The Human Cost of War

[MaggieSwanson]

Images from the "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit in Cedar Rapids last Saturday:

Boots on the ground...one pair for each member of the National Guard killed in the war in Iraq and one pair for each Iowan casualty (regardless of military branch).







50 pairs of civilian shoes to represent the approximate 50:1 ratio of civilian to military deaths.


Tamara doesn't need these any more.



An older couple stopped to put a flower in this pair of boots. The tag bore the name of their grandson.


Bruce Smith's wife saw the exhibit in Iowa City last year. She sent some photos of Bruce and their children to travel with his boots.


I called the National Guard to invite them to come pay their respects. They hung up on me. So I called the Army, because there were soldiers boots from Iowa as well. They also hung up on me. I called the Marines, and they also declined to accept my invitation.

A veteran stopped by. He left and came back later with his boots from Vietnam and donated them to the exhibit. His name was written on the inside.



A poem by Sam Hamill, Founder and Director of Poets Against the War:


Eyes Wide Open

The little olive-skinned girl peered up at me
from the photograph

with her eyes wide open,

deep brown beautiful eyes that bore silent witness
to a grief as old as the ages.

She was young, and very beautiful, as only
the young can be, but within such beauty
as bears calamity silently:

because it has run out of tears.

I closed the magazine and went outside to the wood pile
and split a couple of logs, thinking, “Her fire is likely
an open fire tonight, bright flames licking and waving
like rising pennants in the breeze.”

When I was a boy, I heard about the bloodshed in Korea,
about the Red Army perched at our threshold, and the bombs
that would annihilate our world
a thousand times over.

I got under my desk with the rest of the foolish world.

In Okinawa, I wore the uniform and carried the weapon
until my eyes began to open, until I choked
on Marine Corps pride, until I came to realize
just how willfully I had been blind.

How much grief is a life? And what can be done unless
we stand among the missing, among the murdered, the orphaned,
our own armed children, and bear witness

with our eyes wide open?

When I was a child, frightened of the night
and crying in my bed, my father told me a poem or sang,
“Empty saddles in the o-l-d corral,
where do they r-i-d-e tonight.”

Homer thought the dead arrived into a field of asphodels.
“Musashino,” near Tokyo, means “Musashi’s Plain,”
the warrior’s way washed in blood.
The war-songs are sung to the same old marching measures—
oh, how we love to honor the dead.

A world without war? Who but a child or a fool
could imagine such a thing?

Corporate leaders go to school on Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
“We all deplore it,” says the President, issuing bombing orders,
“but God is on our side.”

Which blood is Christian, which Muslim, Jew or Hindu?

The beautiful girl with the beautiful sad eyes watches, but
has not spoken. What can she

possibly say? She carries the burden of finding
another way. In her eyes, the ruins, the fear,
the shoes that can’t be filled, hands that will never stroke her hair.

But listen. And you will hear her small, soft, plaintive voice
—it’s already there inside you—a heartbeat, a whisper,
a promise broken—if only you listen

with your eyes wide open.




Peace,

Maggie

[LincolnMcGrath]

1. Recommended Greatest

[walk softly]

10. IF EVERYONE COULD WALK AMONG THESE BOOTS, OR RUB YOUR FINGERS OVER THE

names on the Wall, the Vietnam Memorial, or even walk among the boys on night patrol, the Korean War Memorial - if we took our children to see these memorials, can we look them in the eye, and still remain silent

[tom2]

2. Peace

[pstans]

3. Please Recommend and get this on the Greatest Page

[rurallib]

4. Just looking at the pics of boots tears my heart out.

[ralps]

5. K & R for LincolnMcGrath & The soldiers

:hi: :loveya: :hug: :pals: :woohoo:

[LincolnMcGrath]

7. Thanks Truthseeker!

:hug:

[CornField]

6. Proud to be the 5th nomination for greatest page.

I'll post my reaction to the display later.

[MaggieSwanson]

8. Cornfield, when I walked through the boots

I kept turning my body sideways, as if to avoid bumping shoulders (with whom, I don't know). It was the strangest feeling. Did you get that too?

[CornField]

11. Oh yes

On the whole, I found it very difficult to be near this display... at least to be near it and consider exactly what it represented at the same time. More than once I walked the rows and had to wipe stray tears from my face.

Even knowing the emotional response I was having to the empty boots, I was not at all prepared for the flood of emotion which came when I stepped inside the 'civilian shoe circle.' I couldn't spend much time in that area at all because my mind kept flashing back to Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. (I can still smell/taste the cordite when those memories are unexpectedly accessed.)

I was actually quite thankful for the distraction (from the display) of reading the names of our deceased soldiers and ringing the gong. I was just getting a better hold on myself when my 14-year-old wanted me to walk with her through the display.

Why did I have such a strong reaction? I'm not quite sure if I can explain it. The boots, in my mind's eye, not only represented the soldiers lost in the current war, but those in previous wars as well. When I was two, my brother, cousin and several family friends died in Vietnam. I grew up not knowing these young men, but wrapped tightly in the grief they left behind. Our family attended so many military funerals during that time that the noise of the gun salutes stopped scaring the other young children and myself.

My memories of these men are few: a letterman's jacket, high school year books, military medals/honors, a handful of snapshots and the trinkets and letters sent home during the war. It struck me then, when gazing across the display, that much of my life had been shaped by empty boots which hold little more than overwhelming sadness.

[Change has come]

9. . . .

:cry:

[Broke Dad]

12. My brother served in Iraq with the 153rd Engineers . . .

My brother served in the regular Army in the 80s and then joined the Guard. His Guard unit, the 153rd Engineers, lost two members in Iraq. He said the difference between the regular Army and the Guard, is that in the regular Army when you lose a member, you miss him, but there are not daily reminders that he was killed. In his Guard unit, he sees the dead soldiers' wives and little kids everyday on the street and every Sunday in church. It is a constant reminder of the loss, not just to the Guard unit, but to the family and the rural community where the Guard members serve on the volunteer fire department, as softball coaches and as community. leaders.

My brother missed out on 14 months of his children's teenage years for a war that he says was one step forward and two steps backward every day. The sad thing is that all the rah rah Republicans like Chuck Grassley, Steve King, Tom Latham and Jim Nussle do not have ANYBODY in their immediate families who have ever served, let alone served in Iraq. After worrying about my brother's safety for over a year while he defused IED's in Iraq, I just want to punch out the Republican rah rahs. I play John Fogerty's song "Fortunate Son" over and over because it is so truth . . . "When you ask how much more should you give, they just say, 'More more more.' "

All so that W could declare "Mission Accomplished!"

[Debi]

13. Thank you for the pictures and the poem

what a grim reminder :cry: