Two soliders await a helicopter in Long Khanh Province to evacuate their fallen comrade. (Pfc. L. Paul Epley, 1966)

Sometimes wars are not between people, but between countries. Sometimes people just get in the way of wars between governments, like pawns in a chess game. Expendable, inconsequential, beside the point. Not involved, yet present — and in present danger. Individuals in a hostile country simultaneously serve as victim and perpetrator, refugee and criminal, innocent and guilty.

I think that message might have been hidden in President George W. Bush’s October 7, 2001 presidential address to the nation: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies.” According to our president, we were at war with the Afghani government but not with the Afghani people.

I am not sure what his statement means. I hope the soldiers knew what Bush meant as they dropped the bombs, the bombs that were dropped by people and fell on people. People who were Afghani, who hated the Taliban, who loved their country, who were enlisted in armies, who feared for their lives and safety. Nationalities and loyalties, homeland and security, can get all mixed up in the process.

During 1991’s Operation Desert Storm, when we began bombing Iraq, starving the Iraqi people, and interrupting their water supply, I worked in Washington, D.C., at a scientific society. I watched two of my Iraqi coworkers — father and daughter — come to work with heavy hearts. They didn’t support Saddam Hussein, but they had family and friends who were still in Iraq. They knew children who were living under the fear of bombs. The footage on CNN every night was not abstract to them. And yet, each day they came to work, and their taxes were taken out of their paychecks. And those same taxes went to fund the bombing campaign.

As the war in Iraq lingers again, I find myself thinking of them. The daughter worked for me, as a temp, doing some filing. She had been evacuated in the dead of night from her Peace Corps posting because of an uprising in a small African country. She was to start law school in the fall, but at the time she was straightening out the membership files for the society and trying to heal because she never got a chance to say goodbye to the folks she left behind so suddenly. The twenty-three-year old loved punk music and hid a tattoo on her wrist by wearing a watch. Growing up in the D.C. suburbs, she was as American as you or I.

Her father, a director of the association, was leading an Iraqi peace-through-understanding movement in his spare time. He was frightened by talk of internment camps in the United States for Iraqi Americans. The father had a heavy accent; there was no mistaking that he was from the Middle East. Yet, he had seized the American dream. He had risen to a good management position and understood how citizens could create change.

His was a familiar story to me — being taxed to fight the homeland and the confusion of loyalties. Even though my grandfather and my father were Jewish Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States, they were still German. This concept eludes many people in this time of consciousness about the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s and 40s.

An American soldier wounded in France during World War II. (1944)

My family was German and spoke German. They loved German things. Instead of hotdogs, we ate knockwurst and bockwurst with sauerkraut flecked with caraway seeds and coarse spicy mustard. While other families made potato salad with mayonnaise, we used bacon and vinegar. I grew up loving sliced tongue, pickled herring and landjaegers, while my classmates ate ham, bologna and American cheese. We grew German raspberries in our garden, sweeter and brighter than what everyone else knew as raspberries (I see them now in markets as “wineberries”). When my mother bought a bright yellow 1972 VW Beetle, my grandfather yelled and screamed, but truth be known, he loved riding in it. Even though he didn’t smoke, he had a sterling silver cigarette case from Mercedes until the day he died. It was a gift for having a perfect driving record for twenty-five years. He loved German cars, even though he wouldn’t buy one. He collected German postage stamps. My grandparents insisted on living amongst other “refugees,” but they would only socialize with the German ones. They wanted nothing to do with the Eastern European Jews, who were, in their minds, “dirty.”

About ten years ago, when I was about twenty-five years old, I was dating a man whose mother, as a teen, had come from Germany with her family in the 1950s. His parents and mine led parallel lives, living in Philadelphia, attending the University of Pennsylvania, traveling in the same circles, having nearly identical small weddings a year apart, having their first born in 1966. Our grandmothers said “miserable” with the same accent — “me-sir-rah-bell.” I loved the story of his mother making pickled herring every New Year’s Eve, using beets and sour cream even though no one would touch the pink gooey mess. It never occurred to me, when I traveled to his parents’ home in Tennessee, that he didn’t tell them my family was also from Germany. That I was Jewish. Nor would I have thought that he might, I guess. We’d been friends for years. I was a name and some stories to him, not a religion to be announced and worn like an arm-band.

We were sitting at the dinner table with his parents when his mother made an off-handed comment about a cousin who perished during World War II in France. I blanched. I was sitting at a table with a woman whose first cousin was killed in Paris during the occupation. He was just sixteen at the time. I lost my appetite. I was stuck in this house in Tennessee for several more days. I confronted my friend after dinner. I’m not sure what I said, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, “Gee, you never told me your mother was a Nazi sympathizer.” Sure, I knew that she had to have been in Germany during the Holocaust. Sure, I knew they weren’t Jewish. But I had this image of them being fearful and hating the government — not fighting for it. I felt that hating the German government was a moral imperative. At the time I thought there was no other sensible way to feel. I don’t remember what I said to my friend about my feelings, but I remember his response: “There are tragedies on both sides of any war.”

I try to think of this sixteen year-old boy who was drafted and killed as a tragedy. This Nazi, this boy, this enemy, this murdered child. I remember helping the mother clean up the kitchen later, telling her my father was from Stuttgart, but not having the courage to mention something innocuous like Hanukkah or Passover to see her reaction, which I’m sure would have been a politically correct one. His parents were educators and liberals. I’m sure it would have been fine to mention my bat mitzvah, but something stopped me from bringing it up. I was a guest in their house, and my flight home was still several days off. In some ways, I wasn’t comfortable with bringing it up, making an accusation, starting a conflict. The topic was surely too sensitive for both of us.

In light of my friend’s child-soldier cousin, I have to remember that my grandfather, a Jewish refugee but also a German, was gassed twice by the Allies as he fought side-by-side with Germans, with the likes of Erich Maria Remarque in the trenches during World War I. Twice he lay in the hospital, his lungs filling with blood. Fighting for the country whose Final Solution, less than twenty years later, was to see him dead.Being gassed by the country that would welcome him to its safe haven in 1938, when he fled for his life with his family.

I have a box of pictures from his time fighting in the war. Him sitting with fellow soldiers drinking beer, smiling, laughing. Standing near monuments. He was having the time of his life.

All the while, the chemical weapons that would be used against him were being developed at my alma mater, American University, in the very building where my office is now. Perhaps the very place where, now as a professor, I meet with my students. My grandfather survived, but many other Jews who fought as Germans during World War I went on to die in concentration camps. I have proof of this, a rare German book that was put together as pro-Jewish propaganda — a list of Jewish men who died or were wounded during the Great War.

Burial at sea for the officers and men of the USS Intrepid (CV-11) who lost their lives when the carrier was hit by Japanese bombs during operations in the Philippines. (Lt. Barrett Gallagher, 1944)

Tragedies on both sides, sides on both sides

The chemicals that the Army developed during World War I to gas the German soldiers were carelessly buried all around American University. The leaking canisters are causing cancer clusters to this day from the high levels of arsenic. Instead of the Axis powers, the Allies are today gassing the wealthy residents of Spring Valley. The Army Corps of Engineers is still scrambling to end this final battle of a war that most believe to have ended nearly one hundred years ago.

My grandfather, after being naturalized as a U.S. citizen, adopted a young German so that he could enlist near the end of World War II. The young man never returned from the war. A Jewish refugee who had lost his entire family, he wanted nothing more than to go back and fight against the country of his birth. He died turning against the country that turned against him first.

My father was a member of the U.S. Army military intelligence force in 1950s Germany. Though this was during the Korean conflict, my father had been tapped to return to Germany because of his language skills. There, he was driving a Jeep through a pre-wall West Berlin. He was getting shot at as he acted as a Cold War era decoy — real spy, cloak, and dagger stuff — wearing a tan U.S. Army uniform and carrying a brief case stenciled with the words “Top Secret” lying in plain sight on the seat next to him. A German-American, spying on Germans — East Germans perhaps, but Germans nonetheless — and being set-up by Americans.

And now, America wages another quick war with Iraq. A country we supported — a regime we supported, armed against Iran — against the theocracy we thought was evil in 1979 when they held Americans hostage. After decades, Saddam Hussein’s Stalinesque tactics became too much to bear. We fought one war, then another. Ten years ago, we dropped our Patriot missiles and smart bombs. We instituted economic sanctions. Iraqis starved. When that didn’t work, we attacked again.

Just like my family — Germans in America — Iranians and Iraqis in America keep paying taxes and hope for an end. They watch the news and vote. They’re glad a tyrant is gone, but they’re confused by the suggestions, by the ever-shifting policies and alliances. They wonder if it isn’t the punch line to some macabre joke when Bush asked Iraq to look to Iran for a model Muslim government.

A neighbor who emigrated from Iran in 1979 looked aghast when I asked him how he felt about the Iraqis fashioning their government after Iran’s. Had it gotten better? He couldn’t even speak. He’d gone back for a visit just a few years back. “No,” he said. “It’s still much the same.” His two toddlers frolicked in the yard. He looked down and continued to rake the fall leaves — hurrying to get them all to the curb before the arrival of the county leaf collector.

Iranians and Iraqis, like most U.S. citizens, are confused by the possible lies our government tells about Hussein’s weapons, about the pretense for war. Yet, ever still, they’re Americans. They’re hopeful for the promised enduring peace. Not only for their adopted homelands, but for their motherlands, friends, neighbors, and family as well.

STORY INDEX

SPEECHES >

President George W. Bush
Oct. 7, 2001 address to the nation
URL: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011007-8.html

FOOD >

Landjaegers
Photo of the traditional German food
URL: http://www.sacredrock.com/Nowicki’s%20Landjaeger%20in%20smokehouse.jpg

ORGANIZATIONS >

Army Corp of Engineers
Spring Valley cleanup project
URL: http://www.nab.usace.army.mil/projects/WashingtonDC/springvalley/overview.htm

PEOPLE > REMARQUE, ERICH MARIA >

Biography
URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/remarque.htm

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