Recently I happened to find myself at a gathering where the mother of an Iraqi War combat veteran spoke. This woman’s son had participated in combat and also suffered a bomb injury and so in addition to PTSD he also apparently has continuing neurological problems. She was an impassioned speaker. Because of her experience with the military and the VA and with her son’s difficulty in ‘transitioning’ to civilian life, she has been a force in forming a local organization to help other combat veterans. The organization helps not only with a peer support network, but also with practical support issues such as housing, cell phones, laptops and internet, and food. I agreed with much of what she had to say. Too many combat veterans remain isolated, forgotten, left on their own to deal with the after-effects of witnessing and participating in the organized violence of war.
There was a point in her talk, however, when she lost me. Thinking back on it I am almost reluctant to tell the story for fear of it being misinterpreted or somehow manipulated. But because it is Memorial Day, a day this country has set aside to honor our soldiers and their sacrifices, I will try to explain how my thoughts became conflicted as I sat and listened.
The speaker lost me when she used an utterly dehumanizing phrase to describe the Iraqi combatants who had inflicted the injury upon her son. I will not repeat what she said. It is not necessary in order to make my point. And after using this phrase, in her anger, she went on to tell a number of anecdotes to make the point that the Iraqis who fought against our troops were ‘different than us’, and seemed to suggest that nature of our mission in Iraq was that of ‘the civilized’ vs ‘the barbaric’.
The point of all this is not to judge the speaker. It is certainly not to judge those on either side who by force of circumstance found themselves as participants, either willing or unwilling. Although I am not a combat veteran, those whom I have known rarely spoke of their experience in moral terms. Most are just trying to forget. My point is rather one of sadness.
Sadness for the terrible violence of war. Sadness for the denial of accountability on civilian leaders who order soldiers into combat for vague or self-serving reasons. And, quite specifically, sadness for this woman, this mother of a young man who is now not the same. Sadness that within the depth of her anger and pain she somehow could not, even for a moment, step just enough outside of her personal story to see the thousands, the millions of mothers in Iraq who also were left shattered and incomplete as a consequence of war.
I somehow wanted to ask her about that, to see if there might in fact be some sort of healing within that realization. But I could not bring myself to say anything. I shook her hand at the door on the way out and left. It was just too hard to speak.