Just World News with Helena Cobban

Last Wednesday, I spent the afternoon on the National Mall in Washington DC, helping to set out the (then) 2,428 pairs of combat boots that are at the center of the American Friends Service Committee’s traveling antiwar installation, “Eyes Wide Open”.
Each pair of boots represents a US service-member who has been killed in Iraq. The two clunky black boots in each pair have their laces tied together (for easy handling) and have the name, age, and hometown of the represented GI on a laminated card that is attached there. I gather that some of the boots are the actual combat boots of that soldier, and some are simply representative. Members of the anti-war veterans’ organizations that have been working with AFSC on the project have been in touch with all the family members involved, who have the option of having “Name withheld” put on the tag if they don’t want their loved one’s name included in the exhibition.
Very, very few of the tags that I read said “Name withheld.”
When I was working down there, it was the day before the exhibit was due to open. We had a number of preliminary tasks to do. One was simply to count the pairs of boots in the group of plastic bins used to transport the boots pertaining to each of the different states. A fellow-volunteer named Constance and I counted our way through the bins for a number of different states, finishing up with Texas.
Even just handling the boots to do the counting was already a much more moving experience than I’d been expecting. The boots had been brought here in big Rubbermaid-style storage bins, that were laid out along the side of the grass there in alphabetical order by state. We (and other volunteer duos working alongside us) had to take the boots out of each bin, counting them as we went, and then put them back in, counting again (to make sure.) Constance and I got into a rhythm. There were so many bins! It’s not till you stop to think about it that you realize how much sheer space 2,428 pairs of combat boots must take up. Each bin held roughly 20 pairs.
One-two-three-four… Slow and systematic. Try not to get the laces knotted around each other. Lay the pairs out within easy reach as you take them out. Neater works better…
Seventeen-eighteen-nineteen-twenty-twentyone. Right! Twentyone. Now, let’s count them back in. “You start!” One-two-three-four…
Then you start reading the names and the pitifully young ages of these men (and the much rarer women). And the hometowns. And you get to thinking about the life snuffed out of this young person.
Many of the boots have family memorabilia (laminated against the weather) also attached to them: Photos, poems, children’s drawings. Stuffed animals. Flags. Funeral eulogies.
It can get to you. But you can’t let it get to you, because you have to keep focused on the counting.
Eleven-twelve-thirteen-fourteen…
And then we came to Texas. Other duos had kind of side-skipped it, since its collection ran to twelve big bins. While Constance was off getting some water to drink, I took a deep breath and started in on it.
Texas added up to 214 pairs of boots.
“I wonder how many of those funerals George W. Bush went to?”
H’mm.
Later, I worked with the groups of people trying to lay the boots out on the big broad lawn there. We were at the Washington Monument end of the Mall– but you could look up easily and see the great looming mass of the US Capitol Building at the far end of the greensward. The building, that is, where back in October 2002 the 535 lawmakers acting with their “eyes wide open” gave President Bush carte blanche to do anything he damn’ well pleased to Iraq… including, to invade it.
The boots were laid out in a broad, grid-based array. There were 39 in each row– meaning some 63 rows in all. Roughly four feet between each pair. If you think of all those 2,428 soldiers standing there to attention, this is roughly where their boots would be.
But the soldiers aren’t there…
This was mind-numbing work, too. Hauling the bins along the lines, taking out the boots, having someone get down and arrange them properly, respectfully… The work was a little disorganized, since the guys laying out the grids with strings and red golf-tees often weren’t far ahead of those of us trying to position the boots.
The blazing sun ground its way slowly down the big sky.
There were lots of passers-by. Nearly everyone seemed very interested, and very supportive. Random people stopped and offered to help. It got so that when I needed someone to help me haul a bin onto one of the little moving-dollies they had there, I would just ask a passer-by and he or she would always seem happy to help.
(George W. Bush is in deep, deep trouble over this war.)
When my four hours were up, I walked over to the other part of the exhibit, where they’d been working with huge piles of civilian shoes that represented the Iraqi civilian deaths during the war.
Here, they hadn’t even bothered to have a one-to-one representativity. Which total do you count, anyway? I was glad to see they had a big board highlighting the “epidemiological” study that concluded– ways back, a long time ago now– that just under 100,000 Iraqis had met a premature death on account of the war.
What the organizers had done with the pairs of civilian shoes was great. These, too, had the two shoes in each pair attached together, and had tags with the names of killed Iraqi civilians on them. But groups of volunteers had been spending long hours here laying them out end to end in the form of a huge and very complex labyrinth.
“Go ahead, walk it!” someone said. I did. I kept my eyes focused on the shoes as I walked: men’s shoes, women’s shoes, girls’ shoes, boys’ shoes, baby shoes. Scuffed and mangled shoes. Brand new party shoes. I looked at the shoes and followed the labyrinth in toward the center, and forgot all about the Capitol Building looming so close above me. It was very meditative.
… Well, I never had the chance to see the whole layout of all of the boots and shoes there. I gather that between Thursday and Sunday they had a large number of different activities planned there.
On Thursday, there were terrible storms all over DC. The exhibit organizers had made a decision not to try to take the boots off the exhibit to a dry place, but just to let them stand. I guess combat boots are meant to withstand bad weather. I don’t know about the civilian shoes, though. As I went to various meetings in DC Thursday and saw the downpours, I thought about the boots standing there.
… Well, guess who else went to the exhibit while it was up? Richard Perle– the “Prince of Darkness” himself! One of the major intellectual architects of the war.
Bill Perry, a disabled veteran of the US-Vietnam War and a member of “Vietnam Veterans Against the War” and other antiwar groups, was there and happened to recognize Perle. He put this post about the confrontation that a number of the antiwar people there– mainly war vets– had with Perle up onto David Swanson’s website Afterdowningstreet.org.
There are pictures there, too. I particularly like this one.
Perry wrote there:

Richard Perle had a PBS camera crew about 80 or 90 yards off to the side of the Speakers’ Rostrum @ yesterday’s AFSC Eyes Wide Open (BOOTS) Demo, in Washington, DC. The PBS Producers said they were rehabilitating Perle’s image, so he can be kicked upstairs, similar to the Bush promotion of Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank.
They thought they wouldn’t be noticed using the “Boots” demo background during the speaking portion of the EWO demo…

I wish I’d been there for that!
Yes, it certainly seems very exploitative if Perle and the people filming him were using the Boots installation as a background for an attempt to rehabilitate him politically…
On the other hand, at least Perle did dare to go near the exhibit and be exposed to the potent reminders it gives of the costs of war.
As for our President???

David Steinbruner, the author of the piece I just posted here, is one of the emergency physicians featured in the new documentary ‘Baghdad ER’ that HBO will be screening this coming weekend.
CNN had this pre-release description of the movie on their website last week. (Also here.) Read the description there. It makes me definitely want to see the movie, though we don’t have HBO.
The WaPo’s Paul Farhi had a short report in today’s paper about a special screening of the movie that was held Monday night at the National Museum of American History. The main thrust of Farhi’s piece was to note that the support the Pentagon once had for the movie project has waned drastically in recent weeks.
He writes:

HBO executives say that top Army officials expressed enthusiasm for the documentary in March, but that the Pentagon’s support has waned. They believe the military is troubled by the film’s unflinching look at the consequences of the war on American soldiers, and that it might diminish public support.
The documentary, shot over 2 1/2 months in mid-2005, contains graphic and disturbing footage of soldiers reeling from their wounds — in some cases, dying of them — as Army medical personnel try to save them. The film illustrates the compassion and dedication of the staff of the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. But it also has many gruesome images, such as shots of soldiers’ amputated limbs being dumped into trash bags, and pools of blood and viscera being mopped from a busy operating room floor. At one point, an Army chaplain, reciting last rites for a soldier, calls all the violence “senseless.”
… The network screened the film in mid-March for senior Army officials, including Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey, and received an enthusiastic response, said Richard Plepler, HBO’s executive vice president.
… Thereafter, Plepler said, the Army’s support began to evaporate. The network’s offer to co-sponsor a screening of the film this week at Fort Campbell, Ky., the home of the 86th, was turned down by the Pentagon without explanation. The Army wasn’t an official sponsor of Monday’s screening, and none of the service’s highest-ranking officers or senior medical personnel attended, despite HBO’s invitation.

Farhi also wrote this:

Among the guests in attendance was Paula Zwillinger, whose son, Marine Lance Cpl. Robert Mininger, 21, died in Iraq from injuries from a roadside bomb. Zwillinger said in an interview that she didn’t know exactly how her son died until the film’s producers — Joseph Feury, Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill — contacted her as they were editing the film. Mininger’s death is chronicled in a prolonged sequence at the end of “Baghdad ER.”
She called the film a gift. “It gave me peace. At least I know he was with someone, and didn’t die alone,” she said.
Despite the grim subject matter, Zwillinger said: “I am positive about this film. It needs to be shown. I want the world to know this is reality. War is graphic, war is raw, war hurts. And we need more support for our troops, no matter what we think of the war.”