Moral Injury For Memorial Day

My garden is blooming red, white, and blue for Memorial Day though the red is poppies, a symbol reminiscent of the blood soaked fields of Europe after WWI. The paperwhites remind me of my grandmother who would force bulbs to bloom indoors each year to get through mud season, and they also remind me of the older version of Memorial Day which was more memorial in general and less of a frenzy of patriotism. I now know the holiday originated from ceremonies a Black community held to remember fallen soldiers after the civil war that seems to have involved more flowers than flags.

The blue is provided by forget-me-nots and who could forget the people once near and dear to us now departed?

It is the living dead, the veterans struggling with moral injury, who say year after year how hard this day is for them. The more unjust our imperial wars seem, the fewer people are willing to participate (about 9% these day), and the harder the narrative machine grinds out flags and gushy rhetoric thanking veterans who often don't wish to be thanked.

Moral injury is often misdiagnosed as PTSD, which is a real injury from wars also but different being about fight-or-flight alarms your brain can't turn off. Moral injury is about the images burned into your memory of innocents, often children, suffering from the actions of your side who you can no longer see as the good guys. It's about forgiving yourself for the unforgivable, and on top of it putting up with a culture that insists on glorifying the most shameful episodes of your life.

Cannon fodder is, by definition, of little interest to the empire managers who use bodies to further their business ambitions.

Each year I put flowers on my family gravesite in a nearby town. Not buried there is my maternal grandfather, a conscript sent into Nagasaki after the nuclear bombing there. Not an affluent man, he refused his G.I. benefits on the grounds that he didn't want anything from a government capable of that level of evil. 

My other grandfather is buried nearby. He is the one who told his son who was keen to enlist to fight communism in Korea, Don't believe them when they say the next war is a good one. There is no such thing. Of course my father went anyway but missed seeing combat, and he passed his father's observation down through the generations. No one has enlisted since.

This does not stop the local veterans organization from putting a flag in a veteran medallion holder on my younger brother's grave each year. Likely they're confusing him with our grandfather due to sharing a first name. I've asked them to stop but every year they don't, and every year I remove all the flags from my ancestors and sibling's graves.

I even remove the flag from my grandfather's grandfather's grave, a veteran of the civil war who shot himself, albeit years later. I'm the only one keeping up the old family graves at this point, so I figure it's my call.

I put out pots of geraniums and those remind me of my grandmother, too. A white lilac the family planted for my mother is in bloom for Memorial Day, fragrant and ephemeral as life. I'll march with the peace contingent in a parade tomorrow that required legal action to allow any peace messages at all. 

Memorial Day, 2015, Topsham-Brunswick parade

The U.S. as a whole seems to be suffering from moral injury as we destroy country after country in our lust for imperial spoils. Diseases of despair like suicide, depression, and substance use disorders including death by overdose continue to climb. No amount of glorious flag waving changes any of that.

There's a lot to remember on Memorial Day. 

U.S. Army Tweet Backfires On Memorial Day

For Memorial Day I visited the family cemetery and removed the flags placed on my father's and brother's graves at the behest of the VFA (Veterans of Foreign Wars) in Skowhegan. I've asked them to stop doing this, but the cemetery manager says he has to do what the VFA says.

My brother never enlisted, but he bears a similar name to a Civil War vet ancestor of ours who died by his own hand. My father, who was in the Army in Korea post-combat, passed on what his WWI vet father taught him: "Don't believe them when they say the next war is a good one. There is no such thing." (My father enlisted after his father died of his war injuries, before I was born.) My little granddaughter wanted the flag because she loves the stars and stripes design.

It is marketing like this that keeps the Pentagon death cult churning out wars and victims.

But marketing can only take you so far into denying reality. Two of my favorite thinkers blogged about a now infamously ill-advised tweet by the U.S. Army last week, "How has serving impacted you?" The number of responses was only at 5,300+ when Bruce Gagnon, himself an Air Force veteran, weighed in with "Army: It's not a job, it's an adventure..."

• “My daughter was raped while in the army,” said one responder. “They took her to the hospital where an all male staff tried to convince her to give the guy a break because it would ruin his life. She persisted. Wouldn’t back down. Did a tour in Iraq. Now suffers from PTSD.”

• “I’ve had the same nightmare almost every night for the past 15 years,” said another.

• “Someone I loved joined right out of high school even though I begged him not to. Few months after his deployment ended, we reconnected. One night, he told me he loved me and then shot himself in the head. If you’re gonna prey on kids for imperialism, at least treat their PTSD.”

By now various authors have compiled some of the 10,ooo responses. Caitlin Johnstone all the way down in Australia posted "The US Army Asked Twitter How Service Has Impacted People. The Answers Were Gut Wrenching."

“My dad was drafted into war and was exposed to agent orange. I was born w multiple physical/neurological disabilities that are linked back to that chemical. And my dad became an alcoholic with ptsd and a side of bipolar disorder.” 

~ 

“i met this guy named christian who served in iraq. he was cool, had his own place with a pole in the living room. always had lit parties. my best friend at the time started dating him so we spent a weekend at his crib. after a party, 6am, he took out his laptop. he started showing us some pics of his time in the army. pics with a bunch of dudes. smiling, laughing. it was cool. i was drunk and didn’t care. he started showing us pics of some little kids. after a while, his eyes went completely fucking dark. i was like man, dude’s high af. he very calmly explained to us that all of those kids were dead ‘but that’s what war was. dead kids and nothing to show for it but a military discount’. christian killed himself 2 months later.”

George Marlowe writing for World Socialist Web Site, "Memorial Day 2019: US Army tweet prompts outpouring of antiwar sentiment," pointed out what I've been thinking since I saw the original thread on Twitter: "This outpouring of rage on Twitter highlights the latent but deep going antiwar sentiment in the American population[emphasis mine] that finds no expression in the current political system or the corporate media. "  

How can we antiwar activists do a better job of leveraging this?

I would love to hear your thoughts in comments.

Send A Memorial Day Letter To The Vietnam Veterans Wall In Wash DC

Photo credit: Meutia Chaerani - Indradi Soemardjan - Own work Indrani, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=779984

My life has been touched by the suffering of Vietnam veterans since I was a teenager. My first lover was a Vietnam veteran who eventually killed himself. 

I began to fall in love with my husband when I heard him tell a military age young man why he had risked his own health to avoid the draft during the Vietnam war: he knew that his government was lying to him.

My friends in the current antiwar movement often are veterans of Vietnam who have sustained the moral injuries of combat and who struggle with depression and despair. Many family members of students I've taught have suffered from PTSD, substance abuse, cancer and other health effects of being Vietnam vets. This continues to put stress on families down through the generations.

"Heavily bandaged woman with a tag attached to her arm
which reads 'VNC Female' meaning Vietnamese civilian"
Photo credit: By Philip Jones Griffiths - National Library of WalesThe National Library of Wales, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38576244

The above is my response to this invitation from Veterans for Peace co-founder Doug Rawlings:

AMERICA NEEDS TO HEAR FROM YOU

If you have suffered through the Vietnam war, either as a military veteran or as a resister or as a partner of a veteran or a child or a sibling of a veteran or just as a caring citizen of this country, you need to know that your voice is needed. 

On Memorial Day, May 30th, we will be delivering letters to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall) with heartfelt messages to those young men and women whose names are on The Wall. Please join us. 

Your note can be one paragraph long or many paragraphs. It can be written to a specific name on The Wall or just as a general cry out against war. Last year we laid 151 letters and 32 postcards at the foot of The Wall in a ceremony that not only profoundly affected us but also those who read the letters as they passed by. Rest assured that your letter will be treated with the respect and caring it deserves -- this ceremony is not a political action. It is an act of remembrance and grief. 

But it also is more than a reaching out to the past. It is a message to the future.  You who have firsthand knowledge of that war need to have your voices heard. For the next ten years we will be witnessing a series of fifty year commemorations that will mark the Viet Nam War in the minds of many young people. They need to know more than the "official" story of that war. They need to know the many truths that only you can tell. Please join us.

You have until MAY 14TH to write your letter and send it either as an email message to rawlings@maine.edu or as a handwritten letter to Doug Rawlings, 13 Soper Road, Chesterville, Maine 04938. 

I will guarantee that your letter will be placed in a business envelope, opened at the top, with the words "PLEASE READ ME" emblazoned on the front flap, and then placed at the foot of The Wall at 10:30am, Memorial Day, May 30th.   

Last year, the National Park Service collected all of our letters and then asked if they could place the letters in a special display. We agreed. Our voices continue to be heard. Please put your voice alongside ours.

Doug Rawlings

Veterans For Peace

Memorial Day: Politicians Pledge Allegiance To War $$

When Mainers elect a "progressive" candidate like Democrat Pingree or, more recently, independent candidate and former governor Angus King, the newly-elected are immediately appointed to the Armed Services Committee of their branch of Congress.

When constituents call, write, and otherwise demand that Congress bring the war dollars home to fund human needs, the politicians say that sounds like a good idea. That is right before or after they climb into black limos and are whisked through the gates of Bath Iron Works, where General Dynamics builds nuclear-equipped Aegis destroyer ships. Never mind that it's one of the most lousy job generating programs where we could invest tax dollars in terms of number of jobs generated. And never mind the karma.

Pingree told me her first year in office that she knew all about "The Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending," the definitive study out of UMass about how to really invest in order to generate the greatest number of clean, sustainable jobs. She also told me Congress needed to pass an energy bill in order to shift funding from weapons manufacturing into green jobs. 

Pingree has since voted ought to pass on multiple "defense" funding bills coming through the House Armed Service Committee. Then, she voted no when the bills came to the floor and her advisors thought that voters might be paying attention. There are plenty of yes votes in the House, so she can afford to vote no -- there's no chance the bill won't pass. She's done her part, and the campaign contributions from the corporations will keep on flowing.

My husband said he has a mental image of the famous Iwo Jima flag raising, with politicians scrambling up on one another to reach the top and raise the flag the highest.

But it isn't only on Memorial Day that the woman who ran for office as an organic vegetable farmer lavishes praise on the military, claiming "we have them to thank for being able to enjoy this beautiful day." (Pingree seems to have stopped just short of adding, Freedom isn't free.)

You can also see her glorifying militarism here, and here under the headline "Bath Iron Works lauds Pingree's efforts to defeat funding cut for destroyer program." On July 19, 2012 the Bangor Daily News reported:

"This was a last-minute attempt to sneak in and cut funding for a DDG-51 and that could have had some pretty dire consequences for Bath Iron Works,” Pingree said in the release. “But these ships are the workhorses for the Navy, they are a key part of our military strategy and BIW is getting them to the Navy on time and on budget. I think in the end we convinced my colleagues that it didn’t make sense from a strategic or a fiscal point of view to cut this ship."

Here is the tale of the three most recent veterans from my family. 

Source: Nagasaki Journal, Exploratorium.edu

My maternal grandfather, who was drafted into WWII as a father of two young children and sent into Nagasaki following the atomic bombing of civilians there, never spoke of it. He refused all his GI benefits but it didn't stop him from building a house and starting a tire business -- not bad for a migrant farm worker fleeing Dust Bowl Oklahoma.

source: Socialism and/or Barbarism blog

My paternal grandfather volunteered for WWI just after graduating from high school. He had his leg blown up just before the armistice, was gassed, and suffered ill health as a result his whole life. It didn't stop him from running the family ice business, serving in the Maine legislature, and fathering a son. 

source: Boston.com "Remembering the Korean War

When my dad was a high school football star who was drinking the Koolaid about fighting communism in Korea, his father told him there is no such thing as a good war, and you should not believe them when they tell you this one is. The wounded vet persuaded his son go to college instead of joining the Army. But as soon as his dad died my dad joined up anyway. He was amazed at the level of suffering and poverty and exploitation he saw in Seoul as the occupation settled in, and he made sure to pass along his father's wisdom to my brothers and sisters and me. As we have passed it along to our children.

So every Memorial Day I go down to the family cemetery and remove the flags that the VFW puts on my ancestors' graves. I plant flowers instead, and I give the flags to an artist friend who puts them to use un-glorifying war.

This year and last, the cemetery workers goofed and put the flag on my brother's grave rather than on my grandfather's. They probably confused the two men because they shared the same first name.

Or maybe it's like the Obama administration's drone killing policy in Yemen and Pakistan, where any male of a certain age is deemed a militant.

What kind of person doesn't wave the flag and glorify militarism on Memorial Day?

A thinking person.

Special thanks to my husband Mark Roman, who avoided the draft during the Vietnam War, and who helped me plant flowers on my family's graves for this Memorial Day.

A poem for Memorial Day...A poem for Peace…DEAR AMERICA

Veterans give the peace sign before symbolically throwing their medals away. They were fenced out of proximity to the NATO summit going on nearby, so they threw the medals in that general direction. Photo credit: Daily Mail, UK via Veterans Today website.

Few things are more moving than the heartfelt regrets of military veterans who are facing up to their role in the violent oppression of other people in the name of patriotism. By most accounts, the returning of medals by IVAW and other vets during the recent no NATO protests in Chicago was powerful. (Good coverage here on Democracy Now! in addition to Reuters and other mainstream press.)

This poem was written by Peggy Akers, co-president of Maine's William Ladd Chapter of Veterans for Peace. She gave me permission to share it here after her reading at the Pax Christi annual assembly at USM on May 5:

A poem for Memorial Day… A poem for Peace….

DEAR AMERICA

Remember me?

I was the girl next door.

Remember when I was 13, America, and rode on top of the fire engine in the Memorial Day parade? I'd won an essay contest on what it meant to be a proud American.

And it was always me, America, the cheerleader, the Girl Scout, who marched in front of the high school band . . . carrying our flag . . . the tallest . . . the proudest . . .

And remember, America, you gave me the Daughters of the American Revolution Good Citizen Award for patriotism, and I was only sixteen.

And then you sent me to war, America, along with thousands of other men and women who loved you.

It’s Memorial Day, America. Do you hear the flags snapping in the wind? There's a big sale at Macy's, and there's a big parade in Washington for the veterans.

But it's not the American flag or the sound of drums I hear - I hear a helicopter coming in - I smell the burning of human flesh. It's Thomas, America, the young Black kid from Atlanta, my patient, burned by an exploding gas tank. I remember how his courage kept him alive that day, America, and I clung to his only finger and whispered over and over again how proud you were of him, America - and he died.

And Pham….. He was only eight, America, and you sprayed him with napalm and his skin fell off in my hands and he screamed as I tried to comfort him.

And America, what did you do with Robbie, the young kid I sat next to on the plane to Viet Nam? His friends told me a piece of shrapnel ripped through his young heart - he was only seventeen - it was his first time away from home. What did you tell his mother and father, America?

Hold us America . . .

Hold all your children America. Allen will never hold any- one again. He left both his arms and legs back there. He left them for you, America.

America, you never told me that I'd have to put so many of your sons, the boys next door, in body bags. You never told me . . .

AAuthor Peggy Akers is  a dedicated peaceworker and an active organizer with both Veterans for Peace and Occupy Maine.

Veteran Vince Emanuele returned his war decorations to NATO and explained how he sees the connection between veterans and the Occupy movement:

I served with the United States Marine Corps. First and foremost, this is for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Second of all, this is for our real forefathers. I’m talking about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I’m talking about the Black Panthers. I’m talking about the civil rights movement. I’m talking about unions. I’m talking about our socialist brothers and sisters, our communist brothers and sisters, our anarchist brothers and sisters, and our ecology brothers and sisters. That’s who our real forefathers are. And lastly—and lastly and most importantly, our enemies are not 7,000 miles from home. They sit in boardrooms. They are CEOs. They are bankers. They are hedge fund managers. They do not live 7,000 miles from home. Our enemies are right here, and we look at them every day. They are not the men and women who are standing on this police line. They are the millionaires and billionaires who control this planet, and we’ve had enough of it. So they can take their medals back.

Afghan victim of drone attack (Source: No to War)