Words and Warfare

It is a quiet morning. The earliest rays of sunlight begin to fall on the garden. The house is quiet, everyone sleeping but me. Understandable – their late night out rates some sack time, and I crashed quite early after a busy day dealing with my PTSD, heavy traffic, and building some furniture after dinner for a diversion, which was very calming. (Thanks, Ikea!)

It seems I have reached a point in my journey that healing not only seems possible – even likely – it is happening, and in the happening of it, my heart and soul and broken brain are starting to torrent historical pain to the forefront of my consciousness – as though ‘now is the time’ and everything wants a shot at being dealt with.  (Maybe with some coaxing I can get my demons to take a number and queue up in an orderly fashion.) 😀

Pretty morning, sunny, mild, probably quite hot later (for Portland – my Fresno friends will be laughing their butts off, perhaps, because down there 85 isn’t ‘a hot day’)… and I am learning that whatever baggage I am dragging around through life, it is life itself that is what matters most. These precious few minutes and years…this is what I’ve got. The most tender brief life of a flower has more value to the me, now, than a single word of any ideology attempting to express its meaning. (The meaning of the life of the flower? The meaning of the ideology? You choose; works either way for me. )

I have spent too much time at war, again. I didn’t realize I would be, going into it, and having been taken by surprise I left myself undefended from old business and thoughts of war. PTSD is a funny thing.  An individual’s vulnerability to lingering PTSD varies (this is the current thinking, and it seems consistent with my own experience). A lot of people go to war, and come home apparently untouched. (I say apparently, because I’m highly doubtful that sane, aware, reasoning people are ever untouched by an honest look at war, however they may present themselves after those experiences.) For me, I went to war ‘righteous and justified’ – a young patriot, sure of myself and perhaps even eager to ‘defend the nation’, and more or less willing to buy into the propaganda and rhetoric, even knowing that much of it had no substance or truth. I felt we were ‘right’, and I did not challenge that feeling with rational thought. I had doubts. Even then, going to war in a foreign country, to kill human beings for the ‘crime’ of disagreeing with our ideology, didn’t sit well with me. I am old enough to have been a cultural participant during the Vietnam War years.  Still, I went. I soldiered in a professional way, when orders came I followed them, when it was time to go home, I went.

“The Edge of Iraq” oil on canvas 1992

When I got home to the world, people who knew me said I had changed. I said I had not. I couldn’t see it or feel it from within, I only knew that so much of what had mattered before, didn’t matter anymore. The values of many things were clear – and very different. I didn’t understand the change was within me. I knew I would not go to war again willingly. I knew I was capable of killing. I knew I was no longer willing to take a human life unless it was clearly and obviously to save my own.  I knew things. Unspeakable elements of war that the civilian world never sees, doesn’t want to see, and sure doesn’t want brought to their attention. I quietly went about the business of packing it all away. I carried my military footlocker from place to place for years. It had a pair of my Desert Storm BDUs in it, some of my well-thumbed field manuals, a small cassette player that had gone there and back, and actually still worked in spite of the fine pink-ish sand clogging the works, and it had the smell of the desert and the smell of war clinging to it, and contained within. If I chanced to open my footlocker, which was rare, the smell would bring it all back – and I would focus on the nostalgia, the first package from home, perhaps, or the sheaf of letters from my Granny. I didn’t think about War. For many years I have comforted myself that this piece of who I am did not contribute to the fucked up state of affairs inside myself, that the wreckage was other things, other pain, and war was no lingering part of my experience. I had myself pretty well convinced, too…

It was a lovely bit of self-deception while it lasted.

I’ll be saying more about War, I guess. Once the words start to flow… you know? The thing is, I know in advance that the words are wasted. People think they know what there is to know about War, when they haven’t been. They grasp firmly to some notion, some ideology, some bullshit fed to them by the media, or a respected friend or teacher, and they hold on for dear life. They do not want to know. Not really.  I found myself looking across the great emotional and intellectual divide, Thursday night, between experience and ignorance, and found myself quickly becoming enraged and wounded – because I could not effectively share what I know.  Writers write – see, I’m doing it now – and beautiful turns of phrase attempt to build the bridge from the knowing across the chasm to the ignorant (“the horrors of war”, “the war machine” “band of brothers”…) but how easy is that when the greater hope is that no one need ever know??  I, myself, usually respond to inquiries about my war experiences by minimizing and making a vague reference to M*A*S*H.   Worse still, I am often overlooked as having any relevant insight – because I’m female – in spite of the truth that I went to war, too. Frustrating to be dismissed by a civilian on the basis of what they ‘know’ about war, in the face of actual knowledge. I suck at frustration.

That conversation mattered more than I realized and I spent that night awake, thinking about War, the realities of war, the lies about war, the rhetoric used to justify war, the outcome of war… and when dawn came, it was clear that I am not finished with War. Good thing it was a Friday, a day off, and a therapy day. I spent a lot of time talking honestly about war, for the very first time. No amusing anecdotes. No vague references. No excuses.  No withholding. No minimizing. No running away.  I have apologies to make – to friends and comrades who also know the face of War, in one capacity or another.  More than one of them has urged me to open up, to say something, to do something.  One of them makes his every day experience about protesting ongoing warfare.  I actually do understand.  He has experiences he doesn’t want to share, too, and shares them with the world to make the world see.  He also knows it isn’t possible to force awareness or understanding… he does it because it is the right thing to do. I get it.

Anyway, there will be more words about War.  I have a voice, and a tale to tell.  For now, it will have to suffice to say that i am unimpressed with the purported effectiveness of warfare, in general.  Historically, war seems to have very little lasting benefit to anyone at all.  It is an insulting wasteful endeavor whereby the very privileged few can send the children of those without the power to refuse to go, off to foreign lands to kill human beings they do not know in support of a cause that is most likely a thinly veiled grab for power that will never benefit them personally, and will most certainly stain their souls with the changes that come of killing other human beings.  What right does a government have to murder by proxy? To destroy human beings by using them as weapons to kill other human beings – and how is it not murder? We know innocent lives are taken, and instead of being horrified we justify it – ‘collateral damage’. When we err and kill our own, we still justify it with more words to make it acceptable (“friendly fire”).  At what point do we recognize that murder is not a tool for success? That War never ever ends – and never ever works?  Some part of me never came home from the war – and for a lot of us, never does.  We don’t just kill ‘the enemy’ when we go to war, we kill our own people, we destroy their hearts, and souls, and bodies – and lie about being able to rebuild them, support them or heal them.

Do you ‘support our troops’? Then don’t send them away to kill and die, because the effort is wasted, and meaningless to those who do not know War.  Honor the broken hearts, and broken bodies and broken brains of all of history’s soldiers – bring them home.  End the war. Every war. All the war. Just fucking stop killing people you don’t know for things they didn’t do themselves at the request of legislators who are such pussies they can’t do their own fighting for themselves. They don’t deserve to benefit from those sacrificed to the Gods of War.

“Kuwait: Oil Fires” oil on silk, 1992