"They Might Be Living "

The election is behind us. Everyone from the pundits to the president interprets the outcome as a call for change. Public attitudes, ranging from discontent to outrage about the war in Iraq, may well have been the deciding factor.

Now we begin a new chapter in American life. It holds the possibility of reconciliation, of overcoming divisions, of people working together. Public discourse about the war will no doubt shift, and though we cannot predict, we can hope that it will come to whatever humane and just resolution our best minds can plan.

I want to hope - perhaps too much, I admit. I want this moment to mean more than it probably does and to change more than it probably will. But I have lived for too many years with disappointment and anger, and with grief over the colossal loss of life this war has wrought, and I want it to stop. I'm not alone.

As you know, we are holding a memorial service this afternoon at the Santa Monica Arlington West installation on the beach. This monument, tended entirely by volunteers, is growing unwieldy and difficult to maintain. There are too many crosses to set up and take down.

Friday's "Los Angeles Times" covered a similar situation in Santa Barbara. One of the members of Veterans for Peace said that "the ideal . . . would be to continue to place a marker for each battlefield death - but the sheer size might make that impossible."[1] They are considering limiting the number of markers to 3,000. It's getting close. Every time I've stopped in at Arlington West over the past couple of months, I've witnessed grief, as family and friends of the dead stop by at the only place they have to pay their respects. I've felt some of that grief for them, as we all have, and the feeling of helplessness that goes along with it has become familiar to me. I suspect that feeling helpless is one way of not assuming the guilt that this war has imposed on all of us. Now when I begin to feel hopeful again, I have an even harder time making sense of that number as it moves inexorably towards the 3,000 mark. And that's just the American military deaths.

We voted. Everything is different now, we hope. But the dead are still gone.

We have the responsibility to make things right. We will do whatever time and politics and the collective will allow us to do. We will learn our lessons, perhaps, and grieve again.

All this is the luxury of the living. It will mean nothing to Marine Corporal Jorge A. Gonzalez, 20, of Los Angeles, whose cross says that he is a graduate of El Monte High School and the father of a newborn.[2] Or Marine Lance Corporal Jesus Suarez del Solar, 20, of Escondido, "Our Hero and Aztec warrior."

It is not any easier for me to get my mind wrapped around these deaths than it was last summer, as I watched a tourist in a small pink bikini walk through that sea of crosses to make her way to the waves. Then I thought, I must not get cynical or bitter about this. The challenge of life is to hang on to hope. Cynicism and bitterness mean you have given up. And then I'd see a family, looking for a cross in the sand. My struggle against cynicism and bitterness was nothing - nothing - compared to what that family faced.

This weekend has brought us another Veterans Day, a time to honor those who have served in our military, many during time of war. Death and sacrifice belong to every war; people have always had to search for meaning in these events. I have a harder time with it than most people I know, probably because I'm not enough of a realist, or don't want to be. I resonate more with Robinson Jeffers's compelling lament, "Make us worthy of the color of our wounds . . . . For now men fall in battle and that noble flower growing from their bodies tells us nothing except how beautiful they might have been."

We cannot settle for a loss that tells us nothing. We have to learn from the experience. Most of us have known this war from others' reports. We haven't done the real grieving or the real fighting.

Captain Glen J. Bayliff served two tours of duty in the U.S. Marines. He wanted to use his engineering education in the service of his country. He took part in the drive to Baghdad and later went to Fallouja. He is now home, recently married, and in the inactive Marine reserves. His mother, church member Marsha Smith, and her partner, Laurel Bleak, endured a couple of very difficult years while Glen was in Iraq, watching the news, waiting, and worrying.

After Glen returned from Iraq, he served as an aide to Major General Mike Lehnert. Major General Lehnert attended the Stanford University commencement last spring and reflected on the experience in a speech he gave shortly after.[3] Lehnert said, "My son was the only [Stanford] graduate who had a parent serving in the armed forces. As I was introduced to his friends' parents, it was interesting to watch their reaction. Few had ever spoken to a member of the military. . . . Many voiced support for our military and told me that they'd have served but clearly military service was not for their kind of people."

Lehnert continued, "I want to try to give you a better feel about those who serve our nation. Our Marines tend to come from working class families. For the most part, they [come] from homes where high school graduation was important but college was out of their reach. Patriotism isn't a word that makes them uncomfortable. The global war on terrorism has been ongoing for nearly five years with Marines deployed in harms way for most of that time. It's a strange war because the sacrifices being levied upon our citizens are not evenly distributed throughout our society."

The sacrifices "are not evenly distributed." Friends, I have the funny feeling that this is one of the reasons why it is taking so long to end this war of ours. The people who make the decisions haven't had to see their own children come home wounded, or worse.

Perhaps the pain of loss hasn't come close enough for them. But it has for the Americans who voted this week. It's strange, as Mike Lehnert observed, but perhaps we are beginning to close the gap.

The story I read earlier, "The War Between the Vowels and the Consonants," is an imaginative narrative about war.[4] Vowels and consonants have been enemies for as long as they can remember. As their distrust of each other escalates, war ensues, and takes its toll. But the vowels and the consonants keep fighting, as if there is no alternative. Then out of the chaos comes something that frightens everyone even more than their war. Out of desperation, they join together to stand up to this new threat, learning, in the process, that they can work together. And not only that - they can write.

This little fable is a good one for our times. It suggests that we can overcome divisions when we have to, and that we are capable of creative resolutions we have never known before. Difference is not fate.

The veterans we honor today have not chosen their wars. Yet they sacrificed - some with their lives, or with their wounds, or with lost time and opportunity, because they wanted to serve. It is not for us to make them "worthy." They already are. But for the rest of us, who look at the sacrifice and the loss and ask what they tell us and fear that they tell us nothing . . . we have our work to do. For us remains the task of taking the lessons of this war, of all wars, and turning them into a world in which difference is not fate, and peace is the way of the world.

[1] Steve Chawkins, “Crosses becoming too many for group to bear,” "Los Angeles Times," November 10, 2006.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Major General Mike Lehnert, Commanding General Marine Corps Installations West, in a speech given to the Military Affairs Advisory Committee of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, June 30, 2006. For full speech see www.clc2.com/images/lehnert_speech.pdf
[4] Priscilla Turner, "The War Between the Vowels and the Consonants" (FarrarStraus Giroux, 1996).