How my Father Planned to Win a War — With Tubas!

By Oscar Barajas

For the record, I would like to go out on a limb, and say that my father was probably the first czar fighting the war on terror. All it took was for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait amidst international condemnation. When Operation Desert Storm rolled out in 1991, my father was willing to sacrifice everything he had to give to this country – namely me. He did not let the fact that I was only 13 years old at the time get in the way. The man had a plan.

The plan involved me getting into some sort of talent competition that would eventually take me on Sabado Gigante, which would get me noticed by Saddam Hussein. He would then feel compelled to invite me to his national palace. That would be my chance to wrestle him for control of Iraq and Kuwait. It was that simple. After snapping his neck like a chicken, all I had left to do was sit back and decide the color of the convertible Cadillac I was going to ride during the victory parade through East Los Angeles.

By the way, I want to point out that I do not know why Saddam Hussein would be watching “Sabado Gigante”, but my father used the following logic. “Siempre en Domingo” was always shown on Sundays so by that rationale, they could not call it Gigante if everyone was not tuned in on Saturday night to watch Don Francisco hock Downey Fabric Softener thereby making it Gigante-sized in the process.

The fact that I did not have many talents besides naming every baseball team in alphabetical order threw a monkey wrench into his best laid plans. He was still disappointed by the fact that I had not chosen to play the tuba for my 7^th grade Beginning Winds class. He did not even want to hear the reasons why I picked to play the flute, or for that matter the fact that my junior high school did not even have tubas to select in the first place. He refused to buy me a tuba because he claimed that his tax dollars were already paying for the imaginary tuba I was not playing. Even now, I can only imagine that my father had some kind of top secret information that detailed Hussein’s most secret fetish — obese tuba playing Mexican teenagers. I was a husky adolescent and my father naturally figured that tubas and fat boys went together like pregnant girls holding the participation clipboard during gym class.

I would bring my flute home and practice three times a week, but my inexperienced musical ventures annoyed my father because it sounded like I was stepping all over a weasel. My father was not the type of man who had the patience to nurture potential. In his mind, people were born doing what they were destined to do. In other words, Willie Mays was born playing centerfield, Fernando Valenzuela threw screwballs while he was still teething, and Jessie Owens was doing the long jump while he was still attached to the umbilical cord. My natural skills revolved around beating the Red Falcon Organization on the original Contra video game on Nintendo, and even then I needed the cheat code to obtain 30 lives. Clearly my father had his work cut out for him.

Fortunately for me, the war ended just as quickly as it had begun.  On February 28^th, President Bush (the one without the jet suit) declared that Kuwait had been liberated. This meant that I had been liberated as well. On March 4^th, I turned 14 and my father had given me the greatest gift of all. He had discharged me from his ill-conceived war on terror and we celebrated with a birthday family brunch at Burger King. I assure you that any Whopper that came after that one never tasted as sweet.