LIVING MEMORY
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
May 30, 2004
I have a hard time with Memorial Day. I really do. Now I suppose I could say it started when I marched as a high schooler in our small town Memorial Day parade, itching and sweating in my wool band uniform all the way to the cemetery. Late May in the Midwest commonly brings a foretaste of summer, so at the outset of these annual parades we knew that at least one marcher would pass out cold, overcome by high heat and higher humidity. Somehow most of us made it to the cemetery, where we stood for what seemed like days, privy to long speeches, longer than sermons even. Our capacity for attention just melted away under that relentless Iowa sun.
Yet we knew that Memorial Day was a special day, set apart for remembering primarily the war dead, primarily those men—and it was mostly men we remembered then—who had given their lives so that we could be free. We were ripe candidates for a Norman Rockwell poster, so closely did we fit the image of languid but earnest young Americans doing our duty in our nation's heartland. Surely we were spiritual descendants of those who assembled in a little town in upstate New York in 1865, responding to the call of Henry Welles and General John B. Murray, the latter a county clerk and Civil War veteran. The two men had gathered a committee to adorn the graves of local Civil War veterans with wreaths and crosses and flowers. Martial music heralded processions to each of the town's three cemeteries, where speeches were delivered by General Murray and local clergy, the forerunners of those speeches delivered in the small cemetery of my home town and those that will resound today and tomorrow in cemeteries across America.
It took another hundred years for Memorial Day to be declared a national holiday, but a national holiday it is, with all the nuances of holy days imbued with nationalistic fervor. Memorial Day for me is at risk of being digested like one of those donutsÐglazed over, with a hole in the middle of it, and leaving us with an illusory high. In my contrary opinion, the memories invoked on the Memorial Days to which we have grown accustomed too commonly come packaged with an easy amnesia about the toxic realities of war itself.
Historic memory is rarely consensual. Historic memory is as pluralistic as what we accept and deny and realize and resist in the war now being waged in Iraq and yes, Afghanistan, and yes, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In recent weeks, we have been horrified at the atrocities unleashed by some of our men and women in uniform, acting with and without the directives of those in uniforms of higher rank. The extent of these horrors seems to escalate. Abu Ghraib is not the only locus. We're discovering that the deeds of willful brutality there have been done also in Baghdad, Basrah, Tikrit, Kabul, and yes at that site our administration has declared off-limits from the Geneva Conventions, Guantanamo Bay.
How long will we remember what greets us now on the front pages of our papers? As I pick up the New York Times and am jarred by yet another image of this war, another face of oppressor and oppressed, I recall another morning paper, an edition whose front page carried an image burnished in the memories of those of us old enough to have read the papers of June, 1972. Remember that nine-year-old girl running naked into the eye of the camera, along a road with other children? Her agony was visible in her silent scream, her outstretched arms, her body in terrified flight as napalm seared her fragile frame.
I had always assumed she didn't survive our attack, but a few years ago I found myself transfixed by a front-page story of what happened to nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc. The circumstance of this account was Veterans Day, November 11, 1996, Washington, DC. Veterans marched and bands played, but this Veterans Day was different. There was an honored guest among them, who didn't fit the mold of military might and political prowess. She was in Washington at the invitation of Vietnam veterans. The President of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund introduced her. A retired Air Force Colonel embraced her. Together they accompanied Phan Thi Kim Phuc as she lay "a wreath of carnations, iris and amaryllis" at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Then she spoke:
"I have suffered a lot from both physical and emotional pain. Sometimes I could not breathe. But God saved my life and gave me faith and hope. Even if I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bombs, I would tell him, 'We cannot change history, but we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace.'"
Her words rang out to the thousands gathered, and sobs sounded from those who had been there, those whose memories are still haunted by the everyday atrocities of that war.
So what happened on that day when an American photographer caught the agony of war in the fleeing figure of this then young girl? What happened in the ensuing days and years that brought her to Washington on this day of amazing grace just a few years ago?
June, 1972. North and South Vietnamese troops were fighting in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, when "an American commander ordered South Vietnamese planes to drop napalm near a pagoda where villagers had taken refuge. Two of Ms. Kim Phuc's younger brothers were killed instantly; she and a third brother were badly burned."
Nick Ut, the Associated Press photographer responsible for that memorable image, caught her up into his van and rushed her to a South Vietnamese hospital. Phan Thi Kim Phuc spent the next 14 months beginning the long recovery from third-degree burns that covered more than half of her body. American plastic surgeons did numerous skin graftings. The pain was so excruciating when her wounds were washed and dressed that she routinely lost consciousness. Even now, the slightest change in weather brings the severest of pain, for her wounds left her with no oil or sweat glands.
Years passed. In 1986 came the opportunity for Ms. Kim Phuc to study in Cuba, and she seized it. But her immune system was fragile; while there she developed asthma and diabetes, making it impossible for her to continue her studies in medicine and pharmacology. In Cuba she married another Vietnamese student. They honeymooned in Moscow. Eventually, with the help of Quakers, the couple found political asylum in Canada. There they made a life for themselves. She resumed her studies.
In Vietnamese, Kim Phuc means "Golden happiness." "My character is not sad, not angry," she said.
Will we remember? Can we remember Phan Thi Kim Phuc's counsel to "try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace?" What is our capacity for unfiltered memory in time of war, even in a wartime when we are vividly reminded of the horrors that are the unintended but perhaps inevitable consequences of military action and reaction?
"Behind that picture of me," remarked Ms. Kim Phuc, "[are] thousands and thousands of people. They suffered—more than me. They died. They lost parts of their bodies. Their whole lives were destroyed, and nobody took that picture."
How, I wonder, will we remember those who eluded wartime's photojournalists this Memorial Day? How much solitary grief has fallen victim to our selective memory? How addicted are we to the idea of the war hero in contrast to the man or woman who could have lived out the fullness of life and didn't? How shall we honor our war dead without also honoring war? These are the questions that haunt me every Memorial Day that I have experienced the dissonance between the public reality of martial euphoria and the private reality of grief and torment that we have not yet summoned the spiritual and political will to turn toward other ways of resolving our differences. These are the questions that haunt me as I recall William Sloane Coffin's dictum that "the United States doesn't have to lead the world; it has first to join it."
Full-billowed chests, nationalistic self-righteousness surely do not support membership in a family of nations let alone membership in the family of humankind. Humility seems prerequisite for such inclusion. Surely we have cause for humility in the ongoing wake of Ms. Kim Phuc's act of grace and in the vivid current realization that we have continued to violate the basic human rights of our fellow creatures. Surely we have cause for humility even as we live alongside other nations, other cultures, who are complicit in the ways of war. We simply have no cause for global hegemony and less for moral superiority. We just have every reason in the world to remember and to remember well what war is about on this Memorial Day, 2004.
Such remembering is not an easy exercise, for war is a narcotic of lethal dosage. Longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges describes war as a drug, one he "ingested for many years."
"It is peddled by mythmakers," he writes "—historians, war correspondents, filmmakers novelists, and the state—all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life. . . . It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it. . . . Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. And this is why for many war is so hard to discuss once it is over."
That is why so many simply clam up, sometimes remaining silent over the better part of a lifetime, because they, we, have seen and done the unspeakable.
Such a silent one was a man named Vic. His story is told by his pastor and friend, who heard a confession bottled up for fifty years. It is a story related, I trust, with the full permission of the confessor. Now we Unitarian Universalists don't do confession, but that doesn't mean we're immune from haunting memories; nor does it mean we don't have some deep-seated need to seek forgiveness for our complicity in those memories. This was surely the case with Vic, a fishing buddy of David Hansen, a Baptist minister from Ohio.
Vic and David had come to know each other well through the years. It was on a drive back from one of their fishing trips that they passed the time with war stories, Vic's telling of his experiences in the Air Force during World War II. Like one of those hidden pictures in a complex line drawing, Vic told of a bombing mission in which he had strategically avoided destroying a cathedral, then let slip the fact that he had flown over Dresden. David sensed that there was more needing to be said, much more, but he let it be, knowing that Vic wasn't ready to say more.
It was happenstance that on the morning of February 13, 1995, David was watching the news. Old war clips filled the screen with a voice over announcing the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden.
On February 13, 1945, close to a thousand Royal Air Force bombers turned the residential city of Dresden, Germany into a raging inferno. On February 14, Valentine's Day here, more than 300 American bombers took off to finish the job. The Dresden firestorm was visible for 200 miles. Temperatures on ground rose to 1,000 degrees. "Operation Thunderclap" reportedly destroyed "three times as much of Dresden in two days as the Germans destroyed of London in 1940." At least 50,000 were killed, 10,000 more than perished in the holocaust of Nagasaki. Among the few survivors was my husband's late wife, Johanna, who at the age of two barely escaped in the arms of her sister as they fled the city on foot. It was pure terror.
Dresden's strategic value did not come close to warranting such an attack. Even Winston Churchill, who initially supported the operation, voiced regrets at the decision to undertake it. It was among the most heinous barbarities of that War, the so-called "just war."
David Hansen took it all in on the morning news. He had known about Dresden. He knew now that he needed to pay his friend a visit. As he entered his friend's living room, his eyes fell immediately on the coffee table, covered with black and white photos of Vic's squadron and their B-17 bombers, along with "spiral bound mission diaries." Nearby sat Vic, his face buried in his hands.
"I deeply regret participating in the mission over Dresden," he spoke, his voice cracking. "We all hated Hitler, and we had a job to do and we did it pretty damn well, but we shouldn't have destroyed Dresden. There was no reason for it. It was revenge, but that's not what we were fighting for. It was wrong."
Vic proceeded to ask God to forgive him for his role in the destruction of this city. He had been a lead bombardier. His wife, Joan, told David that it was the first time her husband had mentioned Dresden, in fact, the first time he had talked about the War in fifty years. Vic remained haunted by these memories, but he found release in confessing what for him had been a sin.
Who survives ultimately the moral depravity at the heart of every war? Who survives ultimately our human failure to find alternatives to resolve conflict that is inevitable within humankind? To receive forgiveness, as this country did from one remarkable Vietnamese woman; to ask forgiveness, as this country might through individual and communal confessions of wrongdoing, exemplified by that of David's friend, Vic. To wrestle with the question of whether war is ever justified; and I'm not a pacifist, mind you. To let in the rush of memories distant and memories as fresh as this morning's news. All of this, for me, is the challenge of Memorial Day.
Memorial Day can be about remembering what happened, remembering lives lived and lives missed, remembering the murder sanctioned during times of war and the atrocities committed that I believe are none other than extensions of the psychosis unleashed when war is declared in the first place. Hope for the end of war lies in the memories of what war is like, the harsh and painful and gnawing and haunting memories. Hope for the end of war lies in the memories of what our expectations once were for those who went to war and never came back, the holes in our hearts that will never be filled. Hope for the end of war lies in the offering of forgiveness to all of us who are complicit in perpetuating it and in the offering of confession when we fail.
For me to observe Memorial Day is to resurrect the memories of those who once lived among us, to remember their lives and to imagine that their deaths could have been otherwiseÐmaybe after coming back to marry their sweethearts or after coming back to their wives or their husbands, or after staying around long enough to be called Daddy and Grampa or something other than a name etched on a war memorial in the capital of our nation or any other.
My problem with Memorial Day is that we honor the occasion of our military dead more than we honor their living. We raise them onto pedestals of heroism so we won't have to come to terms with the harsh brutalities of war that dehumanize us all. I wish I had the courage to be an out and out pacifist, but I do believe there are circumstances in which I and/or my country must respond forcefully. I just don't believe the current war on Iraq is one of them, nor the Gulf War, nor the War in Vietnam, nor multiple other conflicts in which my nation has engaged. War is the absolutely last resort, and even the criteria for so-called just wars deserve endless examination, because I don't believe war and justice are ever fully compatible.
Hope lies in remembering the hardest of war's truths. Hope lies in those who commit heroic acts of sublime humanity in the face of the inhumane during times of war. Hope lies in resisting the notion that war is inevitable. Hope lies in the women and men who are veterans of our wars, veterans who fought and retained their humanity and veterans who resisted that humanity might be retained. One such resister was David Dellinger, who died this Tuesday at the age of 88. Dellinger spent years in jail for his acts of pacifist resistance, acts which ironically positioned him to negotiate the release of American Prisoners of War by leveraging his contacts with the North Vietnamese, the "enemy" no one else could reach.
Hope lies in digging deep into our souls and pulling out a passion for the practice of peace, which is anything but passive. Hope lies in wrestling with the angels of our despair and the archangels of our sense of futility. Hope lies in transforming our despair and our sense of futility into living memory. Hope lies in living memory that gives us yet another chance to leave cause for hope and a legacy of caring. Amen.
Sources:
William Sloane Coffin, The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality, Dartmouth College, University Press of New England, 1999, 58.
David Hansen, Christianity Today International /Leadership Journal. Fall 2003, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, 104.
Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Give Us Meaning, Public Affairs, 2002.
Michael T. Kaufman, "David Dellinger, of Chicago 7, Dies at 88," The New York Times, Thursday, May 27, 2004, B9.
Elaine Sciolino, "A Painful Road from Vietnam to Forgiveness," The New York Times, Tuesday, November 12, 1996, A1, 20.
Thandeka, "The Legacy of Caring," in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 666.
http://dcpages.com/Tourism/Memorial_Day/History/memday/history.shtml
http://www.twilightbridge.com/hobbies/festivals/memorial/history.htm
http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/memorial/history.html
Back To Jan Carlsson-Bull Sermons