I haven't had time yet to read Medved's additions to the story -- I was celebrating St. Patrick's Day, and we also had some more snow, which meant a snowball fight and sledding with my nephew!

But I did have some further thoughts about that "tommy gun" problem:

There were a dozen soldiers in the truck's bed with strange dated guns with drum magazines in their hands.
Aha, NOW I have a clear picture of the guns!



Yes, tommy-guns is totally correct here, but modern readers (especially younger ones) might not immediately understand this "old-skool" slang without a reminder. So I have a suggestion for rewriting this sentence.

The entire looong section in red is, of course, far too much information here -- "Hello, Mr. Powers, I'm Basil Exposition!" -- and is not meant to be included in the story. (But the sentence in blue at the beginning had been my original idea for explaining "tommy guns" to the reader, before the idea about "old gangster movies" came to me.)

Anyway, the part in red is just me "thinking out loud" to Medved -- some bits-and-pieces of cultural trivia for filling in Peter's psychological background.

I also kept in mind Ramil's correct objection that in 1941, Ann couldn't possibly have used the term "UFO," which didn't exist then -- the expression was coined in the '50s. However, it's quite possible that Ann had read H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds from 1898, and she's intelligent enough to realize that "Martians" could be a literary symbol for "foreign enemies." So I wanted to give Medved some suggestions about how this extra-terrestrial symbolism might work from the POV of Peter, an American born in 1951.

There were a dozen soldiers in the truck's bed, holding strange guns that looked like old props from a B&W gangster movie, with large drums on the barrels. Al Capone and Elliot Ness would've probably called them "tommy-guns," Peter recalled.

[From Peter's distant childhood memories, the old slang "tommy-gun" suddenly arose. That's what guns of this design had been called when Peter played cops-and-robbers as a little boy in the 1950s.] Sometimes, instead, it had been cowboys-and-Indians, with the kids forming their fingers into Colt revolvers, not tommy-guns. But even more often, in the '50s, it had been "the Army versus the Reds" -- or "humans versus Martians". Only adulthood, and college psychology textbooks, had brought the realization that those childhood "Martians", all along, had really been "proxy-Reds".

Glancing at Ann, Peter felt a sudden twinge of guilt, though of course right NOW it would be another 15 years or so before Hollywood began to re-imagine Ann and her people as green-skinned, skull-faced invaders, especially after Sputnik scared the hell out of Americans. (Peter had been -- no, would be! -- six or seven, but he would never forget his dad pointing out the tiny metal basketball moving dimly across the stars: "No, Petey, it's not a shooting star -- they go much faster." Of course, he was slightly too young to remember that the Soviets had successfully tested the A-bomb in 1949, and the hydrogen bomb in 1953 -- but he clearly recalled the grim worry in his mom's eyes when his dad tried to explain what a "spoot-neek" was. His parents, being self-educated bookworms who encouraged Peter to read science magazines, had attempted to use the correct Russian pronunciation for a week or so, but had then fallen into the Americanized "spuht-nick" like everyone else -- they took pride in education, of course, but even so, there was no point in SOUNDING too much like a Red!)

Still later, in the '60s, after the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine had introduced a bizarre peace that even Lewis Carroll would have thought too nonsensical for words, color television had finally arrived in Peter's home. And along with it had come the Klingons of _Star Trek_ as a whole new breed of "space Commies" -- who no longer threatened to invade Earth itself, but who were still locked in a perpetual Cold War with the "American" Earthlings for dominion over unclaimed territories of the galaxy.

Again, only as an adult would Peter later figure out that although Lt. Chekov from _Star Trek_ spoke with a Russian accent (or a bad imitation of one), and would even boast proudly to Captain Kirk about "ROO-shun in-WEN-shuns", Chekov was REALLY some sort of naturalized Russian-American, at least on the level of Freudian/Jungian subtext that Hollywood screenwriters had all learned about in college literature classes. An immigrant with a funny accent, perhaps, and a minority with ethnic pride in his grandparents' ways, but still properly belonging in America, just like Lt. Sulu and "Scotty" and Spock and Uhura -- she was definitely born in Africa, as _Star Trek_ fans knew, but had no accent at all, and wore a daringly sexy miniskirt like any stylish American girl from the 1960s.

As for Spock -- one could argue (and many had!) that the Vulcans were symbolically intended to be "space Jews". But if so, then green-blooded, pointy-eared Spock was nevertheless, beyond any doubt, a Jewish-American -- and therefore, to Peter, he was one of OURS, despite his odd Vulcan habits -- not a menacing foreigner like THOSE Klingons and Romulans! (The only point of uncertainty was whether the Klingons were "Rooskies" and the Romulans were "Ching-chongs," or vice-versa.))))))

The brief interlude of WW2, when the US and USSR were friends-of-necessity allied against the Nazis, had never been a part of Peter's everyday consciousness as an American born in 1951. For about four decades of his life, the Soviets had been an alien threat; and for two decades after that, the "Soviets" had become "Russians" -- no longer quite as threatening, but still rather alien, and not to be confused with NICE Russian-Americans, like Lt. Pavel Chekov from _Star Trek_, and Martina Navratilova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Yakov Smirnoff...

The truck pulled up right in front of the sergeant...