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War and Remembrance

by Stephanie Piper

There is an image that haunts me on these spring mornings, a mental photograph so sharp that it might have been taken yesterday, instead of nearly 60 years ago.

It is a picture of a paratrooper tangled in the flowering branches of a cherry tree. I know it's a cherry tree, because we had one in our yard when I was growing up. It was a tall, handsome tree that bloomed late and was covered, from mid-May to early June, with a cloud of white blossoms.

The picture in my head comes from a television series about World War II. The series follows the fortunes of a company in the 101st airborne. They parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, and fought right through to the end of the war, through Holland and the winter forests of Bastogne to Berchtesgaden. Impossibly young, unfailingly brave, they sustained a record number of casualties. In May of 1945, they liberated the Eagle's Nest and toasted the Allied victory with the Fuhrer's own champagne.

But that was later. First there was a day in June, late spring in a countryside of pastures and hedgerows and small, tidy farms. First there was a mild morning of drifting blossoms, cattle lowing in the fields below, and a young man hanging dead from the white branches.

It is a picture that, for me, tells more about war than any battlefield photo. The juxtaposition of beauty and horror frames a question I cannot seem to shake. How, on the same day, could there be white flowers and violent death?

Today's war is set against a landscape of desert beige. We know more about the day-to-day action than we've known about any military conflict in history, but we do not know, really, how spring looks in Iraq. We do not know how it comes to remote villages where people wait for the firing to stop so they can milk their goats or scatter grain for their chickens. We do not know what trees shade the courtyards of their sand-colored houses, or what flowering weeds flourish in the ditches. Iraq was once home to Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar's hanging gardens. In the fertile crescent, watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, there must still bloom flowers whose scent would cause a soldier to pause, just for a minute, and breathe in the fragrance. We do not know this, and CNN does not tell us this, but we can imagine. In Normandy, there were cherry blossoms. In Baghdad and Basra, there might be lilies.

No soldier would deny that war is paradox. To end the killing, we end up killing. To save the innocent, the innocent inevitably suffer. Spring comes anyway, strewing petals in unlikely places, fostering green shoots in the cracked earth. Our young ones, lithe and able, roll along the desert tracks. Sometimes they stop to return fire. Sometimes they stop to rest, or drink water, or search a warehouse. Sometimes, they stop to accept a ragged bouquet from someone at the side of the road who hopes, as we all hope, that the flowers will last.