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Over 3,000 Americans dead: It’s time to Bring Their Buddies Home.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Bring Their Buddies Home
An Act of Art Carlsbad, CA  Some days I just feel so tired. Down past my bones to my soul - tired. It’s too hard to even feel hopeful –tired. Don’t know what to do next and don’t have the energy to think about it – tired. It’s not despair, or depression, or giving up. It’s just a plain ole’ deep down weariness that comes when we go too long without a something positive to celebrate. That’s the kind of tired I felt on the morning of Feb. 19th when I arrived at the location in Carlsbad where we were going to hold the Bring Their Buddies Home Vigil. It was 8:30 AM and in the few minutes before the volunteers began arriving, it was almost everything I could do just to keep a grip on my umbrella against the wind-whipped rain. I tried to encase the box that held the three thousand memorial pages in a large plastic bag while jostling with an umbrella that was quickly becoming a tangle of metal and nylon. I murmured a string of questions to a God who, at that moment, seemed to be working for the other side: What the hell am I doing here? What if no one shows up? I planned this for months, why couldn’t You just give me a couple hours of decent weather? Why is everything always so damn difficult all the time? The wind tore back the plastic and cover off the box of
memorial pages and I let go of my useless umbrella to hold my body protectively
over the sheets of paper that our participants would wear pinned to their
shirts, each bearing the name and information of one of the U.S. troops who had
died in Iraq. On the top of the pile a page read: In Memory of Zachariah W. L.,
Age 20, Milton, PA, Specialist, U.S. Army, Died 5/30/2003.
Zachariah. An uncommon name... Biblical. I wondered if his
mother had called him Zachariah, or Zachary or Zack? When he was growing up, I
imagined that, like most mothers, she probably called him by his full name,
including whatever his middle and last initial stood for, when she was scolding
him. She probably had an endearing nickname for him when he was doing something
good. What name did she cry out in grief when she first learned her
twenty-year old son wasn’t coming home from Iraq?
Twenty! Not even old enough to legally buy a beer in his small hometown in
mid-PA.
I wondered how this young man with the unusual name died and
if he suffered in his last minutes. I wondered what had inspired him to join
the military and what he thought of a war that would take his life just 30 days
after the President had officially declared the end of major combat operations
under a banner that read, “Mission Accomplished”.
Thinking about Zachariah replaced my feelings of weariness with a renewed focus
on why I’d worked so hard to make this event happen. Real people are dying in Iraq.
Not just our U.S.
troops and contractors, but innocent Iraqi civilians. Real people, with names like
Zack and Tom and Jeff and George. Mostly young people -- the largest type on the
memorial pages was the age of the individual when they died. The numbers were
heartbreaking: 19, 20, 21… few were older than 24.
 Despite the awful weather, people began to arrive – first
the volunteers, who did their best to set up the sign-in table. The rain abated
for a while but the wind never let up and everything had to be anchored against
it. People came dressed in black, with hats and coats and umbrellas. Not the
thousands we had hoped for when planning the event, but a steady stream lined
up to sign-in and get their memorial page. The press came too – impressed that
300 people would brave the daunting weather just to stand in silence for an
hour. One lady happened by and upon learning that we were there to honor our
troops, joined us as the rain picked up again. It was telling that there wasn’t a single counter-protester to mar our vigil -- a first, here in San Diego County. Was it the weather or were we successful in conveying the message that this was not a protest? Or is support for this war declining so fast that there’s no one left to find fault with our vigil?  Just before the bugler played taps to mark the start of our hour of silence, I walked down the line of somber participants in this soggy vigil, offering people black plastic lawn bags to wear as makeshift rain-gear. Already the memorial pages people were wearing were soaked and starting to fall apart. People were trying to hold the melting pages together on their chests, their faces crestfallen and wet with rain and tears. For months I’d been describing this vigil as an Act of Art,
but I hadn’t intended for it to be a watercolor. As I looked down the road at
the line of cold, wet folks who had braved this weather to be a part of this
living illustration, I was suddenly grateful for the rain. Our purpose was to
illustrate the tragic cost of war and letting the viewer draw their own
conclusions about our continuation in Iraq.
A warm sunny day would not have conveyed our message so effectively – war is a
miserable way to deal with our differences. People die. Lives are destroyed.
The sons and daughters of families just like yours, who are lucky enough to
come home, will be changed -- physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Someone sent me an email after the vigil, saying that if I really wanted to
show my support for the troops, I should do something about the way those
returning are being shortchanged by the system. That’s certainly a worthy cause
and the way our vets are being treated is a disgrace. But as we stand at the
precipice of yet another war that’s being sold to us with the same bill of
goods that was used to inspire American families to offer up their children to
fight and die in Iraq,
I think it is equally important that we give those people a look at reality. Casualty
counts are not a scorecard where whoever has the lowest tally, wins. Those numbers are
real people dying, like Zachariah, whose mother’s tears were pouring on our
vigil in the rain.
In peace & hope, Jeeni Criscenzo  Photos by Mark Brosius & Jerry Malamud-Aabs |
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