J.G.P. MacAdam
Confession—I became accomplice to
this action.
This deed inhumane.
—Nicole S. Goodwin, Warcries
I.
The front page of my local newspaper features a photo of the Veteran’s Day parade on sixth street. Army flags, Navy flags, POW-MIA flags, the ol’ Stars and Stripes. The parade had been canceled due to a lack of participation. But after people in the community made enough calls, posted enough outrage, pledged support, avowed their attendance, the parade was brought back, rescheduled, risen from the dead.
In the next breath, I open my phone, tap the X-app, and read the open letter posted by the Poetry Editor of The New York Times Magazine, resigning in protest over Israel’s US-backed war. The war’s only profit is “oil interests and weapons manufacturers.”
Scroll down and protesters in the Bay Area have shut down the Bay Bridge, demanding the President demand a ceasefire. “No more genocide!”
I return to my paper and read about how the Veterans of Foreign Wars hosted both breakfast and dinner at an Elks Lodge over the weekend, and I’m reminded of dropping my James Madison in the collection tin at Safeway over the weekend, chatting and sharing jokes with the VFW guys, my four-year-old tugging at my hand.
Is it wrong of me to feel a connection between both events? A shared blood pumping through both vein and artery? Though it is probably not the connection you imagine.
***
War does this. This is what war does to you. War, violence, civil strife, injustice—I tend to rightly or wrongly house all of these under an ever-expanding umbrella of how monstrous human beings can be towards one another. Part of me feels like you need people willing to make themselves into monsters in order to win a war; people willing to discuss the likelihood, perhaps even inevitability, of civilian casualties; people willing to kill; people willing to design and make weapons that kill, then deploy those weapons, sell them, in the name of freedom.
And part of me feels like a first-world vampire, sucking the life out of other peoples in other places, consuming the spectacle of their deaths—look how breathtaking, how movie-worthy, the distant violence wrought by us, by our weapons, by our money, by our spoken or tacit support. “Everyone exploits these people’s misery,” wrote Saira Shah, a British reporter and documentary filmmaker who spent much of her time in Afghanistan, “—even me.”
II.
“Tonight, in Ukraine, children will get on the ground and scrunch themselves up into little balls, trying to make themselves smaller,” wrote Sisonke Msimang. “In bunkers / in the backs of cars / on trains. I imagine their small arms tight around their knees… I think of their friends in Syria, Afghanistan, on the West Bank and in Gaza. I think of them all: their little backs curled outwards, heads down, trying to survive grown men’s wars.”
Each child is unique, special in their own right. Though, to us, spectators, glued to our screens zombified, outraged, by the tragedy, all the little faces can begin to blur together.
It puts to my mind the idea of a federal holiday to recognize every child ever affected by a bullet, bomb, missile, drone, what have you, manufactured by the United States. A day of remembrance and of recognition, with a little bell to ding all the thousands of times, a public official with a long list of names to recite—and mispronounce. A Memorial Day for each and every child made to bear the burden of greater nations’ interests and retributions.
But then, Russian-made, Iranian-made, Chinese-made, British-Canadian-Australian-French-U.S.-made weapons—to the child on the receiving end, a monster is a monster.
***
Once upon a time, I was a willing if not eager participant in war. Now, like most people, I am spectator. I boo or cheer, according to my own biases and predilections. I post condemnation or avid support or calls for peace according to my second-to-second sensibilities. I tell myself I am being objective, though nothing fans the flames of passion like war, the desire of it, the desire for it to stop, please stop, stop the suffering, look at the children, look at the children, they say, how could anyone do this to children?
***
In an interview between former-General David Petraeus and Matt Gallagher, in 2021, Gallagher asks what keeps the former general up at night. What does he regret?
“I’ll never forget,” said Petraeus, “we had Apache gunships on patrol in eastern Afghanistan, a very mountainous area, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. Through their thermals, they thought they saw men with rifles. We did a lot of checking, there were no friendlies around, so, ‘Okay, we’ve got to engage them. They’re hostile.’”
Turned out those ‘hostiles’ were teenaged boys collecting firewood to take home. “I mean, we’re supposed to be protecting the people,” said Petraeus, perplexed by how such an event could happen, under his watch.
When even a top general expresses bafflement at the course of events, it begs the question: do the weapons we array around ourselves give us a false sense of security, if not hubris? Do the guns, the drones, the ‘smart’ bombs, the sophisticated surveillance programs, the nuclear upgrades, the policies intended to minimize civilian deaths—do they not contain within them designs of their own, written between the lines? Do they not carry within the angles and aerodynamic curvatures of their construction an inertia all their own? Does their very existence not provide the excuse, if not the command, to be used?
***
I remember being a young sergeant in Afghanistan, in 2009. We were down a few people, at the time—IED’s. Cohen came to me fresh out of basic, a replacement, a warm body to fill the gap left behind. I learned that he had joined the military with a waiver signed by his parents. When Cohen came to me, he wasn’t yet eighteen.
I see on Facebook, the baby pictures. Cohen, he’s got a child of his own, now, too.
***
War is horrible and in war we must sometimes do horrible things. So the saying, or something very like it, tends to go. War movies are rife with this sort of reasoning.
In FURY, a 2014 film, a newbie joins the tank crew. As yet unbaptized in the crucible of conflict, the newbie understandably hesitates to shoot a little German boy, a little German boy who, in the next breath, transforms into a combatant when he ambushes and kills another American soldier. The tank commander, Brad Pitt, chastises the newbie. You must kill anyone. Without hesitation. Even a “baby with a butter knife!”
Is this a truth of war? Must we, sometimes, when necessary, as a matter of precaution, kill kids?
Of course, the answer is no—no matter how many war films present the shooting, bombing, or otherwise maiming of children as “necessary” or just plain sensible soldierly conduct. “It’s repulsive pro-war propaganda,” wrote John Horgan. “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film,” said François Truffaut.
***
I recently heard on the radio that an Israeli baby is just as sweet, just as precious, just as loved, as a Palestinian baby, and that to forget this is to become the very monsters we profess to fight. And yet it is our children who readily absorb our hates more than any. They are miniature versions of ourselves. Little doppelgangers—throwing rocks, repeating hateful slogans found on the internet, cursing the very existence of bad guys who, like boogeymen under the bed, must be beyond any hope of redemption.
Children’s minds latch onto black-white modes of thinking. Polarities. This is good behavior, that bad. So do adults’ minds, come to think of it. Subtleties too often escape us.
I volunteer at the preschool my boy attends. I’m often in the outside play area with five, six, eight urchins running circles around me, screaming “You’re the monster! He’s the monster!” We build obstacle courses. I push them on the swings. And when fights break out, as they inevitably do, I try to teach them to share, to have empathy, to understand that other kids will want to play with this or that toy, too. To take turns on the swings since there simply aren’t enough to go around. To try digging for treasure in another corner of the sandbox since this little boy or that little girl is using this or that corner. We must respect one another’s personal spaces, one another’s territories. Often, I fail.
III.
And Samuel said, As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women. Samuel 15:33
***
An eye for an eye. It’s an ancient yet spookily relevant maxim, like a corpse jolted back to life. The thing feeds on loss.
October 7.
Watch in real-time a massacre unfold, in the streets, in people’s homes, though the construction of those homes, on that soil, is, was, itself a form of forced displacement.
November 11.
“Glory to our martyrs,” is projected across the face of a library at George Washington University. A banner is hung over an Israeli highway: Jews will never be safe until all of Gaza is exterminated. “From the river to the sea!” chant pro-Palestinian protesters around the world, whether or not they realize it’s a Hamas rallying cry synonymous with the destruction of Israel.
November 11.
A Gulf War veteran speaks: When I was overseas, I saw a lot of kids without basic needs or anyone to advocate for them. So, when I got home, I went to work in education, particularly in helping developmentally delayed students. I find my job really rewarding.
November 11.
Israeli forces remove hunks of barrier around Gaza City. Communications are out. 1-ton bombs continue to rain down in dense urban areas. The ancient maxim is blown out of all proportion. No longer a life for a life, but one life for thousands of their lives.
September 11.
A nation stops, hearts skip a beat, and we watch the planes crash, the towers burn, the towers fall, one, then the other, one, then the other, one, then the other, one, then the other, on repeat. Payback is sworn. Vengeance, swift and horrifying, promised. You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.
***
The wall around Gaza is a seven-meter-tall concrete barrier, and fence, with watchtowers, remote-controlled machine guns, sensors for detecting subterranean movement, and a razor-wire buffer zone. The barrier has been effective in preventing terrorist attacks into Israel, particularly suicide bombers, and it has been, and continues to be, effective in essentially imprisoning two million people in an apartheid state. The wall has stood some thirty years; it will, in all likelihood, once this war is over, and whenever another starts, go on standing some thirty more.
***
I laugh with the VFW guys. They say I should come by the Elks Lodge sometime. Sure, I say, though I have no intention of doing so. I can’t bring myself to participate, to don a hat or wear a shirt or march in a parade or even fly the ol’ Stars and Stripes from my front porch. I don’t say that. I wave bye. My four-year-old says, Byyye! and we head into the grocery store. We’ve got family inbound in less than a week or two. Time to start stocking up for Thanksgiving. There’s people to feed.
#
J.G.P. MacAdam is the first in his family to earn a college degree. His fiction and nonfiction can be found in The Point, The Colorado Review, Consequence, and forthcoming from Emerge Literary. You can find him at jgpmacadam.com