A Mother’s Day for peace

Julia Ward Howe, after witnessing the terrible carnage of the Civil War as a nurse in Washington hospitals, founded Mother's Day for Peace 144 years ago. She did not envision a day of flowers, greeting cards, and breakfast in bed, but rather mothers united in action to end all wars.

Waging war has changed greatly since 1865. Although we have weapons Civil War soldiers could not have imagined, many more wounded servicemen and women survive and return home to the families and communities they left. Advances in medicine and transportation have allowed thousands to recover from wounds that would certainly have been fatal as recently as World War II. And this is wonderful news.

But nobody comes home from conflict the same person who left. It changes everyone. As Vietnam veteran George Masters writes, 'If you've never hunted humans, if you've never been hunted, if you haven't been shot at on a regular basis,” you will never understand what this person has been through. Beyond any physical wounds, veterans of conflict have experienced trauma that has changed them forever. According to the mother of an Iowa National Guard Vet who recently took his own life, 'Sometimes the worst wounds are the ones you can't see.”

It's difficult to separate out the problems of returning veterans and to determine cause and effect, but the rates of homelessness and unemployment among veterans are unacceptably high. Many of those hopeful young men and women who believed that the military would teach them marketable skills or send them through four years of college successfully haven't found those promises true, or have been so traumatized that they are unable to use them.

And the results of these invisible wounds? According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, 22 former members of the military commit suicide every day; that's almost 1,900 in the first three months of this year, alone. Both physical and psychological pain contribute to the abuse of drugs and alcohol. Sometimes there is unexpected and unexplained violence, as at Fort Hood this past April, when a veteran of the Iraq conflict killed three and wounded 16 others before shooting himself.

Today, 17 percent of United States veterans are women. Their problems can be compounded by the trauma of sexual assault while serving in the military. The Department of Defense reports that about a third of all women who have served in the military have experienced some form of sexual assault or related trauma.

Tina Brown, psychologist at the Cleveland VA Medical Center, states that MST (military sexual trauma) can result in a variety of mental illnesses (including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression), substance abuse, and physical health problems. These, in turn, can result in unemployment and even homelessness. Among 18-34-year-old women, female vets are three times more likely to kill themselves than nonveterans of the same age.

So what can mothers (and others) do? Certainly we can and should demand that the Department of Veterans Affairs provide better treatment and care for all veterans, and we can show more compassion to returning servicemen and women.

But as Bob Wilson, a combat Marine disabled in Vietnam recently wrote regarding calls for tax breaks for veterans, 'What we really need is for you to quit creating us.”

I suspect Julia Ward Howe, were she alive today, would be leading a Mothers March on Washington, calling for an end to our endless preparation for war, and an end to devoting 45 percent of our tax dollars to defense, and only 2 percent to seeking peace.

If peace is your priority, contact Congressman Bruce Braley and Senators Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley. Share your views with them and ask them to fund peace, not war.

' Kathleen J. Hall of Cedar Rapids is a member of Workers for Peace Iowa and Whittier Friends Meeting. Comments: khall479@aol.com