The View from Here:
Requiem to the Victims of Past Wars

Lynne K. Fukuda
Instructor, Institute of Biology, Hawaii Pacific University
lfukuda@hawaii.edu

We live in a time of peace--and yet a time of war. For many civilians, war is a remote reality, only the stuff of TV broadcasts and the president's speeches. Many of us go through life literally untouched by the scourge of combat, never having experienced first-hand a family member lost in battle, a city burned to the ground, how it feels to starve on the streets, or the selling of bodies; we have never lived such miserable, hopeless lives.

In the recent past, we have sent our men to far-off places they have never seen or imagined in their young lives: Europe, Vietnam, Korea, and the Persian Gulf. None of these wars were fought on U.S. soil. While the Veterans of Foreign Wars interred their members in cemeteries around the country, these soldiers' spirits remained lost in limbo, searching out their loved ones far from home, never finding their way back. Veterans' cemeteries form a sea of headstones, a forlorn pattern of haunted souls.

As a little girl, I visited the Veteran's Cemetery at Punchbowl Crater in Hawaii, where the dead of the Pacific war are buried. I was only four years old, unaware of the suffering families of those who lay beneath the stones. These markers were unlike the white crosses, marble statues, and the dark stone Buddhist markers. I did not realize the flat headstone marked real graves. I began to play hopscotch on them, not realizing the gravity of my actions.

Suddenly, I felt a rough hand pull me off the stones. "Do you realize that you are trampling dead people and showing great disrespect?" My mother's voice yelled, piercing my consciousness. My mother's face was the color of a tomato. Then she calmed down and explained to me in a quiet voice (after I bent to apologize to the dead) that the flat stones below us signified the great sacrifice of veterans' lives.

I shuddered, imagining that I had been hopping on the bellies of dead soldiers and stomping on them, and now they would rise from the grave to haunt me at night. Later, I felt terribly ashamed. I was guilty of sheer ignorance. I grew up oblivious to the Vietnam War while it waged in my childhood. And yet, my mother, a small child living in Europe and Japan, had experienced the war twice. She was shocked that her usually well-behaved daughter would embarrass her in front of other grieving people by dancing on graves.

My education was not complete until my mother instilled in me how to appreciate the sacrifice of others. The guilt I felt that fateful Veteran's Day stayed with me for many years. As I grew up, I sometimes made a point to visit the lonely souls of the soldiers in cemeteries, finding solace in the silence, and giving comfort as a living soul to them.

My education on the effects of war went farther than the reprimand I received that day. My mother related to me bit by bit in the years to come how her early childhood memories had been erased because she was probably born during Hitler's regime in Europe and escaped with her parents to a fascist Japan that hated all foreigners. "There is never any right or wrong in war, just a lot of misery and suffering," Mother said to me, recalling how young women prettied themselves up to make a living by serving soldiers' desires; her childhood friends walked the streets with starving, swollen bellies.

My maternal grandfather also hated war. During World War II, he protested against a war with America only to be tortured and forced into the military, where he slaved away in an ammunitions factory. Sickness and poverty befell his once-wealthy and happy family. Grandmother fell ill, and because there were no medicines, she worsened and lived the remaining few years of her life in suffering. If the war had never happened, she might have lived a full and healthy life, but it was fate; my family could not stop a force stronger than themselves.

My Godfather was a victim of war, a veteran of the Pacific war in Guadalcanal. Barely seventeen when war broke out, he sacrificed himself, perhaps being exposed to chemical or biological agents, and died after many terrible years of suffering from a degenerative disease. It took his soul and vexed his waking and sleeping hours with the memories of a grisly past. A friend of mine buried his father, a Vietnam Veteran, whose health was ruined by Agent Orange.

A friend of my grandfather's, an American of Japanese descent, was also a casualty of war. The war with Japan made him--although an American--an enemy of this country's own people. He was held in an internment camp and suffered unmentionable emotional damage. He could not find a job as a medical doctor in the US, so he immigrated to Japan in order to share his knowledge with the people of his blood.

Even decades after war, Japanese-Americans suffer from the aftermath. They suffered financially, emotionally, and in self-image. Imagine if we in the near future discriminated against people of Middle-Eastern descent or Muslim heritage just because we engaged in a war with Iraq. War reaps hatred, prejudice, and too many unhappy results to count. It is not an answer to the problems of our world.

The MIA lab in Honolulu still brings back the remains of soldier who were missing in action during the Vietnam War. I wonder how the families of lost soldiers feel when they never have a chance for closure, when they know that their loved ones have died alone in a foreign land without a decent burial. Why must America's soldiers die on foreign soil when our defenses are meant for self-defense? Would we feel the same about waging war in foreign lands, endangering innocent civilians in their countries, if our own lands were devastated by an atomic bomb, burned to the ground, or our civilians killed by chemical and biological weapons?

As a teacher on a military base, I work with the children of our soldiers. Many are thin, lonely, and sensitive, thankful for any morsel of affection. Their mothers and fathers may have to leave for war and never return. They move from state to state, sometimes the victims of domestic abuse because our military creates "killing machines" that sometimes cannot be turned of after their job is done.

I cried rivers of tears in the years I worked as a teacher for military college students and as a biology teacher for a university that held classes on the military bases. Some of my former students died in "accidents" during training. An aging helicopter from the 50s or 60s took one, live fire exercise took another, and I do not doubt that others have died because they were soldiers simply trained to die.

Recently, I bade farewell to some of my students, marines at the Kaneohe Marine Base. Some were mere boys, fresh from high school with ideals that soon began to tarnish when they were told to fight in a war that no one believed in. Others tried to distract themselves by saying, "Miss Fukuda, I got my new equipment and uniform today!" I saw the scared, sad look in their faces, and while smiling at them, I cried inside. "Maybe they will run out of funds and we won't have to wage war, just practice for it," I said jokingly. I prayed to God that this would be true.

On their last day, after they left my class, I was haunted by the echoes of their young voices. These men joked cheerfully, but they were filled with fear and remorse. "If only I had time to enjoy myself more," some seemed to say. "If only I had more time to spend with my sweetheart," another seemed to say. My head pounded with their regrets. I felt as though I were going crazy. And in the darkness of the Kaneohe night, soldiers' ghosts from past wars appeared. One was a marine dressed in WWII uniform. Another was a soldier from the Persian Gulf. I was petrified and saddened to the core of my heart.

Many of us are survivors of wars long past and their effects. While we do not remember much about those distant wars, their aftermath of hatred, suffering, poverty, and human misery echoes in our world and haunts our everyday lives. Those from Hitler's regime are filled with remorse for what they did and could not do. The descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust are haunted by what happened to the others. Vietnam Veterans are crippled by emotional distress, many unable to lead normal lives, resorting to drink and living on the streets. Soldiers' wives and children are often forced to live with so much personal and private uncertainty. Some soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome after returning from war. Men who have been kind and loving become abusive monsters who beat their wives and children. Others became crazed and addicted, drinking themselves to death.

Many of our younger generation have lost faith in the violent, often impoverished world where the only solutions seem to be killing and war. What are we if we cannot set examples for them of a better, happier world? How can we give them hope, when the status of our nation is symbolized by planes flying into skyscrapers in a mass murder, when people jump out of buildings to certain death because there is no better way? How can I tell the youth that the sad eyes of the soldiers in desert fatigues will not be their own in a few years? As our nation spends our funds in war, our children's educational resources are depleted. Suppose our schools taught them that war is wrong and that there is a better world than this one--one without wars?

I am a selfish aunt, praying that my three nephews will never be drafted and never know war. I want them to live in a time of peace, where peoples of different cultures are treated equally and our resources are shared to create a safer, healthier environment. I am against a culture of hatred and revenge. I petition against the war. I light candles in hope that God will ensure that there is no war.

I am still visited by the ghosts of dead soldiers with their hollow eyes and lost souls. They are still lost in a foreign land far from home. I pray to reunite them with their families, their sources of love, and never again will play hopscotch on their graves. The flat markers shrouded in silence in the Punchbowl Cemetery of the Pacific are symbolic of the ultimate sacrifice: men who served with their lives in hopes of a world without war. I do not want to trample on their graves by supporting another war.

If these dead men were asked to rise out of their graves, they would ask for a time of peace so that they could spend it with their families. They died too young, possibly forced into war, hating war, sold to die for their country. These dead soldiers have taught me how to cherish my friends and family, to give to the community, and to pray to God. Life is much too short to waste in hatred and in selfishness. Perhaps some day, I will meet those soldiers in Heaven and we will laugh over the futileness of war. Maybe we will be sent down as messengers to relay the message that in the end, only love can save our world.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

Page Viewed:   / Created: 21 February 2003 / Updated: 3 March 2003