Washblog || On the Three Thousandth

On the Three Thousandth

By DWE
Sat Dec 30, 2006 at 03:31:19 PM PST
Section: Diary Topic: Military

To commemorate what will soon be the death of the three thousandth American servicemember in Iraq, I recall a poem commemorating the servicemembers who died in the war of my childhood and adolescence. In Facing It, poet and Vietnam veteran Yusef Komunyakaa portrays how everyone who faces the Vietnam memorial finds her reflection contained within it. In commenting on the poem, Komunyakaa has written:

It became a shrine overnight: a blackness that plays with light--a reflected motion in the stone that balances a dance between the grass and sky. Whoever faces the granite becomes part of it. The reflections move into and through each other. A dance between the dead and the living.

As many of us do today, Komunyakaa starts by thinking of the general mass of names and numbers, but ultimately focuses on one name:

I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.

The image of the white flash gives way to the image of the woman's blouse: the bystander can walk away from the dead because she is still among the living. Nonetheless, as long as she is there, she is part of it, just as the woman at the end of poem is part of it, even in the innocent act of combing her son's hair:

. . . In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Dwight Pelz is fond of saying that the Iraq war is Bush's war, but the memorial, in Komunyakaa's poem, shows us how any war is everyone's war. Our humanity is reflected all over the names of the dead, who were once, in the eyes of those who knew them, vivid with humanity. In a sermon, the poet John Donne famously said:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Today I remember that each one of the three thousand war dead was once fully alive as we who read their names. I remember that they are remembered by those of us who--praise life--are still on the other side of the black stone.

Crossposted on The English Teacher.

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On the Three Thousandth | 4 comments (4 topical)

Poignant and tearful Vigil 3000 acknowledgement

Thank you David, you have found words to say much and I honor the thoughts expressed....

On the Surge in Iraq "--we have set the bar so low it's buried in the sand at this point." - Barack Obama

by Lietta Ruger on Sun Dec 31, 2006 at 07:53:55 AM PST

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Milestone of 3,000 today, New Year's Eve n/t

On the Surge in Iraq "--we have set the bar so low it's buried in the sand at this point." - Barack Obama

by Lietta Ruger on Sun Dec 31, 2006 at 12:15:03 PM PST

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Who else has stood before Vietnam Wall?

Who else has seen the actual Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC? I have, in DC, and the replica Vietnam Wall at the state capitol in Olympia, and the traveling Vietnam memorial replica wall - total of three times over the course of my 55 years. I know everyone who sees the wall is overcome by the sheer numbers of names engraved into the black walls. I know my experience of visiting the Vietnam Wall in DC was a visceral experience and personal experience for me....a vigil I dreaded to undertake, for it was the first time in my lifetime that I would see the actual real Wall.

My own history back to that era was firmly in a container with the lid tightly secured and tucked away in the cobwebs in my mental attic. Popular opinion back in that era was not favorable to returning Vietnam veterans or their families. It was safer for us as a family then to quickly put it away, leave it behind and try to move on....

You've heard that expression recently, I'm sure -- get over it and move on. That was one heard repetitiously after the last Presidential election. And yet, were it so simple to get over it and move on, would we be in another situation in Iraq not unlike the situation of Vietnam? I pull the container from my attic, brush off the cobwebs, loosen the lid and let the history wash over me.

I cannot be silent this time, I cannot let young wives and children endure what I endured in silence so long ago. I have something to say this time and I do, and it resonates with many, I know, I can tell by their reactions and actions. Others have something to say and it resonates with many, and eventually it will resonate strongly enough that the outcry of no more cannot be missed. But not yet, not this year, perhaps next year.

The Vietnam Wall Memorial in Washington D.C.
One walks by the first wall which is not so tall and one begins to take in the engraved names. You then walk to the next wall and the next and the walls grow increasingly higher with more engraved names filling out the growing spaces on the increasingly higher walls. By the time you are feeling hopelessly overcome and overwhelmed, you look down the length of the wall to see how much further you will have to walk and how many more walls and engraved names you will have to see before you have completed the walk. As the heighth of the walls reach peak height, the walls then begin decrease in size again until you have reached the last wall and the 'end of the Vietnam conflict' and can now exit the memorial walk of the walls.

That walk registered with me hard as I made that walk, holding my vigil candle, last September in Washington DC. As I walked the walls, I remember thinking at that time, what will the Iraq memorial look like when it is built and how many names will have to be honored in that memorial. I remember reflecting back to when I was young and my then husband was drafted and sent to Vietnam.

I was a young military wife, pregnant with our first child, in my first 'real job', marking time anxiously, hoping he would come home alive to participate in the life of our first child - or even wounded and alive, but please, not dead, not killed in action. I felt empathy wash over me as I contemplated the young wives and children of the young men and women deployed in combat today in Iraq and Afghanistan. I could feel so strongly their youth and the acuteness of loss...how will the new memorial begin to encompass the magnitude of the loss is what was reeling in my mind. It is so much more than numbers.

What I didn't notice until reading David's story was that indeed the Vietnam Wall Memorial is designed to reflect back your own reflection. It occurs to me how appropriate that symbology was then in Vietnam war era and now in Iraq/Afghanistan era....we are each and every one of us complicit somehow and deep reflection is encumbant on each of us as we memorialize today at this milestone marker that as of today 3,000 U.S. troops have been killed - we go into the new year with that number as a marker. It is all we have because no other symbology is permitted at this by this Administration.

We have no way to acknowledge, reflect, mourn, honor except for what the civilian community provides in the way of vigils to try to grasp the overwhelming loss, to try to honor what has already been lost, to try to scream attention that the future memorial to honor the war dead in this era already has too many names...

But then today is the day before a new year, and traditional celebrations tonight ought to be a bit muted to reflect that today is also the day our country has reached another milestone in Iraq. Perhaps when the fireworks are shooting off from the Space Needle in Seattle after an evening of drink, merry-making and celebrating, some will remember to remember that for 3,000 families it is not a celebration. Rather it marks that our country will move into another new year the same way we did last year - with our military still in Iraq, adding more names to the future memorial that will mark this time.

I already thanked David for writing this story and since I left that thank you post, I have sadly learned that as of today, we have indeed reached the three thousand memorial milestone -- let us reflect and be reminded it is our own reflection we see in the Vietnam memorial - and we see our reflection because we are the living, mourning the dead. Perhaps it will strengthen resolve in each of us who reflect today that with a new year we must act to do something different so that we are not re writing this memorial next new year's eve.

On the Surge in Iraq "--we have set the bar so low it's buried in the sand at this point." - Barack Obama

by Lietta Ruger on Sun Dec 31, 2006 at 01:13:38 PM PST

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Thank you David and Lietta

During the first Gulf war, I remember seeing in a sports bar a TV screen split in half with war footage on one side, and a football game on the other.

The "bright line" separating the war and domestic life within the US -- and thus separating our awareness of connection with the people directly impacted by the violence -- seems to me a kind of cultural mental illness. Keeping focused on the reality of this situation is a key political task.

by noemie maxwell on Sun Dec 31, 2006 at 03:42:14 PM PST

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On the Three Thousandth | 4 comments (4 topical)

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