We Can End War

We Can End War
May 28, 2006
by
Fred Louis

Memorial Day was first observed on May 30th, 1868 for the purpose of decorating the graves of the Civil War dead with flowers and flags. Decoration Day originally. It has evolved into a time to remember and honor all our fallen soldiers and even all who've gone before; a time for visiting graves.

My question is: How best can we honor war dead? All war dead.

I earned my Bachelors Degree in Peace Studies in February 1969 after a year as an infantryman in what the Vietnamese call the American War. I am not proud of that time. In fact, I feel great shame. But Buddhism teaches if not that then not this. If not that then not this. So my war experience has led me to be up here today. And it led me to a Thich Nhat Hanh Buddhist retreat for Vietnam veterans in June of 1991.

There that venerable Vietnamese monk told us, "You veterans are the light at the tip of the candle. You burn hot and bright. You understand deeply the nature of suffering." He encouraged us to talk about our experiences and that we deserved to be listened to and understood. In that way we could help heal ourselves and be a powerful force for healing in the world.

Before veterans shared their stories at Buddhist retreats with the large community we invoked the name Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion and deep listening. A bodhisattva is an enlightened being, kind of one step below the Buddha. I would like to do that now.

(BELL)

"We invoke your name, Avalokiteshvara. We aspire to learn your way of listening in order to help relieve the suffering in the world. You know how to listen in order to understand.   We invoke your name in order to practice listening with all our attention and open heartedness.   We shall sit and listen without any prejudice.

We will sit and listen without judging or reacting.   We will sit and listen in order to understand.   We will sit and listen so attentively that we will be able to hear what the other person is saying and also what is being left unsaid.   We know that just by listening deeply we already alleviate a great deal of pain and suffering in the other person."

(BELL)

Easier said than done, isn't it?

So, war stories.   What is a true war story?   This what Tim O'Brien has to say about it in The Things They Carried:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule off thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.... if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty....(P. 68-69) It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story makes the stomach believe. (P. 78)#

We Unitarians are generally very good at dealing with things from the neck up and so I urge you, for there is much urgency in today's world, to listen with your gut and not your head.

And so a bit of my story:   I watched my squad leader check the papers of a wrinkled old Vietnamese man walking with his granddaughter.   His head was bowed in fear, eyes darting.   My sergeant handed the papers back,   said "dee-dee, dee-dee"["go, go"],   then raised his rifle and shot the man in the head.

M-16 rifles have an extremely high muzzle velocity and special barrel rifling.   This causes the bullet to strike with enormous impact and to tumble upon entry.   So the man's head exploded like a watermelon hit with a sledgehammer.   Small chunks of his white, blood-speckled brain landed of my boot.   I remember gently brushing them off with the backs of my fingers.   That's all I remember.   Shut down.   Must Survive.   Smoke more weed.

I did nothing.   Standard procedure.    You depend on your comrades for your very life.   They carry loaded weapons and much anger. Little My Lai's, small massacres, happened many times a day in Vietnam.

It took me over 28 years to cry.

You must remember that it doesn't take monsters to commit monstrous acts.   It doesn't take monsters to commit monstrous acts. Remember sweet, young Lindy England with her leash at Abu Ghraib.   My sergeant returned home a decorated hero, bronze star and purple heart on his chest.   You may know him.   He probably looks a lot like me.    He may deliver your mail, or wait on you at Home Depot, or teach your children.

Or he may be stalking the jungles of Hawaii with other men unable to come home.    Or he may be one of the more than 30% of our homeless who are military veterans.   Or he may have committed suicide as tens of thousands did.That's how well we "support our troops".

The suicide numbers among our Iraq troops are just beginning to increase.   Bless the Hartford Courant for exposing that reality recently. It's the kind of truth we need to know.

So notice how your gut feels now. I could stand up here and tell war stories for days...days,   some much more gruesome than that one. Imagine your most terrifying, repulsive nightmare. (pause)   Now multiply that vision by ten. That's the reality of war.   The greatest obscenity I know.

I also know that there is no such thing as a good war.   You may have noticed in your Order of Service that This Is My Song is dedicated to Steve Shepard.   Steve was a Marine Corps officer who participated in three island invasions in the Pacific in World War II.   It is about 4 years ago now that I met Steve on the stairs in the back after a particularly moving service. I will never forget the pain on his face nor the tears in his eyes as he said, "I can still see the faces of the Japanese I killed and I thought I was such a goddamn hero!" Steve carried those images and that guilt to his death, August 31st, 2003.   The Marine Corps recruiting slogan was right--"the change is forever".

So when did my war end?   Certainly not in 1975.   When he was in the 6th grade my dear son Jesse wrote, "Sometimes my father explodes." I wasn't supposed to see it but I know that the imprint of the terror that I inflicted on my wonderful boys will be part of them forever.   Collateral damage?   I got a phone call this week from a friend whose brother-in-law just died from Agent Orange exposure.
Young kids all over the world are still losing limbs due to unexploded ordinance.

A whole generation of Iraqi children have experienced unimaginable horror.   What will be the legacy from that?   The diameter of the bomb.

But Iraq invaded Kuwait.   There was ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. There is genocide in Darfur.   Not to mention the big one - Nazi Germany. We have to do something, don't we?   Of course we do. Send in the troops!   Get the bad guys!   Bomb the hell out of them! That''s the answer.   That's what we know.   Human history is taught to us as a long series of wars occasionally interrupted by some technical advancement.   We don't learn that most human beings have lived in harmony with each other for thousands of years.

We are constantly bombarded with violent images.   When some troubled teen shots up his school we don't hear about the thousands of other teens doing community service on that same day.   And we respond not by starting, say, a mentoring program, not by making the schools less like prisons but by putting police in the halls and metal detectors at the doors.

There are other factors that make war attractive.   I found a wonderful Memorial Day sermon given in 2004 by Rev. Frank Strasburger.  He quotes from a book called War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges.   Hedges writes:

Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver.... We abandon responsibility for a shared, unquestioned communal enterprise. (P. 45)

Strasburger continues:

In the process, it becomes necessary for us to construct a mythology that will allow us to do what otherwise we would never do. We must dehumanize the enemy. How else could we kill him?

There is, however, a catch 22 as I've tried to point out. You cannot dehumanize another without dehumanizing yourself and the damage to your soul is enormous. The damage to the soul is enormous.

Strasburger goes on:

As long as you and I think abstractly about these things; as long as we fail to identify the individual, the human, the personal nature of war, then, we can't possibly understand those who do battle against us;...those who do battle for us; and we will never understand ourselves.

Our tendency to glorify war blinds us to what really happens in war.

And so I believe that one way to truly honor our soldiers is our willingness to really listen to true war stories.

I believe a second way to honor our soldiers is to wage peace. Happily we do not have to re-invent the wheel to do this. There are millions of examples going back thousands of years to draw from. But perhaps the most articulate and studied example is Satyagraha, Gandhi's name for his overall method of non-violent action.

Satyagraha translates roughly as "Truth-force" or "Soul-force".
Gandhi understood that the power of any tyrant depends entirely on fear and on people being willing to obey.    So if people begin to say, "We are not afraid of prison.   We are even willing to die.   But we are not willing to violate our souls any longer and obey."   Then the tyrant has no power.

Gandhi also knew that if we act based on love and compassion we stay connected to our common humanity and that can transform and de-fuse the violence of others.

Two examples and a fantasy: First: All through decades of civil war (what an oxymoron!) in Central America hundreds of dedicated "internationalistas" from Europe and the United States engaged in "accompanyment", they risked their lives by simply living in villages that might be attacked by government troops or death squads.   They saved thousands of lives and none were killed, but their willingness to die for "Truth" was essential.   I earned my Masters Degree in Peace Studies on an aid caravan to El Salvador in 1993.

Second: At one of our veteran circles a member told of being at a protest against the Vietnam War in Lafayette Park across from the White House. In those days the police were not as well trained as now and peace demonstrators could be decidedly not peaceful.   The atmosphere got more and more tense and ugly and a riot was imminent.   This man simply sat down and began chanting. Others around joined him. Soon hundreds were sitting peacefully.

Finally, my fantasy:   Suppose, just suppose, instead of sending soldiers we sent "troops" dressed as, picture this now, clowns.   And they all had pockets of money and said, "Here's a $100, let me have your gun."   I'm crazy, right?   It cost $350,000 of our money to put one soldier in Iraq for a year.   Surely we can get better results than 1000 to 2000 Iraqi dead showing up at the Baghdad morgue every month.   Or maybe we could send thousands of grandmothers who just say, "Sit with me.   Tell me about your life and I'll tell you about mine."   I have more crazy ideas.   Collateral damage?

In 1968 I allowed my life to be ruled by fear.   I will earn my PhD. in Peace Studies when I can connect with my "soul-force" and act toward all living beings with love and compassion.

May it be so.

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 5/28/06)