A few years ago, on a bright and sunny autumn day, I visited the Vietnam war memorial for the first time--that long black scar in the ground, etched with the names of all Americans who died there.
The beginning is inocuous enough. You're walking along and suddenly the names begin, pretty much at ground level, and as you walk, the memorial wall grows taller and the names more numerous until suddenly, you find yourself surrounded--and overwhelmed by--the names.
Thousands upon thousands of names.
And as I stood there at the apex of the memorial which, at its highest point, is taller than the tallest man, and polished to a high gleam so that you can see yourself staring back from the cloud of names--tears began to course down my cheeks.
At first, I wept silently, but soon I was overcome and stood there alone, sobbing openly as tourists jostled around me, laughing and posing and taking snapshots of one another as if this were a playground and not a hallowed place.
I could not stop crying.
To me, these were not just names etched in stone--they were sweet boys who kissed me good-night on my front porch and wrote me letters from overseas with the word "Free" written on the upper right-hand corner of the battered envelope. I boxed up Care packages for them with homemade cookies and copies of Playboy magazine and bottles of Tabasco sauce. I wrote them letters scented with my perfume and mailed to APO or FPO addresses.
Down along the wall, also silent amongst babbling tourists, I saw an elderly woman standing tall, her hand placed softly against a name. Another older woman stood back and took a photograph of her standing by that name, and they walked away, arm in arm, heads bowed.
I could not stop crying.
Finally, I turned away and, tears still coursing down my cheeks, walked blurry-eyed up to a souvenir stand operated by a gray-haired, grizzle-faced Vietnam veteran.
He looked into my swollen eyes, and he knew.
He said, "Did you serve?"
I said, "No, but my father, my brother, my husband, my brother-in-law all did. And some boys I once knew, long ago."
He nodded. Placing a gentle hand on my shaking shoulders, he said, "Come back at night. By day it's...overwhelming. But at night? It's embracing."
I could see what he meant. At night, anyway, it would be quiet, more reverential, more respectful somehow.
More private.
I stayed with the man at his souvenir stand a while, bought a 101st Airborne pin for my husband and Globe and Anchor for my dad. His knowing presence was calming, and when I was able, I left.
But I will carry those names--and that day--in my soul forever.
During the bloody meatgrinder that was the Vietnam war and the chaos and confusion that gripped the country as peace activists fought to end it, events like the head-bashing anti-war riot outside the Democratic presidential convention of 1968, the war protest at Kent State in 1970 where frightened National Guardsmen not much older than the students themselves, killed four kids, or Moratorium Day where we all wore black armbands--and during a time when the draft hung over the head of any able-bodied male who made a few bad grades in college (if they were lucky enough to actually get to attend college)--it was like you were trapped in an insane asylum, and the loony bin was your own country.
And the inmates were rioting.
In those days, peace activists I knew were very hostile toward the men who were fighting that war. Even though most of them were young too, and had been drafted and sent over pretty much against their wills, they were somehow blamed by the peace activists for the war.
Troops returning from combat--even the ones who were actually going through the process to muster out of the service and return to civilian life--were cursed in bars and airports, called "babykillers" and openly derided by angry young people with long hair, some of whom were wearing fatigue jackets they'd bought at Army-Navy surplus stores.
But to me, warriors were not some faceless, heartless monolith with buzz-cuts who got off on killing people and blowing shit up. They were my family and my friends. They didn't kill babies--they cradled them.
I believed then--as I believe now--that it is possible to hate the war but love the warriors.
Yet this terrible divide between those who wanted to end the war and those who fought in it split this country wide open in a psychological scar that has yet to heal, and caused immense damage to the peace movement itself.
That scar was ripped wide open, all over again, when Bush started the Iraq war.
By this time, those same peace activists were middle-aged and had draft-aged kids of their own at home. To the great shock of some of those activists, their own children volunteered for the armed services during a time of full-on war.
One woman I know, whose son told her he'd joined the Marines, burst into tears and shouted, "I didn't raise you to kill people!"
Others--many of whom had no familiarity with the military way of life--fell completely to pieces, spiraling into a panic every time they had to go any length of time without hearing from their children. I know of one woman who, when her son was finally able to get to a phone and call home from Iraq, literally screamed and dropped the phone. She had actually thought he might be dead, and either didn't understand that the military would have notified her of such a terrible thing--or didn't trust them to do so.
And there are some who, still harboring hostility toward anyone in uniform, actually worried that the child they loved might commit war crimes, might, as one put it, "leave his soul behind in the desert."
It's as if they feared that the military would take the child they knew and cherished--that sweet boy or girl--and turn them into unrecognizable monsters bent on world destruction.
Again, I watched as some families were torn apart. Only this time, the situation was reversed. Whereas in my generation, fathers who were often veterans of World War II sparred with their sons who resisted serving in a war they opposed--this time, it was some peace activist parents raging at their children who had enlisted. In some cases, their military children no longer speak to them now--a tragedy I find unconscionable.
In my own case, when my son enlisted in the Marines during a war I opposed, my devastation was not that he'd chosen to go into the military service, but that I knew he would follow his father and and grandfathers and uncles into war, and I knew all too well what that meant.
Of all my long long list of resentments toward the Bush administration, my number-two on that list (following the #1 of starting the war in the first place)--was that the Bushies deliberately exploited that old scar in this country for political purposes--eviscerating anyone who disagreed with their morally bankrupt policies even if such a public gutting ruined that person's reputation or career.
Soon, all the old hatreds came boiling to the surface again--gray-haired Vietnam vets squared off against gray-haired peace activists--while the young people in the middle remained relatively quiet in comparison to their parents' generation, mainly because this time around, there was no draft.
The horrifying images of such atrocities as Abu Ghraib and the Haditha attacks inflamed old prejudices among some peace activists that soldiers and Marines were, after all, bloodthirsty hate-mongers addicted to violence.
This situation held until the names started to stack up, one after another after another after another--a virtual wall of names this time--of young people lost forever to yet another war.
And as the war dragged on, a strange alchemy began to take place, in which peace activists began to understand that joining the military is sometimes the only way a young person from an impoverished area can find a secure job or get an education, and that they don't necessarily WANT to go to war just because they enlist.
In other words, you don't have to love war to be a warrior.
At the same time, soldiers and Marines began to realize that peace activists weren't fighting THEM as much as they were fighting unfair policies that were putting them in harm's way. War opponents were no longer just "long-haired dope-smoking hippie freaks" of the old stereotype; now they were Mom and Dad and buddies who were themselves veterans of the Iraq war.
And the names kept adding up. A thousand a year, in fact.
Eventually, each side began to realize that they pretty much wanted the same thing as the other--an end to the unneccessary loss of young life.
As more and more Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are joining the peace movement, and as more and more peace activists are taking pains to reach out to the military and to even understand that there can be many good things about stepping up to serve one's country, then this country is in a better place than ever before to begin to heal that terrible scar from the Vietnam war, and to bridge the gap between those in uniform and those out of it who long for peace.
Recently, I've been doing a series of blogposts with highlights of an ongoing "conversation" I've been having with a bright young Army captain who has just published a book, "WILL WAR EVER END? A Soldier's Vision of Peace for the 21st Century."
(All publisher's profits and author's royalties will be donated to charities supporting various veterans' causes. You may purchase the book either at Amazon.com or at Capt. Chappell's website.)
This is the third in our series of blogposts, which can be found either at my website, Blue Inkblots, or at my page at TPM Cafe.
In our first post, we discussed the possibility that war can, indeed, come to an end if we all do our parts to end it. That post summarizes Capt. Chappell's main points in his book.
In the second post, we talked about how to handle it when the media behaves more like a propaganda arm of the government than as a watchdog for poor policy decisions.
For our third post, I asked Capt. Chappell:
How do we foster greater understanding between peace activists and the military? They each tend to hold stereotypical views of the other, and might be surprised to find how much they have in common.
After explaining that most soldiers fight for the lives of the man or woman next to them, or to protect their loved ones at home from aggressors (as they did in World War II)--which we covered in the first couple of posts--Capt. Chappell brought up an interesting point:
One of the most serious offenses in the army is firing your weapon without receiving a direct order to do so, and soldiers who fire their weapons without permission are severely punished. The army has never taught me to hate, because enraged soldiers are extremely different to control. A soldier filled with hatred can easily go berserk, and bloodlust is extremely dangerous to a military unit because it makes soldiers less likely to follow orders and more likely to fire their weapons recklessly.
I am mentioning all of this, because the army has ideals that are very similar to the ideals of most peace activists. For example, the army emphasizes brotherhood, empathy, community, selflessness, sacrifice, and teamwork. In the army, I have been taught to treat my military unit like my family, to lead by example, to never ask others to do what I am unwilling to do, and to put the wellbeing of everyone I outrank above my personal wellbeing. During an army field exercise, the highest ranking soldiers always eat last, and the lowest ranking soldiers always eat first. The Army's Warrior Ethos says, "I will never leave a fallen comrade." In the army, we are taught to never abandon anyone, not the injured, not the dying, not even the bodies of the deceased.
As Dave Grossman explains in On Killing, two percent of the people in the military are psychopaths who want to kill other human beings. Based on my experiences, the other ninety-eight percent are mostly decent, hard working people who want a better and more peaceful world for their children. Although peace activists and most soldiers want the same thing - world peace - they often disagree over how we can best achieve this goal.
To someone in the military, training for war and going to war is his or her JOB. It's a profession to them, they're good at it, and they are proud of what they do.
That does not mean that they love to kill people, not by a long shot. If they did love killing people, they would not suffer post traumatic stress when they have to do it. In fact, they avoid it when possible, especially when working in the midst of a civilian population.
One of my nephews, for instance, was the company commander of a Stryker brigade in the Diyala province for 15 months during the so-called "surge." The Diyala was one of the bloodiest regions in Iraq during that time as the Sunni and Shiite sects went at each other, but my nephew's job was to work with tribal sheiks and to do all he could to restore order in the villages, stop the bloodshed, and repair local services. If he or his men and women were called upon to fire their weapons, it was in self-defense.
After my son finished his active-duty commitment and left the Marines, his unit returned to Iraq for its fourth deployment, and spent the whole time working with the same people who'd tried to kill them in previous deployments. They built schools and helped towns build local governments.
When polled, most Iraqis, while they say they do want the Americans to leave, all the same depend upon the Americans for their protection while the Iraqi army gains in strength and knowledge. And they're grateful for the Americans' help.
War is not all like movies and video games, and all warriors are not necessarily killers.
Capt. Chappell offers four steps to help build understanding between the military and peace activists that will help them, in the future, to work together for the same mutual goals:
Step 1 - Despite your differences, always try to respect the other person as a human being.
Although Martin Luther King Jr. opposed the Vietnam War, he did not see soldiers as the underlying cause of the war...In the minds of many Americans, peace activists have the bad reputation of being radical and out of touch, because some of them acted cruelly toward American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Although they called themselves "peace activists," some behaved more like "anger activists" and sometimes even "hate activists."
[...]
I have met many peace activists who are extremely kind - people who are disturbed by these accounts and would never treat a human being so cruelly. But just as a few bad soldiers (e.g. the prison guards who committed torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib) have given peace activists a bad impression of soldiers, a few bad peace activists have given the military and many other Americans a bad impression of the peace movement. When we look past these stereotypes and respect each other as human beings, we will find that understanding, dialogue, and cooperation become possible.
I think this is a key point: A few bad apples on both sides have spoiled the reputations of all the others. I've always wondered why people don't stop to think that the reason cases of American war crimes and misbehaviors make such big news splashes is because THEY ARE SO RARE. When you consider that Americans have been in Iraq now for six years and have rotated in and out more than a million troops, and that at any one time, we've had more than 150,000 troops stationed there...then you realize that you can count, literally on one hand, the instances where troops have behaved shamefully. The vast majority of them are still the same young men and women we all know and love here at home.
When my son was deployed to Fallujah the first time, we scoured gettyimages photos of his unit, looking for snapshots that we were certain were him. In one, a Marine was herding a prisoner along with his hand roughly on the back of the man's neck, who was walking hunched-over.
The guy looked like Dustin to us, but when he got home and we showed him the photograph, he said, "No, that's not me. That guy is mis-treating that prisoner, which is something I'd never do."
So it was US who wound up faintly ashamed of ourselves, after all, because we had been perfectly willing to believe that the rough Marine in the photograph was our son. We should have known better.
Step 2 - Have a conversation about what you have in common.
When discussing what you have in common with someone else, focus on the ideals you share. If peace activists look past stereotypes and see with an open mind, they can recognize the admirable ideals they share with American soldiers. Although my Korean mother despises violence after living through two wars as a child, for example, she admires American soldiers because they saved the lives of her and her family. If the United Nations had not sent an allied army with American soldiers to stop the invading North Koreans during the Korean War, my mother's family might have been killed and I would have never been born. If American soldiers had not fought to protect South Korea, my mother's family and countless other South Koreans would have been conquered by North Korea, which has become an oppressive country where starvation is widespread today.
Capt. Chappell goes on to compare the solving of international problems with violent war to the practice--years ago--of amputating a limb that had become infected, since there was no antibiotic treatments available at the time. He says that we're still relying on military "amputation" of problems that can be solved by other means.
Step 3 - Have a conversation about your differences
Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi showed that peaceful tactics can heal national and even international conflicts. But could peaceful tactics have stopped Hitler? Waging peace could have certainly stopped the conditions that allowed him to rise to power, and this is why waging peace must be proactive rather than reactive. Once someone like Hitler has begun his global campaign of violence, he is much harder to stop, just as infections and cancer are easiest to cure when they are treated early.
Waging peace can function as preventative medicine by stopping World War III before it begins, because waging peace enables us to proactively heal the turmoil, oppression, and injustice that can erupt into global conflict. Consequently, waging peace is far more proactive than waging war, which often reacts to problems when it is already too late. This is yet another reason why waging peace is the most effective way for solving our problems in the 21st century.
Since peace activists and most soldiers want the same thing - world peace - they should have an intelligent discussion about which tactics can best accomplish this goal, since most of their differences revolve around whether violent or peaceful tactics are most effective. There are many ways to fight for a better world after all. An old adage tells us that "the pen is mightier than the sword," and together we must continue to show the world how peaceful tactics are mightier than violence.
As an illustration to Capt. Chappell's point, observe the difference between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comprehensive approach to the Middle East, compared to the entire eight years of Bushian bluster and blowhard nonsense. During that time, countries like Syria were completely ignored out of some misplaced theory about not negotiating with terrorists, when actually, Syria could be one of the key components to helping establish a peaceful Middle East, in time. In fact, the only progress made at all by the Bush administration in the Middle East on any front was only made in the last couple of years, when they quietly began to talk to their enemies.
Step 4 - Discuss ways of working together despite your differences
We can find ways of working together despite our differences, and even if we disagree we can work together without compromising our values. In fact, peace activists and soldiers are already working together toward world peace without even realizing it. Today, the idea that "war is hell" is common knowledge. This happened because soldiers and veterans organizations have raised public awareness about the psychological trauma inflicted during war. War is harder to glorify today than it was fifty years ago, because so many brave Vietnam veterans told their stories, which has helped countless people better understand the reality and horror of war. Understanding this horror is a necessary step on the journey to world peace, and this step is possible because of the soldiers who courageously share their stories.
If peace activists and soldiers make a determined and concerted effort to cooperate toward their shared goal of a better world, they can help humanity take many more steps toward a global civilization of peace and prosperity. In addition, even liberals and conservatives can work together to end war.
This is possible because world peace is not a partisan issue. In the 21st century, it is in everyone's best interest to stop the tragedy of war that threatens human survival.
It breaks my heart to think that, someday, we're going to have to build a memorial to the young men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't know what that memorial will look like, but I do know that, should I ever visit it, I will cry all over again.
But what if, through my efforts and the efforts of other peace activists and warriors like Capt. Chappell who long for peace, are successful?
Could it even be possible that we might not NEED another war memorial?
Because I've been through this before, both when my family and friends went off to war and later, when I sent my own son, and when I wrote letters to the mothers of his friends who had been killed.
I don't want any other aging mothers to stand next to a cold hard wall someday, tracing her child's name with shaking fingers, while a friend takes a photograph because, truly, it is all she has left of him, and all she ever will have.
TheraP ridicules a strawman and does it nicely. She defends the virtue of uniformity over diversity when it comes to health care and paying for it.
The fact is that not everyone has uniform health care values or needs, whether viewed at a moment in time or over a lifetime or over generations. Another fact: Health care is not monolithic, treatments and diagnoses are often heuristic and sometimes conflicting. And except in a non-evolving autocracy, having options is a fundamental principle of both nature and nurture. It's easy to misunderstand "degrees of freedom" and then play with words, harder to build an effective system which accounts for real degrees of freedom, whether in natural or cultural reality.
As we all know, personal responsibility does play a role in health, and therefore consequently in health care needs. And as we've seen on Wall St. recently "moral hazard" is a fact of the human condition. We won't make good progress if we only castigate a strawman notion or fence with windmills. If you want to argue that health care is a right rather than a privilege, you must also argue with equal eloquence for individual responsibility.
The USA is, and should remain, neither an anarcho-libertarian free market nor a communistic autocracy, when it comes to health care. The public interest in proper health care is not zero, nor should the individual get it for free.
TheraP's post demonstrates how not to take the straight line to a destination. To expedite, I suggest finding a better frame next time.
There are two key 2-D frames to consider from the demand side: Need and access, and cost and payment. There are similar frames from the supply side (doctors, hospitals, technology, ...).
A third frame is that of transition, if the "system" is to be transformed from the mucked up status quo, what are the transition costs (dollar and otherwise)? Economic and human dislocations need to be planned for and paid for.
A rational solution will not ignore any of these.