It was coming.  I knew it was.  I'd managed to put it off for a long time, for as long as possible.

But it had to be dealt with.  There are times when the truth can no longer be avoided.

I had to have a heart-to-heart tonight with my daughter.  It was time to make sure she knew the whole truth.

I know what you're thinking:  It's the birds and bees thing.

If only it were that easy.

The door to the opportunity slammed open as we sat here on my bed this evening, innocuously watching some remodeling show together as I surfed through my usual daily blog reads.  It was right there, thrown at me; I could have tried to avoid it, but it would only have been a temporary fix.

I knew I had to start at the beginning.  I opened a window and went here.

Pointing to the picture, I told her the truth.

These things you see littering the ground are bodies.  They are the bodies of women and children and babies.  They don't look like much, being broken like this.  They are dead.

Some of the children in this photo would be the same age as your mother.

There are no weapons in this photo, either.  No one was armed.

I first saw this photo in a Life magazine when I was eight or nine, I can't remember.  This was a time when many people still read magazines for some of their news; they didn't have cable news or the internet, just the evening news and radio and magazines.  A lot more magazines.  Your grandmother and grandfather used to get Life magazine among others.  This particular edition I found in their bedroom with other magazines they'd been reading.  I went back to re-read this article a number of times, so shocked by what I saw, unable to tell at first whether this was real.  It took me a while to really wrap my head around this, that it was true, that something this horrible had happened.  I snuck into their bedroom to read it; I think they would have taken it away if they'd known I'd seen it.  But I was so shocked and horrified by what I saw, bodies of people that looked like family members broken and discarded like this. 

This place is called My Lai.  You can read more about it here if you wish.

I don't want to gross you out or scar you for life.  But you need to know this.  You must know this.

John Kerry went to Vietnam and saw atrocities like this; he came back and protested this and the war that spawned this.  Many people felt he did the wrong thing by protesting, as if he was saying something bad about the soldiers who fought.  We all know there are some people who are not quite right and do things that are hurtful.  If you put them in a place where things are bad and likely to make them more hurtful, and give them weapons, this is what you get. (I pointed to the photo again.)

This is wrong.  This is not what we do to other human beings, not what we do to unarmed women, children, babies.  This we can't support.

You need to know that this kind of thing can still happen.  Maybe not in exactly the same way, but you need to know that things are still going wrong.

This could be your My Lai.  It will not be pretty; it will be hard to take.  You will not see this on the news in the evening.  You won't even see this in a magazine because things have changed since I was a kid.

(I went to this site and scrolled down.)

She winced at the bodies in the street.

The photos say they are insurgents.  How do we know they were not Iraqi people who lived in Fallujah who were very angry or scared?  We don't know the truth.  It is so hard to tell from these pictures, except that these are people who are not our troops, who are now dead.

(I scrolled down further.)

This photo says this child is nine years old.

I can barely choke that out.  I scroll down further.

This child has lost his foot.  Maybe both feet.  He is not as seriously injured as the last child, but he no longer has a foot or feet.

I can't talk any more.  I am crying.  She is starting to cry.  She covers her head under a blanket.

I am sorry.  I don't want to scare you, to hurt you, to scar you for life.  But you need to know this.

Those pictures of My Lai when I was a kid shaped my political opinions for my entire life.  My mom and dad, your grandmother and grandfather, have always been to the right of me, have tended to vote Republican.  They never really understood why I turned out to the left.  They thought it was because I was mixed race - just as you are of mixed race.

But it wasn't just that.  It was those pictures that shaped my first political opinions.  I can't help but think of those broken bodies whenever I think of going to war.  A bad war will create more of these.

She can't look at the screen, even though her head has reemerged from under the blanket.  I cannot look either and move to scroll down away from the horror on the screen.

I tell her as I scroll: This is not moral.  This is not our values.  We do not do this to children.

My scrolling has stopped at a point where pictures of  troops who've been recently killed appear.  I have stopped, quite unintentionally, on the picture of a 21-year-old man from our home state, killed this past week.

Look.  He is younger than your stepbrother.  He died this past week.

And others like your stepbrother have been asked to fight in Fallujah, doing what you already saw.  That could have been your stepbrother.

I shut my laptop.

This is why I voted the way I did.  It's why I couldn't do otherwise.  The people that lived in this city will be very, very angry with us for a very long time to come.  How do you get over the death of your child?

She says, peering over the blanket, I don't think you ever could. 

It is clear from her eyes that she is very much cognizant of the magnitude of what she is saying.

Sometimes she is so wise, beyond her years.

No, I don't believe I could, as a parent.  What does their town look like, what damage has been done to their houses?  What about their homes?  They will be very, very angry about this damage.  We will have to pay billions of dollars to rebuild this town.  You will be paying taxes when you are an adult for the damage you saw in these pictures, for the bullets, for the weapons that did this damage.

You need to know this, since everything else you hear and see in the news on television and the newspaper, from your friends, might only tell you there was some fighting in Fallujah.  This is what it looks like in the end.

When I was a kid, every night there was a body count on the evening news.  They would tell us how many had died, how many had been injured, how many of the enemy had been killed.  You might be lucky to hear that any of our troops have been killed, let alone that Iraqis or others had been killed.  Never mind hearing the number injured.  You simply don't hear this.  Things have changed so that you don't hear or see the truth, unless you really go and look for it.

I didn't want to you find it alone the way I did when I found My Lai.

We talked more about war, about morals and values.  We actually managed to move towards easier things, like the birds and the bees.

I did not tell her that between her Fallujah and my My Lai, that I might have gotten the much lighter deal.

That will have to come another time, during another heart-to-heart.

10:56:59 PM    comment []