Our Children

For someone who loves to read, I read VERY slowly. And I admit that not only books stack up in alarming numbers before I actually crack them open, so do magazines and newspapers. But yesterday I finally picked up the May 29, 2005 New York Times Magazine and read the article by Cynthia Gorney about Tracy Della Vecchia who runs a website for mothers of American soldiers who are fighting in Iraq. Her own son has spent the last three years in Iraq; he has been home twice in that time. He is 22. Tracy built the website when she learned her son would be going to war “in part because she guessed ….. that people would want a place where they could sit in the dark making an effort to hold one another up…”

Whenever I think about war, I think about mothers having to watch their children openly embrace danger. It breaks my heart; I cannot fathom the immensity of it, the implications. The article follows Tracy through normal days and holidays while her son faces imminent danger in a distant land. It mentions how she spends hours at her computer attending to the website in which “pride and grief and bewilderment and rage seem to be crashing around all the time.”

Why is it that we, as a civilization, still seek resolution to international differences by dressing our children in uniform and sending them off to destroy the enemy in face-to-face battle? Aren’t we sophisticated enough to raise the level of conflict above mass destruction? And what constitutes a win when the repercussions are intangible? The impact on these families is astounding, overwhelming, and on so many levels incomprehensible to those of us who haven’t endured their experience. As a good number of us continue to live untouched by the turbulence in Iraq--thank you, Cynthia and Tracy for a brief, yet sobering glimpse of the personal side of war.