Remembering and Lamenting

As we journey the road to peace and justice, new expressions of the human heart and mind blossom. The Veterans for Peace have been creating memorials for US soldiers killed in Iraq over the recent years by placing religious symbols in open public grass areas like a military cemetery. These extensive memorials are impressive, stimulating a sense of the numbers of people who have been killed fighting for the nation. The loss of life can move the soul to appreciate the reality of war.

Now, we had the Iraq Memorial to Life. Here in Olympia Washington on the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, we created a symbolic memorial to the Iraq persons killed since March 20, 2003. The memorials were in the form of markers which identified the person, often unknown by name, date of death, location. Each marker was handmade on authentic burial cloth shaped like a tombstone and laminated. These could be staked into the ground with a metal wire and spaced like a cemetery. We had nearly 4,000 markers, a mere fraction of the more than 90,000 deaths from the war which have been identified from newspapers, hospitals, or other documents in Iraq. The intention was to create one marker for each, but that was beyond our means at this time.

The Memorial did impress me and many others for its stark reminder that the war has been a horrendous experience. Each marker personalized a death, enabling the imagination to ruminate over a life cut short and relationships changed by the loss of a mother or father, son or daughter, grandparent, and friends.

I led meditations on both mornings of the Memorial. During the evening Vigil, the American Gandhi expressed the search for the real truth and the desire to express authentic love in this situation. This was a radical act here in the United States, which is still occupying and in some ways still at war with Iraq. I tried to put a face on the markers. Since the mainline media does not bring the faces to our attention because journalists are not going out to the Iraq communities, I went to the narrations of Kathy Kelly in her book Other Lands Have Dreams. Here are the first hand stories of the sick and dying during the sanctions which the UN says were killing 5,000 children each month. Kathy and other volunteers from Voices in the Wilderness were there and they were there when the invading troops arrived in Baghdad in 2003.

The Iraq Memorial to Life is now available to be transported and shown in other cities. We must be made aware of war and its consequences in this age of modern weapons which kill at the rate of 90 % civilians, a reversal of the 10 % killed at the turn of the 20Th Century. More information can be had by going to www.IraqMemorialToLife.org.

Having recently returned from Vietnam where I saw the continuing effects of Agent Orange and dioxin to the third generation, I felt very sensitive to the fact that our memorial was showing only a part of the death scenario. We did not highlight the sanctions effects between the 1991 Iraq war and the 2003 War. Further, we did not mention the effects of depleted uranium which will go on killing indefinitely.