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.

Revival: This I Believe - Take One

Revival: This I Believe - Take One

Uncle Sandy in World War 2 – Part One

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

In early July of 2007, I was in San Diego for the wedding of my daughter Amber to a Navy helicopter pilot named Dave Cornell, a guy with a cheerful countenance and a wry sense of humor, highly competent, responsible, and smart as a whip. Just the kind of fellow you'd want to have driving a multimillion-dollar rotor-equipped bird off the deck of a carrier. Dave was about as different from me as could be. (I assumed that meant Amber had very few "father" issues remaining for her work to out. A good thing, no?) He was stocky and physically coordinated, whereas I was skinny, formerly dark-haired, and sometimes found it challenging to tie my shoes correctly, which was why I had worked so hard to learn how to juggle and unicycle earlier, in Amber's toddler years. (I'll tell you more about my putative circus skills later; for the moment, I don't want to lose track of this story about war and warriors.)

Getting to know Dave took me on a journey I had not expected. It was not just that I would have a new member of my own family who was in the military – and a combat veteran of the Iraq War, which I had opposed. It was also that I was learning to respect and admire Dave's underlying motivations. I was beginning to see that Dave's impulse to service and patriotism, his desire to defend and protect and be part of something bigger than himself and his own individual ambitions and needs, were not that different from my own deepest motivations and my own desire to make a difference in the world. Dave's desire to live a life with a purpose larger than himself was similar to my own desire, and it resonated with the principles and values that I had wanted to instill in my own daughter as she grew up. In order to appreciate Dave, I had to learn how to translate from my personal experience to his, and to see the world from his point of view.

Amber and Dave had known each other for years, ever since going to nearby colleges in San Diego. Amber worked on her doctorate in Sicily during the first few years of the Iraq War, while Dave spent those years in the Navy, including on a long carrier cruise to the Persian Gulf where he flew twenty-eight combat missions into Iraq from Kuwait. Finally, in 2005, when Amber finished her degree and Dave's aircraft carrier came home to San Diego, they moved into a little apartment in San Diego and began heading in the direction of their marriage. The wedding took place on July 7th, 2007 (the most popular day in the history of weddings, I am told) in the perpetual sunshine of San Diego, in a pretty little Episcopal church on Coronado Island next to Dave's Navy base.

Amber and Dave had gone on a long journey to arrive at that wedding, across miles and continents, leaping over cultural gaps, across oceans, over mountains, spanning ideological and political divides. For one thing, Dave had supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and went willingly to serve in that war while Amber was as sharply opposed to the war as was her father.

The day before the wedding, I sat at a family breakfast in a Mexican restaurant in the Old Town section of San Diego talking to my Uncle Walt, a non-veteran like me, a tall, thoughtful man who had translucent skin the fine-wrinkled texture of old parchment, and a knack for preaching provocative and entertaining sermons. Uncle Walt had spent over sixty years as a Baptist preacher, as had eight or ten of my uncles and great uncles.

Wasn't it interesting, I said, that Dave would be the first military man in my family?

I had met so many veterans and family members of veterans over the past few years that I had begun to assume almost everybody I met had a military connection in their family – but not mine. Relatives of mine who most recently wore uniforms were soldiers in the American Civil War, including at least three of my great-great-grandfathers.

"You mean you don't know about your Uncle Sandy?" said Uncle Walt. "He fought in World War II, you know."

This was news to me! Uncle Sandy was over 80, and I had known him since I was born in 1950. I thought I knew him well. But he had never said one word about having a personal military history.

Go to Part Two

Uncle Sandy in World War 2 – Part Two

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

A few days after the wedding I called up the Sandberg house in Chattanooga, Tennessee and spent a couple of hours talking to Uncle Sandy and my Aunt Jessie about his time in the war.

"It was only about three years ago that I ever said anything to anyone in the family about being a soldier," he said. 'One of the grandchildren came to me one day to tell me about a project he was doing for his school, He asked me, 'Granddad, were you ever in a war?' 'Actually,' I said, 'I was wondering when someone might ask me that question!'"

So Sandy told his grandson the whole story, and then at Christmas that year he told everybody else -- all his kids and grandkids. He had just wanted to forget about the war. When he came out of the army in 1946, he said, he took off his uniform and threw it away. The army gave him a piece of paper saying he was eligible for a GI life insurance policy, and he threw that into the trash. He decided he would never tell anyone what he had seen and done.

Uncle Sandy was quiet on the other end of the line. I waited, pictured him sitting there in that room in his house in the subdivision south of Chattanooga, with his eyes closed and a hand pressed to his forehead. Uncle Sandy had always been one of my favorite relatives. He was a gentle and sweet-natured man who always had a smile for me. Even in the painful throes of my adolescence, when I was angry at everybody in my family as well as most people in the world outside my family, I could never be angry at Uncle Sandy or Aunt Jessie. Both treated me with respect and affection no matter what kind of self-righteous and angry jerk I might be. They asked me serious questions about my beliefs and my life, and they actually seemed to care about my answers! For many years, while I had much difficulty relating to others in my family, Uncle Sandy and Aunt Jessie were people I could talk to.

It was odd for me to think of Uncle Sandy as a soldier. He was a Baptist minister and a musician. He composed and arranged music for churches, and he led a large choir from Tennessee Temple College that toured the country putting on performances at Baptist churches large and small in dozens of states. His fingers were the long and delicate fingers of an artist, and he had the discipline and passion of an artist. Aunt Jessie is a painter who has been producing her work for the walls of friends and family and members of her community for decades, and their home is tastefully decorated. It was hard to square this pleasant world of my Uncle Sandy with the revelation that he had painful memories of slaughter and terror crashing around in his brain, competing with musical crescendos, sforzandos, and diminuendos.

His voice was pianissimo, just barely audible.

"I was 18 when I arrived in France a couple of weeks after D-Day. They had given me several weeks of training in telecommunications, you know?" He chuckled. "That meant I knew how to climb up a pole and string some wires."

But the Army needed replacements for those wounded and killed in action, and so they gave him five days of combat training and put him into a howitzer company. There were times when he barely escaped being killed. Once his company was a few miles behind the lines where they thought they were safe, and two German soldiers drove up wearing American uniforms and driving an American jeep. The charade was convincing at first, and then the Germans started firing and Sandy felt bullets zip just over his head. Sandy and his buddies started shooting at the jeep until it exploded and burned.

Uncle Sandy remembered travelling through a forest after a battle finding scores or hundreds of dead American soldiers lying in the ditches along the road or out among the trees, unburied. "We were so angry at this sight," he said. "We marched into a small German village near the forest, and we rounded up all the people in the village, old and young, men, women and children. We made them all go sleep in the forest with the dead Americans, and we went into their houses and slept in their beds. All of my life I have felt guilty that we did such a terrible thing to them."

Over the next year, Sandy's unit marched all the way through France and Germany and then into Austria. His regiment was conducting mopping up operations at the end of the war in May of 1945, looking for German troops who had escaped the other American regiments as they invaded Austria. Thousands of Germans were surrendering everywhere. The soldiers were suspicious about the Austrian civilians because they saw them as the enemy, but the villagers were cheering, happy to see the Americans, throwing flowers, the children asking for chocolate, everyone smiling. "This was so strange and confusing," said Sandy.

And then they found the death camp. It was called Gunskirchen, and was outside the small town of Wils, Austria. "We came into this camp and there were thousands of people who were dead or dying," he said, and then paused a long time being going on. "I never wanted to talk about it again. I wanted to wipe those memories away. Before then I was just a kid trying to stay alive. But there at the death camp I thought I knew why it was we had to fight in that war."

That's all that Uncle Sandy would say about the death camp, but I asked him to send me copies of any photographs or letters he had from that time, anything about his years in the war. A few weeks later I got a packet from Aunt Jessie, who warned that they were trusting me with their original copies. I discovered grainy black and white snapshots of my uncle as a teenager in Europe, posing with his buddies standing up against a jeep, riding on an armored car, waving from the windows of a train. Finally, at the bottom of the stack in the envelope I found a letter, written on May 28, 1945 from the town of Wels, Austria, by a member of Uncle Sandy's howitzer company, whose name was not on the letter, and who wrote it to his wife Ellen.

Sandy's friend gave him a carbon copy, and Sandy had kept it for these six long decades. The letter told the story of what Sandy's company found at Gunskirchen Lager, the Nazi death camp just outside the town of Wils.

"We were in the foothills of the Austrian Alps," said Ellen's husband, "one of the most beautiful and inspiring sections of scenery that I have seen in Europe. It was sundown of a sunny day and the sun's red rays reflected off the snowcapped mountains, brilliantly coloring the violet haze of the day. The war was drawing to a close; the roads were lined with liberated people, all smiles… And then, what was revealed is utterly beyond human comprehension. In this obscure town, unknown to the world, prevailed a system of mass murder, a system of slow, torturous, agonizing, sure death.

"The next morning dawned as a cool, dreary day with spasmodic thunder showers. The narrow streets were ever more crowded with Jewish slaves finding their way to town. There were Jewish men, women, and children. They were cooking on small fires in every conceivable vessel. They were literally skin and bone, and here, in this area, they were undressing, and men were picking lice from the women and women likewise picking the lice from the men, for sex had probably long since ceased to exist. The lice bites had a resemblance to small pinpricks over their complete bodies. The skin on many of the bodies was open with suppurating wounds. Their digestive system received a shock in the consumption of food and hence the majority of them were afflicted with diarrhea. These people were, as a result of their treatment, no longer civilized, but more in the category of lower animals; they would not absent themselves from the group to defecate, but in the group where they were cooking and eating would tend to the normal functions of their bodies…

"At two different areas in the camp, approximately 50 yards apart, were piles of bodies. Tangled arms and legs -- human beings that had slowly and surely starved to death. The bodies were so emaciated that their sharp bones stretched taut over their shriveled skin; there was no flesh on the bodies, the abdomen so sunken that it was possible to see the outline of their backbone and their thighs were no larger than a man's arm. Single bodies were lying around the edge of the group, stiff, showing how they had died in their sleep."

This letter from Ellen's husband had been a barely-readable carbon copy, so my Aunt Jessie re-typed it on her computer. She wrote, "I understand why Don wanted to forget all that. After reading the account, all of us can see why. But perhaps we all need to know and to feel what these suffering people felt."

I have come to see that these questions of war and peace are not nearly so simple and easy to understand as I once thought they were. Support for war in general or for a particular war can be driven either by terror or compassion or maybe a mixture of the two; it can be driven by a desperate fear or by some high moral purpose, or by a mixture of both; it can be motivated by a desire to punish and destroy, or by a desire to end suffering and promote democracy, or by a combination of all of these. And popular support for any war, including the present war in Iraq, rests upon a complex set of motives and desires, all of which may be related to my own desire to end the practice of war as a human activity.

I have begun to reflect that the support of my parents' generation for the war in Vietnam was conditioned by their earlier support for U.S. participation in World War II. That war began for the U.S. as a defensive war in the Pacific and as a war to stop German aggression in Europe. A heavy dose of fear for our national survival drove our initial involvement – more than any desire to help the Jews of Europe. But the war ended with horrifying revelations of the slaughter of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis, as my Uncle Sandy witnessed. A natural step after the war was the founding of the United Nations. Americans wanted to bring into being a new world free of war, holocaust, and imperialism. In a moment of idealism and hope after the hot war and before the Cold War, they supported and signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My parents' generation identified "war" with their own idealistic impulse to stop the Holocaust and oppose the unspeakable moral evils of Nazi and Japanese imperialism.

By contrast, as I arrived at adulthood, my own consciousness was being shaped by the pointless slaughter and national self-degradation of the Vietnam War. I knew the history of World War II, and understood logically why it might be a just war, but in my bones I truly could not imagine why any sane person could justify participation in any war.

Go to Part Three

Uncle Sandy in World War 2 – Part Three

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

Six weeks after Amber's wedding to Dave, on a sunny August afternoon, I drove into Wheaton, Illinois after an absence of decades. My own nuclear family had moved from Wheaton to Millington, Tennessee in 1961 when I was in sixth grade, and my other relatives – aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents – had all moved back down South within the next few years. My grandparents had moved to Murfreesboro, Tennessee along with the Sword of the Lord, and my uncles had become pastors of churches in South Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Tennessee. In the absence of my family, I never had any compelling reason to go back to Wheaton.

My only previous visit back to Wheaton was in 1976 during my years as a revolutionary communist. During that summer I returned to the house where I had lived as a child, just down the street from Wheaton College on College Avenue across from the football stadium. By 1976 the house was changed entirely. The gray paint on our clapboard siding had been replaced by purple paint, and the sedate white trim on the house's window frames was covered by a bright fruity orange enamel. I stood on the sidewalk outside the house gaping at its transformation until one of the inhabitants, a member of a tribe of cheerful hippies, came outside to invite me into the house for dinner, which we ate at a rough, round table salvaged from its previous life at the center of a coil of electrical wire. We seated ourselves on pillows, our ankles crossed on the floor of my former living room. Our supper's main course consisted of brown rice accompanied by a selection of stir-fried vegetables drenched in soy sauce. Our dessert consisted of very fat, sweet, and carefully rolled joints of marijuana, the scent of which I have never forgotten.

This time, in 2007, the occasion for my visit was a weekend retreat to train caregivers providing care to veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The retreat was organized by Soldier's Heart, a national network of counselors, therapists, and military chaplains. The phrase "soldier's heart" was used to describe combat stress during the American Civil War, and the theme of Soldiers' Heart is that PTSD can only be understood as an injury to the human soul, as a kind of spiritual and social injury, and not simply as physiological and psychological damage to be treated mainly with heavy doses of drugs and a minimal amount of counseling.

The first morning of my retreat, I got up early and went running in a nearby park. It was a peaceful park, green and beautiful, with trees and wetlands surrounding a large lagoon and a path around the perimeter of the park with a distance of about two miles. As I jogged, my surroundings began to appear amazingly familiar to me, although I still did not know exactly where I was. Only when I arrived at the opposite end of the park and saw a sign announcing the entrance of the park did I realize I was in Northside Park, a place I had not been since 1961. This was the park where I had grown up. There was the broad lagoon at the center of so many days in my youth, and there was the island used for setting off fireworks in Wheaton every 4th of July. This was the island where my mom and dad had gone on scores of dates before they were married, placing a blanket on the grass and taking part in an activity known in the middle part of the 20th century as "necking and petting." There was the small changing house where I had put on my first pair of ice skates: hand-me-down skates from some church rummage sale, old and worn black leather skates passed down from sibling to sibling, each skate with two parallel blades designed to aid small feet like my own as I learned to glide along a wobbly and insecure path with my ankles collapsing hither and yon and my bottom landing with a plop on the hard white ice that covered the frozen lagoon. There was the set of tennis courts where my parents had taken me and my siblings in summers on family picnic outings, along with all of my aunts and uncles and grandparents. Think of it! Seven Baptist preachers and seven Baptist preachers' wives all playing tennis together in the Northside Park sunshine, while I and my sisters and my baby brother, the first four of almost thirty cousins to be born as grandchildren for my grandparents, played happily on the bright green grass next to the courts.

That afternoon, I drove out to the house where my family had lived, and it was gone. Our old house had been torn down earlier in the summer of 2007, along with all the houses around it. The land was being prepared for a construction project for some new housing development or institutional building connected to Wheaton College. The demolition had been quite recent, I could see. The clods of earth were still fresh, decorated with bright green young weeds growing here and there.

I walked one block north from the back yard where I had played to the elementary school I had attended, named after Oliver Wendell Holmes. The brick building was now owned by Wheaton College and had been renamed Jenks Hall. The front part of the building was now the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) classroom building, and the back part of the building was now used for a college theater. The house between my old house and the school building had been torn down in some past year and converted to a military training physical obstacle course. When I wandered into the school building I found that the two rooms used once for kindergarten and first grade were combined for use as a yoga studio. My old kindergarten room was empty, and sunlight streamed through the bank of windows along the southern wall. On the northern wall, where at the age of five I had stored my small towel used to be used for afternoon naps, now were stored two score or more of yoga mats, blue, purple, or yellow rubber rectangles rolled up and piled in a pyramid.

I was struck by the incongruity of what I was seeing. This building, Holmes School, my grade school, had represented both safety and adventure in my life. There were the front steps of the building where my mother had walked me to my first day of kindergarten and then had said goodbye to me. This building was where I had taken my first steps into the world of learning and social engagement in a world beyond my family, and where my innocence had first broken down. This building was where I had first become suspicious of others, fearful of their motives, and desperate for their admiration and approval. This was the building where I had first begun to lose track of my soul, where I had first made compromises in order to get along, where I had first begun to nurture the seeds of selfishness and to fear spontaneity. There was the blacktopped playground where I was punched out by an 11-year-old nemesis named Bradford when I lost my front teeth. This building was the seat of my innocence and also where I had first begun to lose my faith and fear my world.

And now the building contained this triple contradiction; military classrooms for learning the art of war, a yoga studio for healing the mind and body, and a theater for sharing and re-telling stories of what it means to be human.

Go to Part Four

Uncle Sandy in World War 2 – Part Four

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

During the Soldiers' Heart retreat in Wheaton, one of the leaders asked all of us, veterans and civilians alike, to close our eyes for a moment and imagine a place we had been in our lives that felt completely safe and protected. I realized that such a place for me was Northside Park, and more generally, Wheaton, Illinois. It was here that I had once felt completely at peace and entirely protected. Wheaton was a town where, by the time I was eight years old, I had a paper route, all by myself, and I could ride my bicycle anywhere in town without permission and without any guardian or parent needing to know where I was at any moment. No one worried about me and no one needed to. Danger was far away, and the difficulties and responsibility of adulthood were outside my knowledge. I was a child living in a safe and protected shell, ignorant of war's trauma, and innocent of participation in the historical pattern of violent conflict among humans. Now, in 2007, I reflected that I was enabled to feel safe in part because others – veterans of war and volunteers for the military – had been motivated to provide that sense of safety and protection for me.

This contradiction for me is summed up in a book titled Worshipping the Myths of World War II, written by Edward Wood, a combat veteran of World War II. Wood, like my Uncle Sandy, was an 18-year-old thrown into battle in France after D-Day in June of 1944 with virtually no military training. Unlike my uncle, he was severely wounded -- within a few days of arriving in the midst of the war -- and he spent the rest of his life living with the consequences, with terrible physical pain and suffering as well as deep psychological injuries. Wood begins his book by acknowledging that he was haunted by an irresolvable conflict: "I knew on the one hand that the war had to be fought so as to preserve the nation and the democracy I so loved… On the other hand, to the flesh and heart of me, I knew the horror of that war: the stark terror of combat; the wounds that changed my life forever; childhood friends killed or badly maimed; battle fatigue; the murderous destruction of English, German, and Japanese cities from the air; the shock of atomic weaponry; and the death of millions of innocent civilians, mostly women and children, in the Holocaust and the war's other atrocities."

Wood writes that he was saddened, and then suddenly angry, as he watched the harsh reality of the war become softened, sweetened, by a set of myths. One of those myths was that WWII constituted a "good war" -- as if any war could be considered good regardless of whether it could be justified or defended as a way to deal with some terrible reality. And another myth was that great evil in the world invariably lies outside of us and our country, and war is the only means available to deal justly with that evil.

Only when I read Wood's book in the fall of 2007 did I understand how war had been framed for me, for my culture and my country, for all of my life. As a young protestor against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s, it was beyond my comprehension how my parents and others of their generation could justify the war in Vietnam. The war was so evidently criminal in its consequences, so muddled in its professed morality. For me, the issue of the Vietnam War was a simple one. Its justification by people like Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhouse Nixon, and by my parents and grandparents, was fraudulent and hypocritical. I couldn't understand that Vietnam, for my parents, was a continuation of the moral crusade that had constituted World War II for them. It was a struggle against totalitarianism, against indecency, against mass murder and injustice. They were looking at reality through an entirely different filter than I had – the filter of a generational struggle first against Hitler and then what they viewed as an equally evil Stalin.

The moral struggle against evil that World War II represented came to color and characterize "war" for Americans, who in the wake of that war worshipped war itself, and began to believe in the application of military force as a solution to any complex problem in the world. Paradoxically, the victory of American-style democracy in World War Two was used to glorify and perpetuate the practice of war. It was used to justify the creation of the largest and most deadly permanent professional military force in the history of the world, and it supported myopia in our foreign policy.

We can only understand how Americans made the mistake of invading Iraq when we consider how we used our experience during World War II to frame and limit our wisdom and justify launching so many other wars since.

I have learned to regard my Uncle Sandy's service and sacrifice during World War II with gratitude and a degree of awe, just as I've learned to respect Dave's decision to go to war with his helicopter squadron in Iraq, even as I believe that the decision by Dave's commander-in-chief to launch the war was an enormous blunder, and our collective, national decision to support the invasion of Iraq was a sin of historic proportions, for which a commensurate repentance and restitution is required.

Forgiveness in a Time of War

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

War and forgiveness. The two concepts seem mutually exclusive, don't they? How can they have anything to do with each other? We're told that we're at war, and that to win a war we must be resolute, we must be stalwart and certain of the righteousness of our cause, and we must be clear about our purpose, which is to defeat the enemy. I don't see how I can disagree with this set of assertions, which rest in turn on a set of assumptions based on a number of certainties about the way the world is shaped. Assuming there are some incorrigibly evil people out there in the jungle or desert or concrete canyon or wherever who hate me for some inexplicable reasons of their own and wish to act on their hatred by threatening my survival and my family and friends, then I would be utterly stupid not to try to kill them before they succeed in killing me. Forgiveness really doesn't enter this picture, except maybe after I've killed those evil people, and then only as a practical afterthought, with the purpose of helping myself to sleep better at night.

It strikes me, however, that this is the logic of the battlefield. From the point of view of survival for a soldier, it makes perfect sense to adopt such black-and-white categories. You take them out or they will take you out. Simple as that. Part of the problem, of course, in a place like Iraq, is that it is so difficult to know who the enemy is. Who do you target in order to remain alive? Who do you kill in order to protect yourself, defend the lives of your buddies, complete your deployment, and return to your family? Is it that 12-year-old kid aiming that AK-47 at your head on a street in Mosul, or is it that teenage girl with a suicide vest strapped to her body beneath her robe as she meanders up to a checkpoint, or is it the nameless, faceless murderer who staged a car bomb at the side of the road to be triggered by a lethal call to a cell phone as your Stryker vehicle trundles past, or is it a black-turbaned mullah in a Baghdad neighborhood exhorting a gathering of desperately poor and terminally unemployed youth to drive the American occupiers out of their country with all available blood and firepower?

Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton created the phrase "atrocity-creating situation” during the Vietnam War, and uses it to describe a “counterinsurgency war in which U.S. soldiers, despite their extraordinary firepower, feel extremely vulnerable in a hostile environment,” amplified by “the great difficulty of tracking down or even recognizing the enemy.” The built-in logic of being deployed to a place like Iraq during the current conflict seems tailor-made to confront soldiers with morally complex choices in ambiguous circumstances. Who do we blame when things go wrong and noncombatant civilians are killed? Who do we hold accountable when a soldier inadvertently sheds innocent blood in the midst of a firefight? Even more troubling, who is guilty of criminal misconduct when a soldier who has been told that "Islam is evil" commits an act of murder or rape, mayhem, torture or brutality against a randomly-selected civilian in a Muslim country?

Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the war itself, quite apart from whether it was smart or stupid, honorable or duplicitous, just or unjust to invade Iraq in the first place, no matter whether Saddam had or did not have weapons of mass destruction, it seems clear that prominent among the victims of the war will be tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the US military.

Veterans will be paying the price for the service they undertook voluntarily, on behalf of the rest of us, for many decades to come. That price will be counted in millions of nightmares and wasted days, in broken marriages and orphaned children, in depression, alcoholism and suicide, in homelessness and poverty, in crushed hopes and failed dreams.

Is it possible that an alternative logic is available to those of us who have the luxury of not finding ourselves on a battlefield? At the risk of somebody calling me a fool -- a charge that would doubtless be well-deserved -- I'd like to propose a little mental exercise. Please join me in considering the words of General David Petraeus, current US commander in Iraq, quoted on March 8th of 2007 shortly after assuming his new position: "There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq."

I wonder if it might help us to search for the non-military solutions Petraeus implies are essential if we found a way to use the non-military technique of listening to our enemies? If Petraeus is right, we will have to expend a lot more energy and resources in conversing with those whom we have deemed enemies than in destroying them.

And if so, that old-fashioned notion of forgiveness will come in handy. After all, it's hard to engage in a sincere and mutual search for peaceful solutions if you haven't forgiven your conversation partner -- your sworn enemy -- in advance of the conversation.