"It's like going into a dense forest without a map," he said. "Once you're in the forest, it's easy to lose your bearings and very unlikely you'll ever exit the same way you came in. It's clear right away that you're on a different journey than the one you thought you'd be taking, than the one you were told you'd be taking. It's not even clear it's a journey any more. Mainly it's a matter of keeping yourself moving."
This is what my divinity school professor had to say about war. He talked about his military service only two or three times and each time it caught me off guard. It was hard to think of him as a soldier. His gentle way and slight build fit the image of a theology professor perfectly but didn't in any way match the stereotypes of an army sergeant. But then again, if you paid attention, there were visible signs of his service. He carried a weight. Something heavy. Something not easily communicated. Or shared. The best he could do was talk about a forest. Never a story about the actual events. Just this metaphor of being lost in a forest.
"And if you do keep moving," he said, "eventually you make it home. But even if you make it home, you never really make it out of the forest."
I start with this story about my divinity school professor because it seems to me that Memorial Day is largely about stories. Or maybe it's better to say, it's about being visited by stories. Another story that visited me this week came from my time in a Quaker community.
For two years, I led a Quaker youth group. To help the juniors and seniors wrestle with whether to register as conscientious objectors, I invited a number of veterans to come talk. The lieutenant with the Purple Heart made the biggest impression. He said he was proud of the medal, but he also called it a burden. "It's not easy to wear," he said, "because it lies. It tells the truth about one story, but certainly not the truth about the whole story. For instance, it doesn't tell of the night - to be honest, the many nights - I purposely slowed my pace and pulled back just enough so others could lead, so Joey, my friend, could take the bullet instead of me. It doesn't tell of the night we panicked and shot the German soldier bursting through the door, but it wasn't a soldier, just a girl, a scared girl. These stories aren't told by my Purple Heart," he said, "these stories stay inside. I have to carry them alone."
This reminded me, as it might some of you, of Bob Kerrey, the former United States senator from Nebraska and past presidential contender. He was also burdened by the half-truth of a medal, the Medal of Honor for his service as a Navy Seal in Vietnam. For many years, the medal proclaimed him a hero, until it emerged that he and the unit he led were responsible for the murder of almost twenty unarmed civilians - a group that included women, children and elderly men. Kerrey is said to have held one of them down as his fellow soldier killed him with a knife. Kerrey says he remembers the dead civilians but not how they were killed. "I honestly don't remember what happened," he told the Wall Street Journal, "and I've been haunted by that for thirty-two years. It's killing me - people describing me as a hero and me holding the truth inside."
And finally, this week I was visited by a story from my friend Paul, who is currently serving in Afghanistan. One of his Army buddies served at the start of the Iraq war. His small town welcomed him home with a ceremony and a dinner. A hero's welcome. Paul's friend confessed that he felt sick through the entire event. "Heroics weren't involved," he told Paul. "I never engaged the enemy, not even once. I just cleaned up bodies, a lot of innocent bodies. Planes dropped bombs. People died. I cleaned it up. To call it heroic just doesn't make any sense."
Again, Tim O'Brien writes,
"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie."
So, here's my question this morning: In light of O'Brien's guidance about a true war story and in light of the stories that visited me and the stories that visited all of you this week, how does one give a "true" Memorial Day Sermon? Or, to widen the question so it includes all of us, how does a congregation participate in a "true" Memorial Day service?
In trying to answer this question for myself, that lieutenant's story about his Purple Heart has been the best guide. What I heard him saying that night is that the story of medals and ribbons and heroes is never enough - alone, it is never true. Or to put it another way, I heard him say celebration is never enough; it doesn't redeem the burden carried by soldiers as much as force them to bury it and carry it alone. Given this, it seems to me that a "true" Memorial Day service must above all else address and try to heal this burden that soldiers carry alone.
Lawrence LeShan, a psychologist who has made the burdens of service men and women his life's work, says that to understand war and the impact of war, one must distinguish between "mythic reality" and "sensory reality." War requires "mythic reality," he says. Without it, societies and individuals simply wouldn't be able to engage in war. We need to create and share a story that enables us to relate to war as something other than organized murder. Stories that support the idea of the human race need to be reshaped into a story about tribes, made up not simply of "us" and "them," but of "enemies" and "heroes." "Killing" needs to be reframed as "fighting for all that is true and just." Armies need to be seen not simply as masses of effectively trained men and women, but as "tools" and even "servants" of the mythic forces of good and evil. Simply put, mythic reality is not reality so much as the story wrapped around reality.
"Sensory reality" is something very different. It is the direct, more unmediated experience itself. It is the blood and death, not the meaning of the blood and death. It is a man in a uniform different from your own lying on the ground crying out for his mother, asking you, the one who shot him, for help. It is looking in his eyes and seeing human pain, not inhuman evil. Sensory reality is being in engaged in a gun fight without a thought of God or country or goodness in your mind, only the single goal of trying to keep yourself and your fellow soldiers alive. It is not the meaning of the war but the specific actions and moments that make up the war. Sensory reality is what Tim O'Brien means when he refers to experience that doesn't instruct or uplift but simply is - experience that sits there and refuses to redeem itself. Sensory reality is the reality of those who fight wars; mythic reality is the reality of the rest of us who talk and think about war.
And here's the hardest part. Lawrence LeShan says that those of us who live in mythic reality want to keep it that way; we want to keep the sensory reality theirs and the mythic ours. It's not malicious nor necessarily even conscious. No human being wants to face the sensory reality of war. The desire to buffer oneself from the obscenity and terror of war is natural and understandable. Military personnel simply have no choice. The rest of us do. They can't avoid the directness, the reality of it all; we can. And thus the gap between the warrior and those who send the warrior to battle looms very large.
A scene in the World War II film Saving Private Ryan illustrates this gap. Tom Hanks' character is talking of the relationship between war and home. "So I guess I've changed," he says. "Sometimes I wonder if I've changed so much my wife is even going to recognize me whenever it is I get back to her. And how I'll ever be able to - to tell her about days like today. I just know that every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel." Hanks' character emphasizes how the killing on the battlefield distances him from home. I think it's also important to recognize that this is only part of what causes that distance. What happens back home also widens the gap. During wartime, those of us back home aren't passive, just waiting for our loved ones to return. We are - knowingly or not - active. We too are engaging war, albeit in a radically different way than those in battle. We are telling stories, choosing bumper stickers, designing rituals, decorating our porches. Knowingly or not, we are telling ourselves a story about what war is. We are creating a reality to live in. And if we are honest - if we are able to be honest - we have to admit that the reality most actively cultivated and created is a mythic one.
In other words, while our soldiers are away, we as a country aren't engaged in activity that brings us closer to those who serve. Instead, we're involved in an activity that ultimately separates us from them. The hard and tragic truth of what happens at home in war time is not that we "stand by our troops" but that we systematically build walls - mythic walls - to protect ourselves from our troops. Their reality - their sensory reality - is the last thing our fragile and frightened hearts and minds want to experience.
Our newly formed War Issues Committee has begun showing movies every month. One recent film featured a mother who has worked hard to comprehend the reality of what her son is experiencing in Iraq. She regularly meditates on and writes about the actual events of the war - the losses on both sides, the day-to-day missions, the individual stories of soldiers who are willing to share. She does this to stay close to her son. But the result, one she didn't expect, is that she feels isolated as though in a prison. The voices and images she regularly cultivates in her mind are so different from the voices and images of the society around her that she says she feels as though she is surrounded by bars. Her pain, she says, doesn't find receptive ears but instead is rebuffed and silenced by patriotic songs. Her fear and anger are not reflected by societal symbols and rituals but are repeatedly repelled by waving flags and public prayers thanking God for the privilege of carrying out his holy cause. Her doubts and questions aren't given a space in the public square as much as they are declared a threat to the public good. Add it all up and it's like facing a giant wall, she explains. It's like beating your arms against bars that just won't give, bars purposely put there to keep what's inside us from coming out.
This is what mythic reality does; it sets up bars that keep people's truth from coming out. And it is why a Memorial Day service committed to truth, a "true" Memorial Day service, must be the very opposite of mythic. It must be loyal to what has been imprisoned inside, to making sure that what is inside is able to come out and be shared.
Which is all a way of saying that I believe a "true" Memorial Day experience is as much about us as it is about those who have died in service. A true Memorial Day experience, I believe, doesn't simply honor the sacrifices made by military men and women. It also calls on the rest of us to make a sacrifice. Out of respect, honor, gratitude and even love for those who have served, I think we are called to sacrifice and resist the comfort and protection granted to us by mythic reality.
So what does this mean? We can't experience the devastating sensory reality of those who have served, but those of us who haven't served can do much to shut down the wheels and gears that churn out mythic reality. We have the ability to quiet the patriotic songs, to bring more care to our hero-talk, and to oppose the prayers that falsely purify our cause. And we have the ability to make and demand space for the truth. We have the ability to help others in our culture understand that what soldiers and the rest of us need most is not a culture that celebrates war but one that makes room for the honest and unredeemable reality of war.
All of us have either seen or visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. It's important to remember that it was a project funded and organized by those who served and survived, not by the government. This memorial, more than almost every other war memorial in our country, reflects the needs of our military men and women. And think about what they created. Not a statue of soldiers hoisting up our flag high above all others. Not soldiers with hands on their hearts, looking up to and honoring heaven. Not a monument depicting bravery or a thrilling battle scene. Nothing with a story, moral or redeeming message in it at all. Just a black wall with names of the dead. A space amazingly, hauntingly and beautifully carved out for the unvarnished reality of loss and death.
And it's a public space. This is important. It's not just any space but a public space, a public space that in and of itself seems to say to soldiers, "The burden you carry need not remain imprisoned inside. There is a space and a community surrounding you that is willing to look at this burdensome truth, to hear it, to know it, and in doing so in some small way also carry it along with you!"
I learned just a couple of days ago that in medieval times, soldiers were welcomed home in a radically different way than we do today. Instead of being welcomed home with a parade and decked out in neatly pressed uniforms decorated with medals, returning military - alive and dead - were stopped outside the village gates. With the entire community in attendance, the soldiers were stripped of their uniforms, tenderly washed by the hands of the villagers, and given new clothes. Those soldiers who made it home alive knelt as religious leaders heard their confessions and offered the assurance of forgiveness. The villagers then also knelt and asked for forgiveness, in acknowledgement that what had been done was ultimately done by all.
Most of this was explained in a radio interview. The person interviewed was a military Chaplin. He stressed that what the medieval communities understood, in a way that we haven't yet, is that what military men and women need most upon their return from war is not a community that celebrates you like a hero and excuses all the terrible things you did, but one that commits itself to acknowledging the reality and sharing the burden of what was done. He made it clear that those medieval communities offered their soldiers so much more than celebration. In struggling to see and help carry their burdens, they offered love.
May Memorial Day and our use of Memorial Day help each of us offer the same.
So be it. Amen.
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