Persian Gulf War

The Persian Gulf War is a recurring historical and economic reference point in the novel, linking the Birdsey family’s arguments about military service to the changing fortunes of eastern Connecticut. It appears first as an imagined danger and a source of local employment speculation, then through Dominick Birdsey’s encounter with reports of the bombing of Iraq, and finally against a longer account of the region’s transition from submarine manufacturing to casino development.

War, College, and the Family

Before the war, Ray Birdsey opposed paying for Dominick Birdsey and Thomas Birdsey to attend college. He argued that the family could not afford two tuition bills and distrusted colleges, which he associated with communism and drug use. He preferred work or military service, insisting that enlisted men had a choice while draftees were being sent to Vietnam. He also proposed jobs at Electric Boat, where submarine construction could provide both wages and deferments. His practical case joined household finances to defense production: building submarines, he argued, put food on the table and supported the military effort.

Ray’s position set the twins’ education within a larger conflict over what counted as security. For him, college was an expensive and suspect alternative to work, the Navy, or shipyard employment; for Ma, sending her sons to college mattered. When she challenged Ray at supper, his anger turned into a prolonged silent treatment. The war itself is not the cause of this family dispute, but the prospect of military service gives their disagreement immediate stakes.

Work and the Changing Regional Economy

In the summer of 1969, after their first year away at college, the twins found seasonal work with the Three Rivers Public Works Department. Jobs were scarce, and Ray’s connection with the superintendent helped them get hired. The work paid minimum wage and kept them out of the house during the day. This episode places the family’s choices alongside the region’s dependence on available local employment, rather than presenting college and military service as purely abstract options.

Later, Leo Blood voiced anxiety about the possibility that the Navy would cancel Seawolf contracts and Electric Boat would lay off workers. He connected that danger to the Persian Gulf situation, predicting that conflict could instead lead to more submarine production. He also pointed to the casino being built as a possible source of thousands of jobs. The conversation shows how the war’s uncertain course was read locally through competing economic forecasts: escalation might protect shipyard work, while cancellation could make a new industry increasingly important.

Iraq in the News

In a later scene, Dominick reads newspaper headlines while worried about Thomas’s safety and distrustful of the people responsible for his care. Among the headlines is a report on oil prices falling after the Gulf War. The news prompts him to question the human cost of killing for cheap oil, placing economic benefit and military violence beside one another rather than treating them as separate topics.

Another article describes the allied bombing campaign’s damage to Iraq’s infrastructure. Its account presents a society that had been highly urbanized and mechanized as reduced to precarious, degraded means of modern life. Dominick reads this alongside coverage of the beating of Rodney King and sees the front page as a repetition of force prevailing over the vulnerable. His response connects the war abroad to domestic violence without claiming that the events are identical: the newspaper’s juxtaposition makes power, injury, and the language of justification recur across different scales.

Aftermath and Local Transformation

The novel’s later account of eastern Connecticut places the war within a broader decline in defense-industry employment. In the post-Cold War era, Electric Boat has reduced its workforce to a fraction of its former size; the once-busy shipyard is remembered as a ghost yard. The account recalls that Dominick and Thomas had witnessed the launch of the Nautilus there as boys, giving the shipyard’s later contraction a personal as well as regional history.

At the same time, the Wequonnoc Moon Casino opened in September 1992 and grew into a vast resort that employed tens of thousands. Its expansion is described as central to hopes for economic revival, even as it had both supporters and detractors. The Wequonnoc Nation’s economic rise and the shipyard’s decline form a striking contrast: the Gulf War-era discussion of contracts and layoffs belongs to an economy organized around military production, while the later landscape is increasingly shaped by gaming and tourism. The war thus occupies more than a battlefield or headline; it helps illuminate how families and communities measure safety, work, and the uncertain promises of economic change.