“I’m from Lebanon, but I’m a US citizen. I’ve lived through war. I have a lot of friends in the armed forces. I remember having a vivid conversation with members of the Department of Defense in a restaurant that I was running in Washington DC on images of our soldiers breaking down doors and searching, going house to house, into the homes of innocent families because we were looking for WMDs that did not exist. And it was very troubling to me because I remember militiamen coming into my home in Lebanon, searching, trying to figure out whether I was a Christian or a Muslim.
And it was heartbreaking to hear but I think... moral distress is accentuated by the lack of accountability. We’ve been on a slippery slope where our society does not hold people accountable anymore, since 9/11 to the financial crash to the wars. The amount of violations of trust that have occurred by governments throughout the world is beyond imagination and would have been intolerable in other decades. And yet here we are, all idle bystanders while our trust is repeatedly violated on a daily basis without accountability. So yes, there is severe moral distress because there is a lack of accountability.
And my message to the members of the service would be: the reasons for which you got into the service, which were the most honorable and pure of reasons —you need to find that strength again and channel it into accountability to become active members. Those prophets can help us clean up this moral decay... It’s tragic. We seem to be heading in the same direction all over again.”
“As I listened to it, it was almost like I felt like I was shaking, particularly as I was listening to George Bush talking about this. I remember those speeches. And just feeling my own culpability. I remember, I would say in the 80s—I think a lot about this—I was supportive of the Reagan administration, the Iran-Contra, everything that happened in Latin America. I was supportive of Operation Desert Storm and then my daughter went and lived in El Salvador for five years and met someone who’s now my son-in-law.
His dad, who was a guerilla in that war, was killed. He was raised by grandparents when his dad was killed. His maternal mom’s grandparents raised him because mom had to leave because she had been married to a guerilla. And right around the same time, I went up to grad school and started learning, started hearing these stories, started hearing all of this. And, thinking of the silliness of when my kids and I, we’d bake something for the soldiers during Operation Desert Storm when my children were young.
And I was thinking about Cézar in El Salvador. You know at the same time, it’s like this story to us, it’s this distant thing to us, that we’re baking something and we’re feeling like good citizens. It was like these scales fell from my eyes and when the Iraq War started, I just knew in this really deep place it was just about we have to do something because everything I had learned about El Salvador was all so complicated. I thought, “I didn’t know any of that.” I didn’t know any of these stories. I didn’t understand the Middle East, I didn’t understand the complexity of the Middle East. Every time I’ve tried, every time I read it, it just feels like a rabbit hole I couldn’t understand.
So, it’s this feeling of just grief, hearing their stories of… how inoculated we are against them. How far and distant we are from these stories. That’s why, just this project, I think is really powerful. Because just by sitting here, it’s like, yeah, you have to feel this pain and this grief, and bear witness to this. And to me, in some ways, it’s just this kind of personal redemption. Not in some grandiose way…. I think that there’s this moral responsibility on all of our parts to hear these stories, to not say it’s too much. That if we’re going to, in some ways say we can send you to war then we damn well better know what that means. And when he was talking at the end, that he doesn’t believe in war, that’s where I am. These wars are so complex and so it always feels like its most vulnerable are people who have been sold a bill of goods. The narrative is so grounded in World War II, where there felt like there was more moral clarity.”
“What was moving at first was to hear the trauma and the nightmares and the suffering, conscience, pain, etc. that persisted after the experience. And then to me, what made it many more times painful was that they didn't think it had any purpose. So one or two of the people that spoke at least mentioned the worthlessness of this way of functioning in the world after they went through what they went through. So it's one thing to have pain and physical experiences for a higher purpose. So, you know, there's meaning there. But to take away a sense of purpose, that seems totally devastating.”
“I have to tell you I walked into this room being a mom of two boys. One of them being 22, not one hundred percent sure what he's going to do with his life, and you know, my husband's always been like, “Well, maybe you should go into the military. That's a great program.” I think hearing it is big business. I've never heard that before. I've never heard soldiers talk about feeling so bad about what they did. And I mean, I'm completely shifted. So it's awareness one hundred percent because I didn't know. If my son said he wanted to go into the military, great. You get this. You get that.”
“I think for me sending people into something that we know we are gonna need to repair them, meaning we know it's going to destroy them. That is just so hard to talk about. Why do we keep doing this? And I know this is a much bigger issue, but when we're saying we need to repair these people because we know that they're going to go in and be damaged… I guess the word repair, it just brought up a lot for me.”