A few days ago, Dale Cannon referred us all to sojourners, a Methodist social justice network that seeks connections outside denominational lines. The sojourners’ website incorporates some serious expressions of opposition to the war in Iraq, such as this one, though no more serious than this one, which can be found on the Jesuit website. Sunday morning I received a letter from Henry Taber that expresses an opposing view. Henry’s letter can be found here. Since both Dale and Henry addressed a number of us at St. John’s Church, I thought I’d reply.
Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a piece I think is good about how Americans tend to argue these days. It’s a well-known theme, perhaps most passionately explored in Deborah Tannen’s book, The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words. While I don’t agree with Post columnist, Shankar Vedantam, or with Tannen, in all respects, I do think we Americans tend to argue ad hominem, accusing one another of bad faith and attacking one another personally instead of addressing one another’s ideas, and I do think this has something to do with mass culture and the emphasis our increasingly tribalized way of life places on winning. I also think Vedantam is right when he raises this question: “If you believe that you are a patriot but that those who disagree with you about the Iraq war are self-interested zealots intent on destroying America, what can you possibly have to discuss with them?”
So I’m going to digress a little first, ad hominem, in hopes of decentering things. I’m glad to see that the Methodists are still working at social justice. I grew up a Methodist. My maternal grandmother taught the Berean Class at St. Paul Methodist Church where I was baptised and confirmed (though we didn’t call it confirmation) for thirty years. My mother became a professional Methodist educational director after my father’s death in World War II. I myself was once a local Methodist preacher. The Methodist preachers used to sing a Charles Wesley hymn that celebrated the uncertainty of their itinerant life at the beginning of every annual conference. The first verse goes like this:
And are we yet alive
and see each others’ face?
Glory and thanks to Jesus give
for his almighty grace!
The tune is called Dennis. It sounds a lot like Bless’d be the tie.
My life has pretty much been shaped by by war. I have a little photo album here that shows a couple of pictures of my father in his military uniform. The first was taken at Ft. Bliss during training exercises before he and his comrades in the New Mexico Militia were sent to the Philippines as the United States 200th Coast Artillery in August 1941. The second was taken after he had been in the Philippines for a couple of months. He was a physician and a volunteer–at the time his unit was federalized physicians couldn’t be drafted–though he didn’t want to go and hoped for a long time that the unit would be reprieved. We saw him off on the train–he told me to take care of my mother.
More recently, I’ve read his letters to my mother. They describe his voyage to the east, his arrival, much experience in the first heady weeks of his encounter with the MacArthur establshment. He didn’t like MacArthur, but I think he loved the old brown shoe army and relished being even a very lowly Captain, as he puts it in one letter, in that foreign outpost which must have had a certain old fashioned clubbiness and esprit. Then, of course, things turned sour. The letters are fewer from mid October on, and stop altogether in late November. One letter arrived after Pearl Harbor, written from a tent on Bataan in February, 1942. He died in 1944, somewhere in the South Pacific on an unmarked prisoner ship that was torpedoed by the U. S. Navy. The story of the sinking made the papers back home, with tales of escaping prisoners being clubbed to death by Japanese marines. Of course that wasn’t anywhere near the horror of it.
I learned a bit more about the Japanese death ships when I read Dorothy Cave’s Beyond Courage a few years back. That book also confirmed my impression from family and other history that my father and his comrades had been abandoned by their government when it was decided that the war in Europe took precedence over the far east. I learned too that my mother had been a member of an advocacy group, during the war, that attempted to pressure congress and the president to rescue the men in the Philippines. I found a collection of newsletters among her effects after her death. I also found a check for $100 that my father wrote to someone with a Filipino name. It was presented to my mother for payment after the war. The letter that accompanied it explained that my father had written it for black market medical supplies that he managed to smuggle into the prison at Camp O’Donnell.
He had survived the Death March and for a good while after his death on the ship was reported missing in action. After his death was confirmed, they promoted him and gave him some medals. One was a Bronze Star, the highest military decoration awarded to noncombatants. The citation reads in part, “Though exhausted and sick, he distributed smuggled medical supplies where urgently needed, and by his inspiring efforts greatly reduced the suffering of his weaker comrades.” He also received a Presidential Citation, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, which my mother always cherished. I didn’t know much of this as a child. I thought my father’s Purple Heart more important than the Bronze Star, bigger and more imposing. And for a long time I refused to believe he was dead. I fantasized that he would come around the corner of my school one day and grab me up in his arms.
So I sort of understand Cindy Sheehan because I know what it is to lose somebody in war and to believe that the loss may have been unnecessary; and I sort of know what it’s like to yearn for an end to war. I still sing to myself sometimes that wonderful song from the 1940s.
There’ll be bluebirds over
the white cliffs of Dover
tomorrow, just you wait and see.
There’ll be love and laughter
and peace ever after
tonorrow, when the world is free.
And I think the dream of world peace–it had good a run in the last century and seemed almost attainable when the Berlin Wall came down–is one of the noblest dreams of humankind.
On the other hand, I have lived most of my almost seventy years during times of war. I think a pretty good case can be made that war is the common condition of human life, that is that war is the norm. Still, I did not support the war in Iraq and do not support it now, any more than I would have supported the policy that resulted in my father’s being abandoned in the far east, though I certainly supported him. I also think the mismanagement of the Iraq war amounts to criminal malfeasance, and there is plenty of blame to go around for that.
To end where I began, I am closer to the Jesuits than to the Methodists on the one hand or to Henry on the other. Generally I now support a position more or less like that staked out in an editorial in today’s Washington Post. The Post writers are sharply critical of the Pelosi plan for Iraq presently before the House of Representatives, arguing that it “leads not toward a responsible withdrawal from Iraq but to a constitutional power struggle.” But they also urge aggressive congressional oversight of the war from here on out. I do not want the war in Iraq to end ignominiously. I think that would be a terrible tragedy for my country, for the brave men and women who have served because, like my father in that other war, they believed it was their duty to do so, and for the Iraqis, if the result of our intervention in their country results only in a kind of Palestinianization, to use a made-up word.
But I agree with Henry to the extent that I believe we may have to put the dream of world peace aside for a season and deal with the realities of life in a post-colonial world. One of those realities is militant Islam. I don’t think we’ve made a very good start, but I think it’s what we have to do.
