First Parish Unitarian UniversalistBeyond Our Comfort Zones
A Sermon for Veterans Day
Rev. Cricket Potter
First Parish Unitarian Universalist – Canton
November 8, 2009
Reading
Our reading this morning is from a book called Storycatcher by Christina Baldwin. Baldwin has taught and written extensively about the importance of sharing our stories storytelling as she believes that sharing and listening to one another’s stories can heal us and save us. Here is one of her stories:
In the brutal disintegration of tribal wars, the guerrilla armies of the hill people stole the young boy children of the valley people and forced them to fight against their own tribe. UNICEF heard of this atrocity and decided to buy back the children and reintroduce them their villages. The UNICEF workers would drive into these remote villages with several boys who had been gone for two, three, four years; boys whose childhoods had been stolen, whose souls were wracked with the guilt of what they had done. They went to the tribal elders and asked them, “We have brought them home to you, but they are not the same. What will you do?”
“We will light a fire in the center of the village every night for a year,” the elders replied. “The boys will be required to come and tell their stories and listen to the reactions of the villagers. We will weep together for what this war has done. We will talk until the war is talked out of them, until the sorrow is healed, until the fire is burned up.”
Sermon
I have a confession to make about Veterans Day.
Until I served as a ministerial intern with a senior minister whose father was a Navy admiral and with a congregation that had been touched in many ways by war and the sacrifices of military service, Veterans Day had very little meaning for me beyond the possibility of a much appreciated day off.
I had never known anyone who had served in the military, and I had never given much thought to the sacrifices others have made for this country and all the freedoms I enjoy.
Thankfully, the minister and congregation in Lincoln, Mass., opened my heart to the calling of this weekend.
They took this Sunday before Veterans Day, this day of remembering and honoring, very seriously.
What can we learn?
What can we do to honor the dreams and courage of those who gave their all for us?
These questions and others were asked and reflected upon as part of our understood responsibility not to let the sacrifice of so many men and women be in vain.
And so, I can never approach this Sunday the same way, and I thank the wonderful people at First Parish in Lincoln for that.
Drawing from the wisdom of Christina Baldwin and her inspiring book about the deep importance of sharing and hearing one another’s stories, I have learned that the best thing I can do is to share stories on this day before Veterans Day.
How else can we learn about something that many of us have so little understanding about?
How else can we even begin to get it about what war does to a human and about our calling to work toward peace?
These are not easy stories to hear.
I know because I spent one very emotional afternoon this past week listening to audio files of interviews, looking at photographs, and reading poems and letters that were collected by the Veterans History Project (www.local.gov/vets).
The pain and anguish was heavy in their voices and so clear in their letters and poems to loved ones.
These were servicemen and women trying to do a job that was impossible, struggling to stay alive and keep one another alive through conditions that were nothing less than hell.
As I listened to these stories, a quote from the Ken Burns documentary "The War” kept coming to mind.
"In war,” one soldier commented in this documentary, “we are all casualties, even if we are lucky enough to live and return home.”
Here is one story I want to share this morning.
While in nursing school, Rhona Marie Knox was recruited by the army to serve in Vietnam.
After some thought, she felt that serving in the military was the best way to use her skills, so she soon joined the Army Nurse Corps.
Knox started her service outside of the war zone treating wounded soldiers who had been evacuated.
However, as the war escalated, she was assigned to a remote mountain hospital right in central Vietnam.
She shares this memory of arriving by helicopter in the war zone:
We were told to put on our helmets and to run single file… to go as quickly as possible and not to look back. When the doors (of the helicopter) opened, the heat just kind of hit us in the face….. It was close to one hundred thirty degrees. We were being fired at; there were snipers there along the runway; somewhere in the bushes― that they hadn't been able to remove. We were just to run, so that we did…. It was a real eye-opener!
Once at her destination in an area called An Khe, she faced conditions she had never imagined before signing up for military service. Here is her description of the hospital conditions.
And frankly, calling it a hospital takes one huge stretch of one’s imagination:
Well, the hospital was a series of tents; big green tents held up by poles with stakes into the ground. The floor was a tent liner which was just a kind of plastic and canvas material…. It was hot…..There were a lot of helicopters flying over which pulled up with their rotors a lot more of the dusty clay. So, it was not only hot, it was really dirty; there was just dirt flying all the time and it was hotter than Hades during the day and it got really cold at night. The operating room was just one little area with these two little metal tables and an autoclave that was akin to a pressure cooker that we might use at home for cooking and (that was supposedly for sterilizing the instruments).
After a long pause, she goes on:
It wasn't really safe (for surgery). The (equipment) was old…..It was beyond primitive; it was beyond the MASH movie and TV show….We didn't have enough instruments. We didn't have enough hands…. We didn't have suction, we didn't have penicillin to irrigate wounds, didn't have enough blood to transfuse, we just didn't have ...(she chokes up and stops and then after a heavy sigh says)…. We were way above our heads.
When asked to describe the smells and sounds of the place, she began to tear up and describe conditions that were appalling as the doctors and nurses struggled to do their job and offer the best possible care for the wounded:
The only way to function was to somehow block those things from sensory perception or you couldn't go on. So that is what we did, and I don't know how we did it. I guess there is some innate gift in all of us, and I really think it was the hand of God there.
And then she shares the painful experience of coming home to angry civilians and discovering that no one wanted to hear her story, a experience we now know was almost universal for Vietnam vets:
When I (arrived at) the San Francisco (airport), everybody was just yelling and looking mad and calling us names. I ducked into a restroom and took off my uniform and threw it in the trash and "became" a civilian. I never told anybody and went across country to visit my Dad and his wife (my step mother was a nurse in the Korean conflict) thinking, "Oh this is safe haven, now I can just blab and yell and scream and get it all out of my system and they are going to understand." They didn't understand either. My Dad paced, he seemed embarrassed, he didn't say anything…. My stepmother actually yelled at me and told me that it couldn't possibly have been like that. [She said] "the news says this, (and) you say that."
There was just no understanding or support … at all. So I just… didn't talk about the military or Vietnam. I just kind of kept it all inside. From what I understand, that is pretty much what the guys did too….That is what we all did. Nobody would talk about it because it fell on deaf ears.
What can one say after hearing a story like that?
It is so tragic and unjust.
Regardless of our opinions about the military, we cannot forget that the men and women who serve in the military are people just like us – sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, friends, neighbors and loved ones.
They were trying to do what they thought was right by serving their country.
At different times, these people were scared, lonely, in despair – clearly way beyond their comfort zones and way beyond what they thought they could possibly do.
Yet, they could not give up.
So many others depended on them for their very lives.
And then, so many have come home with shattered lives and even shattered bodies.
They then sadly struggle to find a way to survive once home.
“So, what can we do now?” you might ask.
In my opinion, there are two basic and important things we can do.
First, we can listen to the stories of the men and women who have served and are serving today.
Seek them out, spend time listening and learning.
If you don’t know someone to ask, there is a treasure trove of stories right on the internet.
Along with the Veterans History Project, I highly recommend the websites for the Vietnam Memorial Wall (www.thewall-usa.com) and the Memorial to Women in Military Service (www.womensmemorial.org).
One warning: have a box of Kleenex handy.
As our reading offered,
“We will weep together for what this war has done. We will talk until the war is talked out of them, until the sorrow is healed, until the fire is burned up.”
I love that image: gathering as a community and staying together to do the work of healing until the fire is all burned up.
While we may not be able to gather around a village fire to hear the stories of those who have suffered and let them hear how that touches us and stay together until the fire is burned up, we can do the work in our own way.
In listening to the stories we can learn of the pain and understand how everyone is changed by that pain.
We can reflect upon how we can offer support to those needing healing today and then do something, each in our own way, to help in the healing.
From homeless veterans to veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder to, in the case of these current wars, veterans recovering from multiple amputations, there is so much healing that we need to help with.
Once we have listened deeply and learned the part we need to play in the healing, we can then ask several questions of ourselves.
Questions such as:
What can I do to honor the sacrifices others have made for me and to carry on their dreams?
Can I move past my comfort zone to engage more deeply in something that I believe is worth my ongoing commitment?
For me, it is not enough to sit in our homes or gather in our church groups and criticize war.
That gets us nowhere except into a place of cynicism and passivity.
Rather, we need to gather to consider how we can speak up and stand up for peace and all that we believe is true and lasting both in this community and in the larger world.
This weekend before Veterans Day, I am taking time to share some of the information from veterans’ stories with my daughter Haley.
We have talked about what it means to be in the military and how the men and women who serve have to do some very scary and difficult things to protect us and our country.
I do this so that Haley will begin to understand the sacrifices others have made for her and how hard it was for those soldiers.
I want her to begin to understand that these soldiers are moms and dads, sons and daughters, just like us and that they are not abstract names that have no meaning.
I want her to be thankful for their commitment to something they thought was of utmost importance, hoping someday that she will find her own way to serve a larger cause.
So, I wonder if you could join me in your own way and with your own families?
Could you spend time reflecting upon Veterans Day with your loved ones?
Could you seek out the stories of those who have served,
give thanks for what they gave to us in their service,
and in turn consider what you can do to honor and keep their dreams alive?
In that spirit, may we all find the courage to move beyond our comfort zones.
The world needs us.
People need us.
Those who have already served in their own way need us.
May it be so.
Amen.
Note: Here is a poem from the Veterans History Project that Rhona Marie Know wrote while serving in An Khe:
Nurse
Mother Caring through the pain.
Hearing
Crying
In the night
Listening
to stories
of war
agony
a surreal living.
Listening
Hearing
Wondering
Why
did it happen
Living it
through words…
Feelings.
Still not understanding….
Will it ever end?