February, 2010

Dear Mark,

My name is Anna Green and I am currently at sophomore at Creighton University. A Senior Seminar class within the “Justice and Peace Studies” Program here was assigned to read The Book of Mev for the duration of the semester. This class is instructed by Dr. Roger Bergman, who knew Mev very well. I, however, am not in that class. I heard from a friend that they were reading this book, thought it sounded interesting, and went to the library to pick it up. Needless to say, I was hooked. Whenever I had free time, I picked up Mev. Before my 8 am class (which I am not a morning person), I would read. It only took me about a week to read this, but I enjoyed every minute of it. Despite her out pouring love for others and energy for life, I had some connections to the book that really caught me off guard.

The first was in the Acknowledgements section of the book. It isn’t very often that I find myself skimming through the long lists of names at the beginning of the book. This time, though, I happened to notice a few. First was Michael Bartz. I attended Nerinx Hall High School in Webster Groves and he was my teacher for four years. He described the community he lived in and his friends from SLU often and with such pride. After telling him that I saw his name in the book, he wrote me a long description of how grateful he was to have spent some of Mev’s last months with her. He wrote, “She was a great photographer and inspirational Catholic feminist. My life is so much better having known and loved her.” I was also taught by Cathy Hartrich who was mentioned in the book. Finally, I saw the name Kate Linden in the acknowledgments. Because I attend Creighton University, I have met the infamous Kate Linden. I met up with her one day to discuss her interest in social justice and hear about where life has taken her and since then I have loved getting to know her. She is a great role model and inspiring woman!

So after reading within the first few pages of the people I knew were connected to Mev’s life, I also have that special connection of being from St. Louis (and Italian). I really enjoyed hearing about the Tower Grove neighborhood and other places in that great city!! It reminds me of home, which is a warm feeling. As you and Mev also worked and spent time at Karen House, I went to Karen House weekly for the four years at Nerinx Hall. Cooking dinners, hearing the stories of the women there, and spending time with the children was my favorite. It was such a hospitable community and hope was alive. Go Cardinals!!

Thank you thank you thank you for sharing your life with Mev in this book. The love between the two of you seemed endless. I smiled when you said that you “loved her more every day”. That is what marriage should be like. Also I thought the “kissering” was cute. Before moving on to Mev, I just wanted to tell you how supportive, caring, and real you were with Mev, especially during her times of being sick. It made my heart sink to think that she was losing her ability to use her speech and be independent. But it also hurt me to know that she wasn’t the only one suffering, you were too. You are doing exactly what Mev would have wanted you to do- continue on her enthusiasm for life and positivity and determination to change the world for the better.

What Mev did is an aspiring dream of mine. I am majoring in Justice and Society with a minor in Spanish. But this is just a title. I want to travel the world, learn about new cultures, and immerse myself in uncomfortable places. It is when we find that discomfort or that uneasiness that we have the desire to change what is unjust and reach out. Instead of walking away from things that look difficult (like most people do), I want to step forward and help. Not only do I want to go international, I want to find the issues facing people right here in Omaha or St. Louis. A quote by Eduardo Galeano completes my thoughts, “I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it’s humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.” Mev never went to these places, took pictures, and kept the experiences for herself. She shared it with others, like what the people she met would have wanted her to do. They don’t want to be hidden or put on the back burner. I loved in the book when it was said that she wasn’t speaking for those without a voice, she was simply listening.

Latin America has a special place in my heart. I have been to the rural jungles of southern Mexico (near the Chiapas) my junior and senior years of high school. During the immersion trip we stayed with families and did the work they do- painted a grade school the first year and worked in the bean fields the second year (talk about physical labor)..It was incredibly eye opening and humbling. I learned simplicity, the importance of family, and the ability to truly listen to others. I am also planning to study abroad in the Dominican Republic in the fall of next year. Mev’s photographs of El Salvador and Haiti were beautiful. I bet it broke your heart when the earthquake hit Haiti. I have a feeling that Mev would have been down there instantly helping the people.

I so badly want to meet Mev. She is my role model, not because she did extraordinary things, but because she was an ordinary person who found her passions and ignited them!! I admire her confidence and ability to talk to anyone. I would love that strength. Also, I know Mev was a very spiritual person. After reading this book, I believe my spirituality was strengthened. I would not consider myself very religious, but spiritual is a good word. I loved hearing about the way she said the rosary with gratitudes. Thank you again for writing this book. I strive to be more like Mev every day. As Dorothy Day said, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”  I truly believe this.

Have a wonderful day!

Sincerely,

Anna Green

P.S. Would you consider coming to share at Creighton University?

On David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996)

Today there exist tremendous and unprecedented possibilities for knowing the reality of our world just as it is, with all that it has in it of anti-kingdom and all the deaths it produces. As experience demonstrates, however, to know the world truly and to allow oneself to be affected by it, simple access to data is not sufficient, as abundant and trustworthy as the data may be, including those of the UNDP. Serious analyses are not sufficient either, not are truthful testimonies, as important as all these may be for other reasons. The reality of the anti-kingdom, its magnitude and its cruelty, can be truly grasped only by experiencing it in actu, in action, when it is actually dealing death. That is what is capable of moving people not only to laments, but to the struggle against the anti-kingdom.

–Jon Sobrino, El Salvadoran theologian

1.

Reading this book may make you repeatedly squirm in your seat, as much for the past it recounts as for the present in jarringly illumines.

David Harris was a draft resister during the Vietnam War. Protesting and resisting that war took a good ten years of his life, from 1965 to 1975. It took him twenty years before he could write and publish Our War. For Harris, it wasn’t just the troops’ war, or the politicians’ and generals’ war: It was the entire country’s. He argues that, as a nation, we have not reckoned with what we did in Indochina and what it did to us, our politics and collective soul.

And it’s unnerving to realize that sometime in the near future, another resister (a soldier, perhaps) may write a book called Our Wars, referring to the catastrophic U.S. occupations of and intrusions into Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

2.

Harris was the All-American Boy. Student body president at Stanford University, he had the potential to achieve anything he wanted. But he paid attention to what had been going on in Southeast Asia since the early 1960s. By that decade’s middle, he had come to the conclusion that U.S. policy there was intolerable. Therefore, he attempted to put his body in the way of the U.S. killing machine.

He traveled relentlessly around the country to encourage other young men not to go. He gave over a thousand speeches and participated in hundreds of demonstrations. He spent two years in prison. Unlike “the best and brightest”—the men in Washington who planned, initiated, and deepened the war–he was outraged by its murderous devastation and sought to resist it with his whole being.

A common belief about the U.S. war in Vietnam is that it was a “mistake,” although it was said to be motivated by our traditional good will and honorable intentions. Harris’s disagreement couldn’t be stronger:

In this particular “mistake,” at least 3 million people died, only 58,000 of whom were Americans. These 3 million people died crushed in the mud, riddled with shrapnel, hurled out of helicopters, impaled on sharpened bamboo, obliterated in carpets of explosive dropped from bombers flying so high they could only be heard and never seen; they died reduced to chunks by one or more land mines, finished off by a round through the temple or a bayonet in the throat, consumed by sizzling phosphorous, burned alive with jellied gasoline, strung up by their thumbs, starved in cages, executed after watching their babies die, trapped on the barbed wire calling for their mothers. They died while trying to kill, they died while trying to kill no one, they died heroes, they died villains, they died at random, they died most often when someone who had no idea who they were killed them under the orders of someone who had even less idea than that. Some of the dead were sent home to their families, some were reduced to such indistinguishable pulp that they could not be recovered. All 3 million died in pain, often so intense that death was a relief. They all left someone behind. They all became markers visited by those who needed to remember and not forget. The loss was enormous, and “mistake” is no way to account for it. A course of behavior that kills 3 million people for no good reason cannot be passed off as something for which the generic response is Excuse Me. [15-16]

In his 1995 book, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did apologize to Americans for the loss of American life in Vietnam. It is impossible, though, to imagine any American leader acknowledging the mass death inflicted on the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians by the United States.

3.

What did the United States do in Vietnam that demands, even at this late date, a reckoning and accountability? According to Harris,

[u]nable to locate our guerrilla adversaries, we uprooted whole villages and evacuated them to bastions surrounded by barbed wire, almost always against their wishes. Since we were in control of both everything and nothing, we measured our success by how many people we were able to kill and announced those statistics on a daily basis. We created free-fire zones where we claimed the right to do anything we wanted to anyone found there without our permission. We burned the homes of people we suspected of helping the other side. We tracked our adversaries with a secret police network of political prisons and assassins. We often killed whoever aroused suspicion and asked no questions. Eventually, we barricaded ourselves in urban forts and attempted to drive the countryside to us. We marked off sections of landscape on the map and sent bombers to saturate the areas in the hope of making them inhabitable. Before we left, we had dropped some 250 pounds of high explosives for every single human being in that part of the Southeast Asian continent. We also occasionally raped, pillaged, killed for sport, and transported heroin. The first three crimes were usually spontaneous actions by individual soldiers that went virtually unpunished; the fourth was a de facto government policy. Everywhere we stayed for any length of time, young children scavenged our garbage dumps, old women sold us dime bags of heroin, and impoverished teenagers sold us blow jobs. [40-41] We thought our interests had automatic precedence over anyone else’s. We thought we were civilized and they weren’t. We thought our purposes were sufficient cause to poison their countryside. We couldn’t fathom that getting rid of us would be sufficient incentive to mobilize millions of people to risk everything. We thought we could win concessions at the bargaining table that we had never won on the field of battle. We thought we couldn’t trust them but they could trust us. We thought that whatever we said was true just because we said it. We thought our government knew best. We thought our government would never tell us lies. We thought that if we escalated just a few more notches we’d have them right where we wanted them. We thought no one could match us toe to toe for a year, much less ten. We thought what they did to our prisoners was shameful but thought nothing about what we did to theirs. We thought our surrogate government, still with little or no support, could resist the force that had kicked our ass for years. We thought we could save face by leaving the war with the South Vietnamese army still in the field. We also promised to repair war damage and normalize our relations after the war was over when we never had any intention of doing so. [63-64]

We left three countries in ruin and for years acted as if the only issue arising from the war years was the fact that a few hundred of our troops were MIA and thus unaccounted for. Like Cuba after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed dictator, Vietnam paid a price for its triumph by facing years of a fierce U.S. economic embargo as well as the U.S. refusal to honor Nixon’s pledge of $3.25 billion in reconstruction.

4.

What still stick in some Americans’ craw is that Vietnam is the first war we “lost.” Accustomed to being the winners, the righteous, the talented, the land of the free and home of the brave, Americans knew that they had the most formidable military machine in human history, and yet were unable to impose their will on the Vietnamese resistance.

There are lots of explanations, but the simple truth is that we ran into a group of people who brought considerably more seriousness to this fight than we did: they lived underground, the huddled in the jungle, they moved by foot and bicycle, they fought on a little rice and a little ammunition. They absorbed enormous punishment, bore great sacrifice, endured untold hardship, and fought us and all our war machines to a dead stop. If they survived, they fought until the whole thing was done, some for as long as a decade. They did not back off, and they held the field until we finally lost our stomach for the fight and went home. And not only did we lose, but we were poor losers. When we finally left, we left like a whipped dog, pissing on one last bush as we fled down the street. [172-173]

Nevertheless, the U.S. inflicted such vast ecological, infrastructural, and human damage during the war that post-1975 Vietnam posed no serious threat to other nations of becoming an inspiring example of independence and social development.

5.

It was a commonplace for liberals during the Bush years to decry that Administration’s policies, which created a terrible blemish on America’s moral standing in the world. One can only mouth such idiocies if one totally ignores our wars in Indochina, which spanned from the Truman Administration to the Ford Administration. Such commentators evidently can’t handle the truth of what we did and who we really were.

As it turned out, we got little of it right and almost all of it wrong, and our war was the proof. It was the wrong fight, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, with the wrong strategy, the wrong tactics, and the wrong weapons. It was the wrong approach, to the wrong situation, betraying the wrong motives, from the wrong perspective, with the wrong attitude, to the wrong end, using the wrong means, effecting the wrong result. It was both the wrong twist and the wrong turn, arriving inexorably, of course, at just the wrong moment. It was the wrong choice, the wrong answer to the wrong question, altogether the wrong way to take care of business. And it wronged just about everybody it touched: it wronged the wrong and it wronged the rest of us as well. [177] And now, twenty years after we finally left the war behind, all that hasn’t changed. What remains is for us to finally engage in the public arithmetic and admit we had no right to have been there and no right to have done what we did and no right to continue pretending otherwise. [178]

But the pretending continued and eventually helped to facilitate the on-going U.S. production and distribution of Iraqi corpses and refugees.

6.

Like their predecessors before them (Johnson and Nixon, McNamara and Kissinger), George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney walk free and easy, now that they are out of office. Like many previously engaged but finally weary U.S. citizens after 1973, people today are in the process of forgetting what just happened and, even worse, ignoring the continuance and even expansion of Bush’s criminal policies by the current administration.

At the conclusion of his book, Harris offers these words for our past and present wars: “I still cannot listen to the whump of helicopter rotors without recalling now middle-aged evening news footage of American boys armed to the teeth, arrogant and terrified, leaping though the downdraft and into the tall grass, ten thousand miles from home. Most came back, many came back in pieces, and some didn’t come back at all. I remember, and, like many who lived through the war, I remain suspicious of power and have never regained much respect for the exercise of force. I still have little use for patriotic displays and no use at all for military conscription. I close my eyes and see wire-service photos of peasants in black pajamas huddling together in the hope of simply making it through the afternoon without being shot or burned alive, and I am still haunted by how easily we defiled and abused, devoid of reflection, hidden from ourselves by a veneer of geopolitics and a parking lot full of denial.” [191]