Forgetting a War

I haven’t talked to Tommi for several days now, though we manage to pass IM greetings in moments we steal from busy schedules, each on her own side of the planet. This blog serves to house responsive reflections between us, and it distressed me to read comments recently posted by Tommi reporting a challenge received from peers questioning her worth in friendship. I might otherwise have dismissed such a difficulty as common to workplace negotiations; under current circumstances, however, it became a troubling concern and preoccupation – but only for time before my thoughts returned to my own day, my own workplace, and the difficult demands of negotiating my own challenges.

It bothers me to find that Tommi can fade from my thoughts just like the war in which she is ordered to participate. I drilled myself last November in anticipation of this experience, “practicing” considerations of the everydayness that would be and now is the normal through which I’m passing, and it still doesn’t feel at all right now that I’m here. I ought to be praying, for example, but the truth is I forget to pray – I can forget entirely that Tommi is even in Iraq, that there’s a war going on at all, and that there are people dying in a fight for something – freedom …though the word is far too easily said without a responsible interrogation of what that means and from whose point of view the value is assessed.

I’m on my way home from school as I write this piece – a week of spring break in Minnesota. James is driving; Abe and Jen have supper waiting, and Brad has been cleaning all day in anticipation of our arrival. I’ll have coffee with friends this week, take in a yoga session, get my hair done, my teeth cleaned, and catch up on reading that still needs doing before classes resume in a week. I’ll think of Tommi, and people I’ll see for the first time in a while will make conversation with questions about how she’s doing over there. They’ll ask for her address with intentions of writing, but, like mine, their days will fill with more immediate engagements … not more important – no, just more immediate.

I wonder if it’s easier to pay billions and billions of dollars for a war that is this easy to forget? The truth is that I’m more aware of the $2.17 a gallon I just paid for gas than I am of whether or not (or how many more) suicide bombs went off in Baghdad today. And strange as it is to make a war disappear, it’s somehow worse – wrong, I think – to feel Tommi “disappear” in exchange for a day full of hours themselves full of casual chatter, and laughter, and an occasional glass of wine with friends.

In fact, I am fundamentally opposed to the U.S. occupation of Iraq in which our country is currently engaged, but I know, too, there’s no easy way out of that picture now, however moral (or not) the initial prompt for invasion was. I wonder what “bringing home the troops” will look like this time? And I wonder if a war where there are heroes serving is easier to forget than a war where the villains are the men and women “we” sent to fight it. I’m proud of Tommi for the work she’s doing on duty in Iraq; I’m proud of the men and women with whom she serves, but all the yellow ribbons fade into easy icons as the days pass by. And even when we remember to remember the troops we’re sending (and re-sending) to Iraq, I wonder if that’s enough. What does it mean to remember why we sent them there in the first place, and can we remember now what we thought then about when they would come home?