Allow me the temerity of paraphrasing the late tart-tongued Mother Teresa: there are no great stories, only small stories told with great attentiveness.
So I tell you a war story that has nothing to do with arrogance or fear or cash, the usual reasons we foment war. It has to do with a really lovely left-handed jump shot, the parabolic poem at the heart of the sweet, quicksilver, tumultuous, graceful, gracious sport of basketball.
It's about a boy I'll call Jimmy Ward. He was the shooting guard for our basketball team when we were boys just starting to be halting men. Point guards came and went on that team, forwards shuffled in and out, centers lumbered and plodded and were replaced by other massive slabs of meat, but Jimmy was eternal.
Jimmy played every minute, year after year, because Jimmy had the quickest, deadliest, loveliest jump shot anyone had ever seen, and even the most martinettish of coaches knew enough to leave him alone and let him happily terrorise defenses with his sharp-shooting.
He had divine range, and could drill that shot from anywhere. He was cat-quick, and could get his shot off against the grimmest of defenders. He had exquisite judgment and timing — he never took a bad shot, was liable to stunning hot streaks, and had the killer instinct granted to a few great players who understand exactly when a crucial score utterly deflates an opponent.
College scholarship offers piled up on the dining room table of his house. I remember Jimmy's father grinning as he riffled through the pile, reading the names of the colleges aloud in wonder. But Jimmy declined the glories of collegiate sport; he wanted to be a United States Marine, one of the few and the proud.
He joined the Marines the day after we graduated from high school. Several months later he was in a war. Two months after he joined the war both his hands were blown off by a mine.
Two years later he entered college, this time on an academic scholarship. Eventually he became a teacher, a profession he enjoys today, a few miles from where we were boys playing basketball. He coaches, too — the littlest kids, on the theory that if he can get them to run and pass and savor the looping geometry of the game, they'll have good hoop DNA when their bodies begin to rise.
He can't shoot, of course, can't