Bringing home Iraq

By Marifi Jara

The image of US Army Sergeant Richard “Valiant” Correa’s casket, alongside his grieving family and friends, is poignant.

He was so young. Sayang.

That the casket was draped in an American flag, arriving a day before the celebration of the Philippine’s Independence Day during which the waving of our own flag is supposed to take on special meaning, was quite disturbing.

The return of one of our own in a cold coffin following a tragic and untimely death from a bomb in troubled Iraq brings home – right into our shores, straight into our lives – a war that seems so distant, almost  unreal. A war that we only watch on television and read about on the internet with detached sadness.

In our new world order, diaspora, which originally refers to the dispersion of the Jews, has been extended to all peoples, including our own. And this scattering is not necessarily always rooted in negative grounds. People from the east have spread out to the west and similarly, people from the west have also come to settle in the east. Because of this trend, now that we are living within a largely cross-cultural planet, everything and everyone is interminably linked.

That we buried an American war hero in the capital town of Lingayen – someone who has freely chosen to be a soldier and serve his adopted country but remained deeply tied to his hometown and kin from Pangasinan – compels us to take a second look at Iraq.

This thorny US-Iraq war-turned-civil war on the far side of the Asian continent suddenly becomes real for us.

We can no longer simply watch and read about Iraq with nonchalant interest.

We are now forced to think about the ugliness and complexities of war. There have been so many – far too many – in our world’s history. Why?

There’s a little book, first published in 1989 by the New York-based The Berkley Publishing Group, entitled “What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam?” It is a project of Bill McCloud, a Vietnam War veteran who luckily survived to become a social studies teacher in Oklahoma. As a teacher, he faced a major dilemma when the lesson came to the topic of the Vietnam War. And so he wrote to more than 100 people – including US presidents, fellow veterans, and parents of those who died in that war – asking that basic question.

The answers, as contained in the book, are varied.

One of the respondents, Philip Caputo — a Vietnam veteran, a journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and author of the book “A Rumor of War” – had this to say:

“1. The United States learned in Vietnam that there are limits to its power and that to exceed those limits invites tragic consequences.

2. The American soldiers who fought in the war did so out of a sense of duty to their country, but their country betrayed them by sending them to an unwinnable war.”

Former US President Jimmy Carter had this to say: “This (Vietnam) war had a devastating impact on the American public, creating a sense of confusion over purpose and a buildup of mistrust in our high government officials.  More   important, many precious lives were lost. To honor these brave men and women and all those who willingly answered their nation’s call, we must give our solemn pledge to pursue all honorable means to establish a just and lasting peace in the world, that no future generation need suffer this way again.”

Substitute Iraq for Vietnam and their words could still very well ring so true.

Now, what should we tell our children – ourselves even – about Iraq?

(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/roots/)

Share your Comments or Reactions

comments

Powered by Facebook Comments