Sowing And Reaping In This Time Of Perpetual War

June 9th, 2012  |   

Five months ago, on New Year’s Day, I looked at the front page of the New York Times and saw a story about a twenty-seven-year-old army veteran, Matthew Pennington, who lived in Dexter, Maine. The article was entitled, Acting Out War’s Inner Wounds.

Matthew had joined the Army at age seventeen, where he served for six years with three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the age of twenty-three, while driving down a road in Iraq, his Humvee was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED).    

These devices are homemade explosives that are planted in or on the ground and detonated by a trip wire or a remote-controlled device. IEDs are the weapon of choice for the enemy and have caused approximately 64 percent of U.S. troop deaths in Iraq.

The explosion took Matthew’s left leg below the knee, severely damaged his right leg, and scorched his lungs. After extensive care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he was honorably discharged and sent home.

Back home, the psychological injuries inside his head surfaced—post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He had left the war zone, but, like so many returning veterans, the war had not left him. Paranoia, fits of rage, and bouts of alcohol-fueled despair and isolation, combined with prescribed drugs, threatened his marriage.

In 2009, a friend forwarded to Matthew what proved to be lifesaving e-mail. It was a casting call from an undergraduate filmmaker looking for someone to play a combat veteran who had lost a leg, had PTSD, and lived in Maine. My God, thought Matthew, this fictional character is me. That’s my story.

Having only had a tiny middle school acting part, intimidated by crowds, and now avoiding human contact, Matthew responded to the e-mail and was chosen to play the part. The brief, fictional film is titled, “A Marine’s Guide to Fishing.”

Matthew says, “I thought acting would be so out of the normal that it would force me to deal with things. I wanted my life back.” Acting out the part, he found his way to health.

I was so moved by this story about Matthew Pennington that I searched out his phone number and began a conversation that led to him, and Nick Brennan, the writer and director of the film, to visit Charleston to screen the film and do two public presentations during the week just prior to Memorial Day.

The morning following his public presentations, I put Matthew and Nick on a train bound for Washington, and then on to Philadelphia for a Memorial Day film and speaking event. Please take 30 minutes to view him in Philadelphia (https://vimeo.com/43063521). 

Now that Memorial Day has come and gone, it’s lettuce-and-tomato-planting-time in our little garden. And even though frost-covered-pumpkin-time is months away, it’s time for me to harvest a crop of thoughts about sowing and reaping in this time of perpetual war.

Home—For Summer Reading

I came away from Memorial Day, and Matthew’s visit, recognizing that each and every war has its own set of warriors, bound by common experiences of war, but divided over the particular wars they fought. Sad to say, but all too often veterans wind up dressing up for parades with their caps, buttons, badges, and medals, but taking little interest in the men and women who have come back carrying the weight of post traumatic stress disorder on their shoulders.

I have just finished Toni Morrison’s new book, Home. I highly recommend it for summer reading. The story revolves around a black Korean War veteran, Frank Money, who has come back to a racist Georgia town he had fled, like so many young people, to get away from home. I won’t spoil the story for those of you who take my suggestion and read the book, but I will only say that Frank is forced to make a reconciling peace with his past, his sister, and the war in Korea. PTSD and racism are inextricably linked in this book.

Veterans from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home, because everyone has to come home, one way or another. It would do us all well if we gave them our attention, by doing the best we can to understand that they are not the same husband, sister, neighbor, or friend who left home to fight a war that is in every way an endless war.

To Snort With Anger Over The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Wall

Over the Memorial Day weekend, the traveling Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall was on display at a football field in South Charleston. It is a scaled-down version of the original Washington Wall. People came and paid respect to all who gave their lives in that war.

One woman, who had never seen the Wall, was touched emotionally. She was quoted in the local newspaper. “I wanted to cry, because they gave their life for us.”

I have no doubt about the sincerity of this woman. Her tears obviously reflect an outpouring of sorrow for the 58,272 men and women whose names are etched on the surface of this memorial. Schoolmates, and men I have known from my time in the Marine Corps, are listed there. One cannot help but be moved in the presence of their sacrifice. It is enough to make one cry for those no longer with us, and their families.

When it comes to tears, however, one must admit that there are other reasons, other than sorrow, for the shedding of tears. Tears also express anger.

Jesus is said to have wept over Jerusalem. The Greek word commonly translated as wept (embrimaomai) literally means “to snort with anger.” Jesus was upset with the leaders and his own people, calling them blind fools, because they resisted facing up to the truth. They had a history of banishing and executing the prophets who spoke unvarnished truth to power, and that pissed him off.  

I want to snort with anger over the death of Jay Stull. His name is engraved on the Wall. I played lacrosse with Jay at Washington and Lee University. He entered the Marine Corps in 1960, two years after I was commissioned. He was killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam in February of 1968, a few months before I left my parish work in Annapolis. My departure from Annapolis took place as Naval Academy midshipmen I had known at church, and in my time spent as an assistant lacrosse coach, were departing for Vietnam.

I want to shed an angry tear for the blind fools—the presidents, politicians, and military leaders, General Westmoreland for example—who sent our country’s finest flesh and blood to kill and be killed in a war in Vietnam we should never have fought. And despite the weeping woman in South Charleston who said these veterans “gave their life for us,” I have to say that I see it differently. As I so often do, I turn to fiction the better to express the truth that haunts me.

I highly recommend Graham Swift’s powerful new book, Wish You Were Here. Swift, like all great writers of fiction, creates fictional characters to tell the dreaded truth about the lies that capture us when someone we love is killed in war. The book is set in England during the Iraq War. Tom Luxton, a sniper, has been killed in battle and his brother Jack is left with his own despair as he accompanies Tom’s body to its burial site. 

The burial ceremony is called “repatriation,” a ritual marking the return home to the country that has born and bred Tom and sent him off to die. The term intrigues me. A final repatriation to the earth that through its gravitational force draws all of us down to ground level where the weight of status and rank guarantee no glory. 

Derek and Dave, the morticians who drive the hearse on the two-day trip to Barnstaple, then assist in carrying Tom’s coffin to the gravesite, are moved by a mystical epiphanic experience. The red sky and the darkened hills draw them into a place of truth—one they cannot avoid but dare not speak, for fear of being misunderstood. The words sting.

“This was Corporal Luxton’s land, his country, as much as theirs. He had been returned to it—with a little help from them. Corporal Luxton, who’d ridden with them, must have been a pretty good soldier… But to say, as is said of soldiers, that he’d died for his country—no, that wouldn’t be exactly true, would it?”

Sow Lettuce And Enjoy Salads—Sow Violence And Reap A Bitter Harvest

So we are promised that we will reap what we sow? That means that we can look forward to a crop of lettuce planted by Judy after I ripped out a plantation full of vines that suck moisture and minerals from plants and flowers. As directed: Plant the lettuce seeds in your garden and cover them with a thin (1/4”) layer of soil. Keep the soil moist. Thin the plants, if necessary, when they are 3” tall.

The earth has an inherent covenant with us, that is, if we keep our part of the bargain. Till the soil, plant the seed, water and weed and you will reap a bountiful harvest. But don’t expect tomatoes if you have planted lettuce. And never forget, if you poison the earth, there will be a bitter harvest.

Case in Point: Up a hollow, just outside of town, there is a garden tended to by volunteers who will work the soil for a harvest of vegetables that will feed the poor at a community kitchen called Manna Meal. (Interesting, in that manna was what fed the Hebrew tribes in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.) But not far from that hollow, as the crow flies, you will find mountains that have been raped for a harvest of coal—we call it mountaintop removal. People living at the base of those mountains reap devastating runoff, polluted water and a crop of cancer and respiratory illness—a bitter harvest.

Tom Engelhardt, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project, and a prolific writer on TomDispatch (http://www.tomdispatch.com/). I recommend his blog as an invaluable antidote to mainstream media mediocrity. In a recent piece, “Praying at the Church of St. Drone,” he offers a warning as we approach the November election: “Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin in chief.”

·      Like a runner in a relay race, President Obama has grasped the Commander In Chief baton from George W. Bush and run even faster than his predecessor. The imperial presidency has grown even more obese since his arrival in the Oval Office. Foreign Affairs says “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.”

·      Drone production and drone attacks have escalated since Obama took office. We now have 775 Predator and Reaper drones, with hundreds more in the pipeline. Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, has by far exceeded his predecessor’s record for drone attacks.

·      We now know that our assassin president makes the final decision as to who will be a drone target somewhere halfway around the world—thumbs up or thumbs down mimicry of Roman emperors. Like a set hour of prayer, each Tuesday our president sits in a cloistered setting with his C.I.A and national security “monks” and approves a kill list of “suspected militants,” even Americans without benefit of any legal due process. Like a Star Chamber, decisions are made much like the decisions that sent us to war in Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Dennis Blair, Obama’s trusted director of national intelligence, was forced to resign, excommunicated from the band of military disciples, because he had pressed for an open discussion and debate about our drone policy.

·      As I write, our president has ordered a sharp increase in drone attacks on targets in Pakistan, our supposed ally. Defense Secretary Panetta, speaking from Kabul, expresses openly that the U.S. is reaching “the limit of our patience” with Pakistan. It is worth noting that over 60% of the population in Pakistan sees the U.S. as the enemy. No wonder, time and time again, these pilotless Predators rain down death on innocent civilians, 18 just a few days ago. Then there is the child killed by a drone attack while he picked up scrap metal from the war.

·      The ever-pervasive fear of a cyber war that would cripple our nation has taken a new twist. It is our cyberwarrior in the White House who has launched a sophisticated computer “worm” on Iran.

It is difficult to comprehend the DNA of Mars, the Roman god of agriculture and war. How can it be, when war devastates the land and cripples crop production? Doesn’t this put Mars at war with himself? A just and caring god would deplore the carnage of war and it’s inevitable consequences on human and animal life. The earth was meant for the planting of seeds and not for weaponry.

The news from Syria is that the government there is planting land mines, those deplorable instruments of death that nations around the world have agreed to ban by signing the Mine Ban Treaty. People die and lose legs in some 70 countries long after wars have ended, even WW II land mines. In 2009, just prior to receiving his Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama said he would push for the U.S. to sign the treaty. Since then, nothing has happened, and he has shown no leadership to make it happen. Instead, our president has been adamant in deploring the Syrian use of land mines.

As I write about Syria, I think of the words of Jesus directed toward the hypocritical leaders in his midst. Good at paying their religious tithes, and cozying up to political power, they were rebuked by his anger. “You have neglected the important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You blind leaders!”

Sprouts In The Garden—Messengers Of Life And Hope

I get up every day and look for signs of hope in an America that wages perpetual war on the poor, both domestically and in nations around the world. It’s a bit like looking for a few spouts of green that foretell the arrival of lettuce, and two tiny tomatoes that have popped out like chicks from an egg. Two hopeful examples will suffice.

·      God bless the pacifists in our midst! Believe me, there isn’t enough weed-killer to thwart the never-ending criticism pacifists get from the so-called realists who naysay these nonviolent disciples of peace and justice. A lengthy New York Times article, “Pacifists in the Crossfire,” describes the work of doctors, nurses and staff at the Emergency Surgical Center for War in Kabul who treat everyone brought there for care. No matter which side of the battle these warriors are on, they are welcomed, Good Samaritan style. And, of course there are the women and the children. Plagued by war. I can only imagine two recovering enemies being reconciled through their wounds, as they lie side-by-side.

·      “People feel like they need to matter to something bigger than themselves, bigger than a task and marching orders.” Those words describe how Rich Blake, former Marine Corps sergeant, approaches veterans who feel a letdown as civilians who are trying “to feel useful again” back home. Back home is Baltimore where Rich is one of the organizers of Operative Oliver.

This organization of veterans is rejuvenating and revitalizing a poor neighborhood. Volunteers have planted over 100 trees, and pulled over 65 tons of trash from lots and alleys. Combat veterans do evening patrols in the neighborhood to identify drug targets. They’ve organized a Veteran’s Artist Program working on murals, a community garden, and a playground.

The work is done in the Lanvale Street area, just moments away from Bentalou Street where my grandmother lived when I was a child; back when my parents marked my growth with periodic marks on a doorjamb. Remembering those days, I recognize early intimations of my desire to grow into something bigger than myself. It is the spiritual quest each of us is engaged in, whether we acknowledge it or not.

The Earth Laughs In Flowers

Ralph Waldo Emerson is at his best when he says, “The earth laughs in flowers.” As Judy and I approach our fifty-fourth wedding anniversary next week, I catch a glimpse of her planting zinnias in among the lettuce and tomato plants in our little garden. How she loves to stick her hands in dirt and make things grow. I am married to a dirt buzzard.

And I think of the proverbial statement, “Grow where you are planted.” That is what we have been doing together for over half-a-century. My hope is that the soil will continue to remain fresh, nourished and well fed, as the preacher put it years ago, “for as long as you both live. “

Entry Filed under: A Fig Just Dropped Archives

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