Dear Friends,

Four years after having written the piece, "Folding chairs on desert sand," the photograph in "The New York Times," April 2nd, 2003, to which it refers, is still fresh in my mind. As my elderly Baptist friend would put it, "It is a scald upon my heart." Upon yours, as well, I am sure.

The article is being posted again, in honor of our brave men and women, who sit in chairs on desert sand, memorializing their comrades, needing no photographs to remember them.

There will be the waving of flags, marching bands, picnics, church services, speeches and music across this land of ours... and heartache over a war gone on for too long, at far too great a cost.

And there will be tears. If we are to retain our sanity and humanity, there must be tears of anguish, anger, confusion, feelings of being lost in cities with street signs on corner after corner, but not a one to tell us where we are going, or how we will get there.

Therefore, we, too, find empty chairs on desert sand, and pray.

Folding chairs on desert sand

The antiseptic visions of war, flashing white bursts of clouds against green backgrounds, are no more real than the games youngsters play at computers when parents think they are doing homework behind closed doors.

But pictures of our men and women are different. They bring war to us, and us to war, with real people, real injuries and deaths, suffering and anguish. Pictures have a way of settling into our minds and remaining there, coming uninvited to our consciousness over a quiet cup of coffee, while waiting for a freight train to pass, or when tucking children safely into their beds at day’s end..

One scene that has stayed with me for three days now, and has the kind of power that promises longevity, is no doubt one you’ve seen, for it has appeared in a number of papers that have crossed my desk lately. It is that of Lance Cpt. Julie Martinez, as he sat after a service for three marines killed in a helicopter crash Sunday, which would have been March 31st. The paper I am looking at is “The New York Times” April 2nd.

There, Martinez sits, at the close of service, amidst row upon row of empty folding chairs, head bowed in his hands, with his back-pack’s straps stretching across his neck, gun resting at his side, hat on the chair behind him. Alone. How is he praying, I ask myself. Does he say words, or is his prayer a silent moan of grief over the deaths of his three comrades? Does he, as do I, ask himself what this war is all about?

Is he sensing there in the desert, away from home, family and friends, a kind of poverty a Francis of Assisi, a John of the Cross or a Teresa of Avila would understand, that stripping away of everything and everyone except God? And in the stripping and the silence, does this marine, somehow, find his God, and a peace not offered by the Pentagon’s propaganda machine?

And what of us as we watch him? In this shared loneliness, do we allow ourselves to question his presence there, our presence here? We sent him; we allowed those who did so to sign the right papers to make everything legal, though it never was, never will be so Yet, we tried to stop this race to war:

We marched; they took no notice. We cried out; they closed their ears. We wept; they smiled. We wrote; they never read.

Now we’re stuck – Martinez, there; we, here. And only by more killing will he return to us, if he, himself, is not prayed over by comrades on folding chairs beneath the desert sun. Perhaps, with bowed head, he was thinking that thought, as well, in that solitary chapel.

Bring him home, dear Lord. Bring him safely home, we pray.

When he arrives, along with thousands of others, let him find that his veteran’s benefits have not been cut, but increased, that his service has been honored, his prayerfulness cherished, and his manhood respected..

In the March 31 issue of “The New York Times,” Doug Rokke, 53, of Rantoul, Ill., about 160 miles south of Chicago, a physicist on a team to help clean up the contamination in the gulf war, who is also a Vietnam veteran, said he was afraid the media was not portraying the war’s harshness and effects on soldiers.

“Everybody forgets war is about killing and destroying,” Mr. Rokke said. “You’re physically changed forever, and you’re psychologically changed forever. People think this is a computer game where you come back famous and wealthy. It’s not about that. War is death. When the war is over and the troops return, they will need psychological and medical care, just like the rest of us who have gone to wars.”

Lance Cpt. Julie Martinez knows about real war, beyond the glitz of all-day broadcasts, devoid of folding chairs for services honoring dead soldiers on desert sand, so far from home.

May he, we, and the people of Iraq come to know real peace based on justice, not treaties laden with secret deals favoring the rich and powerful. Amen.

April 5, 2003

(The original article was published on this site here)

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