The majority of Americans have not seen war like I have. Sure, they may have seen movies or even have served in the military. But very few have actually seen the impact of war on women and children.
My first lesson on the ugliness of war was learned in the slums of Rio, Brazil when I was 18 years old. My team and I were standing at a place where rival gang members execute one another. It was at that moment that gun fire broke out near by us. We had to flee that place and seek shelter from the gunfight that had broken out. That night, as I saw a young man boldly swagger down the street with an A-K47 strapped to his body, I learned that 5 children are gunned down every day in the slums of Rio simply because they are viewed as a disposable nuisance. The place was literally a war zone and is often the case in war, it was the non-combatants that were paying the heaviest price.
And then when I was 21, I traveled to Rwanda. It was there that I learned what war really is. War is a 21-year-old girl named Febronie. My eyes filled with tears and I could barely breathe as this young woman, my age-mate, told me about the war in her country. She and her family were Tutsis and were therefore marked for slaughter. When the Hutus came, they grabbed her baby brother off her mother's back and hacked his limbs off before her eyes. They then raped her and younger sister and killed all of her uncles. She was seven at the time. War is Febronie.
War is Murambai Technical School where I saw the bodies of thousands of murdered men, women and children. Just fourteen years ago, the French aided the Hutus in luring 65,000 Tutusis to the school and then slaughtering them like cattle. I still remember the crushed skulls and faces forever frozen in terror and agony. But even more haunting than the bodies were the clothes of the victims. T-shirts, pants and dresses belonging to the slain victims hang eerily from clotheslines--seemingly lost without their owner. I still remember the garish Mickey Mouse face on one of the T-shirts. It seemed so out of place in that house of death. I wondered who its owner was. But what moved me most in Murambai was the man that showed me the site. He was not some well-paid tour guide. He was a survivor. His wife and child never made it out of Mumbai, hacked to death with a machete like so many others. He told me that he never left for he did not want to leave his wife and child. War is Murambai.
After Rwanda, I traveled to place called Soroti in Uganda. There I met 5000 refugees from the war in the northern part of the country. For four weeks, I spent 10 hours a day listening to the stories of the survivors of Joseph Kony's war. Nearly the entire camp was malnourished and lived in squalid conditions. HIV was rampant and the smell of despair clung to the place like a tick on the back of someones neck. One woman told me that when the rebels came, they forced her to kill her husband. They then made her cook his body and eat it. I could see madness in her eyes--trauma and guilt gnawing away at her soul. War is Soroti.
I then moved on to Gulu--the epicenter of much of the war. There I met Concy. She was kidnapped when she was 11 and forced to serve as a child soldier, slaughtering people she new, former friends. After being repeatedly raped, she gave birth to two children. When I asked where the other child was, she told me that he was killed by a grenade when he was four. Before this, she had recounted her story without a emotion. She then broke down, her body heaving with sorrow. Have you ever heard the wail of a wounded soul? I would dare say most of you have not. It is not a sound you will ever forget. It is a cry that can only produced when a person has experienced the deepest of agonies, a sound that can only come from a person who is experiencing a hemorrhage of the soul. I wish more people could hear that sound. I believe then they would understand what war really is. War is Concy.
What I am trying to tell you is that war is a very ugly thing. No matter how righteous the cause, any person that dies leaves someone behind who loves them. And far too often, war is not contained to merely those who wear uniforms and willingly choose to lay down their lives. Instead, it is often then innocents who suffer the most. Whether they are slaughtered, displaced, traumatized, raped, or orphaned, they often bare the heaviest burden.
It has been a long time since the United States had a war on its own soil. And it is far easier to let out the cry for war when that war will be fought on someone else's shores. But I beg you, the next time you find yourself lightly suggesting that we should just "nukethem" or "give them a little shock-and-awe" I would ask that you would remember the slums of Brazil, remember Febronie, remember Murambai, remember Soroti and remember Concy. War is not a video game that you can simply play again when you lose. War has very real and painful consequences--and not just for Americans.
So, I would ask that when your feelings of patriotic pride are simply gushing and the call to war seems inherently good, remember the cost.
B
Note: I am not suggesting that those who serve in the military are in any way acting immoral. I am merely asking you to consider the cost of war not just for those we love serving overseas, but for those who are not wearing a uniform.
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