World News from Waverly High

By Linda Kass

Editor’s Note: An excerpt from Linda’s Kass’s forthcoming novel (9/9/26), a YA/Adult crossover set in an urban high school during a singular moment in American history—as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable girl. —David Michael Slater

November 1969, “Give Peace a Chance”

Within a couple weeks, what begins to reach a boiling point is Vietnam. If I weren’t taking Current History and weren’t a Beacon editor, I wonder how informed I’d be about what’s going on in the world, given the bubble we live in here at Waverley. How caught up we are in who’s dating who or how well we scored on our last exam. But I’m reading Time magazine, and since it often lags behind, I’m watching the nightly news. Not much escapes me anymore. Right now, anti-war sentiment is anchored by nonviolent mass marches in Washington and San Francisco, with smaller demonstrations going on throughout the country. The majority are college-age kids wearing bell-bottom blue jeans with peacoats or old army field jackets.

In Washington, a new anti-war demonstration called the March Against Death began the evening of the thirteenth, a Thursday, and continued throughout that night and all the next day. Piecing together what took place from Walter Cronkite’s nightly reports and Time’s November 21 recap, I couldn’t help thinking how surreal it all was. People gathered at Arlington National Cemetery carrying devotional candles and signs with the names of dead US soldiers and destroyed Vietnamese towns. They marched, in single file and grouped by states, down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the front of the White House, and on to the west side of the Capitol. By Saturday, there were hundreds of thousands of people marching in Washington, for the second Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. Cronkite said it was the biggest turnout of its kind that Washington had ever seen, exceeding even the 1963 civil rights rally. Someone was quoted as saying it brought out a number equivalent to “two Woodstocks.” There were speakers like Coretta Scott King and George McGovern, but it was the rock and folk performers who galvanized demonstrators gathered across from the White House as Pete Seeger led the crowd in singing John Lennon’s latest, “Give Peace a Chance.”

Now, sitting in Current History, I wonder if my classmates are as prepared for this discussion as I am. Or feel as agitated as I do.

Mr. Gordon asks his typical opening question. “What history has been made this week, students?”

Uncharacteristically, I decide to open our discussion. “These death marches, all the protests . . . people want the war to stop.” I speak louder than usual and with some force. “This is a cause that people feel is morally defining. They . . . we want peace. But what is peace—a feeling, a memory, a thought? The world is crying.” My voice is high and cracking. I feel like crying myself and can’t go on. I must be getting my period; I suddenly feel embarrassed about my outburst.

The room is quiet as everyone is digesting my words, and my discomfort grows until Derrick steps in. “Mr. G., you’re a music devotee. It’s all in the music, man. Those songs tell our story. I mean, listen to this piece on Pete Seeger’s new album called ‘Bring Them Home.’ The words. They’re an explicit retort to this senseless war. I’ve played the song over and over. Makes me nuts. Every other line he repeats, ‘Bring them home, bring them home.’ The guy is saying we gotta get our boys outta Vietnam, return them home to their friends and families. Hey, there’s even a line in there saying the world needs teachers, books, and schools, another reason to bring ’em home. We should just talk about song lyrics in this class, Mr. G.”

I find myself nodding as I take in the depth of Derrick’s comment. I turn around to regard him and can’t help but feel admiration. It is all in the music. Something all of us, including Mr. Gordon, relate to. The soundtrack on the television reports about the mass marches going on around the country repeats the refrain in Lennon’s song as we keep suggesting, even insisting, that we give peace a chance.

I admit I spent the rest of that Monday in a daze. There’s this undercurrent of tension I’ve become more aware of, making it hard for me to concentrate on anything. At dinner, as I pick at the food on my plate, Nathan jabbers on about his latest chess win against his nemesis, Logan Perkins, a kid who acts like he’s the smartest at their junior high. “I could end up the school champ if I keep this streak up.” I listen to Nathan, stone-faced, then watch him fill his mouth with a large forkful of meatloaf.

Dad gives him an affirming nod and starts to say something at the same moment Mom asks me what’s on my mind: “Lena, you haven’t said anything through this whole dinner, and you’re not exactly eating either. Are you okay?”

Okay? My first instinct is to rehash the myriad things not okay in the world, far more important than Nathan’s chess prowess, but I hold my tongue. It’s not my family’s fault I feel like I do. “Yeah, I’m fine, just have stuff on my mind.” I try to perk up. “After I do my homework, let’s watch some TV. Red Skelton’s on at eight thirty. And we can’t miss The Doris Day Show, Mom. You love that.” The show’s theme song even inspired the mantra she uses whenever she doesn’t know how to respond to me: “Qué será, será.”

After I help clear the table, do some reading for American History, and write an essay for English, I go to the den and turn on the TV to CBS. Nathan joins me since we both get a kick out of the slapstick on The Red Skelton Hour. It opens with two alien moon men the color of pea soup performing comedic antics as the song “Màh-Nà-Mah-Nà” plays. Nathan is laughing so loudly, I’m having a hard time hearing, so I turn up the volume. After the opening song-and-dance routine, Skelton offers a monologue that drifts into these hilarious characters. Tonight is one of my personal favorites, Gertrude and Heathcliff, the two seagulls, which Skelton performs by crossing his eyes and sticking his thumbs into his armpits for wings. Next, he does a comedy sketch built around his signature character, Freddie the Freeloader, a drifter with a heart of gold.

“Freddie’s okay, but I really like Junior, the Mean Widdle Kid,” Nathan says. His laughter, which devolves into hiccups, has subsided, and he’s in a performative mood. “I mean, don’t you love his line, ‘If I dood it, I get a whippin’ . . . I dood it!” Nathan does such an accurate imitation that I tell him he might want to try acting if chess and bowling don’t work out.

As the Doris Day theme song opens for tonight’s episode, “Doris Strikes Out,” my mom walks in from the kitchen with her dishrag still in her hand. Did I mention she’s always wiping things up? She sops up the Doris Day story that she began watching last year. Day’s character, Doris Martin, is a widowed mother of two young sons whom she’s brought to her father’s rural ranch north of San Francisco after having lived in New York City for most of her adult life. This season, Doris begins to commute from the ranch to San Francisco, where she starts working as an executive secretary at Today’s World magazine. I’m wondering if my mother vicariously enjoys the idea of a woman working, quite out of the realm of most moms here in the Midwest.

A commercial promotes an upcoming 10:00 p.m. CBS Radio News special promising breaking coverage about the Vietnam War. I am all ears now. At this point, Nathan has gone to his room and my dad is lounging on the couch, his feet up on the coffee table.

“I’d like to listen to this special. I know it’s late, but can we tune in?”

My dad looks at me like I’m a Martian. “What’s with all the news you’ve been following? You’re supposed to be enjoying your teenage years.”

I haven’t exactly been forthcoming about the discussion of current events that’s been consuming me lately. And since both of my parents basically got screwed out of their normal teenage years, all they want for Sylvia, Nathan, and me is to have some kind of idealized American childhood. I sometimes think about where they were at my age. My dad was trying to fit in as an immigrant at a Columbus public high school right after arriving in the United States. Mom was somewhere in eastern Poland living under Soviet rule. Their early lives feel so unreal to me because all I’ve known is life here in the middle of America. If anything, they are the Martians.

It’s time that I bring them into my school life. “I’m taking an elective called Current History. The class assignment is to follow the news, Dad. Remember that PGA-tournament article you were reading from Time? I used that for my class. All kinds of current happenings from the news are what I need to bring to class discussions. That’s what we’re being graded on.” Using the schoolwork angle always works because of the less-than-subtle message in my house about getting top grades.

I notice the clock shows it’s ten o’clock and get up to turn on the radio. Mike Wallace, the host, warns listeners that the interview that follows describes violent events that took place in March 1968 at My Lai, a hamlet in Viet Cong–infested territory some 330 miles northeast of Saigon. He then introduces his guest, a Vietnam War veteran named Paul Meadlo.

Meadlo initially responds to Wallace’s basic questions with one-word answers. Wallace first wants to know how many were in Meadlo’s platoon. (There were about twenty.)

Wallace: “What had you been briefed to do when you got to Pinkville?”

Meadlo: “To search and to make sure that there weren’t no NVA in the village and expecting to fight—when we got there . . .”

Wallace: “To expect to fight?”

Meadlo: “To expect to fight.”

Wallace establishes that Meadlo and the group left in four choppers with five men in each and they landed next to the village. A Sergeant Mitchell was in charge of the squad. Meadlo indicates there was a man—Meadlo called him “a gook”—huddled in the shelter they approached. Wallace asks if he was of fighting age or an older man. Meadlo says he was an older man, but his superior, Mitchell, said to shoot him anyway, and they did. The squad got to the village, searched it, rounded up forty to forty-five people, and placed them in the center of the village: “And we placed them in there, and it was like a little island, right there in the center of the village, I’d say. And—”

Wallace: “What kind of people—men, women, children?”

Meadlo: “Men, women, children.”

Wallace: “Babies?”

Meadlo: “Babies. And we all huddled them up. We made them squat down, and Lieutenant Calley came over and said, ‘You know what to do with them, don’t you?’ And I said yes. So I took it for granted that he just wanted us to watch them. And he left, and came back about ten or fifteen minutes later and said, ‘How come you ain’t killed them yet?’ And I told him that I didn’t think you wanted us to kill them, that you just wanted us to guard them. He said, ‘No, I want them dead.’ So—”

Dad, Mom, and I sit like statues, our mouths open, not sure at first what we are hearing. It’s like we’re listening to a horror story, not a factual description of the pitiful war we’re conducting in Vietnam, with a devastation unfolding on national radio. And we’re only hearing now about something that happened nearly two years ago. I move closer to Mom on the couch. Our arms touch.

Meadlo: “[Calley] stepped back about ten, fifteen feet, and he started shooting them. And he told me to start shooting. So I started shooting. I poured about four clips into the group.”

Wallace asks about the gun. It was an M16. He asks about the number of bullets per clip. Meadlo explains he carried seventeen rounds to each clip.

Wallace: “So you fired something like sixty-seven shots—”

Next, as Meadlo answers one question after another, we learn that they gathered up more people; put them in a ravine; dropped hand grenades into the ravine; gathered more civilians, including babies; pushed them into the ravine; and continued shooting.

Wallace: “How many people would you imagine were killed that day?”

Meadlo: “I’d say about 370.”

After the details of this brutal massacre of civilians are exposed, after Meadlo tries to explain he was ordered to do what he did, that he was doing the right thing, that it was revenge for the deaths of soldiers he knew, Mike Wallace begins to describe his time fighting during the Second World War, and he says, “But the thought that goes through your mind is, we’ve raised such a dickens about what the Nazis did, or what the Japanese did, but particularly what the Nazis did in the Second World War, the brutalization and so forth, you know. It’s hard for a good many Americans to understand that young, capable, American boys could line up old men, women and children and babies and shoot them down in cold blood. How do you explain that?”

Meadlo, in response: “I wouldn’t know.”

I have the urge to take a shower. I feel dirty and want to wash that filth from my body, remove this new knowledge from my brain. I feel a rage and a sadness. I glance over at my parents. Mom looks like she’s about to cry. Dad’s eyes are strangely wide, staring hard at nothing in particular. His voice sounds hollow when he says, “I don’t know what I just heard. I served in the last world war. This type of savagery is what we fought against. What we just heard tonight is an American atrocity, and surely, it’s not an isolated incident.”

Linda Kass began her career as a magazine journalist and correspondent for regional and national publications. Along with her forthcoming novel, World News from Waverley High (September 2026), she is the author of three previous works of historical fiction: Tasa’s Song (2016), A Ritchie Boy (2020), and Bessie (2023). A longtime civic leader, she is the founder and owner of Gramercy Books, an independent bookstore in Central Ohio. Linda lives in Columbus with her husband, Frank; they have four children, six grandchildren, and a labradoodle named Wally.

Things That Bring Me Joy

• Drinking my morning coffee and looking out my kitchen window at our magnificent 100-year-old neighborhood library

• Walking my sweet Labradoodle Wally along the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood

• Connecting with my book club friends every month as we share our love of story

• Cycling the open roads in Ohio with my biking friends and viewing the breathtaking vistas

• Chatting with staff and customers at my indie bookstore.

Jewish Things That Bring Me Joy

• Being with family and friends during Passover, my favorite Jewish holiday

• Making a challah from scratch

• Listening to the emotional Kol Nidre violin melody played during Yom Kippur

• The taste of buttery, fruit-filled Rugelach

• Noting small wonders in the everyday, like the beauty of nature or the wonder of a work of art.