Warfare In The Short Story Grace Period By Will Baker

When one thinks about warfare, the average mental picture is usually a movie war scene with soldiers, and planes; very rarely do people think about about the average Joe, trimming his hedge. In the short story “Grace Period”, by Will Baker, there is a man trimming his hedge outside with an electric hedge trimmer when a nuclear bomb is dropped; his wife has gone to get the mail. In “an instant [he felt as] everything stretched just slightly, a few millimeters, then contracted again” (Baker, 1989, p. 7). Although the character does not know what is happening, the reader may realize that this description is a high altitude nuclear burst. The article “Nuclear Weapon Effects”, by John Pike, describes what a nuclear bomb’s effects are and what could happen if one was dropped. Based on clues in the story and the information from the article, the reader can determine what is happening to the man and what he can expect will happen to him.

The man was looking at “a fluctuation of light, tiny pulse, coming from behind the hills” (Baker, 1989, p. 7) which is “the fireball [when it] begins to grow rapidly and rise[s] like a hot air balloon” (Pike, 1998, p. 3). When he cannot reach people on the phone the reason why is the “generation of an intense electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which can significantly degrade performance of or destroy sophisticated electronic equipment” (Pike, 1998, p. 4). The shuttering of the house is created from “the blast[wave or] shock[wave] produced by a nuclear weapon” (Pike, 1998, p.