I was tired, mostly of trudging to the mall to watch bad teen movies. I asked my mom if we could possibly move to a more exciting place. I was too old to play with my kid brother, was too young to date and yawned when I thought of my friends. Thus began a predictably long phase of staying up late, burning candles and listening to dreary records. I also discovered paranoia, and made it my motif.

I vaguely knew about the nuclear thing. Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear accident had occurred a few years earlier, and Maryland residents worried about living downwind and downstream. In school we learned that the Soviet Union was bad. The children there had to wear uniforms and study all the time, plus work in the fields and factories because their bland, cold and sinister country wanted to take over the world. And "The Day After," a made-for-TV movie that dramatized the effects of a nuclear missile attack on a Kansas town, was about to air.

The movie generated enormous controversy in 1983. No network had ever attempted to bring the horror of nuclear war to America's living rooms, much less during sweeps week. Critics warned that it was relentlessly depressing and deeply disturbing -- two punishing prime-time hours of Hiroshima in the Heartland. The network warned parents that impressionable young viewers should not see the movie, which included graphic sequences of mass death and destruction.

I demanded to be allowed to watch it. Nuclear war and radiation poisoning sounded very grown-up. I was ready to have a ringside seat to Armageddon and all of its secrets. If we were going to be blown up, I argued, I should be prepared. I even had a holocaust-appropriate wardrobe: black sweaters and old Army fatigues.

I don't remember actually sitting down to watch the Sunday night special in our house. But I vividly remember certain scenes, images that immediately seared into my psyche. When the nuclear missiles hit, wind and flames engulfed the region. The rolling Kansas prairie charred to black soot and became littered with the corpses of cows and horses. An entire kindergarten class vaporized during a bright orange blast of fire, instantly turning to skeletons. Green and hairless people with boils on their faces staggered Quasimodo-like along a desolate road in search of food. Jason Robards cried in the rubble. As the credits rolled, a weak call for help came from a basement bunker on a radio. "This is Lawrence, Kan. Is anybody out there? Anybody at all?"

Nearly 100 million people watched the movie. We talked about it in social studies class the next day, and some students delighted in sharing their nightmares, or acting really freaked out. The day after "The Day After" was high drama in junior high -- being traumatized was all the rage.

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