watergate. I knew the names of all the players (Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell, and Dean … what they say, is not what they mean) but I couldn’t grasp how it made Nixon a criminal (and still can’t).
Ford was weirdly invisible … then Squeaky Fromme propelled him to fame … then he disappeared again only to emerge in Vail after he lost to Carter.
Carter bored me to tears, I thought he was just as cringy as can be with his sweaters … then the Iran Hostage Crisis happened, and the botched rescue attempt … and I understood the national embarrassment that my grandfather and his friends had felt regarding the loss in Vietnam.
The Iran Hostage Crisis made me into a Republican despite all the best efforts of Laugh-in and Simon & Garfunkel to steer me left. But despite the fact that I thought Reagan was a total badass for getting them released so quickly, the matter always felt quite unresolved to me.
So tonight, as the IDF go to war against Iran … I think of Brian Wilson, and how we modified the Beach Boys song, “Barbara Ann” back in 1979 (bombbombbomb...bombbombIran), and say “Godspeed.”
Iran has had it coming for a long, long time!
And I pray for the people of Israel on this, the 16,658th day of the Iran Hostage Crisis.
Image: Wikimedia Commons, via Picryl // public domain