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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels October 15, 2004 I'll Shut Up - Right After This Being loyal to the whole John Darling I'm interviewing S., this doctor and she's helping teens, nudging them to build conscientious objector files. We finish our interview and she starts telling me tales about her draft resistance work back east in the early '70s, painting guys' bodies with crazy designs in India ink and building a big nutcase file by going for months to a shrink and telling demented stories. She tells me about talking with a Christian woman in Medford whose brother was wounded in Iraq and how the woman believes Bush is ordained by God to do what he's doing and how the churches, the more conservative ones, are "pounding it into them" and she told the woman that the U.S. is not obligated to set the Islamic world straight. "I feel pretty helpless," the doctor said. "It's so enormous. I just try to educate people to get in the highest place but people don't understand the ability of humans in the political world to create horrific situations like the Holocaust. And today, we've created these people in the Mideast who, from out point of view, aren't human." She sees it here at home in little things, like honking at someone who doesn't immediately move at a green light. "The level of how people care for each other has really degenerated. I'm really freaked out by this." After the draft resistance story, I get more e-mails than I've ever gotten on a story - and from all over the country, almost all scared, wanting to talk to the local people organizing the resistance here. Despite the sudden, huge House vote against it (intended to dispense with it as a campaign issue), they say, the draft can be used at any time. Listening to John Edwards in Medford, I realize this guy will very likely be the next Democrat nominated for president. He doesn't talk much about Iraq. He wants to keep it about domestic stuff, especially health care, which could be funded for the next couple centuries out of what we've spent in Iraq in 18 months. Pressing the flesh after his talk, you realize, hey, he's receiving acclaim you rarely see for a candidate. He walks by me, stopping dead in front of me and looks into my eyes, as he does with everyone. He's presenting himself to listen to anything I might want to say. I so don't expect this. I smile and say "Good luck, senator." He nods and moves on. The soccer moms and I hang and watch the debates, sipping wine, nibbling pizza while our teen sons run around the house. How can we not glance over at their lovely smiles and mad, zany energy and not imagine them being sent to war? Bush is asked what mistakes he's made as president. He skips the question, using it to say why the Iraq war is not a mistake. Next day, half a dozen Oregon guardsmen, wounded in Iraq, fly here to pick up care packages put together by volunteers. I've never talked to young men with fresh wounds. They speak their gratitude for the caring of people who did these packages. It's the love, not the stuff, that counts, they say. One says he would turn around and go back to Iraq if he could, but his wounds prevent it. Others agree. Why, I finally ask, would you want to go back there? My pals, he says. He mentions the "mission," but it's his comrades that he cares about. It's my job, my duty, my friends, he says. He even made friends among the Iraqi people and misses them, it's clear. At the end of the interview, they show some of their wounds to each other and me. One is a foot long gash on the arm of this man from Corvallis, from a stray bullet. It's healing nicely, he says. Another shows what looks like recent claw marks from a large cat - shrapnel. Almost all of them were blown up in Humvees as they ran over IED, which means improvised explosive devices - bombs rigged inside big shell casings, with a car alarm for a trigger. Another wounded man says he's got a wife and kids - and feels bad for wanting to go back but, at the same time, bad for wanting to stay here. When he was blown up, a pal was killed, a guy he knew back home. He visits the man's mother every day. It was her only child, so she said she'd adopt him in her son's stead. He was good with that. I talk to Anne, an old colleague from '70s Medford TV news, who says she's become captivated by helping the Iraq war's wounded because no one wants to forget them, like we did the soldiers from 'Nam, so many of whom went onto depression, alcoholism and feeling they'd done something wrong. I finish my interview and look at these guys, the same kind of tough, happy warriors I served with in the Marines (peacetime) and I so know their loyalty. I put my hand on a shoulder or two and say, hey guys, thank you for going over there and fighting and suffering for us and carrying wounds you'll have all your life, including the wound that won't go away - seeing friends die. We see the soldiers onto their jet-prop National Guard plane. Anne and I talk. She's been working hard on the Kerry campaign. Never seen one like this, she says. Me neither, I note. Even during the Vietnam War, there was a sense that the rubber duck would right itself in the bathtub, but that's gone now. These are no ordinary times - the country vehemently split in two and backed by deeply-seated, almost ancient emotions that portray the other side not as just misguided, but bordering on evil itself. Even if one's own side wins, will it stop? No, it won't. There's a lot of work to do and it doesn't end if one's candidate wins. It's about loyalty, not to one's side, but to the country as a whole - to all of us. That's what these soldiers showed us. Contact John Darling, an Ashland writer and counselor, at [email protected]. DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams