Tags
Fallen warriors, Memorial Day, National cemeteries, The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, U.S. Armed Forces, Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Civil War headstones on Memorial Day
Alexandria National Cemetery – United States
Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA)
Monday, 26 May 2014, is Memorial Day here in the United States. Every year on the final Monday in May, Americans remember and pay their respects to all those who have died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. For those families who have recently lost a loved one during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pain is still a raw, open wound. Lots of these families will be visiting national cemeteries and memorials across our nation. To mark our most solemn federal holiday, others will take part in thousands of parades.
As a nation honoring our fallen warriors, remembrance is not enough. We should also reflect on the scourge of war: on our families, our communities, our nation, our world. When it’s not our loved one out on the battle front, do we really care? When the war zones are far away in distant foreign lands, do we feel the pain, the fear, and the loss?
We are a self-destructive species. We kill our women and our young. We kill to stop killing. We offer awards and honor to those who give their lives in our killing fields. Can any award or honor substitute for the life of a loved one? If they’re able to share the truth about war, our warriors who survive the killing fields tell a different tale.
In The Yellow Birds, a novel about the Iraq war, Kevin Powers shows us the killing fields through the eyes of twenty-one-year-old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy. Kevin Powers, a poet and writer, served in the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner.
When Private Bartle returns home after his deployment, he struggles with the gratitude for his service he receives from the people in his community as well as his mother’s pride. How should he respond when former friends ask, “Hey, how are you?” How can he tell them the truth?
[S]hould I have said that I wanted to die…because there isn’t any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life… (p.144)
This Memorial Day, I mourn for our species.
Three Worlds One Vision 
Reblogged this on Guyanese Online.
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A big thank you, Cyril.
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I know you have read this Rosaliene, but your post brought it to mind once again: http://drgeraldstein.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/two-americas-but-not-the-two-you-think/ As you said, “When the war zones are far away in distant foreign lands, do we feel the pain, the fear, and the loss?”
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Yes, Dr. Stein, I did read and comment on your excellent article about our two Americas: “on one side the fighting men and women in our armed forces (along with their families) and the rest of us on the other.”
As you expressed so well, those of us, like myself, who belong to the non-fighting America “perhaps remain too comfortable, too detached from something of desperate importance: the work done far from home in our name by the children of other people.”
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check out the conscripts in us armed forces……many not even born or bred in AMERICA the land of the free and brave……
UK abolished National Service decades ago….now UK s armed forces are 100%
British born and bred….
UN is the peace keepers of the planet but because of USA contribution/influence
it has lost its credability…..maybe the UN s charter should be reinvented if it is to
be acceptabed as the peace keepers of the planet.
Maybe the western world should be redefined….as the christian or capitalist world.
Our papals brother visit to unite our world religiously is but a PR exercise….
religion should be re-defined….as indoctrination to its extreme.
The only just WAR is the one on poverty….with TAX its weapon of mass distribution
of wealth (WMDW)
a ” classless ” society where its lower classes have the opportunity to “classful”
enlightenment….its a fact that the larger the middle classes in a society the more prosperous that society becomes….its not rocket science….commonsense approach to BOOM and BUST economics.
my spin
kamptan
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Kamptan, I don’t know if re-defining religion as “indoctrination to its extreme” will make any difference. What we do need is an understanding of the ways religion have divided the human species and how it is used to enslave or subordinate the female of our species. This can only come with an end to ignorance.
I agree with you: “The only just WAR is the one on poverty…with TAX its weapon of mass distribution of wealth (WMDW).”
A classless society in which all humans are regarded as equals is not possible where hatred and greed prevail.
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Actually, I don’t believe a classless society is possible at all – not with our species as “constructed” today. We have to work with what we have or can develop, the old virtues like respect, caring for the disadvantaged, neighborliness, kindness and mercy.
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Judging from the criminalization of the homeless in the USA, I’d say that we’re badly in need of those old virtues.
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