Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

 

 

May 30, 2004

 

  

“We Remember Them”

 

 

Rev. Kathy Duhon

 

 

            Memorial Day has come again, and we have more war dead to remember this year.  We have that obligation to them – to remember their sacrifice and to work assiduously for peace, so that, as Winston Churchill said, “‘Not in vain’ may be the pride of those who have survived and the epitaph of those who fell.”  Not in vain.

            In some sense, our soldiers of this war have died because of September 11^th, and yet not because Iraq had anything to do with that tragedy, and not because this war will address the problems or assuage the fears caused by that national catastrophe.  We became more frightened as a people, and more ready for war, and our leaders have embarked on a “war on terrorism”.

            The first thing we did after 9-11, however, was to band together – mourning, healing, helping, and noticing that what we have as a nation is precious.  We sang more national songs than ever – we prayed, we wept, we wrote poetry, we held each other.  Some reflected how this disaster would give us more empathy for the suffering peoples of the world.  For others, coming together grew into a strong nationalism, so clearly displayed by American flags everywhere.  Flags were taken out of storage – some had only 48 stars on them, they’d been put away so long – and plenty of flags were bought for the first time.  Flags were put places they’d never or rarely been before – on cars, ads, even hillsides -- like the big flag painted up at the high school. 

            As an aside, I was offended in a way that most were not, in an old-fashioned way.  I did not like what people were doing to my flag.  The flag I grew up with was not supposed to get dirty or wet – the sun did not go down on it – and it was not to be touched, unless by gloved hands of folks preferably in uniform.  A powerful symbol of our country and the honor we feel for being American could be found in my understanding of the American flag.  I hated seeing it flying tattered on cars, drooping to the ground off porch rails, used commercially to sell stuff, and degraded into a commonplace cloth dividing “we” from “them”.  Who would have thought I’d be the old-fashioned one, upset with the unthinking, flag-flying actions of folks who were often one or two generations my senior?  But I am a minister who feels deeply the importance of symbols.  The flag is the symbol of our nation at its finest, which is not the way it was being used for the new nationalism.

Some of us worried – was this simplistic and strident nationalism a sign of idolatry, of raising up love of country as the highest value?  Nationalism is tough-hearted.  Muslims and Arabs were hurt, civil liberties were abridged, and we went to war on first one country and then another, though neither had attacked us.  We began a “War on Terrorism”.  But terrorism is not something you can fight in the traditional way of warfare, and that is what we are now realizing.  Fighting terrorism with warfare generates more terrorism, so says the latest studies by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Amnesty International, which is headed up by a UU minister, by the way.

I am old fashioned in another way.  I respect and honor the military service men and women – I truly do.  I am proud of my Dad for his service in World War II and of my brother Marvant, a Marine who helped get children out of Vietnam at the end of that war.  In my research on veterans, which you have helped with, I have read wonderful stories of heroism and camaraderie, of leadership and hope, of personal growth and honor, as well as of fear and sadness and resentment and regret.  We need to honor their sacrifice.

When we honor those who died in wars, we usually think of the most honorable wars – World War II, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War – not Korea, nor Vietnam, nor the Gulf War, nor any of the myriad conflicts we have been involved in where war was not the last resort.  The wars we like to remember are the ones that we were dragged into, regretfully – they were thrust upon us with heart-wrenching demands that we fight for freedom and justice.  Ellen Goodman reminded us this past week that, although there are just and unjust wars, there are no “good wars”, that war is always tragic for the human beings involved.

I admit I have tried to be a pacifist and cannot quite be one.  I am a strong peace activist and believe that most war is not only preventable, but immoral, but I am not sure about all war.  I honor pacifists.  And I honor those who serve our nation, who protect and defend the Constitution, who risk their lives for values that they believe are worthy.  And sometimes what they do is for justice’ sake, and sometimes we ask them to do what is not just.  And whether it is just or unjust, we are the ones who send them, who elect the leaders, who pay for the weapons, and in whose name they serve.  And when they are killed, as more than 800 have been in Iraq, we are partly responsible, and we owe them our mindfulness.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, so I speak first for the dead, but I also am mindful of the living, the ones in our armed services who are in harm’s way, who may be the next dead we honor for Memorial Day.  We need to bring them home not only so that they will not be at risk, but we must bring them home because we have no just reason for them to be there.  And it is wrong, dead wrong, to ask someone to risk their life if there is not an extraordinarily good reason.

We must bring them home because we have put them in greater risk than they should be.  When we ask people to defend us, for example, our cops and firefighters, we always give them the equipment they need, and we pay for the best leadership we can, so they will get the training and the direction that will keep both them and us at our safest.  The clear understanding of some of our highest ranking military personnel is that we have not done this for our troops in Iraq.  We did not plan well, we did not adequately train or supply, and we have not led in ways that keep them and us the safest.  Objections to the planning and execution of this war have been made by General Zinni, the previous commander of the American troops in the Middle East, by former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki.  General Zinni said, “In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worst, lying, incompetence and corruption.”  Then he compared a faulty plan to a faulty rifle – both will get people killed, and so he says that we must speak up and change the course of this war, holding Secretary Rumsfeld and others responsible for their failures.  This was not some peace activist, but a 4 star general with 40 years of experience, including most recently in Iraq.

The hard news of the bombed wedding, the prisoner abuse, the catastrophic civilian deaths, the growing terrorist activities that continue raising the death toll for our troops, and the building resentment to our presence by even the most moderate Iraqis, has changed the understanding about this war for the whole world.  We are seen as immoral aggressors who are engaged in torture, war crimes, and a “no end in sight” occupation. 

It’s not just that we have forfeited the moral high ground and the respect of our military as a force for justice, as bad as that is.  That will plague us far into the future.  Andy Rooney said last week, “The day the world learned that American soldiers had tortured Iraqi prisoners belongs high on the list of worst things that ever happened to our country.  It’s a black mark that will be in the history books in a hundred languages for as long as there are history books.”  It’s not just our reputation; it’s that we have placed our precious military service men and women in grave danger – danger to their bodies, danger to their hearts, and even to their souls.   

I was thinking of another tragedy this past week, one that brought us together locally.  Not long before September 11^th, a little 5 year old girl drowned one January in the icy Housatonic River.  We knew she had died after that first day, but the teams and teams of firefighters, police, and rescue personnel, who had come from many towns and far away, worked for more than a week until they recovered the body.  Several of us ministers would go down to the command center at Searles School, then at Camp Eisner, and try to be present for that weary team.  On the last day, when they found the girl’s body, I was called in to offer a final prayer for the gathered.  I listened to their own last words together – words of wisdom from their commander, and they were good and wise words.  He reminded them that this was a heavy-hearted task, that they would feel it when they were with their own families, that they needed to be mindful of that, that they needed to remember that love heals all, that they should take whatever time they could in order to feel human again.  All this for a week long recovery operation – how sensitive, how careful, how caring.  Those men and women were prepared, and not likely to become traumatized. 

What do we do for our soldiers who recover the dead all the time?  I read a story this week about a man who was a staff sergeant in Iraq, honorably discharged in December, and a marine for 12 years.  Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey was speaking out forcefully against the Iraq war.  His concerns went back to the initial invasion, when they first began killing civilians in large numbers, not so much the “collateral”, unintended killing, but what he called “genocide”, “mass extermination of thousands of Iraqis, and with the depleted uranium that we’re leaving around on the battlefield, we’re setting up genocide for future generations in Iraq.”    

He understood that the troops were tired, that their intelligence was faulty, that they began to believe the enemy was everywhere, but he didn’t understand why they killed so many families fleeing Baghdad, or why they bombed so many buildings full of civilians, or why he was holding a child as he died, a child that the father had brought from a building they’d bombed.  Sergeant Massey said, “So, as his child died in my arms you know, I began to think, you know, wow, here’s an innocent child that was just sleeping or doing things that children do, and the [blankety-blank] response that I got from my command was, well, better them than us, and you know, it’s [blankety-blank] he’s just a casualty of war.  Sorry.  However, that father that was standing there as his child was dying in my arms, and, you know, the doc was resuscitating, doing CPR, this father was looking at me like, why did you do this?  You know, and [blankety-blank] you know, why does my son have to die?  Almost like a hatred look towards me.”

This sergeant is not a lone voice from our military.  Apparently “The Stars and Stripes”, an international newspaper for U.S. service personnel and their families, is filled with letters of anger and sadness and resentment for the politicians who have broken the sacred covenant between our country and our military.

We have to bring home our armed service people because they are being asked or led to do things that are wrong, in our name, and not just in the prisons, and not just recently, and not because they are bad people.  What are we doing to lessen their trauma?  What are the good and wise things we should say to our men and women in uniform as they deal with the death and the horror?  We have placed them in an untenable situation, full of unnecessary risk, and often minus that greatest thing we have always given our men and women in uniform to keep them safe in their hearts.  We have always given them the great and noble task of defending something more important than our flag, our Constitution.  It’s not the same these days. 

Our Constitution, our rule of law, the one that includes the sacred right to life as the most basic right that we all have, that includes abiding by the treaties we have signed, like the Geneva Convention, has been abridged by this government.  Parts of the USA PATRIOT ACT violate our Constitution, as we have learned in our study within this congregation.  More importantly, our leaders at the highest levels, including the Secretary of Defense, have decided to reject the Geneva Convention in conducting part of this war on terrorism.  That has been clearly documented.  We also have the stories of people like marine sergeant Massey, who said, “Iraq violated every rule of engagement that I have ever been taught – violated every rule of the Geneva Convention that I have been taught.”  And violating the Geneva Convention is absolutely equivalent to violating our Constitution.

The Geneva Convention and our U.S. Constitution are complicated documents that stand for the rule of law.  They enshrine our values, among them one of the most common tenets in all religions, called the Golden Rule in Christianity.  As Jesus said it, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” 

A few days ago I was listening to a legal expert commenting on our breaking of the Geneva Convention and it sounded like he was talking about the Golden Rule.  He said we are endangering our troops.  It is only by upholding these hammered out rules of warfare, so that conditions for POWs are decent and treatment of civilians is just, that we keep them in play by other countries, for our sake.  We are the strongest – if we become the outlaw posse, the vigilante enforcers who are above the law, then the law is doomed.  Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, years ago, “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher.  For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.  Crime is contagious.  If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”  Our military personnel are the ones first and foremost at risk when we invite contempt for international law through our policies and actions, as we have been doing these last few years.

In ethics, there is much discussion about “the slippery slope”, much like the idea that “crime is contagious” from Justice Brandeis.  If you do something slightly unethical and justify it, you are more likely to use that reasoning in the next situation, and worse reasoning, and keep sliding away from morality, until you are at the bottom in a morass of evil.  Personally, I have always been suspicious of the uses made of the slippery slope, since it links things that are perhaps neutral morally, or even ethical, though not traditional, with what is clearly despicable.  I am re-visiting the slippery slope these days.

Ethical decisions are based on many things, including information, understanding, reasoning, personal development, relationships, law, ethical principles, and religion.  That’s the hopeful version.  Unethical, morally bad decisions are often barely even noticed as decisions – they are positions that are slid into, less like choices than like careening downhill without brakes.  Evil happens when information is missing, understanding is clouded, reasoning is ignored, people are immature, relationships are weak, the law is seen as malleable, ethical principles are not considered, and religion is absent or idolatrously held, such as when nationalism becomes the operative religion.  Evil continues when we are in denial about the evil – how can we then change what needs to be changed?  How can we climb back up the mountain of peace and justice?

We could start with some bedrock principles like the Golden Rule, where we do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and since it would be unacceptable to have thousands of innocent American civilians killed, or perverse actions done to our prisoners, or have our sacred areas desecrated, or live under a military occupation while people tell us that they will eventually “take the training wheels off” and let us self-determine our government, then we won’t do these things to others.  Bedrock principles like the Golden Rule keep us from sliding down into a heap. 

We’ll go further, because we have a religion with guiding principles that call us to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all, acceptance of others, justice, peace and compassion.  We know that we are the ones who, by acting upon our principles, change the world for the better.  Our religion teaches us to abhor war, even when it is just, and to honor our dead and living service men and women by working and praying for peace.  Amen.