The War is Breaking My Heart
The war has been weighing heavy on my mind these days.
I think about it almost all the time. When I’m listening to the radio
in the morning, when I read the paper later in the day. It pops up in my conversations,
my thoughts, my letters, and my writing. I go to just about every protest
there is, but it still feels like it’s just not enough. Sometimes I
feel like the war is making me go slowly crazy. Like the rest of the country.
It just drags on and on, gets bloodier and bloodier by the day, and doesn’t
seem to have an end anywhere in sight.
In the early days, after it was slowly becoming true that all of our predictions
about the war were turning out to be true, I have to admit I did get a little
satisfaction from that knowledge. I’d think of the person that threatened
to beat me up over my protesting the initial invasion and I’d wonder
what he thought now of his great, all-knowing president. But it didn’t
take long to realize that my being able to tell people “I told you so”
meant nothing when the price came at hundreds and hundreds of dead people
piling up in the streets of Baghdad. Now I get no satisfaction out of any
of that and think I was stupid for even thinking that in the first place.
I still wonder what those people who backed the war at the beginning think
now about it, but not more than I think about what the families of the dead,
Iraqi and American, think about.
The other day, I got to my Intro to Philosophy class a few minutes early so
I could read the paper. There was a horrible article about a bombing at a
Shiite university in Baghdad that killed 60 some people, mostly students and
workers, supposedly in retaliation for the hanging of Saddam’s brother.
The brutality of the execution was so vivid in my mind when I read that the
man’s head actually came off the body during the execution. And to think
that this act of “justice” served to inflame the endless cycle
of violence by generating another revenge killing, this time killing dozens
of students.
After the bombing, a group of US soldiers sped to the area in a convoy of
humvees. As the convoy passed an elderly man who saw the whole incident happen,
he spit on the Americans and yelled “You are the ones who brought this
devastation to our country!” as he spat on the humvees.
This line stopped me cold when I was reading it. It was directed at me. “You
are the ones who brought this devastation to our country.” Am I a part
of that diseased machine which destroyed these people’s lives. All of
us are. I would like to think that because I protested the war at every turn,
worked with coalition groups that opposed the war, helped organize protests
against the war, and never supported it that I was not a part of it. But I
don’t believe that. The only other people, besides the Iraqis, who can
stop this war, are the Americans. Myself included, sadly. I didn’t want
this carried on in my name and have resisted as much as I can, but I know
that it has been carried out in my name. Almost as if someone wrote my name
on a bomb, or everyone in this country for that matter. Like it or not, this
is our war and the blood is all over us. From head to toe.
Maybe that article caught my heart so deeply because the people that were
killed were mostly doing the same thing that I was doing that day, in fact
at that very moment. I thought about the students that were killed that, the
workers, and wondered if they were taking the same classes I was. Studying
the same things I was study, working the same jobs I was working, or helping
to raise their children, like I am now. As I was thinking these thoughts,
I was looking around at the students that were filing into my classroom. Probably
half aren’t even that interested in what we’re learning. As we’re
studying Plato and Aristotle, it’s a safe bet that some of those kids
killed in Iraq were taking the exact same classes I was taking. Thinking of
how much they were risking to take those classes, and seeing how little people
in my class cared struck me. They risked their lives to take classes that
a good number of my classmates couldn’t even stay awake in. I thought
about that for the rest of the class, myself so preoccupied with these thoughts
that I couldn’t keep my mind on the lesson at all.
As I left the classroom to cross the campus for my next class, I heard a voice
begging me to stop. “Excuse me, sir. Do you have a minute?” I
turned around and it was a young Marine, a recruiter, maybe no older than
19 years old.
“Have you ever thought about a career in the military?”
Right then it hit me. This was a direct connection to what I read in the paper.
This recruiter sweeps in to pick up the bored and disenfranchised of the student
body, like a harvester of future ghosts, to offer them travel and possible
adventure. From my campus to yours. Maybe some of those same soldiers who
were spat on by the elderly Iraqi man had come from our schools, our wasted
economy, to join what has essentially become a group of economic draftees
to fight and die for absolutely nothing, for lies, and to kill and kill and
kill for those same lies with no end in sight.
From my campus to yours.
The war weighs really heavy on me and I think about it all the time. But deep
down, I know, it’s not enough. The bombers are leaving from my front
porch, the trains, and the troops, are leaving from my front door.
I just feel bad for everyone over there.
I read this article in a book that came out around the time of the first Gulf
War where the author wrote of an encounter he had:
“On the first night of the war I took a taxi ride in New York; the driver,
an unhealthy-looking black man about my age, turned out to be a Vietnam vet.
He said he’s nearly drunk himself to death after the war, done nothing
but drink for years and years. Finally he’d managed to get it together,
kick the juice, and buy an (AA) medallion. ‘And now…this! I keep
on flashin’ on those missiles,” he said, actually gazing up into
the winter night with an expression of dread. By the time we got to my destination
we were both nearly in tears. ‘All I know is, man, I’m against
death,’ he said.”
Me, too.
Me, too.