This weekend I worked as a volunteer at Eyes Wide Open.
Eyes Wide Open is an exhibit put together by the American Friends Service Committee. It originally consisted of pairs of military boots, one for each American serviceman or servicewoman killed in Iraq.
The exhibit has been traveling the country since it started in January of last year, and is tentatively scheduled to end in March of next year, on the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. A date on which we will undoubtedly still be fighting "terrorists" in Iraq.
I have been wanting to see this exhibit since I first heard about it, but I missed it when it was in DC in January. So I was glad to see that it was coming to Baltimore, and later, when I got email from a peace coalition group I'm involved with asking for us to volunteer, I did so eagerly.
I arrived just before noon yesterday. I was supposed to pass out fact sheets on the exhibit, but what I really wound up mostly doing was talking, and listening.
I had never seen the exhibit before, and though I expected it to be both powerful and painful, I was unprepared for just how much of both it was.
The boots were laid out in neat, precise rows, like the crosses at the military cemetary at Normandy. If you've ever seen "Saving Private Ryan," you know the ones I mean. If you sight along the rows laterally or diagonally, every subsequent cross -- or pair of boots -- is perfectly in line with the next. I wonder, given that this is all set up by volunteers, how they get such crisp, orderly rows. Each pair of boots has a plastic tag, with the name, age, and state of each victim. Some boots had more: photos, newspaper articles, flowers, flags, teddy bears. I saw one tag from Florida which said "Name withheld by request of the family."
Next to the boots, though, was something I hadn't been expecting. I did not know that the exhibit now includes civilian shoes, to represent the innocent dead of Iraq. There are 2000 pairs, a mere token when the country has 100000 dead. That estimate was according to epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University -- which is where the exhibit was held in Baltimore.
The civilian shoes were laid out in spirals, and in circles, and in a labyrinth that people were encouraged to walk. They had name tags, too, heartbreaking ones: "14th relative of" some Arabic name that I did not write down and don't recall, age unknown; some other name, age unknown (attached to a pair of children's little red rubber boots); another Arabic name, age 11. There are so many Iraqi dead, and they are so insignificant to us, we don't even count the number, let alone record their names. Someone told me they had seen a pair with a tag that indicated they were the 29th -- that's 29th! -- member of some family. Is it any wonder why they hate us? And some of those people slaughtered in our name were undoubtedly killed by some of the people (mostly also children) who were represented by the boots. Everyone loses.
There were a couple of National Guardsmen who made speeches. The first, Patrick, spoke only briefly, then choked up and yielded to the second Guardsman, Charlie. Charlie spoke eloquently about his friends, killed by friendly fire or by a lack of armor, and he donated a pair of his combat boots to the exhibit. All I could think of was that while he was donating those boots, the person whose nametag would soon be attached to them was still alive.
These boots came with a story. Guardsmen who were called up were required to have two pairs of desert combat boots, but they were issued only a single pair by the government. Charlie -- and all the others like him -- had to pay for the second pair himself; it was this pair he donated.
Later on, I spoke with someone among the boots who was having a hard time holding back her tears. She was in the South Carolina section, and told me that she was from SC and had seen the exhibit on 4th of July in Philly, and there were only a few boots from SC; now they took up almost an entire row (there are currently 36 dead from South Carolina). It turned out she was the wife of Patrick, the first National Guardsman speaker. She talked about how she and her husband were fighting his rotation back to Iraq, and as upset as she was, she was still able to say that they were lucky, at least he wasn't wounded, and at least he wasn't dead. What an amazing woman.
Patrick's wife also told me how someone started screaming invective at him in Philly, telling him he was a disgrace to the uniform for speaking out against the war. Though I had been prepared for some similar jackass to show up and harass people, I was pleasantly surprised that, while I was there at least, NO ONE did anything like that at all.
I spent a long time talking to a pair of late middle aged black women. They seemed to need to vent, and god knows I shared their frustration. We talked about Iraq, but also about Katrina and the racism in the (lack of) response, of our disgust with all those who call themselves Christians and act like monsters, and our utter loathing of Bush. It did me good to see that there are other people out there who are as pissed off about things as I am. I hope it helped them as much.
I talked to another man who was positively irate that there were no media there. When I told him that I had seen someone with a tripod and a pro-quality video camera, he told me that he had indeed seen them, and talked to them -- and they were shooting for Japanese TV. There was no one from any of the local stations. I don't know if anyone from the local film media ever showed up any time this weekend; I did see someone whom I assume was a print reporter interviewing Charlie, the National Guardsman.
I found myself hard-pressed at times to keep tears from my eyes. I was supposed to be there, in part, to help others who were emotionally overcome, and yet there I was on the edge of bawling for much of the day.
At 2PM they began reading the names. They read all the names of the military dead, and at least some of the names of the Iraqi dead -- maybe all, I don't know. It takes over 4 hours to read the names.
That was all yesterday. Today I went back to help with takedown. Yesterday there were 1895 pairs of boots. Today, there were 1896. And so it goes.
The Eyes Wide Open web page is
http://www.afsc.org/eyes/default.htm