The ache and the tension of it reminds me of a court case I heard about yesterday. My daughter's boyfriend has a summer job in a lawyer's office, and spent the day yesterday reading through the medical and military records of a young man who's on trial for rape.
Apparently he returned to Washington after a seven year tour of duty in Iraq, having been, by all accounts, a bright and exemplary soldier, awarded for his performance. But the strain of the return was clearly significant; eventually his wife left him, taking their children with her, and somehow he ended up with this rape charge and a dishonorable discharge.
I get the sense, just from this small taste of the story, that we have here yet another story of a man who has seen more than he can bear and been stretched beyond his own personal limits to a snapping point that would have been unimaginable to his pre-war self. And it seems to me that war wounds all its soldiers in this way, though their responses may be different. Certainly in my generation the phrase "He's a Nam Vet" carries with it a host of implications about psychological damage -- though I think we all assumed that the difficulties those veterans carried had a lot to do with the lack of respect they were getting here at home for their sacrifices back in the killing fields.
But now we are all so careful to celebrate the labors of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and still they return severely damaged -- and we don't seem to really have adequate systems in place to help them overcome their woundedness. When will we realize that war is simply not worth it? That in demonizing other we destroy ourselves? I know -- I sound like a hopeless idealist, a deluded liberal. But I think that same dynamic plays out on a smaller scale at home, in neighborhoods, in the workplace... any time we decide another person is a lost cause and begin to exclude, or attack, or ignore we are in fact creating more walking wounded. When will we realize we are all connected, all valuable, all deserving of hope and care?
And yet this is not exactly a new thought: Twice in the Gospel of Thomas (Logion 48, Logion 106) Jesus tells us that if we could manage to achieve peace -- to understand that we are all one -- we could move mountains. And if you're looking for a more worldly statement to this effect, you can look to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights put forth by Eleanor Roosevelt's Human Rights Commission and unanimously approved by the United Nations in 1948: Article 25 states, "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control." We're talking EVERYONE, not just people like us, or people in our country, or people whose countries are friends of our country. We're talking EVERYONE.
I am probably naive; God knows I have no experience of war in the traditional sense of guns and battlefields. But my suspicion is that what torments our returning soldiers is not just the horrible sights they have seen or the loss of their comrades in arms. I'm thinking the piece of war that must be inescapably haunting is the part where you destroy another human being and realize they are not some faceless enemy but just another person like yourself, with parents, or children, or siblings; a person who hungers and thirsts, who loves and protects and defends just as you do.
That said, I must also confess that I know how it feels to be furious with another person, so furious that some part of you dreams heinous thoughts of revenge. I am not innocent here, and know I have work to do. But looking at this image, and thinking of this one particular soldier, I cannot but be reminded that in picking up the rock we long to hurl, we risk stretching ourselves into the same hideous contortions I mentioned two blogs back when speaking of avoidance -- and we also risk getting stuck there, trapped in our own venom and vindictiveness.
Which brings me again to one of the key reasons I am a Christian: it has always seemed to me that the key characteristic of Christ's message was forgiveness. As human beings, we desperately need to learn and practice the art of forgiveness. What Jesus is telling us is that if we could do that, stop throwing stones, we could begin to move mountains. Our determination to punish and our reluctance to forgive are crippling us, making us weak and ineffectual. Imagine the wonders we could accomplish if we could forgive, cooperate, and stop wasting so much money on pointless wars.
And the best time to start? I think that would be, well... now.
3 comments:
I have also been thinking about forgiveness, if on a much smaller, more personal scale. You show me what a lack of forgiveness can do. To me
Thank you
I love seeing through your eyes. Your photo so moves me.
As do your words. I'm accused also of idealism, told that war has always been and forever will be. . . and yet, I'm not willing to accept that. I think it's too easy to accept that and excuse ourselves of our actions.
My eldest brother is a Vietnam vet. He hasn't held a job in decades. He's been in and out of VA hospitals, which still think drugs are how you cure.
Today's Post ran its periodic feature, Faces of the Fallen. I always spend time looking at the faces (I wrote on my blog about doing so in 9/09). In some ways, death protects them from the nightmares they'd live out at home. And I say a prayer that my son is not among them, because they are all "the Fallen".
Until we all become "naive," we will never imagine the possibilities of universal peace. Thanks for being at the forefront of the naive movement. The damage done and being done to the people we send to war and the families and friends they leave behind can never be calculated.
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