There was a big D-Day spread in the newspaper today. Morganne and I read the articles together, stopping to talk about the various people, places and events that were mentioned in the article. I showed her the map of Normandy and pointed to Omaha Beach, where my great-uncle Ray died. He was 19. We talked about war.
War is a tough subject for me. I grew up in the Vietnam era, at the heart of the peace movement. I watched my cousin Mike, decorated Green Beret and All American as they come, come home from Vietnam with a haunted look and an addiction to heroin. And his life, once so full of promise, ruined. He never married and now works as a park ranger. He no longer uses heroin, but he still shakes and has nightmares.
The night the US started bombing Iraq, I prayed. I prayed for the hearts of the leaders to turn, to find a way to settle the situation without the need to kill so many innocent people.
I do not want to glorify war. War is painful, ugly and wasteful. I have been hoping that humanity will mature, that we will learn to resolve our differences without needing to break young men's bodies to do so.
We come to WWII. A war that might have needed to have been fought. A war where the deaths of men like my uncle Ray bought the lives of other innocent people. I wonder what he thought as he sat off the coast of Normandy. I wonder whether he was killed by the enemy or by friendly fire.
I'm struggling with what to tell Morganne, other than the bare facts. How do I reconcile my own pacifist leanings with the belief that uncle Ray did not die in vain, that his death had meaning and purpose? How do I communicate that war, although wars are often fought for bad or insufficient reasons, can nonetheless be necessary? How can we talk about the deaths of thousands or millions of people without devaluing human life, without looking at people as playing pieces in a bloody game?
I do not want my children to fight when there are other alternatives. For this reason, I am teaching them communication skills. However, I also want them to fight for all they're worth if they must.
So, I have two issues here. The first has to do with talking about war and wars to our children. The second has to do with finding books that talk about wars without glorifying battle and abstracting away from the human element. War may sometimes be necessary, but it's never pretty, except in history books.
Thoughts and help appreciated.
Copyright © 1996 by
Heather Madrone. All rights reserved.