Honoring Veterans with Prayers for Peace

          

            It is Veteran’s Day weekend, a time when we honor all of our veterans of war, both dead and living. I honor my father, who thankfully did not have to fight in World War II, but served as a private in ordnance; my late father-in-law, who flew with the navy during World War II, my uncle who flew a fighter jet in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, a cousin and brother-in-law, who still suffer the after effects of the Vietnam War, and many others. I honor them for their sacrifices and I pray for the day when we no longer create veterans.

I was born eight years after World War II ended, and just after the end of the Korean War. As I grew up, these wars were a part of the dim past that made up the history of the world before I came into it. For the first ten years of my life I maintained the naïve belief that all wars were history; that people had learned to resolve their differences without violence and warfare. I couldn’t imagine that I had been born into a world where people didn’t live together in peace and harmony.

Yes, I remember the bomb drills in elementary school, when our teacher led us into the hallway to crouch in what we now know as the “child pose” in yoga, with our hands behind our heads. But I didn’t worry about bombs falling any more than I worried about fires during a fire drill. Bombs and fires were abstract concepts to my child mind, and not a part of the real world I thought I lived in.

It wasn’t until I was in sixth grade that I learned about the war in Vietnam and my innocence was shattered. I remember watching the news on television, something I didn’t do often at that age. I suppose my parents were watching it and I just happened to be in the living room. That’s when I saw the flag-draped coffins being unloaded from a military transport plane, one after another, after another, after another . . . they just kept coming as I watched, horror-stricken, tears running down my face. The world I had been born into was not the safe and rational place I had imagined it to be.

In music class we sang “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” and it became one of the songs that I would sing to myself while I walked home from school. At home I listened to Joan Baez records and sang along to “With God on Our Side” by Bob Dylan. When it came to the last line, “If God is on side, He’ll stop the next war,” I changed it to: “If we are on God’s side, we’ll stop the next war!”

The Vietnam War raged on throughout my high school and college years. Teachers explained the “Domino Theory.” If we didn’t win the war in Vietnam the countries around it would fall to communism and soon thereafter the United States would fall, too. We didn’t win the war, and we didn’t fall to communism, but then there was the equally irrational Nuclear Arms Race.

During the early 1980s Mark and I lived in Johnson City, Tennessee, where we were members of Peace Links and EPIC, two organizations that empowered people to work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons. We participated in peace marches and educational programs to inform people about the dangers of nuclear weapons. I stayed awake many nights, thinking about what would happen if a nuclear war should break out. And I wondered what was wrong with people who thought it was a good idea to continue amassing nuclear weapons when there were already enough to destroy all of civilization.

          

           In 1984 Mark and I traveled to Costa Rica with a short-term missionary group to work in a Nicaraguan Refugee Camp. Mark worked as a physician assistant, and I assisted the dentist who pulled teeth all week. It was my job to blot the blood and dispense aspirin. We experienced first-hand the despondence of people who have been forced to flee their homes during war. Just as I hope for the day we stop making new war veterans, I hope for the day when people will no longer have to take refuge in foreign lands.

            

           The United States has been involved in wars for most of my life. I might feel hopeless about the possibility of world peace; but there are hundreds of anti-war organizations around the world, each one of them working with a different approach to foster non-violence and peace on earth. I feel encouraged when I realize there is a huge and growing segment of the human population striving for world peace. Maybe it won’t be in my lifetime, but I won’t give up hope that the day will come when all of humanity will sing: “I ain’t gonna study war no more.”