Musings from distant cemetery

This September I visited Tunisia. Military cemeteries weren’t in my travel plans. They go unmentioned in guide books. One day, D’Arbi, a taxi driver, insisted on driving me past the Saint Georges Hotel. Although he didn’t speak English, D’Arbi made me understand why this hotel was important – former President Dwight Eisenhower stayed here when he visited Tunisia.

D’Arbi wrote a date on a piece of paper, 1963, saying “Eisenhower, good.” D’Arbi then named aloud each American president since Eisenhower. He rated each with a word – an OK or good except for the current one. Later, another driver Hamid, who did speak English, drove me to the Roman ruins at Dooga. We passed a cemetery with a British flag at the side of the road. Hamid said it was a military cemetery. There were English, French, Dutch and German military cemeteries – and an American one. In them were buried soldiers killed during the North African campaign of World War II.

The next morning D’Arbi drove me to the North Africa American Cemetery at Carthage. I arrived early, but a caretaker after calling the cemetery director opened the gates. I walked into a place too beautiful to represent war and death. A border of trees, flowering shrubs and vines enclose it. A lovely chapel and marble wall adorn it. At its center are 2,842 graves while the names of 3,724 more – missing in action – are engraved on the diorite wall.

A caretaker was hosing down the tombstones. Around me was silence except for the birds who found this oasis in an arid land. I walked on the paths among the graves, but it was hard to read their inscriptions while crying. The director arrived. I found out that visitors are few. For ceremonies on Memorial and Veterans Days, military personnel from Italy fly in. He tells me the soldiers buried here were killed in Niger, Morocco, Algeria, Iran and Tunisia. The graves were all consolidated in this place. Many died in the battle to liberate Tunis from the Germans. Only the remains of those whose families chose not to bring them home remain here. Many were 18- and 19-year olds. He tells me he wishes more Americans would visit these cemeteries, especially when thinking about another war. In the office was a picture of President Eisenhower taken during his visit.

Leaving, I visited the nearby site of ancient Carthage. It sits next to a gorgeous sea with misty distant mountains. The ruins are Roman, built after Rome flattened Carthage. Rome was fearful that Carthage might attack it – so it made a pre-emptive strike. More than two millennia later, such attacks still happen. On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan made a “pre-emptive” attack on the United States. Its justification for this Day of Infamy was that America would block its access to raw materials including oil.

Now, 61 years later, it is a U.S. administration planning a “pre-emptive” attack against Iraq. My mind cannot absorb it – could my country really commit such an act?

Home again in Maine, I went to the Dwight Eisenhower Web site. He warned us about the military-industrial complex. What would he say if he saw the immense power that complex now has? In his 1953 speech he said “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

What if we, while totally vigilant against further terrorism – which, the CIA says has not up to now come from Iraq – what if we spent as much to pursue peace as in pursuing the illusive protection of ever more weapons, brute force and a “missile defense”? What if we applied American ingenuity to understand the roots of terrorism, and then worked to deprive those roots of water? Might we find solutions other than endless war? Why not honor our young soldiers with the gift of peace instead of beautiful lonely cemeteries so very far from home?

Marquita Hill lives in Orono and is a member of the University of Maine faculty.