“The scene is burned into my mind to this very day. At the foot of the casket of my twenty-year-old
cousin, an only child, killed in Vietnam just weeks before his military discharge, my gentle uncle recited
again and again for all to hear his one consolation: his good boy, he said, “had at least died a hero.” I
thought of the burning villages and displaced children and raped girls and defenseless dead farmers left
behind in other graves in another place that day and, with nothing heroic in sight, went silent and
looked away. I knew that young soldiers were victims too.
*****
I have never been able to forget the sight of the mass graves in Russia. They held the bones of 20
million young soldiers who died in World War II defending the country in their own backyards. In city
after city the mounds covered the landscape, raised like huge welts on the national body as far as the
eye could see. It was an entire generation of Russian manhood gone. I remember, too, the looks of
horror on the faces of Russian women left behind in that war when they pleaded with our small,
pathetically unrenowned delegation, “Peace, please.” They have been haunting memories. Most of all,
these graves, these faces, have acted as filter for every story of war I have ever read since: Bosnia,
Rwanda, El Salvador, Iraq, South Africa, the entire litany of political sin, all the deaths, all the pleas for
peace.
*****
At the first Iraqi-American dialogue convened by the Women’s Global Peace Initiative in New York on
March 29 (2006), the differences were plain. The women’s first agenda did not concentrate on who did
what or who profited or lost by the doing of it. “Take the oil. We don’t care about the oil,” one woman
cried across the room. “We never got any value from it anyway,” she went on. “Never mind yesterday,”
another woman said in answer to the Sunni-Shi’ite tensions. “Forget who did what to whom. We must
turn the page now. We must rebuild the country.”
“And what is the first thing that must be done to rebuild the country?” we asked them. I sat with my
hands over the keyboard, sure that the list would be long and varied. I was wrong. To a woman, the call
was clear: “Take care of our children.”
— from There Is a Season (Orbis) and Joan Chittister: In Her Own Words (Liguori)
cousin, an only child, killed in Vietnam just weeks before his military discharge, my gentle uncle recited
again and again for all to hear his one consolation: his good boy, he said, “had at least died a hero.” I
thought of the burning villages and displaced children and raped girls and defenseless dead farmers left
behind in other graves in another place that day and, with nothing heroic in sight, went silent and
looked away. I knew that young soldiers were victims too.
*****
I have never been able to forget the sight of the mass graves in Russia. They held the bones of 20
million young soldiers who died in World War II defending the country in their own backyards. In city
after city the mounds covered the landscape, raised like huge welts on the national body as far as the
eye could see. It was an entire generation of Russian manhood gone. I remember, too, the looks of
horror on the faces of Russian women left behind in that war when they pleaded with our small,
pathetically unrenowned delegation, “Peace, please.” They have been haunting memories. Most of all,
these graves, these faces, have acted as filter for every story of war I have ever read since: Bosnia,
Rwanda, El Salvador, Iraq, South Africa, the entire litany of political sin, all the deaths, all the pleas for
peace.
*****
At the first Iraqi-American dialogue convened by the Women’s Global Peace Initiative in New York on
March 29 (2006), the differences were plain. The women’s first agenda did not concentrate on who did
what or who profited or lost by the doing of it. “Take the oil. We don’t care about the oil,” one woman
cried across the room. “We never got any value from it anyway,” she went on. “Never mind yesterday,”
another woman said in answer to the Sunni-Shi’ite tensions. “Forget who did what to whom. We must
turn the page now. We must rebuild the country.”
“And what is the first thing that must be done to rebuild the country?” we asked them. I sat with my
hands over the keyboard, sure that the list would be long and varied. I was wrong. To a woman, the call
was clear: “Take care of our children.”
— from There Is a Season (Orbis) and Joan Chittister: In Her Own Words (Liguori)
MEMORIAL DAY THOUGHTS
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