This afternoon I received two reprints from friends relating to the lives of the many who are stuck fighting our war so far away.
There are so many stories, of soldiers and innocents, and innocent soldiers, on both sides of all our wars, but the battles over what is right and what is wrong don't remove the pain of the loss that is delivered again and again.
In both cases, the authors of these pieces can say more of what it means to remember on this day than the many words that I would stumble through, so in lieu of making my own mess of it, I'll just leave it for them to say.
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An Army of One
By LOUISE ERDRICH
Minneapolis
I FIRST noticed that he was unusually polite when I brushed by him to get into my middle seat on the plane out of Los Angeles. Then I saw the rose at his feet. It was a long-stemmed red rose. I'd nearly stepped on it. I showed him how to roll it in a magazine and we put it safely in the seat pocket. He looked at my newspaper and said he was interested in Iraq.
"Why?" I asked, though I could tell by now.
"I just came from there."
His eyes were a clear, pale, unusual green. His cheeks thin and sunburned. He could not keep still. His fingers fluttered, his eyes darted to each person who entered the aisle. He told me that he'd graduated two years ago from his high school outside Seattle on a Friday and that he had enlisted on the following Monday. "Because I'm sort of patriotic." With a shy squint he pulled up his sleeve to show that his arm was tattooed with a brilliant Stars and Stripes, a mint-green Statue of Liberty and a frowning eagle, all woven together.
He had just returned from the Sunni Triangle near Falluja and was stationed now in the West. His roommate had been killed — as well as a friend on his third tour of duty. At another point, a Humvee he was riding in had been half-melted into the street by a roadside bomb.
Though there was e-mail, the whole battalion would curtail its communications with the outside world when there was a death, so that the two men in dress uniform could be the first to deliver the news to the family back home.
"Sometimes I get mad when my family says I'm changed," he said carefully. "But they have changed, too. While I was there we caught lots of bad guys, right? I don't want to go back and start all over. A Pennsylvania Guard unit has taken over our work and so far they're getting hammered. Back when I left, I didn't have a girlfriend ..."
I looked at him and thought there was no way they wouldn't send him back. He looked at me; then whatever he saw made him quiet. The plane landed in Seattle. He carefully retrieved his rose. "I brought her a whole big bouquet last time," he said, "but by the time I landed it was all messed up, so this time I just got her one."
"One is more eloquent," I said.
He got up. "After you, ma'am." So I left first. In the terminal, I saw him once again. He was bent over his backpack, hitching something onto it. He straightened and put his cap on backward, bill down his neck. He was carrying a skateboard on his back, a red rose in his fist, and the war.
Louise Erdrich is the author, most recently, of "The Painted Drum."
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After Loss of a Parent to War, a Shared Grieving
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
ARLINGTON, Va., May 28 — Jacob Hobbs, 10, did not mince words about the death of his father.
"He was in a Humvee, driving at night on patrol, and a homemade bomb blew up on him so bad it killed his brain," Jacob said of his father, Staff Sgt. Brian Hobbs, 31, of the Army. "But he wasn't scratched up that much. And that's how he died."
Sitting across from Jacob in a circle at a grief camp over Memorial Day weekend, Taylor Downing, a 10-year-old with wavy red hair and a mouthful of braces, offered up her own detailed description. "My dad died four days after my birthday, on Oct. 28, 2004," Taylor said quietly of Specialist Stephen Paul Downing II. "He got shot by a sniper. It came in through here," she added, pointing to the front of her head, "and went out there," shifting her finger to the back of her head.
"Before he left," Taylor said, "he sat me on his knee and he told me why he had to go: because people in Iraq didn't have what we did. They didn't have enough money. They couldn't go to school. And they didn't have homes."
An estimated 1,600 children have lost a parent, almost all of them fathers, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, nearly 150 of these children gathered at a hotel here in this Washington suburb for a yearly grief camp run by the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, a nonprofit group founded in 1994 that helps military families and friends cope with death and talk about their loss.
Burying a parent is never easy for a child, but losing a father in a violent way, in a far-off war, is fraught with a complexity all its own.
The children receive hugs from strangers who thank them for their father's courage; they fight to hold back tears in front of whole communities gathered to commemorate their fathers; they sometimes cringe when they hear loud noises, fret over knocks at the door and appear well-versed in the treachery of bombs.
And often the children say goodbye not just to their fathers but to their schools and homes, since families who live on a military base must move into the civilian world after a service member dies.
At the camp, their drawings of their fathers are never mundane, they are mythic: a father as hero, in uniform, with medals trailing across his chest and an American flag floating high above.
"Before my dad left, he said he wasn't afraid to die," Jacob said of Sergeant Hobbs, who was killed in a bomb blast in Afghanistan on Oct. 14, 2004. His father was awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, Jacob explained. "He saved his commander from an exploding tank," he said.
Many of these children are old enough to remember their fathers, but now the images are slipping away in fragments.
One memory few will ever forget is the moment they learned that their fathers would not come home. Paul R. Syverson IV, a 10-year-old with a blond crew cut and his father's face, saw a soldier at the door. "My mom saw him and started crying," said Paul, trying hard to stifle tears as he recounted how he was sent next door to play.
His father, Maj. Paul R. Syverson III, 32, a Green Beret, had been killed by a mortar round inside Camp Balad, Iraq — or as Paul put it, "He was eating breakfast, and he was shot by Iraqis."
Later, "I cried," he said. "I played with my soldiers. And then I went to the basement because my dad was a collector of 'Star Wars' stuff. I took those out, and I played with them."
Brooke Nyren, 9, whose father, Staff Sgt. Nathaniel J. Nyren, died in a vehicle accident in Iraq on Dec. 28, 2004, told her story in a writing assignment at the camp. When two Army men showed up at the door, "I was really scared," Brooke wrote. "The two Army men asked my mom, please can you put your daughter in a different room. So I went in my room. The only thing I was doing was praying."
"My hart was broken," she wrote.
Paul, the blond 10-year-old, recounted how his father was injured by a bomb in Afghanistan in 2001. The blast broke his father's back, Paul said, but not his eagerness to fight again. Paul's drawing features his father, with his green beret, and the words, "Men will jump and die."
And Jacob, who wants to be a soldier, remembers his father saying that he had to go off and fight. "But he didn't like my mom crying," Jacob said. "She always cried when he left because she didn't want him to die."
The violence of their fathers' deaths, and its public nature, can be especially troublesome for children. "'It's a traumatic grief that is highly publicized," said Linda Goldman, a grief specialist. "Dad was murdered in a public way. This heightens the sense of trauma because it never goes away."
The children's mothers say the deaths have had expected repercussions, like plummeting grades and mood swings. But they have also seen unexpected reactions. Madison Swisher, 8, who sleeps in her father's T-shirt, is afraid of loud noises; her dad died in Iraq from an improvised bomb. She and her younger brother talk a lot about bombs in general. They call the Iraqis the "bad guys" and are afraid the bad guys will arrive any minute.
Several mothers said they worried that their children's hero worship, a healthy balm in the beginning, could turn problematic if they tried to follow in their fathers' footsteps.
Teenagers, in particular, have trouble adjusting. Scott Rentschler, 14, was living on a military base in Germany when his father, Staff Sgt. George Rentschler, was killed in Iraq in 2004 by a rocket-propelled grenade. His life, Scott said, "is a roller coaster." Scott's grandmother, Lillian Rentschler, said that moving off a military base was difficult for him, and that society and schools make few allowances for children in their second year of grief.
"People think he should be all fixed up," Ms. Rentschler said.
The outpouring that families receive after a death is mostly comforting to them. But in time, it can verge on stifling, some parents said. Jenny Hobbs, 32, Jacob's mother, said that in their hometown, Mesa, Ariz., her three children were "embraced as heroes. It was cool to know them."
But there was a downside, Ms. Hobbs said, and ultimately she moved the family to Ohio. "The death is in the public eye," she said. "It is hard to let go. The war is still going on, and you are reminded of it. One reason I had to move is that it was hard to be normal."
Ms. Hobbs continued: "He was no longer ours and human. We needed him to be ours."
Parents and mentors say they try to help the children stay connected to their fathers and grieve in intimate ways, far from the public eye. They post photographs all over the house, make teddy bears out of their dads' shirts and encourage them to write letters.
Eddie Murphy, 10, whose father, Maj. Edward Murphy, 36, died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan in April 2005, did just that one day at grief camp. "Summer is coming up," he wrote to his father. "It won't be the same without you. You won't believe it but I'm in Washington."
He signed off: "I love you. Hi to Heaven."
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Peace.
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