no war • no shame • i am a proud american

that was the slogan on my first anti-war poster. i lived in alhambra, california when 9/11 happened and we commenced the war in afghanistan and resumed the "theater" of war in iraq.

while living in alhambra, i met a neighbor, he was 72, his name was "Mr. Ray". if you saw mr. ray, you would have sworn he was a homeless bum, pushing his shopping cart of cans, hunched over from oesteroperosis, shufflin his feet, not able to pick them up completely, drool hanging from the corner of his mouth which housed only his tongue. the first time i met him, he was down the block, sitting on his chair on the sidewalk, socks and shoes off, and he was putting some cream on his feet. they were purple to black in color. later that week, i ended up bringing him to the VA to have his feet checked on ... diabetic, unless he changed, he was going to lose them. the only thing that made mr. ray take his insulin was mrs. ray (his wife, violet). if he could not walk, he would have to stay home with her ... he took his insulin.

what happened to him, i wondered, to make him this way. i eventually met his brother, a couple of years older than mr. ray ... perfectly normal, healthy ... a regular guy. i asked him what happened. "he was never the same since the war." 'the war' was the korean war in their case. mr. ray enlisted along with all of his brothers and was used by the navy on the docks down in long beach. he worked on the loading docks loading weapons, rations, supplies and the like onto the ships to carry off to the war. that didn't sound too bad to me, and no one, especially his family, could understand why the war affected him so much.

if the war didn't happen and mr. ray at the age of 18 did not enlist, he would have probably have been a poet, an artist, a mathematician (what he could figure out in numbers in his head was amazing). i once asked him about the war, and what happened, he would just sob uncontrollably. its was probably two years after i met mr. ray that he had an accident and ended up at the VA hospital in west los angeles. i would go and visit and he was doing great ... recuperating quite well. i had not seen mr. ray look as good as he did while he was there. of course, they were taking care of him, making sure he was taking all of his medications (which i learned included many 'psychological' drugs) ... his chronic depression gone, we were able to sit in the park surrounding the hospital and talk about the war.

he told me about one day, he was loading stuff like always and a box of grenades had dropped, broken open and they were working to clean it up, repack it and load it up to go. not that big of a deal except that was the first time he had ever held a grenade, a mini-bomb he called it. so long as they were in boxes and things, the word on the outside of the box meant little to him. now that he held "the little bomb," he had a huge realization what he was doing. he knew that the only purpose for that 'little bomb" was to kill someone. he didn't even know why they were fighting the war. he said that every box he now loaded was a box intended for the sole purpose of killing another person.

mr. ray was the youngest in his family ... he had no reason to kill anyone. he wasn't a fighter, as his brother told me, he was the only one in the family (with 4 boys) that never got into 'fistocuffs' or trouble.

one day several months after his release from the hospital and mr. ray had stopped taking his medications, as he tended to do because he did not like how they made him feel, i found him, once again, sitting on his chair on the sidewalk about a block from his house sobbing. incoherent, the only words he would repeat was "i'm so ashamed, i didn't have to do it, elaine. i didn't have to do it. i am so ashamed. i killed so many people."

perhaps an unrealistic view from a man who carried so much shame for many years for what he saw as his part in the war, death and destruction in korea ... but he carried it nonetheless. one man, in the last "good" war, carrying the shame of killing people he never knew for reasons he didn't even know why.

no war • no shame • i am a proud american ... because if he wasn't taken so young in his life to become a part of our nation's war, mr. ray would have had a perfectly normal life. and he stayed right here in his home town of long beach, california.

peace & harmony,
elaine
'freedom must be exercised to stay in shape!'