The war is one endless night

The Boston Herald

April 4, 2003

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Middle of the night is the worst. I wake now at 3 a.m., and hear the silence and think instantly about the noise on the other side of the world, and how lucky I am to be in my house, in my bed, safe. And how grateful I am that my son isn't over there. Or my daughters.

These are my first thoughts. Then I think about other people's children, the faces I see in the paper and on TV - kids still - under all that protective gear, in harm's way, fighting an enemy no one understands. And I think about what they would be doing on a normal day, in a different year. Meeting friends. Getting ready for a date. Watching a movie. Taking a vacation. Walking through the door at the end of a day, coming home to a young wife and a child yelling, "Daddy, Daddy!" Walking in the door at the end of a day to a husband who has set the table.

Only when these things are threatened do we realize how big the small moments are.

Tonight is Canton High School's junior prom. Boys in tuxedos and girls in long dresses will go off in a limousine. They'll talk and laugh and dance until the wee hours of the morning. And then they'll go home and tiptoe up their stairs and dream the dreams of the young.

Just a few years separate these boys and girls from the men and women fighting sand, suicide bombers and soldiers dressed as civilians - people who believe we are evil and that they are good and the way to eternal salvation is to kill us.

So we're killing them, instead, and they're fighting back, soldiers and civilians, and there's a prom going on and the forsythia are blooming and people are cleaning up their yards and pushing baby carriages and training for the Marathon.

I imagine the whir of weapons I've never heard, bullets flying, bombs whistling and missiles hissing overhead. And I think what this is like for both the hunter and the hunted and how this ability to empathize even with the enemy is perceived by the enemy as weakness, America's good will its soft spot.

We have trouble even now, believing that any sane person - never mind a whole group of people - want us dead.

Sept. 11 should have taught us better.

But this is the other war we are fighting. Are we liberators, or aggressors? Are we the good guys come to the rescue, or the bullying superpower the world thinks we are? Is this war justified?

Love thy neighbor. Turn the other cheek. How often are we to forgive? Seven times seven. This is what most people here profess.

The American way has always been to help people. Show us someone down and out and we're there, ready to pick him up and dust him off and give him whatever he needs - a meal, cash, a bed, a ride, a shoulder, freedom - anything.

But do the Iraqis want our help?

My father says he can't sleep either. He says that this war is bringing back too many bad memories. He knows about desert fighting and about being a boy away from home, away from safety. He watches the news and sees himself in these boys. And every day he gets a little sadder.

In the middle of the night when he can't sleep he thinks of the years a lifetime ago but still beside him when he was fighting to free the world of a different despot, not knowing, not ever imagining, that at the end of that long, hard road, there would be another road, just as hard.

I fall back to sleep. My father does not. I imagine war. He has lived it.

We both pray it will be over soon.