The tears of war

by Jim Wallis

My dad came to visit last week. He's 82 now but still does pretty well
- traveling on his own to see his two grandsons in Washington, D.C. It
was the typical yet wonderful grandpa week - going to see Luke's
second-grade class and Jack's new pre-school, watching both our Little
League practice and the big Saturday game, cheering on Luke's soccer
team, checking out the new Sojourners office (he's been to them all),
and eating some special Mexican meals.

Having my father watch from the stands as I coached Luke's baseball
team felt nostalgic and warm when I recalled how he used to be my
Little League baseball coach. I realized Luke wasn't the only one who
was glad to hear that he had done very well.

Tuesday was Luke's personal sharing day at school (all the kids have
one) and so he brought his grandpa to "share." When Luke told his
classmates that his grandpa had been in the Navy during World War II,
one kid asked who won the war. When they heard that we did, the class
started cheering. (And what was the score?) Of course, at this age,
they have almost no idea of what war really is.

Later in the week, I took the day off and went with my dad to the
World War II Memorial, now about two years old. It is the only major
national memorial or monument in Washington, D.C., that my father
hadn't seen. And since I hadn't yet visited it either, we were both
curious as to what the enormous project on the Mall, pushed hard by
actor Tom Hanks and former Senator Bob Dole, would be like.

We thought the memorial itself was nice (lovely fountain) but not
overly impressive. My dad liked seeing the names of all the Pacific
islands he remembered as the junior engineering officer on a
destroyer-minesweeper. His ship had been scheduled for the invasion of
Japan, and casualty rates were expected to be very high. Like many
others, my father believed that the atomic bomb might literally have
saved his life and made our family possible. His new bride, waiting at
home, might otherwise have become a young widow.

The World War II Memorial includes a comfortable stone bench in the
shade, where my dad and I talked for a long time about those war
years, his school days, and my parent's first months and years of
marriage - which were dramatically impacted by the war. Amazingly, he
was commissioned in the Navy, graduated from the University of
Michigan, and married all on the same day! The Navy was in a hurry to
get fresh officers into the last days of the Pacific conflict, which
ended only months after he was deployed. He became part of the mop-up
operation in that theater of war after the bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki caused Japan to surrender.

My father recalled the visit he made to Hiroshima, just weeks after
the world's first nuclear explosion had been detonated there. He was
part of a two-man team, surveying the impact of the bomb on major
structures such as factories. The devastation, he told me, was like
nothing he had ever seen or imagined. Just unbelievable. He described
how the nuclear explosion had sucked out all the air in the area, and
when it rushed back in everything was flattened - totally flattened,
even huge factories.

He admitted that he had not been at all sympathetic to the Japanese
after they had attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and especially after
they and their German allies had killed so many of his good friends.
Along with many of his fellow soldiers, he felt they deserved the
atomic bomb - though at the time, he said, few of them fully
understood what it was. But then he saw Hiroshima. As the two young
Americans were walking through the flattened rubble, they passed by a
small pile of bricks that had been fashioned into a kind of makeshift
shelter. Suddenly, a little girl appeared from behind a wall. My
father remembered her as about 5 years old, with old, dirty tattered
clothes falling off her body. As far as they could see, she was all
alone with no one to take care of her. As he talked about the child,
he seemed to remember her vividly, as if it were yesterday. And he
recalled the feelings that welled up inside him: She was just a little
child, none of this was her fault, and she had nothing to do with it.
They knew she would die soon, if only from the exposure to all that
radiation. My dad, an 82-year-old war veteran, began to cry as he
remembered a day more than 60 years ago.

"That's war," he said, "and that's why I hate it." He still believes
that we had to defend ourselves from a direct attack in World War II.
But why did they drop that bomb on civilian targets, he asked, cities
with no military significance? They could have dropped them in a
desert, he said, or a deserted island to make the point. My dad has
opposed every war since then, and is especially upset about the war in
Iraq. They just lie about it and it was totally unnecessary, he said,
as his tears turned to anger on a sunny day in Washington, D.C.

My dad is part of what former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw has named the
"greatest generation," and I know two little boys who, after a week's
visit, think he is the greatest grandpa. We all missed him after he
left for home and wish that we lived closer. Luke gave thanks for him
in his prayers before bed, and so did I. But my dad doesn't like the
direction his country has gone since his generation has retired. Now
he often shakes his head while he watches CNN most days. "How do they
get away with it?" he often asks me on the phone.

Sitting with him at the memorial, it was moving to see how this war
veteran has so turned against war and still feels the emotions that
senseless suffering brings up. Most of those who run our wars now are
not really veterans of any war, and have little to say about the
senseless suffering that now occurs every day. I wonder what would
happen to them if a 5-year-old girl came out from behind the rubble of
war to stop them in their tracks. But most of them never get close
enough to the rubble to see her.