Remembering the Alamo resulted in hundreds of deaths in the Mexican War. Remembering the Maine, we began the Spanish American War, creating the first US overseas empire. "Remember the Lusitania" brought the United States into World War I. And in the spring of 2003 as I argued against the impending Iraq war on local radio G105, callers seemed incredulous. Don't you Remember 9/11?

Each "Remember" is intended to call us to vigilance against an attack. Each "Remember" presents the US as victim of an attack that the Reminder claims can be set right only by the call to arms. Each "Remember" becomes the jingoistic recalling of tragedies that calls forth more violence.

To erase the horrific memories, we go to war. The wars plunge soldiers and bystanders into more horror. Wars claim their own victims, whom we honor once a year. But then we forget, every year, leaving the bereaved alone to grieve, sending the broken to hospitals, relegating the devastated to the streets. War becomes normalized, its horror sanitized, its victims invisible. Except on Memorial Day.

So on this Memorial Day, I propose a new remembering: Remember the War. After each of the "Rememberings," terrible events ensued, events whose victims we honor today. It is time that we respond to renewed calls to violence with a different demand, "Remember the War."

The war raging in Iraq has already claimed the lives of more than 1600 American troops. It has claimed the health of tens of thousands more. But the numbers have no meaning. Our soldiers aren't numbers. It is sons and daughters who are dying, mothers and fathers. And Brad Beard, a local artillery mechanic killed in Ramadi, Iraq by a Roadside bomb.

October 19, 2004:
Chatham soldier dies in Iraq. Beard had sense of humor, serious side.
By Anne Blythe, News and Observer

"Specialist Bradley Scott Beard could keep a roomful of people in stitches doing impressions of celebrities, presidents and his favorite, Austin Powers -- cinema's kooky spoof-spy. But there was a serious side to the tall, burly, hazel-eyed 22-year-old who was drawn to the Army after the September 11, 2001, attacks. He believed in the mission in Iraq, his parents said; he thought it was important...."

"'I'm so proud of him," [Brad's father] Randy Beard said Monday. 'Believe me, I would give the world to have my son back, but believe me, I was proud of what he was doing....'

"He was an avid reader who relished science fiction and a good adventure or action story. He showed a talent for language by picking up Japanese quickly during a family visit to Japan. But math and computers were his passions, so much so that he took community college courses at Wake Technical Community College during his high school years. He played basketball in the Apex town league, took tae kwon do, went to Peace Presbyterian Church in Cary and did some acting with the Christian Youth Theatre, which now is in Angier.

"'He was very bright,' said Richard McKee, the father of one of Beard's best friends.

"Beard set out for North Carolina State University in 2000, a scholarship student who seemed destined for a career in engineering. But after three semesters, he decided to go in a different direction. He enlisted in the Army in May 2002....

"'Brad always had an inexhaustible supply of jokes,' [mother] Betsy Beard said. 'From an early age, he seemed to think it was his job to make people laugh.'"

Remember the War!

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The non-combatant victims of war are not collateral damage, either. They are children and parents, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters. Each leaves a wake of grief.

April 1, 2003: "Hilla, the local hospital director said 33 people were killed and more than 300 wounded in a bombing raid yesterday. A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross told the Agence France Presse: 'There were dozens of smashed corpses' at the hospital.

"The London Guardian reports unedited TV footage from the Babylon hospital showed horrifically injured bodies heaped into pick-up trucks. Relatives of the dead accompanied them for burial. Bed after bed of injured women and children were pictured along with large pools of blood on the floor of the hospital.

"An AFP reporter also encountered a civilian sitting among 15 coffins at the Babylon hospital. Razek al-Kazem al-Khafaji said the coffins contained the bodies of his wife, six children, his father, his mother, his three brothers and their wives. They were killed Monday night when a US helicopter gunship fired on the family's pickup truck. The family was fleeing fierce fighting in Nasiriyah."1

"Bakhat Hassan...lost his daughters, ages 2 and 5, his son, 3, his parents, two older brothers, their wives and two nieces, ages 12 and 15.... Hassan's wife Lamea recalled: 'I saw the heads of my two little girls come off.' She repeated herself in a flat, even voice: 'My girls -- I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead.'"2

August 15, 2003 "In another tragedy, panicked US soldiers, thinking a blown transformer was a bomb, fired on a car filled with a family who did not see the soldiers' checkpoint. The attack widowed a woman, killing her husband, two daughters, and a son. The youngest was 8. The family was coming home from dropping off a grandmother. The surviving daughter, 13-year-old Hadeel Kawaz, said the soldiers left her dying father and siblings bleeding for an hour without medical attention. During the occupation, the family had given water to patrolling US soldiers."3

Remember the War!

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When the war is over, the dispossessed, the injured, the survivors continue to suffer.

According to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, "19 percent of Marine respondents and 17 percent of Army respondents in four infantry units in Iraq and Afghanistan reported major depression, general anxiety or PTSD....More than 90 percent of surveyed troops in Iraq had seen bodies or human remains or had been shot at. About half had killed an enemy combatant."4

Lawyers against the War discusses "1000-2000 tons [of depleted uranium]- more than three times the amount used in the first Gulf War...only this time it was primarily spread in Iraq's cities, not on the battlefield."5

Dr. Duraid al-Khatoon, pediatrician at Children's Teaching Hospital in Baghdad, warns, "We have entered the summer season and the water and sewage treatment in Baghdad still requires urgent repair. Children are developing cholera from these sources and all my patients are being told not to drink water unless it has been boiled and to keep children from playing in streets."6

UNICEF reported that more than 1,000 children had already been injured during the two months after the end of major combat activities by unexploded ordnance and unguarded munitions.7

The other victims? Our children. The war in Iraq has so far cost the people of North Carolina more than 37,000 affordable housing units. It could have insured 2.5 million children, hired 72,000 new teachers. Just in North Carolina. The Peace Dividend I was promised before I became a mother has become an enormous War Deficit, and spending on the War and its share in the debt now demands forty-two cents of every dollar I pay in taxes.8

The legacy of war, whether in our memories or not, continues. War kills people, and modern warfare continues to kill long after. Death. Amputation. Hatred. Fear. Suicide. Disease. Terror. War threatens our humanity, individually and collectively.

As Staff Sgt. Camilo Majia wrote in his application for Conscientious Objector status: "I have held a rifle to a man's face, a man on the ground and in front of his mother, children and wife - and not knowing why I did it. I have walked by the headless body of an innocent man right after our machine guns decapitated him. I have seen a soldier broken down inside because he killed a child. I have seen an old man on his knees, crying, with his arms raised to the sky, perhaps asking God why we were taking the lifeless body of his son. It is the war that has changed me forever.By putting my weapon down I choose to reassert myself as a human being."9

Remember the War!

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Remember the War! As long as we honor only some of its victims only once a year, as long as the rest of the year War is relegated to the distant reaches of our un-recalled past, War will continue to be a conceivable policy. War can remain an early resort to conflict only if we refuse to remember it. But being against war, this war or any other war, can hardly provide a coherent alternative. We need a policy to set against the existing policy of militarism, a policy emphasizing other ways to resolve disputes, a policy that will ensure our children's survival, a policy that will not demand most of our wealth for the creation and use of deadly force. To create that policy, we must demand that every day be Memorial Day. "Remember the War!" must become a call to action.

Sarah Shields teaches Middle East history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her email address is sshields@email.unc.edu

1. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/16/2156242
2. http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/5537735.htm
3. http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0815-01.htm
4. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/351/1/13
5. http://www.lawyersagainstthewar.org/iraqnews/duspread.html
6. http://electroniciraq.net/news/1979.shtml IRIN report
7. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=7758&Cr=iraq&Cr1=relief
8. http://www.nationalpriorities.org/TaxDay2005/pdf/ncorg.pdf
9. http://www.mfso.org/

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