The Young Dead Soldiers do not Speak

Remembering the fallen this Memorial Day, 2014.  So many friends gone too soon.  I carry you in my heart.  

The young dead soldiers do not speak.
Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:
Who has not heard them?
They have a silence that speaks for them at night,
And when the clock counts.
They say: We were young. We have died.
REMEMBER US.
They say: We have done what we could,
But until it is finished it is not done.
They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished,
No one can know what our lives gave.
They say: Our deaths are not ours: they are yours,
They will mean what you make them.
They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for,
Peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say,
It is you who must say this.
We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.
We were young, they say. We have died;
REMEMBER US.

by Archibald MacLeish, The Young Dead Soldiers

Sassoon's Declaration: "the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise."

 “Honor also to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field, and serves, as he best can, the same cause,... who braves, for the common good, the storms of heaven and the storms of battle.” Abraham Lincoln

 I carry that one with me... Sassoon's declaration remains true. Most at home do not share the soldiers'agonies. Most. But not all. I think that is why the feelings of alienation and separation, of being "apart," are so profound for those that do. Not a soldier. But not quite a 'civilian' either. Soldiers can only meet you halfway in terms of 'what it was like' and only the rare civilian can even enter the conversation. And no matter what you did do, it never feels like enough, even when someone hands you a quote to remind you. When it ends there is a gaping hole where that intensity and sense of purpose lived. There is a knot that remains buried within you. The war lives in small things, like hands that shake slightly when the topic comes up. But who will ask the citizen who cared for her brother in the field, who braved the storms that came, why her hands shake? Only her brother. Maybe. Ignorance and casual indifference will mean most of those stories will never be told. After all, the voices of callous complacency say you just sent care packages...

All of the most important physical items from my war years (photographs, uniforms, war loot, letters, etc) sit in that nondescript tub that was purchased for less than $5 at Walmart. It’s a vital, yet hidden, link to my past....

Who do you tell

First time writing since my injury.  It's like riding a bike, right?...~wendy

Ten years on this journey.

But who to share it with?  Who can know?

Not the feel good, funny, homecoming, brotherhood side.

The dark. The ugly side.

Ten years of war and it is easy to pick out the soldiers. The warriors.  But there are others equally scarred by its destruction. They are in the background. Families.  Friends. Lovers. The volunteers. Those nameless people doing all they can to help contain, in some small way, all that destruction. But that means letting the destruction in to your own soul as well.

Who tells our stories?

Who knows what we have seen?

What we have heard?

What we have felt.

The things we do not talk about.

You cannot share them at the time.  

We must-- "Keep all communications positive.  To do otherwise is to put your soldier at risk.  Do not be a distraction.  It can get him killed. Listen. Do not judge. Remember your smiles!" 

"Send a themed care package once a month. Make it fun."

"My Hero. Thank You for what you are doing. We support what you are doing.Thank you for your service. You are a Hero." 

What happens when the words have lost their meaning?  When you can no longer ignore the messy darkness shoved behind the boxes and no longer stand the platitudes you are supposed to spout? 

When you can no longer ignore the things that are real.

The killing.  The dying.  The wretched wounded.  The souls torn open.  The shattered minds.

The unrelenting never-ending fucking wastefulness of it all.

Who do you tell?

Very few people want to see the darkness.  It doesn't fit well into their world views.  It is messy.  It isn't nice to look at.  It might make them hurt too.  It is too hard. Some may ask, but then they get that stunned shell shocked look on their faces, so unprepared for the truth.

Ten years is a long time and it all has to go somewhere.  Buried deep. Maybe too deep.  But also right there, just under the surface, if you care to know where to look.

It is all there in the silence.  Bursting out of the footlockers in the garage where I try to leave it.

If you do it right, it is more than you ever expected to see.  More than you were ever prepared for.  More than you know what to do with yourself.  But no one wants to hear about that part.

Don't let things get too heavy.  Lighten it up.

Smiling soldiers with puppies are good for slideshows. No one wants to see the screaming, bleeding ones at your presentation.

Remember, Baking cookies is easier to deal with than the sobs of grown boys.

Do you hear it? 

(The weeping. He killed a man today. His first. I can hear it, ragged breath coming through the ripped open pieces of his soul. The broken pieces spilling out over the phone line to cover me. I hold them in my hands but I do not know how to put him back together.) (The sobbing. Helo crash. A spinning rotor blade will cut right through human flesh.  It doesn't care if that piece of flesh happens to be the face of his best friend.) (The crying. I love you. Jess is dead.)

Squirt guns and school supplies make better stories than talking the rifle out of a man's hands. (Pleading. Praying. ohgodohgod Swearing. putitthefuckdown. Begging. please.please.please.please.don'tdothistome.please.)

(Two days spent waiting for word. Success or failure? Can I live with failure?)

The flags.  The funerals. Their mothers. 

(I sit sometimes, at your grave, W.  I try to tell you these things. But I can't. I'm always empty. Like this place seems empty. I stare blankly at the granite.)

Broken bodies trying to put broken minds back together.

Even when they make it home it isn't always better.  Too many still fight the war. BD. CJ. Too many lose. The number keep rising.  Justin. Mac. It hurts. Oh God. It fucking hurts.

No one tell you that you when you start this that you will get broken too. You will make promises you can't keep. There are things you cannot unhear or unfeel. The Loss. The waiting and the helpless watching.  No ones says you will also touch the black and it will gut you too.

When we started none of us expected to still be doing this 10 year later.  But it didn't end. 

All of these things...who do you tell? 

And how do you walk away?

I made him a promise. Without this I don't know how to keep it.

Perhaps, it is time, though.

All that is left is the doing.
“The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn't any war. There was no war here. Then I realized it was over for me. But I did not have the feeling that it was really over. I had the feeling of a boy who thinks of what is happening at a certain hour at the schoolhouse from which he has played truant.” 
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Remembering Gunnar

I haven't taken the time to write since life decided to toss me upon the rocks about this time last year.  But I cannot let this day go by without reflecting on the passage of time.  Today marks 8 years since the loss of a very special young man.  A soldier.  A son.

There are those who do not know this part of me.  They will ask: Who is this man?  and  Who is this man to you?  To their Facebook queries and offhand inquiries I will tell them just that. He is a soldier.  A son.  A fallen hero.  He deserves to be remembered.  You must remember his name. He is a casualty of war.  You must remember that he is a person.  And he has left behind very real people who still mourn him but have carried on.  

Who is he to me?  He is the soft note of sorrow in every sad and patriotic song.  He is "the land of the free and the home of the brave."  The red in the stripes that fly overhead.  To me he is the first casualty in a list that continues to grow.  He made me understand what I had begun and its importance. Where pride and pain intersect.  He is a drop in the bucket that turned a project into a mission.    Honor.  Courage. Commitment.  Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless-Service, Honor, Integrity, Personal Courage.  He taught me more than he could ever know.  In some ways, Gunnar was one of those first defining steps into the realities of adulthood.  He prepared me to send someone I love to war.  He prepared me for Will.  For Jessica and Jonathon.  For Kyle.   

 The things that I've learned in the last nine years, the things I have been taught, are why I cannot walk away.  Gunnar is a part of that. I cannot accept the refrain: "Haven't you done enough? Just stop with the letters. The boxes.  The names.  The stories.  Walk away."  But I am the keeper of stories, even if many of them now live in a footlocker in my garage or inside me, tucked away and guarded.  I will not break faith with those who live or those who die.  Steve, wherever you are, I will keep my promise.  I will not let them be forgotten.  

Since Gunnar was also a poet I offer this tribute in verse.  May your words forever live beside these as they capture the life and experience of soldiers.  I can't wait to hang out with you some day. In the meantime, your mom is pretty remarkable.  Keep looking after her and exercising those angel wings.  You will live forever in the memories of those who knew you and you can be assured that you will not be forgotten.

This We'll Defend.

PFC Gunnar Becker

January 22, 1985 - January 13, 2005
 

Iraq

The Kid Has Gone to the Colors

William Herschell

in The Indianapolis News

The Kid has gone to the Colors

And we don't know what to say;

The Kid we have loved and cuddled

Stepped out for the Flag today.

We thought him a child, a baby,

With never a care at all,

But his country called him man--size

And the Kid has heard the call.

He paused to watch the recruiting

Where, fired by the fife and drum,

He bowed his head to Old Glory

And thought that it whispered "Come!"

The Kid, not being a slacker,

Stood forth with patriot-joy

To add his name to the roster--

And God, we're proud of the boy!

The Kid has gone to the Colors;

It seems but a little while

Since he drilled a schoolboy army

In a truly martial style.

But now he's a man, a soldier,

And we lend him listening ear,

For his heart is a heart all loyal,

Unscourged by the curse of fear.

His dad, when he told him, shuddered,

His mother--God bless her!--cried!

Yet, blest with a mother-nature,

She wept with a mother--pride.

But he whose old shoulders straightened

Was Granddad--for memory ran

To years when he, too, a youngster,

Was changed by the Flag to a man!

To the Fallen--Laurence Binyon

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,

England mourns for her dead across the sea.

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,

Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,

There is music in the midst of desolation

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;

They sit no more at familiar tables of home;

They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;

They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,

Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known

As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,

To the end, to the end, they remain.

The Heart-Cry

She turned the page of wounds and death 

With trembling fingers. In a breath 

The gladness of her life became 

Naught but a memory and a name. 

Farewell! Farewell! I might not share 

The perils it was yours to dare. 

Dauntless you fronted death: for me 

Rests to face life as fearlessly. 

F.W. Bourdillon

The End of Iraq

“What is to happen to women like me when this war ends...if it ever ends?”  Helen Zenna Smith, Stepdaughters of War

The End of Iraq.

The End of Iraq.  It began around Christmas, when the troops were redeploying home.  There were ceremonies, reflections from newsmen, and talks of a parade.  It is something I have resisted contemplating.  I have pushed the reflection away, first to enjoy the serenity of Christmas and then because it is an instinctive reaction to the ache the word brings forth.

Iraq.

Even if the war is officially over it will always be a part of me.  It grew up with me through my adolescence and early adulthood.  It has been my teacher, my tormentor, and my spirit guide.  


It has made me old.

In some ways, I know more of Iraq than I do parts of my own country.  I have never been there physically but part of me has been there since the beginning.  When I said yes to a commitment of my own we became intrinsically linked.  I know its geography by the names and stories scrawled on wrinkled, dusty paper.  

Its customs and its people crossed the distance in the form of smiling, cheeky interpreters more than willing to trade handmade gifts for more chocolate chip cookies.

I see two young faces frozen in a picture.  I wonder where these boys are now that we are gone.  I wonder if they are dead.  

When I see Iraq on the news or work up the nerve to watch a documentary, all of these suppressed feelings bubble up inside of me.  Things that I have pushed away for so long because they are overwhelming.  They always have been.  It is easier to ignore them.  To pretend they are not there.  I tried to bury them once in the sands of Santa Monica and let the Pacific carry them out to sea.

Iraq is a word that brings forth a flood of memories.  It is as intertwined in my experience of growing up as high school graduation and college cram sessions.

While other students partied I wrote letters, planned care packages, and raised money to send them.  I wondered who was doing what when and if the helo that just crashed held anyone I knew.  While my peers lived in the now, my head and my heart was in the sand.  

I sat in a campus computer lab opening emails floating in with pictures of strong young men posing with their weapons in desert camouflage uniforms while a small group of male Saudi exchange students eyed me with open suspicion.  I wondered if in a different life we might be holding weapons on each other.

Iraq is the reason I formed some of the closest friendships of my life.  It gave me a sense of purpose and a mission that I have not found duplicated in the rest of civilian life.  There are no words to explain the bonds created between those who dedicate themselves to caring for those who serve. There is no way to explain the friendship of those entrusted to your care. There is an intensity and immediacy to life.  Unless you have lived it for years on end there is no way to explain the joy it brings and the toll it takes emotionally and spiritually.  It is as George Oppen wrote, “I cannot even now/ Altogether disengage myself/ From those men.”

Iraq has brought me awkward recognition and praise.  But I do not feel worthy of praise.  I only tried to keep faith with those we as a nation sent to undertake the most unpleasant of tasks.  We sent them to fight.  We sent them to die.  If I did not pick up a gun, the least I can do is stand with them.   They want to tell me what I have done is special.  Older women who have not lived through war think it is somehow cute, maybe even romantic.  Perhaps a good way to meet a man.  They want to heap upon me recognition.  They want me to speak to their groups about what it is like and what it is that we do.  But they do not really want to know.  They do not know that when you open the door to War you get all of it.  You also stare into the Darkness.  They turn away when you tell them that with your cute logo comes, as Helen Zenna Smith writes in Stepdaughters of War, “a world of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair...that you want to find somewhere where life is quiet and beautiful and lovely as it was before the world turned khaki and blood coloured.”  That is the dark secret, I suppose.  That sometimes I wish I did not expose myself to this world and could unlearn some of what I have learned. The proverbial “youth sacrificed to the alter of war.” It was so much more than baking cookies and sending boxes.

Iraq is haunted, hallowed ground.

It is static-filled phone conversations, missing legs, and crying boys and kills.  

Iraq is death. Grief. IEDs and flag draped caskets. Sweat soaked dreams and sobs in tiny bathroom stalls. Names.  So many names.

It is love, anger, all-consuming fear and all encompassing relief.  And it is tired, oh so very tired.  Emotions overflowing until they become flat and then numb.

Iraq matured me.  I grew up with the men and the women who fought it.


Iraq is carried within me like a tiny, jagged piece of glass buried deep inside, always trying to work its way out.

Iraq is too much to be summed up with a ceremony and a stamp that declares “Over.”  It will never be over.  I suppose there will be no closure. We will just try to move on.


Post Script:
I have taken on a new set of names now that is slowly starting to take shape into likes and dislikes, personalities, pictures, people.  With no personal connection left in the war that remains I felt like it was time.  And yet the cycle is beginning again.  Part of me is scared. I have seen too much not to be. I feel Iraq creeping up on me, tightening my throat, putting tiny tremors in my hands, and stealing my breath.  Part of me does not want to know these names.  I do not want them to become people that could be missed.  Opening myself up to them is a risk.  But it is one I must take because the deploying continues.  They are all not yet home.  That was the promise that we made.  “Until they all come home,”   insuring Afghanistan will live with me too, in a different way, with its own memories, good and bad.  I will carry them all in my heart. It begins again. It continues.

He is a United States Marine

He will steal your last beer, but give you his last magazine of ammo. He will drop 6 F-bombs in one sentence, but write you the most endearing letters. He will be your worst enemy, and your best friend - often in the same day. He will borrow twenty dollars, and will repay you in alcohol. He has forgotten more names than you have ever known. … He has hurried more than you. He has waited more than… He can stand for hours, he can sit in a puddle of mud for hours on end and still crack a joke. He can sit in a small room, and stare out over a thousand yards. He will be friendly to every person he meets, but will have a plan to kill them if the need arises. He will smoke 3packs a day and run 3miles in 20 minutes. He can fall asleep in the middle of a construction zone, but is restless in his own bed. He will lace his shoes left over right, and will not tell you why. He will be the filthiest person you ever met, and the most handsome when he cleans up. His mind will swim with stories of adventure, but he will remain still. He is a rough man that watches over you while you sleep. He is a United States Marine.