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The many faces of war


Thanks to the Bush administration’s censorship of images of coffins returning from Iraq and the media’s tendency to treat victims of Iraqi casualties as statistics — or names, at best — our relationship to the war in Iraq has generally been a story of mass destruction rather than a complicated mosaic of individual tales woven into one.

But war can — and perhaps should — be a very personal experience, not only for those who are fighting or whose family members are fighting, but also for those whose name, whose freedom, war is being fought in. (And yes, it would be a mistake to say that the war in Iraq was only being fought in the name of the Iraqi people when we’re continuously told that Operation Iraqi Freedom makes the world a “safer place for democracy.”)

How do we represent our personal relationships to and opinions of the war, then, when the media falls short and is incapable of providing a forum for personal reflection about the war? Sure, the personal essay piece occasionally makes it into a publication, or some expert gets interviewed on Larry King Live about the war because s/he is an expert. And songwriters, of course, weave their war sentiments into the lyrics of their songs.

But while these stories, these modes of representation, can be quite poignant, I find that these stories rarely stay on my mind for long, generally getting pushed out by the next story on the news. That might be changing, though. Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times just published a series of poems about the relationships of individuals to the war written by people across the country. Reading these prosaic stories, the wheels in my mind can’t help but spin. I can’t help but feel the same way that I feel when I read a work of fiction and want to keep reading, or in many instances, do nothing but think about what I’m reading (or what I’ve read). Why these stories and this particular mode of representation strike a chord with me moreso than other tales of war, I don’t know. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the brevity of the pieces leaves details out. Thanks to silences, omissions, a dearth of details that news reports would never permit, these poems invite — even demand — further thought and imagination.

Here are but a few examples of poems submitted to Kristof:

Alexander Nemser of New Haven, Connecticut, wrote about the death of a pilot:

His mother sent him pictures of his truck,
A pickup, hubcaps polished every time
He stopped to fill the tank, as clear as mirrors;
The dog, who’d lost an eye last spring; his town,
Apollo, Pennsylvania, near the falls
On Roaring Run; the watch his uncle won
From playing cards; his empty chair at dinner,
Audacious as the space left by a tooth.
We traded rifles, scripted final letters
And promised their delivery home. At night,
We planned escapes to Istanbul to join
The dervishes. Eleven miles from Baghdad,
I stood, dumb as a cow, and watched two choppers
Collide like fists and spin across the sky.

David Keppel of Bloomington, Indiana, responded to the torture at Abu Ghraib:

Did I hold a dog
To your terrified nakedness
Or perch you on a box,
Your outstretched arms wired
To the current of fear? . . .
Tell me what I have done,
I beg you, as you begged me,
Tell me what I can do
To make you forget
That my people never remember.

James Yeck of Boulder, Colorado, focused on those left behind:

A tiny piece of metal hangs upon a frame,
That has “father” written below the name.
The tiny piece of metal hangs in glory there,
Never left to tarnish by neglecting care.
The tiny piece of metal brings fame to the home,
Glory for its man who crossed the ocean’s foam.
Politicians send praises into the peaceful air;
Others smile now who once would only stare.
People from all around come especially to see
The tiny piece of metal, a symbol of the free.
A country’s grateful token to the bravest of its land . . .
Proud of their famous town the village people say,
“Do you know what this means?” with pride most every day,
To the little boy whose father went to war.
“Yes,” softly he replies, “I have no daddy any more.”

After reading these poems, you, like me, may want to do nothing but reflect on the meaning of the poems. But if you don’t, it only goes to show how differently each of us is affected by stories and different representations of war. A war, after all, has thousands of faces, and no matter what anyone else says, war is about people first and foremost, regardless of whether it’s fought in the name of “resources,” “weapons of mass destruction,” or “securing the world for democracy.”

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