Voices in Wartime Newsletter

"I want to share the words expressed by people in this and other wars. They come from a new book called "Voices in Wartime." It contains profoundly moving and often poetic thoughts from brave U.S. soldiers, loved ones and Iraqis....I urge every American to pick up a copy and read it."
Congressman Jim McDermott (WA) in a speech made on the floor of the US House of Representatives.   http://www.house.gov/mcdermott/sp070607a.shtml

What a War Is

by Chih Ling Hu
20 years old
Bellevue WA

Among the young generation, it is hard to picture what a war really is. There had not been wars in the time I lived. I read about war in school only in history textbooks. I watched war events in movies. Even if sometimes someone tells me about how hard it was during the time of war, I cannot really feel it. Wars always sounded like legends to me, and I was not even sure if the war was true or not.

I heard of a lot of war stories, since my grandfather was a soldier during the Chinese Civil War. I did not hear about war stories directly from my grandfather, but from his friends. There were not many people knew how to write during his time. Fortunately, my grandfather was literate. Due to the fact that he knew how to write, he got an office job in the army. All he had to do in army was sign papers, and look through documents; he did not go to the battle-field. But his friends did.

Once in a while, his friends would come to our house and had a meal with us. Usually they ate a little, but drank lots of wine. Those friends talked about war. Maybe it was because of the effect of alcohol or it was because the emotions, their faces became red and the volume of their voices turned louder and louder. Opposite with their agitation, my grandfather just sat there, ate more than his friends, barely touched the wine, and listened.

Read the rest of Chih Ling Hu’s story at:
http://www.voicesinwartime.org/Home/Article/DisplayArticle.aspx?AuthorID=109874&TypeofContent=Article&ArticleType=2#369844

Editor's Reflections

How do children
imagine war?

by Rich Moniak

 In America, where armed conflict hasn’t scoured the landscape in a century and a half, war has come to children’s awareness through a myriad of messages generally handed down by adults. During the periods when American troops were fighting somewhere, there were snippets of war brought into our homes via the news. In between our wars there were war dramas in the movies and on television, and war toys bought at stores. In today’s high tech virtual playgrounds, war comes to the flat screen via games.

At what age are children ready to hear about the harsh realities of war? There really are no answers to this question, but it reveals that the greatest paradox of raising children is in the desire to protect them from life’s harshest experiences.

We treat a child’s innocence as a sacred right to be preserved until we decide they are ready to be exposed a world capable of immense cruelty. But as adults we’ve supposedly come to trust the adage that we learn best through the harder experiences life presents to us. While it is entirely natural to protect our children from the most painful possibilities, how do we reconcile shielding them from the horrors elsewhere in the world?

In Iraq these questions are moot. America delivered the horror of war to their children. It doesn’t matter now who is at fault for the violence that has lasted 4-1/2 years since we invaded the country. The children are living among, and dying as part of real war stories that are being created. We can only hope that the children of Iran won’t learn about war the same way.

If You Are Lucky in This Life

by Cameron Penny

If you are lucky in this life
A window will appear on a battlefield between two armies

And when the soldiers look into the window
They don't see their enemies
They see themselves as children

And they stop fighting
And go home and go to sleep
When they wake up, the land is well again.

If we were to be young again, whose eyes would we want to see war through, the blinders our parents chose for us, or the eyes of the children suffering in far away places. But to ask this question is also to wonder how we might see the world differently as adults by looking through different eyes. We’d realize that we won’t have any answers without learning to listen closely to the questions posed through the eyes of the world’s children, which we all are, just as Cameron Penny imagined.

Cameron Penny wrote the poem "If You Are Lucky in This Life" in 2001 when he was a fourth grade student in a Michigan school. Poet Marie Howe read his poem during a Poet’s Against the War event before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and her reading is memorialized in the film Voices in Wartime.

Photos from Iran courtesy of Arash Shiva - See more of Arash's work at www.insighta.com

Soldiers of Conscience

Their country asked them to kill. Their hearts asked them to stop. -  A documentary film about our soldiers in Iraq facing the most difficult moral decision of their lives: to kill or not to kill. Eight soldiers, torn between the demands of duty and the call of conscience, including four who decide not to kill. Made with US Army permission, a realistic yet optimistic film about war, peace and the power of the human conscience. Featuring Kevin Benderman, Joshua Casteel, Aidan Delgado, and Camilo Mejia.

Upcoming film screenings in Seattle, Los Angeles, Hot Springs AR, Stanford University, Wilmington NC, Denver, and Olympia WA. For details see the Soldiers of Conscience official website: http://www.socfilm.com/

Peace Tags

David Smith-Ferri’s volume of poetry is a collection of his work written primarily while in Iraq as part of a Voices in the Wilderness delegation beginning in July 1999. He returned to Iraq in September 2002 as talk of war loomed, where he spoke with “people who lived at the edge of a precipice, and whose point of view had the clarity that only comes with proximity to death”. Most of the funds raised from purchasing Battlefields Without Borders will be donated to the Iraq War Victim Fund

Included among the poems from the book that are available to preview online is one about Seattle’s own Bert Sacks, a member of the Voices in Wartime Board of Directors.

David wrote: "I'm particularly fond of the poem about Bert, I guess because I'm fond of Bert!"  Read his poem here: http://www.battlefieldwithoutborders.org/bert_sacks.html