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In
my generation’s time, Robert MacNamara may be the only major
political figure to publicly admit he was wrong and apologize,
even belatedly, to the hundreds of thousands of people harmed
by his role in a war.
Politicians
and influential "think-tanks" still speak of middle-east
"strategy" and boast of "kicking some butt"
as if their strategies and macho posturing justify killing tens
of thousands of people on both sides. People who are fighting
foreign troops in their homes and "collaborators" in
their homeland are in turn labeled "terrorists" or "insurgents,"
as if the labels can justify the decisions made to risk lives
and kill.
The
irony of new blood being spilled by those who hid from war in
their time is not lost on Glenda Carter. Her very personal story
of one person struggling to make sense of needless death brings
home the true cost of war on all sides to those who must suffer
the consequences. To tell her own story she risks the disapproval
of those in our society who still expect the living to contain
their grief and anger to "honor" the sacrifice of those
who have gone and those who, in our political fervor, fear, and
hatred, we still expect to sacrifice.
Glenda’s
story is a portent of things to come, communities torn by another
thirty years of grief, anger, and perhaps healing, spawned by
war. If it only takes the needless death of one family member
or friend to teach us that one death is too many, then how many
years will it take for the new survivors to join the old ones
in saying "No more war!" and become a majority that
demands diplomacy and thought before sending others to die? It
will only happen if people like Glenda speak up and say "I
will not pretend it was OK" for soldiers and civilians to
die in war.
Glenda
Carter’s new book, Sacred Shadow, Sacred Ground, A Vietnam
War Widow’s Journey Through Unresolved Grief, is one worth
reading.
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