The Owl Eyes in World War Two
Aaron Sharp | October 27, 2021
This column originally appeared in the Odessa American newspaper October 22, 2017. It appears here by permission of the newspaper. The text of this column appears as it originally did 4 years ago, but I have taken the liberty of adding some clarifications, and adjusting numbers as necessary.
I feel like questions kids ask could be a regular column topic for me, like maybe even a monthly feature where I talk about the questions my kids ask and how pathetically bad I am at answering them most of the time. Over the course of the average day, numerous questions are directed my way, which I answer with varying degrees of success.
Sometimes the questions are easy, or you think they are until you try to answer them. For instance, I love history, and especially World War Two, so I took the six-year-old Zoologist and the four-year-old Cowgirl to a World War II air show. It was great. I loved it, they loved it, we all had a good time, and it gave me a chance to talk to them a little bit about what the world used to be like for their great-grandparents. We had a wide-ranging conversation about good and evil, race and racism, inventions, and a host of other topics. A few days later the Zoologist wanted to clarify a few things with me. First, he asked some questions about the Owl Eyes (how he says Allies). Second, he asked me a few questions about the Axis powers who fought the Owl Eyes. He then asked me, “What is an axis, dad? And why did they call those countries that?” I thought I knew the answer until I tried to explain it to him. By the time I was through stammering and stuttering I wasn’t sure that I knew what it meant anymore. I literally had to Google it on my phone to make sure I was in the right neighborhood of the definition. Even then I was thinking to myself, “There is no way a first-grader is understanding my explanation.”
A few days after the Axis and Owl Eyes incident I was dropping the girls off at preschool and the Cowgirl decided it was question speed round time as we were about to pull into the parking lot.
The following exchange took place in about 15 seconds.
Cowgirl: What are those girls in that car eating?
Me: I don’t know.
Cowgirl: Why was that truck going so fast?
Me: I don’t know.
Cowgirl: What do you know?
Me: Not much, apparently.
Cowgirl: Why aren’t we turning?
Me: Because there is oncoming traffic, and I do not want to die.
At this point I think she actually asked a couple more questions, but I started twitching as I pulled into a parking spot.
Now I’ve got to go read up on the Owl Eyes strategy on D-Day. I’ll probably get asked about it by the end of the day.