By
the Rev. Jon Rieley-Goddard
Dear
friends,
War is upon us, and for good or
ill, we occupy a goodly chunk of Iraqi soil.
My story is deeply intertwined with
the Vietnam experience, and as a onetime student with a
deferment, I talk to you today, having survived by attending
university rather than being vulnerable to the Draft.
I remember guys who came back from
Vietnam, and in varying degrees they were obnoxious, gentle,
the same as ever – you name it. War changed some and
not others, at least on the outside.
I never really questioned my decision
to study rather than fight, other than to think through
my stance on that particular war.
It made no sense to me.
My father had other ideas, and we
had some ugly arguments that were partly war debate and
partly just me growing up and demanding my place in the
sun. I learned a lot from my father in those arguments,
including the latent knowledge that good people who loved
each other did not have to agree on everything, even important
things.
God, I miss him.
Dad had been a Technical Sergeant
in the Army Air Force during World War II, stationed in
England, where he loaded bombs on B-52s. He taught me how
to make what he called Barracks
Eggs (break an egg into a frying pan with
melted butter and stir with a fork until done). He would
not willingly tell any other stories about his wartime experience.
He said that it was too painful to talk about. I was too
small to understand, really, what he meant by that. I started
pressing him for war stories when I was a small boy watching
old black-and-white war pictures on television.
He
didn’t want to talk about war because it was too painful.
How do you tell an 8-year-old that
you were in England when your first child, a son named after
his father, was born in the States?
How do you tell an 8-year-old what
it was like to be in love and totally unable to touch your
wife for two years, except through the sterile medium of
paper and pencil?
How do you tell an 8-year-old that
you went because you had to, though you were not opposed
to the war effort itself?
I’d like to think that at
some level he found it painful that his son was taken by
the flash and noise of war. I don’t know if he did.
I do know that he hated guns and would not own any. In a
part of the state where real men killed deer, he had no
guns. A hunting accident long before, where a friend had
been killed by a friend, had cured him of any macho tendencies
having to do with guns.
As a young man I knew that dying
in the jungle, to stop the spread of Communism, sounded
like madness to me. If I thought about people who went,
I didn’t think about their motivation. I considered
them to be unlucky, or stupid, in the sense of making dumb
choices such as dropping out of school.
When I talked with guys who had
been there, I tried to find common ground rather than argue
about the politics of the situation. After all, they had
been unlucky, and I didn’t believe in compounding
the misery of someone whose only sin was a lack of luck.
I remember one guy at a party, who wanted to know, right
out front, where the bathroom was, because he had a bag
instead of the internal plumbing that God gives us at birth.
A bullet had altered that for him, for good, so to speak.
I remember one particularly obnoxious
fellow student who explained that he and his friends did
things that were dangerous because they needed the adrenaline
rush. Vietnam had given him a taste for that rush.
I remember another fellow student,
who had been a medical corpsman, who was a gentle guy. His
stories were strange and frightening, but he was gentle.
War is ugly, and war is evil, and
war sometimes cannot be avoided. I kept my wife up far beyond
her bedtime the other night because I had so much on my
mind about this war we find ourselves caught up in. When
I was young, I didn’t think about the integrity of
my stances beyond defending them with vigor. At this stage
of life, with the responsibilities that I accept as a leader,
as a minister, and as a citizen, I worry a lot about the
consistency and reasoning with which I take and articulate
political and theological positions.
You could say that I don’t
want to give aid and comfort to the enemy, which for me
is the malevolent force of evil that I see and hear and
feel, inside me, inside you, inside us, and all around.
It gets confusing to know who the real enemy is, since evil,
I believe, begins at home, in the depths of each person’s
own darkness.
Still, I must have something to
say, and I want what I say to make sense and to have a connection
with who I have been, who I am, and who God keeps inviting
me to be. I owe it to me, to my father, to every soldier
I’ve ever talked to, and to all the rest of you, to
have integrity of thought and feeling, consistent over time
and flexible to meet new situations.
There really is nothing more frightening
that a person who will evaluate situations with clear thinking
devoid of prejudice or programming. I make sense to myself,
but I know that often I have confused others, because my
thoughts and feelings will take me to some strange and new
places. I created a good deal of hostility during my time
at Seminary because I thought about the issues and commented
upon them from my own thought processes rather than learning
the Party
Line and the Politically
Correct stances.
If you want to anger someone, think
for yourself and say so. The
only thing more frightening that a person who does his/her
own thinking is a person who feels strongly but does not
think, too.
My feeling side, which is strong,
opposes this war and all wars. My feeling side has no problem
condemning our leaders, political and military, for having
their heads in the darkness of benighted stupidity. My feeling
side, however, is the part of me that is in recovery. My
feeling side, frankly, is on probation.
The eye blink of time God grants us demands of us the ability
to think and to feel, at the same time, in consort. Life
is too short to live a lie.
One thing I know is this: I cannot
alter the flow of human history, and I cannot affect the
decisions of persons in high places. I can, however, think
and feel, and decide what is most important for me. I know
that if I think and feel for myself, with integrity, I can
affect human history and the decisions of the high and mighty.
I don’t tilt at windmills, but I do think for myself.
This is what I have decided. In
the aftermath of the attack on our nation that brought down
the towers of the World Trade Center, I felt great fear
and anger. I wanted Ben Laden dead, and still do. I was
glad that we sent troops to Afghanistan. The actions in
Iraq are a logical outgrowth of our national focus on security,
and I wanted this security. Men and women have died and
will die in answer to the national call for greater security.
I wanted this, and still do.
Therefore, I will not utter a syllable
that I judge to offer pain to those who serve us in dangerous
places, and I extend this vigilance to the families of these
persons who have accepted danger in my place, so I can flick
a switch and have light, or insert a key and hear the roar
of my car engine.
I deeply disagree with those who
have felt it necessary to take to the streets to protest
this war. At the same time, if their right to free assembly
and free speech were sharply abridged, I would join them.
Right now, I believe that it is more important to take that
energy and channel it into loving action, such as finding
and assisting families paralyzed by grief, fear, and anxiety.
If our church has a mission in this
war, it is to offer comfort and assistance to families.
This is far less sexy and exciting than confronting overworked
police on the streets of our cities, but at the same time
it is work that is going undone.
I
don’t have to know everything in order to have a plan
for action; I simply need to be able to hear what God whispers
in my ear.
That’s all.
