During
the lead up to the second Iraq War, I was living in Philadelphia. We were
supposedly debating as a nation whether to go to war at all (something we know
now was a lie), and in the last week before the vote in Congress, there were two
different sets of rallies. There were
rallies against the war. And then there
were rallies to “Support the Troops”. Before any of our troops were engaged in
a war we had not yet begun. Before we
officially made the decision to unleash destruction on a nation poorer than
ourselves. A war that killed tens of
thousands of civilians, and God knows how many troops on both sides (or all
sides, as the civil war was unleashed).
It
makes supporting our troops much more complicated, doesn’t it? We want to help the returning veterans, who have
been victimized by the war. But they—and,
more importantly, we (who paid for the war and did not stop it)—are also
perpetrators of the violence. They are
complex human beings, many of whom have experienced horrible things, and many
who have done horrible things. Reducing them to simply heroes diminishes their
humanity. As does reducing them to simply victims, or reducing them to simply perpetrators.
How
do you love and support someone with that weight of humanness about them? We can’t really ask that question until we
ask ourselves a similar one: how can we live with ourselves, as individuals and
as a nation, we who carry that weight of evil and good in us?
In
my spiritual tradition, the way commended and commanded is reconciliation, and
oh, what a beautiful word and terribly hard way it is. We have reduced that way too often to saying “I’m
sorry” and the other deciding whether or not to forgive. But the places where true reconciliation has
been tried—I’m thinking of South Africa, North Ireland, Argentina—it means being
fearlessly honest and public about what has happened. And then facing the pain of finding a way to
live together again. Will we ever seek
reconciliation with the people of Viet Nam or Iraq? Will we ever be able to seek reconciliation
in our nation, we who are so polarized over so many things?
My
parents were of the generation that didn’t talk much about the war, although
little bits of it leaked out from time to time.
More than ten years after my father’s death, my older brother and I
realized that our father had told each of us stories about the war that he did
not tell any other of his children. This
poem is about the one he told me. It’s
helpful to know that my father grew up speaking German at home, and had the
misfortune to go to kindergarten in 1917, when we were at war with Germany, and
children were told they would be hit if they spoke it at school. Later, he served in the US Army Air Corps
during the war and occupation in Germany, where his native tongue was an asset
to his native land.
FATHER,
WHY ME?
A
man hung from his parachute
like
a seed softly whirligigging down,shouting “Don’t shoot—I surrender!”
in the tongue of the enemy, your first tongue.
He had no way to reach
his weapon, but the men under
you did, and in a minute—though your voice
was raised and your rank commanded
obedience—it was the county fair
in Shreveport, in Pembina, in New Ulm
and New Prague, step right up, everyone
wins a prize, the lights flashing,
the girls all giggles, and bullets
and a ribbon for the man who hits the nose.
Then,
silence, the head of the boy
on
his chest, his body limpin its harness, gravity doing
its work. The son of German cousins—
perhaps the grandson of your grandfather’s friend—
spoiled blood over his uniform. Father,
why
did you tell me this story
and
not my brothers? Your memories are like your hands:
big, calloused, open.
His
boots newly shined, pulled him
down
to the earth he finallymet as a shroud, a nothing,
a home. Your men did not speak.
They held their rifles across
their chests, as if bearing sick children.
My
mom also served in the war, and although she did not see combat, she worked at
an air force base where pilots where French and British young men were trained
as bomber pilots. I’ve often wondered
how many of those French pilots died bombing their own country, in order to
free it. The impetus for this poem came
from seeing a photograph of my mother in uniform at the base. The indented stanzas are spoken in a
different voice than the narrator of the poem.
The voice is not a specific person, but more the voice of the air base
itself.
YOU
STAND TO THE SIDE, MAY 1944
in your WAC uniform,
cap just a bit jaunty,your smile aching to discharge.
You’ve seen the future
from this air base in Georgia
and you want to get out.
The German prisoners shouted
and beat on the wallsall night, until the commander
sent men down with sticks
to quiet the faces. Soon after,
the southern birds began to chirp…
No one can know a woman
who knows she is goingback to live with her parents,
work all day at Kresge’s,
come home and clean.
No one touches the skin under the skin.
The French pilots peed off the plane, singing
‘Oui-oui on the runway’, their boyish faces
ruddy in the round wind. We knew
their deaths before they died, we
wondered
if any last words
passed
between them
and
their loved ones,
waiting in the houses and towns
for the freeing bombs their boys dropped…
deaths only you could know.
Day after day, you watched the pilots
from your tower, called out their numbers
with your radio, tried not to imagine
them slowly drifting to earth
in a silk parachute, their eyes
and hands and shoes shot off.
The men who were due to ship out flirted
the
most; their eyes seemed to leak
sunshine.
At dusk, they would fly
their
planes at treetop, as if
by defying death in practice,
they could defy when it came
blasting
from a Krupp Flak 36,
the
deadliest tall gun the Nazis had.
You came back to Austin
in one piece, your uniform stashedaway, the letters burned
with the trash. You took up
your old job, counting the numbers
every day, then walking home
to eat supper, wash dishes,
make the beds of the roomers,
listen to Grandma’s rants,
pray the Rosary on your knees,
hope for a life outside your own.
When the war was over
the equipment shipped out,
and the paperwork filed,
we disinfected the barracks:
walls, floors, the slats
that held the mattresses.
We heard they were going to convert
it to a prison, a dormitory for
migrant peach pickers, some kind
of training camp for boys coming home
with less than two arms or two eyes…
the men you hand known, or missed
your fellow WACs smoking cigarettes
outside the barracks, you kept
it hidden from your children
like the Easter chickens you kept quiet
until the morning we received them: birds
dyed pastel blue, red, green and yellow.
But the way you laughed when
we saw the photo, the way you
would pick it out of the album
and hold it close to your face
meant someone else was standing there:
who were you posing for, mother,
on that winter day in Georgia,
your hair peeking out from under your cap,
your painted lips ready to speak?
Be
justice. Be beauty. Be reconciliation.
Patrick
