Post Ramadi—What Now?

May 22nd, 2015  |   

Maybe it isn’t that it’s so difficult coming home, but that home isn’t a big enough space for all that I must bring to it. America, vast and laid out from one ocean to another, is not a large enough space to contain the war each soldier brings home. And, even if it could, it doesn’t want to.

            “My Life As A Foreign Country” Brian Turner

                                         **

A Prophet is without honor in his hometown, and his own home.

            Jesus: Matthew 13:57

                                        **

How Did It Get So Late So Soon?   

When it comes to the subject of time, I suspect that most of us, maybe all of us, spend more time just living in it rather than thinking about it. There are some stop signs in our lives that invite us to dive deeper into thought about the pendulum that moves like one’s heart beat—always in motion, yet often ignored.

Back in February, I had fun in these Notes by turning to Dr. Seuss as a life preserver as the world was being pulled into an apocalyptic whirlpool of ISIS beheadings. So, as Ramadi falls, with the future of Iraq uncertain, and the past in our face as presidential candidates are being asked about the past—the 2003 Iraq invasion—I turn to Dr. Seuss.

How did it get so late so soon?

Its night before its afternoon.

December is here before its June.

My goodness how the time has flewn.

How did it get so late so soon?

How did it get so late so soon? That’s a pretty basic question don’t you think? It often times gets asked when someone has a birthday, a crisis, or a moment in life where we become more fully aware that time is marching on. And, if time is marching on, where does that leave us? Behind time? In step with time? Out in front of time?

The same is true for a nation. Our country’s past history, where and how decisions were made, helps us understand what’s going on now, so that we can move into the future, having learned from our mistakes and our successes.

The critical situation in Iraq right now (It was bound to happen.), combined with an upcoming presidential election, is causing questions to surface, like shrapnel, about the Iraq War, questions that have been avoided. How did we get in such a mess? Who is to blame? What is there to learn from past mistakes? What do we do now?

Some will say that it will do no good to revisit the past; we must deal with the situation, as it exists now in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the Middle East. What I say to that is best said by pointing to what you might find in the arena at a bullfight.

Dressed To Kill?

If I was prone to use idioms, and I am, I might say, “He was dressed to kill.” In fact, he was dressed to keep people from being killed.

As the city of Ramadi, in the Anbar Province in Iraq, just 70 miles from Baghdad, is overrun by ISIS, I think back to the early years of the war, and remember the man sitting next to me dressed in his Marine Corps Dress Blue uniform.

Across the table from us was Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito. (She is now our recently elected Senator.) I’d been at that table before the war had begun in 2003, pleading with Shelley not to follow President Bush’s determination to take us to war in Iraq.  

My congresswoman was no stranger. Years ago, she had lived down the street from me. One of my daughters babysat for one of her children. Leaving her office, I knew she was no longer a neighbor down the street. I also knew she would listen to her neighbor on Pennsylvania Avenue, down the street from the Capitol, not West Virginia Patriots for Peace, the organization I represented.

I knew she would take us to war, and she did, by voting to authorize an invasion of Iraq.

The next visit to Shelley’s office, I took the man in his Dress Blues with me. Perhaps he could convince her to bring the troops home and discontinue funding for the war in Iraq.

My spit-and-polished young friend had come home following his tour of duty, having fought as an infantry Marine in Baghdad, Fallujah and Ramadi. Surely he could convince her that we were engaged in a war that we could not win, a war that we should not fund or support with troops.

Wrong again. He’d come home with a message about a war our country never should have gone to, but neither Shelley, nor the country, was willing to hear that message.

An Angry, Anonymous Message

A dozen people, back in 2002, helped bring West Virginia Patriots for Peace into existence. It grew into a statewide presence that took out a full-page advertisement, filled with hundreds of names of people advising President Bush not to take us to war.

A week after the ad appeared in the newspaper, I received a copy of it in my mail, sent by a very angry anonymous person. It was covered with black-penned messages:

HA!!! YOU’RE NOT EVEN A CHRISTIAN—MUCH LESS A REVEREND— GOD IS NOT THE AUTHOR OF CONFUSION!!  The word “Patriots” had been circled and marked—PLEASE!!! The largest, underlined message read—TRAITORS

The Need For Disambiguation In The Land Of Obfuscation

Looking at a daisy, I think of the game kids used to play. Did a girl love me? Pick a daisy and speak the refrain, “She loves me, she loves me not,” plucking the petals until the flower is naked. The last petal to fall to the ground answered the question. Ah, the last petal in my hand tells me she loves me. This pedal-plucking exercise is a lesson in disambiguation. The spent daisy gives me the answer I need, in no uncertain terms.

When things are unclear, ambiguous and confused, as they are right now in Iraq, and the surrounding countries as well, disambiguation is required. The fall of Ramadi is a Waterloo for our nation, trapped in the fog of a war we blundered into, and don’t know how to get out of without making matters worse. 

The ISIS takeover of Ramadi has brought to the surface questions about the Iraq War that have been neglected and avoided. Twelve years of war; trillions of dollars spent; an obscene number of deaths; waves of refugees; and no end in sight, disambiguation seems to be the only antidote to the malaise that covers our beleaguered nation.

A massive train wreck in Philadelphia, and a rumble between bikers in the streets of Waco, Texas, vie for media attention with Republican candidates who are twisting in the wind over the subject of the Iraq War. In order to-be-or-not-to-be the Republican nomine, these fellows sweat and sway when asked if the war was a go-or-not-go war.

Jeb Bush is the obvious personification of the odious obfuscation that refuses to speak a truth that might possibly be the first step in the healing of our nation’s soul. Perhaps loyalty to the nation, and to truth itself, rather than to his brother, might serve all of us well, including him. All he needs to do is just come right out and say, “I love my brother, but he made a mistake, and I will do everything possible to clean up the mess he made in Iraq.”

Last Sunday I was teaching a class at a local United Methodist Church. The subject of the war was raised. One man said, “I don’t think we learned anything from the Vietnam War.” Another person said, “What do we do now?”

A simple answer will not suffice but in all honesty I must say that confession and repentance might be a good place to start.

If Jeb, or any other political candidate, won’t lead the way, perhaps people of faith might organize a soulful nationwide day of confession and repentance.

The confession might sound like this: “We are sorry we invaded Iraq. It was a mistake. We should not have sent troops there. It was the wrong thing to do, and we grieve over all the suffering and death we have caused.”

Try this on for repentance: “We will send no more weapons or boots on the ground; we will turn to diplomacy rather than military action; we will no longer torture people; and we will direct all our efforts toward helping to rebuild all that we have destroyed since 2003.”

Spell Baghdad S-A-I-G-O-N

On April 30^th, I was in the car driving from Charleston to my brother’s funeral, two days later. My car radio reminded me of a fortieth anniversary. CNN was advertising a special documentary that would remind viewers of what had taken place four decades ago.   

April 30, 1975 was the day the Vietnam War came to a halt, with a massive evacuation of people from the Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon, and the rooftop and neighborhood of the American Embassy. The film footage of people pleading for rescue as they cried and clawed their way for a ride on departing helicopters was dramatically tragic.  

After almost 20 years of U.S. warfare in Southeast Asia (more if you count our involvement with the French effort that collapsed at the battle of Dien Bien Phu) our nation had to face the fact that we had lost the war. It was a bitter pill to swallow. That North Vietnam could defeat the greatest military force in the world was inconceivable, after the euphoria our nation had felt following WW II.

Much has been said about those who protested the Vietnam War. Even though the media made the most of the times when an American flag was burned, I never saw a flag burned at the marches I attended, or any returning veterans taunted or spit upon.

What I have long felt, but have been reluctant to say, is that those who opposed the war were the ones who were maligned. They had to flee the country; go to jail; be shunned and labeled as communists, un-American and godless. I believe antiwar protesters received that kind of treatment precisely because they were the prophetic voices that spoke the truth to the nation and the world. The Vietnam War was a hideous mistake, and we should not have sent our troops there to kill and be killed. For delivering that message, they lived without honor in their own native land.

Perhaps the hardest thing to face is the truth that unless we, as a nation, own up to the mistake of having sent troops to Vietnam, to kill and be killed, they will have died in vain. Rather than being seen as lambs, sacrificed on the altar of patriotism, perhaps their courage and willingness to serve their country can be viewed as its own prophetic witness against senseless and unnecessary wars.

Fast forward to the Iraq War and the presidential elections since the 2003 invasion, including the upcoming election. Hillary Clinton, after an extended silence, has written and said that the Iraq War was a mistake. Yes, she admits to “a lot of rhetorical dancing” on the subject. But why did it take so long for her to stop dancing, and come forth with the truth? “In part,” she says, “it was because I didn’t want to say to the young men and women who were serving in the United States military in Iraq, fighting and dying and being injured, ‘yeah, one more person is saying it’s a mistake you’re there.’ ”

That’s the message that Debbie Lee, the mother of Marc Alan Lee, should have heard long before she had to see an ISIS flag flying over Ramadi, the city where her son was killed nine years ago.

The Perpetual War Waged Around Truth

Over the past 20 months, I have seen Judy die, as well as my brother, Gary. The person who knew me the longest is now dead, and the person who knew me better than anyone else is dead.

Judy had 28 years to fight for her life and, also, prepare for her death, as did I, given the fact that her breast cancer shadowed us throughout those years. In that sense, her death was not sudden.

My brother, on the other hand, was struck down suddenly. With little warning, he had only 28 days from the time he was admitted into the hospital until he was pronounced dead.

When it came to Judy’s death, both of us wanted the doctors to tell us the truth. We asked them if there was any more they could do for her? There was obvious sadness and grief over the fact that the doctors told us that there was nothing more they could do for her medically. How can I ever forget those late afternoon conversations? God, I hated to hear that report. But the doctors did not lie. They gave us what we needed. The truth.

For my brother, who was in no condition to make his intentions known, our family had to rely on what he had said about never wanting heroic treatment that might leave him incapacitated. In search of the truth, we asked the doctors if they had done all they could possibly do for Gary. If so, was it time to stop treatment and let him die? Unfortunately, there was reluctance on their part to face the truth about Gary. Even though we knew he was dying, the medical team seemed unable to give us what we needed. The truth.

The search for truth; the need for truth; the hunger for truth; the desire for truth; the quest for truth; the necessity for truth; the indomitable passion for truth; is persistent and drives us addictively in a quest that is relentless.

But wait a minute, the avoidance of truth; the fear of truth; the unwillingness to accept truth; the distortion of truth; the denial of truth; the manipulation of truth; the propensity to misuse and misunderstand truth; is also a reality for people.

It is as if there is a perpetual war being waged around truth, as if she were a queen to be loved or hated; a companion to embrace or, perhaps, keep at a distance; a Siren who is alluring yet dangerous.

What can be said about the personal quest for truth, as I have done by sharing the realities that surrounded Judy’s and Gary’s death, can also be applied to our lives in community—in our neighborhood, in the organizations we belong to, and in our nation.

Our country is at a critical point right now. I hear it in the rumbling around race, inequality, sexuality, politics, and ever loudly in the drums of war. When I hear the United States described as an indispensable nation, yet impotent when it comes to waging peace rather than war, I fear that we are but a step away from turning to what has failed us in the past. War.

Did Anyone See The Boy Fall Into The Sea?

Brian Turner, a veteran of the Iraq War, and the author of “My Life as a Foreign Country,” writes “America, vast and laid out from one ocean to another, is not a large enough space to contain the war each soldier brings home. And, even if it could, it doesn’t want to.”

Over the years, I have turned to the poetry of W.H. Auden for inspiration. Jen Percy, who reviews Turner’s book in the New York Times, suggests that I do precisely that. In the poem, Musée des Beaux Arts, Auden focuses on Brueghel’s painting, Icarus.

Master painters had something to say about suffering as it takes place in the context of everyday living. Brueghel depicts the human propensity to turn away from suffering. While someone is suffering, even dying, Auden writes, “someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

Auden captures the painting beautifully, with a pragmatic touch of sadness.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

We did not turn away from the violence and suffering unleashed in our homeland on 9/11. Tragically, as a nation, however, we have turned away from the suffering we have unleashed in Iraq, as the country has sunk into a sea of violence.

How we will respond to Iraq, as well as Syria and Afghanistan, post-Ramadi, will depend a great deal upon our willingness to take a hard look at the mistake we made back in 2003 when we invaded Iraq. Avoiding more mistakes, more war, will depend on our willingness to engage such hindsight.

Entry Filed under: A Fig Just Dropped Archives