December 2009 Issue
by Vickie Aldrich and Mary Burton Risely
What began as a family project in the fall of 2003 as a response to the invasion of Iraq has become a leading with its own life. “At the time we started, there were 637 deaths, and they weren’t allowing images of coffins in the media. We wanted to make that number visible,” said Vickie. She and Tim Reed and daughter Jenny Stuart began making cranes, and crafted the first eleven panels of cranes, which they displayed at local peace vigils. Since then, everyone from IMYM’s children’s program to community members in Las Cruces has worked to make cranes for the memorial. It now contains 110 panels with over 4,000 cranes. When it is set up, it extends for nearly 100 yards, the length of a football field. It has been displayed in Las Cruces, in Silver City, in Albuquerque and Santa Fe—and in our nation’s capital.
In the winter of 2008, I mentioned to Mary Burton Riseley of Gila Friends Meeting in Silver City that I would like to take the Iraq Peace Crane Memorial to Washington DC. Mary said, “Great! We can take my truck.” In the spring, we telephoned the National Park Service, which operates the monuments in Washington, DC. They sent us a permit to display the Memorial for three days over the Memorial Day weekend at the base of the Washington Memorial on a grassy plot at the corner of 14th Street and Constitution Avenue. This permit was free, as we were not selling anything and qualified for First Amendment protections.
We did not believe it would happen until we pulled out of the driveway on May 19th. Tim figured out a way to support panels in cross-shaped groups, since the National Mall does not allow stakes to be put in the ground and Jenny (my daughter) came to help and took digital photos. Friends from Quaker Meetings and the peace community in our region sent money to pay our expenses. So many people supported us that we have money left over to buy more panels and take the memorial to new cities in our region.
It took us four days to drive to DC, and four days back. (We traveled in a 1994 Toyota pickup with the odometer reading 301,100 plus miles when we left New Mexico. Prayers were welcomed!) We had friends and family who gave us hospitality en route and in Washington.
I had never been to DC and as we drove in with Mary pointing out famous sites. We kept seeing the many homeless people, with their shopping carts and plastic bags.
Thousands of people travel to Washington for Memorial Day, and hundreds stopped by our display. On the first day we asked people many questions. “How are you related to the person you’re looking for? Have you been to Iraq? What do you think we should do now?” To the last, we heard interesting responses, and not one person supported staying in Iraq. One Army guy said, “We’re training the Iraqi police and I don’t see any reason we need to stay over there.”
Day Two
The second day, the day of “Rolling Thunder”, over 20,000 Vietnam veterans on their motorcycles roared along a route from the Pentagon to the Vietnam Memorial and then right past us for six hours. We asked fewer questions.
The memorial creates its own space, its own energy. I keep learning this each time I sit with it. This time I was impressed by the juxtaposition of the peace crane symbol and the pictures of the soldiers. On Memorial Day, the past deaths of soldiers are often used to justify current and future wars. It seemed to me that we presented an alternative, the possibility of remembering and honoring these mostly young people who have died in an unjust war as a way of expressing our wish for peace.
By Monday, we just felt like listening if the person we’d helped find someone wanted to talk. Most did not. So we just stood by them for a short time, and then left them to their own thoughts.
Mary said, “I began to feel that by questioning them I might be using them to satisfy my curiosity or to have interesting experiences to report when we got home. I gradually became more sensitive to my own grief and to theirs. Each day I cried more. By that last day, I felt that my generic grief for the 4037 lives lost in the Iraq War was joined to their deeper and more specific grief and I didn’t want to talk, either.”
It was a unique experience to set up on Memorial Day weekend. We met many vets, Girl Scouts passing out angel pins, a sympathetic woman from the Defense Department, a Japanese journalist, young women from England who videotaped us, a Washington blogger, motorcyclists and motorcyclists and motorcyclists, people from all over the world and the Scientologists who set up next to us and helped us set up and take down each day.
On the way home, driving through rain in Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, and white sky humidity in Western Tennessee and Arkansas, we listened to “Field Notes on a Catastrophe” by Elizabeth Kolbert, a fascinating account of the evidence supporting the human role in global climate change. I was driving and I said to Mary, “This makes me feel like we should pull over and park the truck and never drive again.”
Was it worth it, driving 3,984 miles to DC and back to New Mexico?
We feel it was. We bought carbon offsets, calculated for us by the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a non-profit which buys solar and wind power generation. (The cost for the 3011 pounds of carbon we produced by our round trip at 25 miles per gallon was $40.)
Most of the people we met were tied in some way to the military. These are the people who make an effort to go to Washington for Memorial Day. It felt very good to serve wives and fiances, friends, brothers and sisters of those who have died in Iraq, to provide them with the only marker of the Iraq War in DC this year, an impressive visual record of those 4037 lives lost so far.
We reached across an ideological divide in a way that most peace actions really don’t. We left those who stopped by with a different idea about peace activists than the one we leave when we’re marching or vigiling for an end to the war. We both wore FCNL “War is Not the Answer” blue and white buttons, but we did not proselytize, and hopefully we were able to embody an anti-war sentiment that clearly cares deeply about the people who volunteer to fight in war, and for the grief of their loved ones.
May the gifts of the Earth touch our hearts.
May we be filled with kindness for ourselves,
for our planet, and all beings.
May we have the courage to change.
Since our trip and the publicity we have received locally, we have been invited by veterans groups to set up the memorial on Veteran’s Day. We live in an area with lots of military installations and lots of veterans. How do we as Friends talk and discuss the issues of war and peace with our neighbors? How do we move away from polarization to communication? The strong vision I am left with after DC is that this memorial is one of hope, it gives an option to those in the military—yes, mourn and honor the lives that have been lost, but change directions and work not for more wars but for peace. I believe it will be the soldiers and their families, not us peace activists, that will lead us in demilitarizing and creating new priorities for our country.
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Vickie’s journal entry May 26, 2008
Memorial Day
I woke up with thoughts about the Peace Crane Memorial. We have set it up on the Mall for two days.
Some people are able to see it, others not, they walk past or right through. Children come right in and begin to read names. Where we have it set up, from far away it looks really huge, but from up close it is smaller.
It is a spiritual journey, as a Friend said. I see it now as a ‘listening project’. I wonder if we could listen away a war. I think I am getting better at listening to the vets and their families but I do not know how to listen to the angry Quakers or ‘peace’ activists. I do not believe we can stop the war machine with anger. I think all nonviolent movements need to get beyond the anger of those harmed, to compassion.
The way of war continues as we accept structures or see relationships and agreements as structures. The poverty here is amazing, homelessness and overt richness. We accept this relationship and use the military to defend it. The use and abuse of the soldier and the veteran is amazing.
So much comes down to listening and it is such a challenge for me. One woman came up to me and said she had walked into the Memorial and the first name she saw was from her home town. It kind of freaked her out. People have asked if we had something, an info sheet, a hand out a web site. I think it is better that we do not. What we have is the experience, the feelings they have at seeing the memorial.
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Vickie Aldrich is a member of Las Cruces Monthly Meeting in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Mary Burton Riseley is a member of Gila Friends Meeting in Silver City, New Mexico. Friends interested in learning more about the Iraq Peace Crane Memorial can contact Vickie at mathstar (at) zianet (dot) com.
The prayer included in this story is reprinted from raventalk.com.