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John Cory begins: "Rows of white granite markers drop away and then ripple up the far grassy hill and go on forever across flat green lawns. Arlington Cemetery. It looks like a thousand little scabs trying to heal one big wound. War is about holes."

The feet of a dead Libyan man, inside a hospital in the eastern town of Brega, Libya, 03/02/11. (photo: Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP)
The feet of a dead Libyan man, inside a hospital in the eastern town of Brega, Libya, 03/02/11. (photo: Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP)



War Holes

By John Cory, Reader Supported News

20 March 11


Reader Supported News | Perspective

 

ows of white granite markers drop away and then ripple up the far grassy hill and go on forever across flat green lawns. Arlington Cemetery. It looks like a thousand little scabs trying to heal one big wound.

War is about holes.

Colin Powell planted the seeds for war with a story that had an integrity-hole big enough to drive a WMD Mobile-Lab truck through. Donald Rumsfeld now tills the book-sales circuit as he works to bury truth down the memory-hole. The corporate media cultivated and nurtured the lies of Curveball even as they knew there was doubt. They all dug a deep and deadly hole and now scramble to backfill and cover it over.

War is about holes.

The definition of what is a good or bad war; all the patriotic rationalizations and reasons for war, all the war movies and war stories are nothing more than the dirt we shovel in to fill up the holes. Powell and Rumsfeld and the corporate media are all shoveling as fast as they can right now.

War is about holes.

Foxholes. Bullet holes. Fire-in-the hole! Bomb craters. Caves and graves.

Whether Grunt, Fobbit or REMF, a combat tour is all about holes. Holes you jump into for survival when the shooting starts, and the constant hope and prayer you don't end up in a hole for good.

A Mother often describes the arrival of the uniformed messengers of death on her front porch as the moment she felt as if she had suddenly fallen into a deep, dark hole.

There is a hole in NYC. Some say, that hole started the war. Some say, the war started long before the hole. And there are fights about what should go into or who should be allowed anywhere around that hole. I guess you could call it, a hole controversy.

In the controversy surrounding the creation of the Vietnam Memorial was the issue of the design. Critics said it looked like a long gash in the earth, like a wound or a scar. It was a hole you had to descend into as the black Wall towered over you. And that is exactly what happens when you walk the Memorial. You descend into the hole of war and stare at the names behind your own reflection and the reflection of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. It is a powerful, overwhelming experience. And then you slowly ascend out of the hole of war. Back above ground.

But the names stay there. My friends, John Patrick Lambooy, Ronald Peter Huffman, Craig Pyper Fielding, and Michael Richard Pickles remain forever captured in that black and white granite reflection of eternity. The youngest KIA name was 15 years old, 5 names were 16 years old, 12 were 17 years old, and the oldest KIA name was 63 years old. There are 8 women on the Wall, approximately 38 sets of brothers, and 3 sets of fathers and sons. Since 1997, 88 names have been added as they die from the wounds received during their time in Vietnam. It is literally, an expanding hole of war these many decades later.

Back in 2007, Stephen Dark wrote a piece for the City Weekly in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was titled The Things We Carry, and told the story of the Midvale Boys, as they are known on the Wall, John James Martinez, Frank LeRoy Tafoya, and Tom Gonzales. The young soldiers died within 16 days of each other in 1967. LeRoy Tafoya was killed Nov. 22nd, the fourth anniversary of the JFK assassination. James Martinez died the next day, Thanksgiving. And Tom Gonzales was killed on Dec. 7th, Pearl Harbor Day.

Stephen Dark's story was also about the 2001 pilgrimage of Al Schroeder, a Vietnam combat medic, to the graves of the first five men who died under his care. Tom Gonzales was one of those. Al Schroeder was dealing with his own personal demons.

From the article: "Schroeder was caught off-guard by 'the depth of emotion I would encounter on the other side of the table from these families,' he says. 'Somehow, I believed they had gone on and left it way behind them ...' Instead of encountering memories laid to rest, he found himself 'reopening a sore by bulldozing through a Band-Aid.'"

"With the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars, these families and others continually relive their loss with each American death they hear or read about."

When I was a kid, Midvale was a stop on the way to and from Bingham and the Kennecott Copper Mine. Kennecott was the biggest employer around back then and the mine was a premier elementary school field trip. If I remember correctly, Kennecott is the deepest open-pit copper mine in the world. Just not deep enough to bury the sorrow of war.

War is about holes.

It is about holes in the truth. Holes filled with the black, oily ooze of lies. It is about holes at the dinner table, holes for the holidays, and holes in the neighborhood. It's about holes in families. It is about holes - in all of us.

And lest we forget, at the bottom of those holes are millions of eyes staring back at us, uncomprehending eyes of children, civilians and innocents who are the collateral damage of shock-and-awe set free by a MOAB - the Mother Of All Bombs during the Mother Of All Battles or some other deadly device in the spread of peace and freedom through superior firepower.

It is March, the mark of eight years of war in Iraq and a decade in Afghanistan. March is the forward edge of spring, the planting time. And that's what Powell and Rumsfeld and the media are doing. They are desperately backfilling the holes of their war with the seeds of forgetfulness and false memories and hope that the death blossom will cover their garden of sin.

Out in Louisiana, Miz Remy is planting yellow orchid trees and red dogwoods and seedlings of cucumber, artichokes, red pear tomatoes and coriander - beauty and nourishment. She even has Cherokee black bean seeds directly descended from the black beans carried by the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. Seeds of history and remembering.

I guess we forget sometimes that we can use holes to plant life, to plant the seeds of hope or the saplings of peace. Not too deep lest we smother the plantings. Not too shallow or we risk it being easily uprooted. But we must be constant gardeners and prevent the weeds of war from spreading and strangling the roots of peace and hope. We must tend to the garden for all our sakes, and for the sake of those lost in the holes of war, and those who stare back and ask, why.

War is about holes.

Peace is about what we put in those holes.


-PEACE-


Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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