On Friday, I was back in Charlottesville and in the late afternoon I biked to downtown to do a couple of errands. There, right next to the magnificent “Free Speech Monument” on our downtown pedestrian mall was the Virginia version of the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit, set up over this Memorial Day weekend by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice and other congregations and groups.
In case anyone’s unfamiliar with EWO, it is a simple display made up of two portions. One portion is combat boots, lined up as in a (personless) parade, with each pair tagged with the name of a US soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The other is a group of just-regular-people’s shoes, babies’, kids’, women’s, and men’s shoes, each tagged with the name of a civilian Iraqi casualty of the current lengthy war. You can see some good photos of the last time EWO was set up in Charlottesville, here.
EWO started off as a nationwide project. I wrote about participating in the nationwide EWO exhibit on the National Mall in Washington DC in May 2006, here. At that point there were 2,428 pairs of combat boots and the logistics of setting them out, guarding them (including from rain), then packing them up and trucking to the next place was becoming huge. Soon after that, they broke them up into state-level collections. In a sense, this helps “bring home” the cost of these wars even more effectively.
Friday, when I found them down on the C’ville mall, I slapped my forehead in exasperation. I had forgotten it was this weekend they were doing it– and I’d been meaning to volunteer to help them read the Iraqi names. Because what my good friends in CCPJ were planning to do was every couple of hours have a solemn reading of the names of all 117 of the Virginians killed in Iraq, alternating with the names of “a small sample” of the many Iraqi civilians killed in the war.
Here is a listing of the names of 141 Virginians killed in the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
But it was okay. They were about to do a reading of the names and I was pressed straight into service. Someone had produced a list of some of the Iraqi war dead. That was what I read. The way we did it, standing on the small granite platform there with a sound-system, was a woman called Kelly would read the name of a Virginian casualty; Christine, one of the main organizers of the exhibit, would strike a bell; I would read the name of an Iraqi casualty; Christine would strike the bell again… and we’d repeat the whole process, name after name after name.
We tried to keep the pace slow and dignified, to give each name some full seconds of thought and attention. I found it far more moving than I had expected. The sun was pretty hot. We got into the slow rhythm of the reading and stared out over the rows of black empty black combat boots, or turned to stare at the circles of civilian shoes.
Name after name after name.
Punctuated by the eery chiming of the bell.
Just three days earlier, I had been in New York City, listening to a very expert and attentive reading-out of names. Those were the names of half of the entire Master’s-degree graduating class at Columbia Teachers’ College. Eight hundred names! Each read out with good attention– but a little faster than our reading at EWO on Friday.
The Columbia TC graduation was held in Riverside Church, the same soaring, Gothic-style edifice in which, in April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr., started speaking out publicly against the war in Vietnam. It gave me goosebumps just now to press the audio button you’ll find on this web-page devoted to the sermon, and hear Dr. King’s voice, and realize he was standing in the very same space we were sitting in, Tuesday.
Each of those names read out at the TC graduation corresponded with one of the bright-faced and slightly excitable mass of blue-robed Master’s candidates packed into the pews in front of us… Young people in their twenties or early thirties, most of them; young people of now-proven accomplishment and skills who were looking forward to making new contributions to society as they apply those skills in the years ahead. Young people with hopes and dreams, fears and concerns, loved ones, and many of them– like my daughter, Leila– with their own distinguished professional record already.
Young people visibly bursting with energy and life.
So then, just three days later, I was myself a reader-out of names. Each of these names, however, corresponded not to an excited young person on the brink of a new phase in her or his life, but to a loss.
A loss that is worse than nothing, unimaginably worse than “just” a pair of empty boots or shoes, though the empty footwear helps represent the loss.
A loss that rips a lasting hole in the lives of loved ones, rips a hole in the universe.
A loss that need never have happened. A loss that should never have happened.
Name after name after name, after name after name after name…