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.