The Human Cost of War

[MaggieSwanson]

Images from the "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit in Cedar Rapids last Saturday:

Boots on the ground...one pair for each member of the National Guard killed in the war in Iraq and one pair for each Iowan casualty (regardless of military branch).







50 pairs of civilian shoes to represent the approximate 50:1 ratio of civilian to military deaths.


Tamara doesn't need these any more.



An older couple stopped to put a flower in this pair of boots. The tag bore the name of their grandson.


Bruce Smith's wife saw the exhibit in Iowa City last year. She sent some photos of Bruce and their children to travel with his boots.


I called the National Guard to invite them to come pay their respects. They hung up on me. So I called the Army, because there were soldiers boots from Iowa as well. They also hung up on me. I called the Marines, and they also declined to accept my invitation.

A veteran stopped by. He left and came back later with his boots from Vietnam and donated them to the exhibit. His name was written on the inside.



A poem by Sam Hamill, Founder and Director of Poets Against the War:


Eyes Wide Open

The little olive-skinned girl peered up at me
from the photograph

with her eyes wide open,

deep brown beautiful eyes that bore silent witness
to a grief as old as the ages.

She was young, and very beautiful, as only
the young can be, but within such beauty
as bears calamity silently:

because it has run out of tears.

I closed the magazine and went outside to the wood pile
and split a couple of logs, thinking, “Her fire is likely
an open fire tonight, bright flames licking and waving
like rising pennants in the breeze.”

When I was a boy, I heard about the bloodshed in Korea,
about the Red Army perched at our threshold, and the bombs
that would annihilate our world
a thousand times over.

I got under my desk with the rest of the foolish world.

In Okinawa, I wore the uniform and carried the weapon
until my eyes began to open, until I choked
on Marine Corps pride, until I came to realize
just how willfully I had been blind.

How much grief is a life? And what can be done unless
we stand among the missing, among the murdered, the orphaned,
our own armed children, and bear witness

with our eyes wide open?

When I was a child, frightened of the night
and crying in my bed, my father told me a poem or sang,
“Empty saddles in the o-l-d corral,
where do they r-i-d-e tonight.”

Homer thought the dead arrived into a field of asphodels.
“Musashino,” near Tokyo, means “Musashi’s Plain,”
the warrior’s way washed in blood.
The war-songs are sung to the same old marching measures—
oh, how we love to honor the dead.

A world without war? Who but a child or a fool
could imagine such a thing?

Corporate leaders go to school on Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
“We all deplore it,” says the President, issuing bombing orders,
“but God is on our side.”

Which blood is Christian, which Muslim, Jew or Hindu?

The beautiful girl with the beautiful sad eyes watches, but
has not spoken. What can she

possibly say? She carries the burden of finding
another way. In her eyes, the ruins, the fear,
the shoes that can’t be filled, hands that will never stroke her hair.

But listen. And you will hear her small, soft, plaintive voice
—it’s already there inside you—a heartbeat, a whisper,
a promise broken—if only you listen

with your eyes wide open.




Peace,

Maggie