A military mom's view of the recent past

Under a Better Flag

By Jill Kuraitis, 11-13-06

Yesterday, my beloved firstborn left for the Middle East.

He will not see combat and will be relatively safe, but still – the Middle East – for a year.

First there is the whole year thing – it seems unimaginable right now – and then there is the location thing, and then there is the whole year thing. A year without rubbing his head and catching that clean scent that hasn’t changed since the day he was born. Twelve months without his company for dogwalks by the river. Four seasons without his familiar calls to chat about the latest political outrage, his lectures about my car-maintenance habits, and the way he cracks up. He doesn’t crack up often, but when he does – mercy but it’s a beautiful thing.

Ten days ago I was more upset than I am now, even though Andrew is gone. Bush was still proclaiming his support for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it was uncertain whether the Democrats could take the House, and the Senate was but a crazy dream.

Though tempered by Idaho’s disturbing election, my relief at the national results of November 7 has given me hope for relief for our military.

As of yesterday, official reports say 2,847 of them have been killed; 21,077 have been wounded.

Our sons and daughters.

Sources from the BBC to NBC and from The Washington Post to The Manchester Guardian put the number of Iraq civilian deaths at between 30,000 and 50,000.

They are also someone’s sons and daughters.

Mothers don’t like this war business. We have an inborn, profound interest in a peaceful world where our children can thrive. The great 19th-century American peace activist Julia Ward Howe, founder of Mother’s Day, had a different idea for the holiday than what it has become. She wanted to rally mothers and move them into the public-policy arena with one goal: to protect children from war. She said Mother’s Day was “to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” It was to be an annual promotion of the Second Commandment: to love thy neighbor as thyself.

I’d like to have a talk with Barbara Bush about that.

Howe was also the author of the beautiful “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which is not the call to arms that many may assume. It’s a plea to stamp out violence through the grace of God:

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

My late father, to whom my son was very close, was a veteran of four wars. As a teenager, he went to Spain to fight Franco. In the U.S. Army, he was with General Stilwell in WWII. He helped train the Israeli infantry in 1948 and then fought alongside them, and he ran transportation battalions in Korea. Throughout, he remained a liberal Democrat and never wavered. On his deathbed he made me promise to give a small portion of my inheritance to Betty Richardson, who was running for the 1st Congressional District at the time and whom he admired. He also urged me to consider military service for Andrew, whom he adored with his whole heart.

Partly in honor of his grandfather, our son entered the military for unique reasons having to do with special talents. He is a soldier in the war on terror, but not the way you may think. But if we had known that Bush lied about the existence of WMDs and would falsely link Saddam with Al-Queda; that the war would be as disastrously mismanaged as it has been; that kids in the military would be treated as badly by their own government as they have been - we probably would not have allowed our son to answer his call. But we liberals are just as interested in wiping out terror as are conservatives, and that’s how we proceeded.

I am not a pure pacifist. I believe in a super-competent military as an unfortunate necessity. But I grieve that foreign policy is so partisan, when what we all want is peace. I’m horrified at the overwhelming evidence that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld made decisions based on faulty intelligence; that they ignored direct intelligence of the September 11 attacks; that they used the Republican Big Lie Machine to convince Americans of an illogical untruth: that finding Saddam would lead us to Al-Queda and eventually to the wipeout of terrorism.

I’m also aghast at the conservative big lie that only pro-war Christian Republicans, only churchgoing straight married people have “family values” or are patriotic. What do they have to say to our 25-year marriage and two children who were never even sent to the principal’s office or got into any trouble; who received awards and honors and recognition for their grades, leadership and talents? Who were raised by hand with me at home; who write thank-you notes and hold doors open and help the elderly ladies on our block with their garden chores; who dress modestly and behave modestly and are now at university and in the military? Children who flew home on election day to cast their votes in person in their much-loved Idaho?

My Andrew, the offspring of supposedly immoral-godless-evil Democrats, is a man in your military. His sense of honor, his intellect, his competence as a responsible and productive man is in service to us all.

But now, he is in a service which will operate under a Secretary of Defense who will be scrutinized and held accountable in a way Donald Rumsfeld never was, and a Congress which will insist on a stronger role in foreign policy. A Congress, it is hoped, that will pay more attention to the broader and more basic principles on which humans should surely agree.

“Don’t run with a stick in your hand!” shriek mothers everywhere. “Don’t cross your eyes; they’ll stick that way!” “Give me those matches; we don’t play with fire!” we say.

My hope is that the American war machine will consider a lure instead of a stick; that they’ll uncross their eyes and see things in a different way, and that they’ll put the matches away in a safe place for now.

And may they remember my Andrew, and all our Andrews, while sifting out the hearts of man.

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