I am a soldier’s daughter.
Maybe that’s why the front-page photograph the newspaper printed on Feb. 28 has stayed with me.
Do you remember the picture?
It showed a husband and wife clutching each other, the husband dressed in Army camouflage, left hand clasping a red-white-and-blue pinwheel; the wife, her back to the camera, tucked into her husband’s embrace one last time before he left Fort Knox for the Middle East.
Standing alongside them was their 8-year-old daughter, her face scrunched with worry or sadness or something else, her small hands folded, almost as if in prayer, in front of her mouth.
When I saw her, I felt as if I were looking in a mirror, because once you have done it, you never forget what it’s like to say goodbye to a parent who is leaving for a long time, leaving to fight in a place far away.
That sense of ache and dread and a kind of hopeless love has stayed with me, too. And it has shaped who I have become and what I believe about the costs of war.
If our government isn’t forthcoming with a truthful price-tag for a war that seems destined to be fought, it must be said that there is no way to wholly project the human costs of war, either. Those costs are borne out in so many different ways, and the costs exacted always last longer than the war itself.
I can speak only for myself. I know only what I know, and I can share only what has happened in the life I’ve been given, and what I’ve learned through the people I’ve met. Here is some of it.
Long ago, when my father was training for his second tour of duty in Southeast Asia, we lived for a short time in Arizona.
One day, the families of those who were being trained to fly various aircraft in Vietnam were invited to a range in the desert for a display of air and fire power.
I’m not sure what the point of the exercise was. Probably it was to build pride. If so, it also was an inadvertent reality check in spades.
All I know is, we cowered in an open-air tower as jets screamed close overhead. We cupped our hands over our ears as bullets tore at metal targets in the desert floor below us.
I would always be proud of my dad, proud of the integrity with which he served his country.
But something in me died that day; I think it was innocence. And something else was born; I know it was a tiny question mark.
I was 12 years old.
The wrench we felt when my father left for war was deep and long-lasting. But at least there was an end to it: Our daddy came home. So many others did not.
One of my dad’s best friends, the head of a family I babysat for in Arizona, is but a name on the famous black wall that looks like a gash in the soul.
Many times I have visited that wall, and never have I left before tracing the name of that man with my fingers, that young, blond husband and father who had a bright and friendly smile, killed in a strange jungle, a long time ago.
I grew up in military housing, and among our neighbors was a family whose father was MIA, missing in action.
Most of us wore the silver bracelets bearing the names of those imprisoned or missing, a trend and a statement among us teens. But knowing my neighbors gave the bracelets real meaning to me.
I rode to school with two of the kids, who were about my age. I was afraid to ask them about their dad. And I always felt a little guilty around them; a single second, a different flight plan, and things could have been so different for our families.
Later, when I became a journalist, I would profile their mother, before and after her death.
I always believed she was a soldier, too.
I still believe she was a casualty of that war.
She lived with hope and loneliness for more than 10 years before her husband was declared killed in action.
Only then did she learn that officials were nearly certain her husband had died immediately. But he had been sent to fight in an area our troops were not known or supposed to be. Much about his final battle was kept secret, even from his waiting family, for all those years.
I think I am older now than she was when she died.
When the movie “Platoon” was released, I was assigned to watch it in a theater filled with Vietnam veterans — Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines. I was to write about their reaction to the film.
We met in a restaurant afterward.
Some of the men laid their heads on the tables, and sobs shook their bodies. The hands of others trembled as they tried to light their cigarettes.
I will never forget talking to one man that day. He told me he had left for the war before he really began to date. He got into trouble with drugs during the war, a problem that escalated when he came home. He had never married, had never loved.
This is what I know.
Multiply it by hundreds of thousands in this country.
Multiply it by hundreds of thousands in dozens of other countries.
You will not read of these things in news stories about shock-and-awe war preparation, nor will you learn about them in pieces packaged for programs emblazoned with offensively snappy war logos.
But they are real. As real as anything you’ll hear in a speech or at a press conference. More real, probably.
They were real long before any of us came along.
The holes in my formal education are so large you could drive trucks through them. I read some Mark Twain in school, but it wasn’t until I was an adult that I found “The War Prayer.” (Read it at www.thewarprayer.org)
I thought of it last week as I read a well-written column about how it was time for us to gird our loins and fight the good fight.
In “The War Prayer,” Mark Twain wrote, “If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon your neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain on your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse on some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it. . .”
That applies to what we rain upon our enemy.
And, lest we forget, that applies to what sorrow we bring to ourselves.
Some have said war may sometimes be “a necessary evil, but it is always evil.”
Others have said war is “an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.”
I agree with both, though they are too abstract.
My feeling about war is personal.
But war is personal.
I am a soldier’s daughter.
