First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Victoria Safford
Presented at the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
January 30, 2005

The first reading is adapted from the title story in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a memoir in stories from his experience in Vietnam

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together these things weighed 15 or 20 pounds, depending on a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia...

They all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds; they carried standard fatigue jackets and trousers. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament; as a hedge against bad times, however, he also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, and his grandfather's old hunting hatchet.

Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Almost everyone carried photographs. Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, codebooks, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe light, and the responsibility for the lives of his men. Rat Kiley, a medic, carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape...

In addition to the three standard weapons - the M-60, the M-16 and the M-79, they carried whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive. They carried catch-as-catch-can. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore anti-personnel mine, they all carried fragmentation grenades, Lee Strunk carried a slingshot, a weapon of last resort, he called it. They carried all they could bear, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

The carried mosquito netting and machetes. They all carried ghosts. They carried chocolate. They carried one-pound blocks of pentrite high explosives. They carried USO stationary and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins and signal flares, razor blades, statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, copies of The Stars and Stripes, Psy ops leaflets, and Black Flag insecticide. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery.

They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections, diseases, lice, ringworm and leeches. They carried chess sets and Vietnamese-English dictionaries; they carried the land itself- Vietnam, the place, the soil, a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and faces. They carried their principles, their own lives...

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, intangibles with their own mass and specific gravity. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down... They carried their reputations. For the most part, they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity... Now and then there were times of panic... when they covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die.

For all the ambiguities of Vietnam, for all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

Be ye lamps unto yourselves;

be your own confidence;

hold to the truth within yourself

as to the only lamp.

___________________________________________________________________

They all carried photographs. They all carried ghosts. They shared the weight of memory. They carried their principles, their own lives... Often they carried each other...

How do you assess the weight of what you carry?

Next Monday night we're inviting teenagers, from 7^th grade through 12^th grade, young men and women and their parents, to come talk about, learn about, ask questions about military service and conscientious objection. This is the third such program we'll have offered since 2001, and I see no end in sight. Sadly, we see no end in sight. Out of necessity, we're inviting them to come and to assess (in a way that many of us adults have never had to, never tried to) the weight of what they carry as human beings - their principles and beliefs, their fears, their convictions about human nature and society and community and country; we're inviting them to assess the weight of conscience, and to consider what they can and cannot do, what they must and must not do, to become familiar with the things they carry, the ideas and ideals that make them who they are. Some of them are so very young. All of them are so very young.

Robert Lawrence Smith is a Quaker retired now as headmaster of Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., the largest Quaker day school in the country. He writes of growing up in a Quaker household, surrounded by parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and the ghosts of many ancestors, "staunch Quakers," he says, "of unquestioned integrity," convinced that "that of God" exists within each human person, "the light that was shining before the world began, the light that is shining in the heart of man," and all of them convicted pacifists. He writes,

He writes of being very young, too young to face so serious a choice. Ultimately, despite the consensus of his family and their history, despite his own dedication as a Quaker to nonviolence, he chose to enlist, and he writes of his tour of duty on the ground in Europe, which was brutal. "How far is it," he asks, "from Moorestown, Pennsylvania to Grandmenil in Belgium? As far as to the moon to my Quaker friends [and family.] Yet for me these places were inseparable, joined firmly in the part of the mind where conscience meets relentless reality." Decades later, he does not regret the terrible decision to take up arms against Hitler; for him there was no other choice. In the end, his community embraced him, because in their tradition, pacifism is never passive; it cannot be inherited or imposed or handed down. Conscience for Quakers, and I think for Unitarians, is intimate. We may try our conclusions in community, and be grateful (or not) for the community's response, but in the end you walk it by yourself, and the journey is sacred. Smith writes,

No one knows whether the draft will be reinstated now by this Administration. It's hard to imagine how the catastrophe of Iraq could be long continued or resolved without a massive influx of additional troops - but no one knows. And so we begin reluctantly but resolutely a conversation with our young people that we wish we didn't have to have, and we suggest a question that we hope they will not have to ask, "What would I do?" Sometimes someone will say, "You know you really should provide some balance there; you don't want to have a one-sided program," but the fact is, these conversations are precisely designed to provide a little balance to the incessant roar our kids are hearing from recruiters (who are nothing if not one-sided), and balance to the media and to the culture at large (the most casually violent and consistently militaristic civilization ever in humanity's history); balance to the law itself which, like all laws, insists upon unquestioning compliance (that's the purpose of all laws) and not upon moral reflection or thoughtful, ethical dissent.

The point is not to convert anyone, least of all our children, to any point of view. The point is not to suggest, either directly or subversively, that one opinion is more righteous or more right than another. For us as for the Quakers, the point is not uniformity of belief, but the primacy of conscience, and the complexity of conscience, and the unexpected way that the complicated collection of the things you carry as a person may point you down an unpremeditated path. Here is a lifelong Quaker who finds he must become a soldier. Here is a veteran who served with distinction and honor in one war, but finds himself risking his reputation and much, much more to protest a new war later on, again with honor and distinction. We know when we sit with our youth that conscientious objection, like conscientious assent to military service, is a moral stance that can be encouraged but cannot be imposed; otherwise it is entirely bogus and false and will not sustain the person, spiritually. It will rear up as shame or deep regret in time. These choices spring from a deep, specific well, from each person's own river of life. The point, for young people and for adults, is to sound the depths, and then walk in the light of what's found there.

Last spring when we offered a program, one person shared his experience as an objector during the second World War. His speaking was so humble, as I think it must have been when as a young man almost 60 years ago he faced a very hostile draft board; his thinking was so clear and so simple. There was nothing self-righteous about it. He said, "I knew that I could never kill anybody, certainly not on command. I would be of no use." As he spoke to us it became clear that he also knew he would serve, he could even serve in some way that might place his life in danger, he could, he would, make a great sacrifice - but what he could not do was carry a weapon or use it. The consequences he faced for realizing this about himself and expressing it were immediate, relentless, humiliating, and severe. It was by no means an easy way out. There is no easy way out - of any ethical dilemma - and no easy way out, ever, of war.

Recently I read about a lieutenant colonel in the US Army who conducted an independent survey through the years of WWII and in 1947 published its result in a small book called "Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War." The study found that throughout the war only about fifteen per cent of American riflemen in combat ever fired at the enemy. One commander complained that after the struggle on Omaha Beach he couldn't get one man in twenty- five to fire his rifle, despite yelling and swearing and threatening them. These men weren't cowards. They would hold their positions and willingly perform dangerous tasks. They simply couldn't bring themselves to aim a rifle at another human being - even an armed foe - and pull the trigger. Fear of killing, rather than of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure." (The man who addressed our group last spring was perhaps not so unusual, except in his own self-knowledge.) It was not an official study and not a scientific one, but within months after its publication, the Army dramatically revised the training of men for combat, in order "to free the rifleman's mind with respect to the nature of targets" -- in other words, to remove from his mind the distraction of the enemy's humanity. Looking now through the lens of subsequent conflicts, especially Vietnam, but also the first Gulf War and numerous smaller engagements, some historians agree with people inside the armed services that this change was profoundly effective, that the "problem" of soldiers not shooting or being unwilling to kill was drastically reduced. But of course there are serious consequences for a person and for a culture, for the culture that must receive him home again, when that resistance to killing is muffled or removed. People both within and outside the Pentagon agree that there is now virtually no place a soldier can turn to reflect on any concern, distress, fear, guilt, symptomatic behaviors or any small or large wondering he or she may have, not only about killing in battle, but even about killing civilians. There is no place to bring it. From psychiatric services to chaplaincy and even post-service throughout the Veterans Administration, there are systems in place to address fear of dying, but no place to speak at all about living with killing, or with any emotional, spiritual, psychological, or pathological response to having killed someone (or trying to) whether in a "justified," "necessary," "morally neutral" way (if there can be such a way) or not. Last year's best seller, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges, explores this topic extensively. (*)

How do we balance what we know, what we intuit, about the reality of war against the call to service? How do you balance love of country and national defense, or international defense, and civil responsibility, against what your own heart speaks? How can you arrange the weight of all you carry so that the burden of conscience is light and liberating, not heavy and oppressed? The weight of all you carry is what gives you gravity and heft, what gives you substance, as a moral agent.

I carry the memory of my parents' eerie silence about the period of time that I know shaped their lives most profoundly - my mother's life in London during the bombing of Britain, and my father's service in the Air Force, dropping bombs on European targets. I carry the memory of his not so silent rage during the Vietnam war, and his disgust with the lies of Kissinger, Nixon, Johnson; and the memory of his sense of betrayal late in his life, shared by so many other veterans, as the invasion of Iraq began. In 2001 he wrote to me, "This president is dishonoring everything we fought for. This whole thing is a crime." In those two short sentences, he told me more about the meaning of his service in the Air Force than ever before. And to the end of his life last year, with the fury and precision of a bombardier, he fired off letters to the editor of the Orlando Sentinel.

For years I've kept before me, close at hand and close to heart, words written more than four centuries ago,

It was a statement of conscience written by the English Quakers to King Charles II in 1660.

They were accused of cowardice but they were not cowards. For speaking such thoughts they were imprisoned and tortured and banished and burned at the stake and hanged. They were accused - and still are - of denying reality, the reality of evil most of all - but they answered - and still do - how can evil be abolished if its opposite is never spoken, how can violence be redressed if its opposite is never tried?

Close at hand and close to heart, I've also kept for many years more recent words, written by Wally Nelson. Wally was an activist and an organic farmer, an African American war resistor, born in 1909, and he was one of the most joyful, exuberant, hospitable people I have ever met. He was never one of those dour, bleeding heart earnest, depressed and depressing kind of activists (the kind we all hope we're not turning out to be), but a lover of life in every way - playful and joyful and crystal clear in his convictions, even when these placed him in danger, as they did in the South in the 1940's or in prison, as they did many times throughout his life. Wally wrote these words that guide me every day:

Nonviolence is the constant awareness of the dignity and humanity of oneself and others. It seeks truth and justice. It renounces violence both in method and attitude. It is a courageous acceptance of active love and goodwill as the instrument with which to overcome evil and transform both oneself and others, It is the willingness to undergo suffering rather than inflict it. It excludes retaliation and flight.

These words guide me, but elude me. They challenge me, chastise me, reminding me how far I have to go, how far I constantly fall short. They express an ideal to which I give my full assent in principle, but with which in practice I'm still wrestling. Kind of like the Sermon on the Mount. Kind of like "Love is the spirit of this church," or "May peace dwell within our hearts." (**) We're all on the way to where we're trying to be, travelers together toward wholeness and integrity, and like Tim O'Brien's comrades, each of us is defined by what we choose to carry on the way.

No one knows if there will be a draft. Our youth themselves have made insightful comments about this - both last spring and at a prior meeting, wondering whether universal conscription might be more ethical than the "poverty draft" in place right now. It is more than poignant to hear our kids speak of this. Last year several asked about deferments, most of which are disappearing - but they asked (these children of relative privilege) how such a racist, classist system could ever have got started in the first place. One of them asked, "If the draft is reinstated and I became a conscientious objector, wouldn't someone else have to go in my place, and wouldn't that be wrong?" They are wise beyond their years, and I wish they didn't have to be.

No one knows where this is headed. What we do know is that as of yesterday 1,166 American soldiers have died in Iraq so far. What we do know is that somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 Iraqi civilians, not insurgents, not soldiers, not police, but babies and women and children and men have been killed - a fearsome number whatever it is, and we own it together. It seems to me that it is not the responsibility of boys alone to wrestle with the rightness or the wrongness of this war when on their 18^th birthday they head over to the post office and fill out their registration cards; it is not the responsibility of our children by themselves to search their souls and see whether they approve or disapprove this massive deadly occupation and war in general in the 21st century. When the country is at war, and when it is at peace, it is everyone's responsibility to own this thing, to come to terms with where we stand and why and how we got there and what that standing says of who we are.

When a young man (or perhaps before too long a young woman) goes before a local draft board to apply for status as a conscientious objector to war, he may he asked any number of questions, and his answers to all of them would flow from three very basic lines of inquiry:

Not just your opinions about what's in the news - your deepest beliefs, your ethical or religious beliefs about war in general, and the duties of citizens. What is it you object to, or dignify with your assent?

Who have been your teachers? What have you witnessed, what have you done? What have you seen, that's changed your mind or opened your heart? What were you taught in school or church or late at night alone reading or witting by yourself? What did believe as a little child and how has that changed, if it has, over time? How have you become the person who you are so far?

And then lastly,

How do you walk your talk, or how do you hope you might some day?

Whenever I review these questions in draft counseling materials, the more ardently am I convinced that no child should ever have to answer them unless the adults in that child's world have done it, too. Think of yourself at 18 or 21, on the edge of the world, or at 30 or 50, or whatever age you are this morning; this is a serous project, a doctoral thesis of massive proportions. What would it be like, if our entire community here, no matter where you stand (and truly -the more opinions the better) took on the responsibility of addressing these questions in private first, and then sharing them together, holding them, in trembling hands, to the light of each other's scrutiny, reading them aloud, in shaky, humble voices, together? A community like this, with a little trust under our tentative feet, is such a rare opportunity. The risks are so great when you say what you feel, when you speak what you think, when you dare to confess what your faith is, but you know (from times before when you've risked it), what a blessing it is when someone lovingly but firmly asks a question or challenges you. If you can stay open and not shut down defensively, your thinking broadens, your wisdom deepens, and in that encounter you grow. What would it say to the lonely 18 year old boy, the one who turns 18 this spring, or to the young man who went off to college, if we sent him a packet of all our collected conviction, with a note saying "Thinking of you. Like you, we're all trying our best to figure out what we believe in, where we stand for now. We'd be so grateful for your critique of our work so far. Let us know what you come up with. We know how hard it is. We are holding you in love, whatever choice you come to - whatever choice you come to. We are holding you in love and trust. We'll stand by you and we'll honor you, wherever your clear conscience leads."

To what in good conscience do you assent or object? To what in clear conscience, that clear light of partial truth which is all you have to see by, do you give the blessing of your life? It's good to keep track, accurate and articulate, as you travel.

On one end or other of the Civil War, the ravages of which and the rightness of which troubled his mind and his heart lifelong, Walt Whitman wrote this counsel:

He meant, like the Buddha, Hold to the truth within yourself as to the only lamp.

He meant, live freely.

______________________________________

The quotes from Robert Lawrence Smith are from his A Quaker Book of Wisdom: Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service and Common Sense.

The reading from Tim O'Brien is condensed and paraphrased from the title piece in his book The Things They Carried.

(**) These are quotations from lines read in unison every Sunday at White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church:

- James Vila Blake