War dreams

I dream of seeing an article I wrote years ago for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reprinted in a bland church magazine. (I really worked there, I didn’t write an article like this.) It is accompanied by black-and-white photos. It is about war and Russia. Everything is grayed, faded—the typeface, the photos. The clearest, most dramatic, least faded photo is of soldiers’ legs and feet, in rough boots. 

The dream wakes me at 4 30 and I can't get back to sleep. I come downstairs and make tea, read the online NYTimes. I come across this article: "Face that Screamed War's Pain Looks Back, 6 Hard Years Later." It is about an Iraqi girl who was photographed in 2007 as an agonized 5-year-old after her parents had been shot by American soldiers. She was seeing the photo for the first time at age 12. 


That event was not the end of her suffering. Her brother was killed in an attack on the house 3 years later. She is no longer in school. She is beautiful and sad now in her long red dress.

 

This photo was not as widely published as the photo of the napalm-drenched child in Vietnam. At least I never saw it. The photographer who took the iconic picture was dis-embedded, banned from the unit he’d been covering after the picture was published. He was recently killed on the front lines in Libya.

I wonder about my dream, the faded gray of my passion against war, my passion to understand it, to understand Russia--the enemy--juxtaposed to the full-color terror of a young orphan. Her terror has faded, too, sunk to depression, an inability to focus on school though she vaguely wishes to become a doctor someday. She now dreams, she says, of her dead mother, father, brother.

Jon Stewart went serious for a few minutes the other night and said yes we should see the photos of the dead Bin Laden, but only if we also were allowed to see photos of all the dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, our own and the others. We are under a shameful censorship.

If we had seen, would we have put up with these wars for ten years???? (I refrain from inserting obscenities.)

I have no wisdom to offer, nothing to say, really.

The leaves unfold in the spring woods. Is that a wood duck I see perched on a tree trunk? A pair visits every spring, looking for a nesting place. Every spring they realize that there is no water nearby, so, despite the lovely holes in some tall trees, this is not prime wood duck real estate.

Life goes on but death goes on, too, at our collective hands. I am sad. I am angry. My anger is gray and it will fade. I don’t know what to do. I pray.