Power among the ordinary people

by Rich Moniak, Voices in Wartime Staff

"I'm sorry that your mom was killed
When a missile struck your home
You were only three, and innocent.
Your mother too was innocent.

That missile came in my name,
Paid for by my tax dollars.
I was against the bombing, but
Not registered to vote,
Afraid to make a stand."

… Pamela Hale, excerpted from "Poem for an Iraqi Child in a Forgotten News Clip"

In an interview about her poem which was used in the Voices in Wartime documentary, Pamela explains that the missile she remembered was “when the bombs first started dropping during the first Gulf War, I was at a friend's house helping her move. The television was playing in the background. One second we were casually complaining about moving boxes and the next second we were seeing news footage about bombs dropping in Iraq.”

Here again is “those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end” described by Tim O’Brien in his stories of Vietnam. For Pamela it was “a random ten-second shot of soldiers carrying a little kid away from a bombed-out house" that never went away.

What is it that haunts our memories in such ways that an ordinary moment becomes attached to an extraordinary scene then transposes itself into a source of inspiration 12 years later? Why doesn’t it let us forget?

Pamela described herself as “an ordinary person in an ordinary place” not part of a group of "crazy left-wing people who were against the war.” Of course, she never expected her poem to stop the war. But she didn't anticipate that it would become something more than just another among the thousands of poems offered in solidarity with the Poets Against the War movement. In other words, she thought of her poem in an ordinary sense too.

The word ordinary seems to want to put us in our place, to reduce our potential in life to the common, just as the word’s roots belong to the classical Latin ordinarius meaning “regular, usual, orderly”. Strangely, there the word vulgar has roots in common and ordinary as well: vulgaris "of or pertaining to the common people, common, vulgar," from vulgus "the common people, multitude, crowd, throng."

But Pamela’s poem wasn’t seen as ordinary at all, as it stood out among the multitude, the thousands of poems expressing the same truth other people passionately felt, that going to war was wrong. The word same again suggests common, as in commonly shared. But in returning the truth to common we reach clarity, for isn’t it the simplest truths within ourselves that we may be best aware of?

Among Pamela’s simple truths was the memory of “being afraid to make a stand.” She offers her honest place next to the image she saw on the news by admitting to a common fear enabled by the judgmental ideal of orderly, the warning against associating with the vulgar crowd, in today's language, the “crazy left wing people.”

Her poem reveals that those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end have extraordinary meaning. Are they related to finding our individual destiny, our unique contribution to life, no matter how small it seems? Is the truth itself telling us we can make a difference because collectively the ordinary people are extraordinarily powerful?

'Because it's all relative'

by Rich Moniak, Voices in Wartime Staff

“You’re pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs – the whole world gets rearranged – and even though you’re pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace.” … Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (pp 35-36)

Although I’ve never been pinned down like that, the sky’s poetic portraits can still deliver a calm that approaches an ultimate peace like O’Brien describes. Or can it? Does having too much time among the beauty around my home dilute the serenity into pieces instead of peace? Is it only in the life and death struggle of war that a human soul glimpses eternity?

This morning I am on the opposite side of relativity’s psychological dimensions. I’ve just returned home from a benefit concert for Voices in Wartime and Soldier’s Heart. The cloud gray urban landscape of Seattle gave way to soft fluffy snow resting on the boughs of spruce and hemlock trees as far my eyes need to see. I’m pinned down among the beauty of Alaska. But war is peeking through the peace just as O’Brien explains: “those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end” are stuck in my memory.

This time it’s the voice of Army Reserve Capt. Ashleigh Fortier. Her brief role at the concert was to read a quote from among the world’s most famous believers in peace. First though she introduced herself, and her voice cracked as she explained to the audience the way peace is trying to elude her life now that she’s home. Her pain is real. Her world away from the war has been rearranged the wrong way.

Relativity speaks. I’m a zillion miles from understanding Fortier’s Iraq experience and O’Brien’s never ending remembering of Vietnam. But her voice becomes my reminder of other fragments through my son. I know Michael doesn’t want to go back to Iraq, but his voice never sounds like Fortier’s did. The two ideas don’t mix well alone, and they stir the pot of past confusions that will always force me to wonder how the war has disrupted his world.

I think back two years and remember the voices in playwright Simon Levy’s “What I Heard About Iraq”. There was a short segment where soldiers, young men like Michael, described killing with excitement bordering on pleasure. Later that same night I found Michael online and he told me about an IED that hit his Stryker vehicle a few days earlier in Mosul. Not much damage was done, and he shrugged it off quickly, too quickly, leaving me to wonder whether the event was all too common. What else had he seen? Could he become so disturbed by the war that he might sound like the soldiers from the play?

Less than a week later he was home on leave and we discussed that scene from the play. He assured me that he was working hard not to reach a breaking point that could become the wrong kind of rage. I trusted him completely, but he had to go back, and then was redeployed to Baghdad, the belly of the beast, for four more months. He came home in one piece physically, but Fortier reminds me how deep the other wounds can go. How much can any soldier be exposed to before they break one way or the other?

Should I feel relieved that Michael hasn’t exhibited the symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder when we’ve talked? Or is he so hardened by the war that he can hide it from me? Do I hope he’s haunted by the horror he’s seen because I don’t want to imagine he’s indifferent to it? Or maybe it’s my peace activist persona that wants an undisputable truth that war ruins the lives of all who are sent to fight it. But I don’t want his life ruined.

I wonder why I’m reading O’Brien. Is it to understand the effects of war on a human being who fought it so I can understand Michael better? Or am I being selective in choosing the stories I read, looking for new evidence to strengthen a belief that war isn’t the answer.

The trees catch a breeze and momentarily toss the snow as if the flakes are becoming impatient because I’m not listening to something. Then they settle back to a dominantly peaceful scene. “It’s all relative” O’Brien says.

Every human being should feel the nature of such beauty for more than the time between explosions and fear. It's not mine because I’m lucky. It’s too big for just me. Like the breeze, Fortier’s voice and O’Brien’s stories aren’t a disruption but a necessity. I need to imagine the meaning of their truths to better understand the purpose of the beauty in my life.

Voices in Wartime Education Project receives a Seattle Foundation grant

In late December, just in time for the holidays, the Voices in Wartime Education Project received a $10,000 operating support grant from the Seattle Foundation and the Paichee Fund. The Seattle Foundation is a community foundation that encourages personal philanthropy to improve the quality of life in King County, Washington. Their mission is to create a healthy community through engaged philanthropy, community knowledge and leadership.

We would like to thank the Seattle Foundation and the Paichee Fund for their support of our mission and organization, and we look forward to a fruitful year dedicated to creating healthy community through education of our youth and working to help returning veterans reintegrate into the community and civilian life.

Peace on Earth

by Andrew Himes, executive director of Voices in Wartime Education Project

Thanks to my friend Tim Harris for telling me about this magnificent cartoon from 1939 on his blog, Apesma's Lament.

When the war is over

by Rich Moniak, Voices in Wartime Staff

It was a quiet holiday here in my Southeast Alaska home. The landscape wasn’t white, the inside wasn’t decorated, and my children were elsewhere. My oldest son, Michael, was in Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, thousands of miles and dozens of hours away from Iraq, where he spent Christmas two years ago and may return to spend the next one.

It’s easy to hope the war is over before then. The word easy is troubling though, because it asks too many questions related to forgetfulness. If it is over, will my efforts on behalf of peace be replaced by other pursuits? Will I stop wondering about the fate of other people because American weapons aren’t armed and ready to fire into their neighborhoods? Will I be able to relax believing Michael will never again be spending the holidays, or any other day, in a war zone?

The last question taunts me the most, because I have to wonder if it’s the one that leads to the other two. Michael was in Iraq during the 2003 invasion. I never supported that, but it wasn’t until after he left for a second tour there in August 2005 that I can say I opposed the war. Before then, I was a silent observer, aware but unengaged in expressing my beliefs. Indeed, I was merely a statistic for the pollsters because my supposed convictions were really reduced to mere opinions.

Before Michael left for his second deployment, the last hours we spent together were on the slopes of a mountain above downtown Juneau. As we traversed the western flanks of Gold Ridge, the first high point on the way to Mt. Roberts, he was given the full dose of my armchair activism temporarily moved to the outdoors.

The civilized city below disappeared from view at the lesser peak, where a fork in the trail led either east to Gold Ridge or dipped into a saddle below Gastineau Peak. As we stood there deciding which way to go, I realized that Michael had hardly said a word all the way up. I apologized to him for the endless ranting monologue he’d just heard while I wondered where he stood. Where did I stand in his eyes? Did he imagine I didn’t support him because I didn’t support the decisions of his commander-in-chief?

He told me it was ok. He said he wasn’t into the political controversies, but added that he always listened to me because I made him think of things he normally wouldn’t pay attention to. Then he said “I respect your views. Mostly, I respect your right to have them and express them. If I am supposed to be fighting for them, why would I deny them to you.”

Michael’s brief speech shattered one of the easiest excuses I had to remain an outsider. No longer could I tell myself it was a necessity to remain silent in order to protect my relationship with my son. Dismissing this was to expose my mind to more complexities. By accepting I could openly oppose the war that he was prepared to participate in, where did I place his personal safety next to the innocent citizens of Iraq mostly imagined as children of parents like me?

To honestly believe that the death of any innocent child is wrong, I also have to pray that the weapons that can be used protect Michael are never used in the blindness of only thinking the enemy is threatening. I found myself anxious about the possibility that he might kill a child in a moment of intense fighting. The “collateral damage” from bombing raids that might spare him having to face a combat situation were still wrong.

I am not a believer in anything literal, nor a reader of the Christian Bible. Yet some of the hundreds of parables within it occupy the vague recesses of my awareness. I don’t claim to understand these, or even know the meaning given to them by others. But as they gnaw at edges of these thoughts, new questions rise with them. What is the meaning of Abraham’s offering Isaac as a sacrifice to his God?

One translation of the parable reads that when Abraham was about to take his son’s life God said to him “Abraham, Stop! Do not hurt your son. You have proven your faith and shown how much you love Me by willing to sacrifice your son for Me. Therefore, I shall bless you and your family, and through you, I shall bless all the nations on earth”.

All nations are blessed, not just “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” When we imagine soldiers sacrificing themselves for our nation, aren’t we placing America above God who told Abraham not to take his son’s life? The sons and daughters of all nations should be free from the sacrifices of war offered up an authoritative ruler.

But once a nation goes to war, a just war or not, who chooses who lives and dies? Doesn’t Isaac represent all the innocent children? Is my son an innocent child or a participant ordered into battle? In my heart I see him as my son and deny the latter if I am turning my back on the innocent so that he’ll be less likely to die there.

The last conflict is one that I’ll never find peace in. And it’s not only a real question if Michael goes back, but it asks if I am ignoring the possibility his safety was enhanced because our military might shelled a city when it only thought all the innocent civilians were gone.

The sad truth is I needed Michael to go to war to discover these questions. Now there is no easy way to forget them. The easy answers, such as trusting it was God that stopped Abraham from sacrificing his own son, only serve to relieve me from the burden of my complicity in the killing that I didn’t try to prevent. When the war is over, the questions will remain, and all I can do is place them ahead of returning to a life of silent convictions.

Finding My Voice

by Faith Ramos, Voices in Wartime staff

I was raised to be “seen and not heard.” This not only applied to my childhood, it was intended to blanket my life as a woman. While this continues to make me reticent to share my views, it did bring with it a great capacity to receive stories; to be a good listener.

My parents separated when I was 18. The following year, my mother began dating a high school sweetheart. The two had recently encountered one another at a twenty year, Class of ’67 high school reunion. Both were separated from spouses whom they married as teenagers. I eventually met Johnnie Michael Adams, my mother’s “first love.” He seemed affable enough. He and my mother could wax nostalgic about the shared stories of the Atlanta of their youth. (This strikes me as funny now because at the time, they were both years younger than I am today.)

As Johnnie integrated into our lives, there was occasion for me to observe him. One afternoon as he walked my mother’s dog in the sweltering Atlanta summer heat, I watched from inside the parked car. My mother and I were absent-mindedly conversing about some trivial thing when she casually mentioned that Johnnie had been in Vietnam and had contracted malaria while there. She went on to say that he became a bit anxious on hot days. That was all that was said. I didn’t ask any questions. I hadn’t really known any veterans so I had no point of reference. I mean, yes, both of my grandfathers were WWII veterans, Navy and frontline Army, and my grandmother’s brother had been a military chaplain during WWII, but I knew them from a child’s perspective. It didn’t register.

My mother and Johnnie eventually wed. He has been in my life for twenty years now. On very few occasions over the years, my mother said matter-of-fact things like, “Well, he had a hard time coming back from Nam” but there was never any explanation and I never asked. It didn’t connect.

On October 1, 2007 I joined the staff of the Voices in Wartime Education Project. One month later, I travelled to Atlanta for a pre-planned trip home. My mother and stepfather have a cabin in the north Georgia mountains. Due to commute logistics, my stepfather and I shared the 2.5 hour ride back to their home in Atlanta. In twenty years, the two of us had never spent this much time together without other members of the family to buffer communications. After reading the Voices in Wartime anthology my perception had shifted. Now, I connected with this man as an individual who had experiences I could barely imagine; not simply as my mother’s high school boyfriend whom she married in my young adulthood. I began telling him about the people I was meeting through my new job, in particular the story of a young returned Iraq veteran. It struck a chord. He spent the next two hours recounting pieces of his tour of Vietnam.

In January of 1968, one month after turning 18 years old and joining the Marines, Johnnie Adams boarded a plane headed to war. He joined thinking he would “be like John Wayne.” When he landed in Vietnam and prepared to board a bus that would take him to his quarters, young men ending their tours of Vietnam were getting off of that same bus. His heart dropped. “Every single one of these guys had hollow eyes. If you’ve ever seen a person with hollow eyes, you don’t ever forget it.” Johnnie spent eight months in Khe Sahn where the battles are now reported to have been the worst of the war. He was there long enough to see his best friend’s body thrown, along with hundreds of others, onto the back of a truck that carried both the dead and wounded “like firewood”; long enough to see white phosphorus and napalm dropped following an ambush that lasted twelve hours; long enough to see young men succumb to drug addiction; long enough to hear battlefield cries of “Corpsman!” deteriorate into hysterical cries for mothers, brothers, girlfriends and wives. While in the infirmary recovering from a second bout of malaria, Johnnie’s entire platoon was killed. To this day, he asks the question, “Why not me, and why them?”

I listen.

Haunting voice of 'O beautiful death'

by Rich Moniak, Voices in Wartime Staff

The neck of the cavalry-man, with the bullet through and through, I examine;
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard;
(Come, sweet death! be persuaded, O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly.)

Walt Whitman’s words, from his poem The Wound-Dresser, recited in a deep, peaceful voice, is one of the most haunting moments in the film Voices in Wartime. (listen here)

The ‘beautiful death’ Whitman imagines is merciful, sweet in the moment that it overpowers the wretchedness of war and allows the soul its final peace. There is no glory to killing in war, but Whitman restores the natural order of life by returning death to the quiet realm where it belongs.

Death is a subject more distant from the proverbial dinner table conversation than religion and politics. It belongs to the spiritual and philosophical imaginations, places where answers are at best metaphorical questions.

In a culture addicted to the need for certainty, science fails to deliver any meaning to death. It has worked hard to protect us from it, from medicine to meteorology. But I wonder if war, the bullet through and through, is the shadow image of all the technological advances, looming in wait because we resist death even when it comes to us naturally.

I’ve never discussed death in any great depth until three years ago. It hasn’t visited me much by way of family or friends passing on. Fortunate is the word this simple truth attempts to use as if a smile is warranted. But smiles generally elude me. Just a few weeks ago a man who is currently serving grand jury duty with me said that almost as soon as he saw me he said to himself ‘now there is a man who knows a lot of pain.’

Why am I so serious and glum so often? The question has plagued me, and seemed to isolate me, for most of my life. It’s only been recently that I seem to have a found a place in society where I might have something to contribute. To plagiarize the title from Chris Hedges book, the war seems to have given me a purpose and meaning. How sad is that?

Death in these questions merges the spiritual and philosophical as one with the psychological. What kind of complex has been haunting me all these years? What is it about Whitman’s O beautiful death that reaches deep into my psyche?

Psychology defines a complex as a system of interrelated, emotion-charged ideas, feelings, memories, and impulses that is usually repressed and compel characteristics or habitual patterns of thoughts, feelings or actions.

Have I been repressing an interest in death? If so, is this the reason for my generally solemn demeanor? Yet to have followed the haunting of voices into this curious shadow of life would likely have made me even more of a depressing soul to be around.

What voices? Whitman’s imagined voice through the narrator in the film follows a similar dark affection for my taste in music. Sad love songs are joined by lyrics composed by numerous songwriters that allude to death. They’ve always been there, but it wasn’t till just recently that I realized how fascinated with death my subconscious has been. I became utterly haunted by Jesca Hoop’s recently released “Love Is All We Have”, a song about Hurricane Katrina.

the rains that came
with the force of a runaway train
ohhh run away
and the waters rose and the levies the levies
broke
ohhh run away
and the cradle broke my beloved
the cradle broke
i must stay
for deep in the heart of our home
my beloved washed away

Death is there, in the words, the melody and her voice. And like Whitman, Hoop restores beauty to what is naturally real and intensely sad in the lyrics that form the bridge to the title.

love me know now is all we have
love me now love is all we ever really had

I listened to it over and over again, as if to define the idea of haunting in the act itself. Until after the recurring tune had settled into the background of awareness, these words transposed themselves for me.

the old church bell
is in the graveyard
the old church bell
ohhh lace and stone

In my head, in a distant yet distinct manner, my subconscious re-imagined the old church bell is in the graveyard to lyrics of a song that caught my attention more than 30 years ago. I was hearing her music but the words had become the church bell chimed, 'til it rang 29 times.

I was stunned when I began to perceive that it was The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a Gordon Lightfoot ballad that began a life long interest in his music. And then I remembered that within days I strangely bonded to the closing words to his Canadian Railroad Trilogy: 'And many are the dead men … too silent to be real.'

I can trace a journey over the years that tried to keep me near to death’s voice through haunting lyrics of other songs, each one which I would listen intently without a clue as to what they wanted from me. Dan Fogelberg’s In the Passage, Carly Simon’s Life is Eternal, Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes, and more.

What did they want is a question psychologist James Hillman has taught me to ask even when there is no apparent “they” doing the asking. So who is this haunting? The apparition of your voice remembers love, according to Sarah McLachlan, but to me, also belonging to death.

Three years ago I floated in the cold Alaskan water after an embarrassing spill in a kayak. Alone and unsure of whether or not I’d make it back, death itself had never been closer to my mortal thoughts. Oddly, I felt an intense peace, aided by the quiet beauty of this place I love. But upon reflection the very next day, the peace was disturbed by the confession I had no right to die in such a beautiful setting because I had done nothing meaningful in 48 years of wandering the planet.

Life changed for me soon after that, but not as if I had been so thoroughly woken up that I marched forward with a determination to do something, anything, that would merit appreciation from anyone in the world. Death would haunt me as it always has because I wasn’t listening to it.

War is about death, isn’t it? What else is there that troubles us? I come back to Hedges book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, and it is death that does the work.

For two years I’ve been writing mostly about war, the Iraq war, and past wars that have evaded the future by way of false histories built on glory. I’ve railed against the politicians, searched feverishly for clues in hopes of mobilizing dissent, and only temporarily retreated to disappointment at the effort that always fell short.

There have been a few pieces that carried a softer tone. Those mixed images of flowers with gray days and rain, inspired absent of ambition to end the war. Just as Whitman and Hoop reached me, it was like another voice guiding me to a peaceful appreciation for my soul’s apparent affection for the mystery that death is.

But before all this I wasn’t really writing at all. Did death want me to take writing seriously?

Psychology isn’t about fixing what we perceive ails our mental or emotional state of mind. Rather, it is part of the search for the roots of our existence. For 30 years or more I ignored the subtle callings of death. I needed to almost drown to be stirred from my sleep and start searching the corners of my mind for meaning beyond me.

The words beside my photo on this page suggest I am a writer. That’s Andy Hime’s kind appreciation for my unaccomplished history somewhat redeemed by a few years of trying to give something back to the world I live in. I hope I can live up to what he sees. And I hope what work I do honors the soul of a voice I still hear after she reached for my hand in the cold water.

Death is a silent metaphor to life that perhaps is seeking attention from more than this isolated soul living in the imagined cold of the far north. Are war and death aligned in our collective human complex, the repression of one manifesting in another as all rage and ugliness?

To discuss war in our homes and schools, death will be present. We may need to be open to wondering about O beautiful death before we’ll truly turn away from war.