From war to war

Dear Gerdie, Gammie, Grannie, Goma, Gumma, Farmor, Fam, Famo, or Mago (my favorite),

You were 56 years old when you wrote today’s entry in your diary, which is just a few years younger than I am today. You talk about the last war (World War I) being “misty” in your memory, not because it didn’t affect you in material ways, but because no one you knew was in it.

Today the US is again at war. As I write on the evening of January 14, 2007, the US is escalating a war in Iraq, which we instigated some 4 years ago in the “fight against terrorism” , seeking “weapons of mass destruction” that were nowhere to be found. Since then a civil war has broken out in Iraq. And just as you refer to memories of a war that was fought when you were in your twenties (as you were during World War I), I also have memories of the of the Vietnam war. But for me, neither the current war in Iraq nor the previous war in Vietnam are particularly misty. I recognize some of the sentiments you expressed about the war in 1942, but not because I share your sentiments now, but rather because they are being mimicked - in an entirely different context - in the rhetoric that our current president has been using this past week in his speeches to the nation and congress.

The war in Vietnam (my equivalent to your "last war") is not misty in my memory either because, like perhaps World War II was for you, people I knew and went to school with were drafted. Some never came back. A friend and president of a neighboring high school stepped out of a helicopter and onto a mine in Vietnam in 1966. There was no body left to bury in a grave in the US. Many people whom I knew and still know were conscientious objectors or deserters who went to Canada or Sweden. It’s not misty, because we borrowed grandma Shaw’s old Rambler (on the condition that we took her to see her childhood home in Coeur de Alene, Idaho) in order to visit a close friend and conscientious objector in Canada. It’s not misty because the FBI later came searching the college commune where I was living looking for the friend whom we brought back from Canada. It’s not misty because I can still remember how my stomach turned when I saw the green plastic body bags being unloaded at Alameda Naval Air Station where I was working part-time to put myself through college.

The Iraq war is not misty either, because I traveled extensively there in the fall of 1973, met many Iraqis and kept a detailed diary of that trip with which I can now refresh my memory. (I don’t however know any of the US troops who have been sent or will be sent to Iraq, since the US military is recruited today among the uneducated, poor and unemployed. I am from the educated, middle class of a previous generation.) While I was in Iraq (and you were still alive) I might have written then to tell you that I crossed Shaat al Arab from Iran into Iraq on an Arabian night, and mentioned how a kind hotel owner at the River Front Hotel in Basra offered us a couple of dinar that first night to go out and get a bite to eat since we didn't have any local currency when we arrived. Perhaps I wrote you a letter to tell you how we had wandered about in the old marketplace of Basra (since bombed), or about how we were given a personal tour of the incredible natural beauty and unique culture of the marshlands (now drained and dry) of southern Iraq. And I’ll never forget a boat ride and swim with Iraqi students up the River to the garden of Eden where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together, meeting at the excavations of Ur and Babylon, or a meal at a restaurant in Baghdad with black, white, Christian and Muslim students. Likewise, how can I forget how our hunger was memorably relieved on the last day of Ramadan when we found ourselves being navigated to a delicious meal at the personnel canteen at Iraqi Oil in Kirkuk, or how safe we felt with a Kurdish farmer standing guard outside our tent when we camped in the mountains just outside of Arbil.

College days and the war in Vietnam. An intensive time of life, followed by so many pleasant memories of the Iraqi landscape and people. Now war again.

Dear Mago, times are different now. So many thoughts I’d love to share with you, but tomorrow is another workday and it’s time to hit the sack…
Your devoted granddaughter