THE HUMAN FACTOR-- War stories told in classroom

As the rhetoric among pundits heightens for war in Iraq, I have been hearing some other voices, which, though less schooled, have something most of our op-ed heroes don't--the experience of having lived in lands ravaged by war.

I teach at a university on the far northwest side of Chicago where for the past 10 years I have been educated in my classroom on the effects of war on the families and homelands of my students.

My experience began in the early 1990s as the waves of Vietnamese were still flooding into our campus. My students were but children during the war, yet their memories were still fresh from floating on overcrowded ramshackle boats and from the indignities of refugee camps.

In their bodies, I could see the scars of a nation that suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and, 30 years later, still has hundreds of thousands of people who are sick from the use of chemical agents.

Then came the Cambodians. I can recall students describing their mothers carrying them through the jungle as they fled the Khmer Rouge. I read about villages being burned and fathers leaving for work and never coming home.

From Africa I have heard stories of Sierra Leoneans who have watched as their friends' arms were sliced off at the elbows. I have followed an Eritrean through the desert of southern Sudan with his brother in his arms and his mother by his side as they ran from the Ethiopian army.

I have watched a Palestinian young woman crumble in my office when I asked her to read out loud a grammatically incorrect sentence. Sometimes sentences are better left alone, especially if a verb error brings back the memory of a 14-year-old brother lost in the violence of the West Bank.

Stories also came from battlegrounds no less bloody and not so far away, from Latinos and African-Americans who are veterans of a war we never talk about, a war that kills and maims our young people by the thousands every year.

One of the most difficult stories I have had to read came from a Puerto Rican veteran who described in chilling detail blowing up a drug depot deep in the jungles of Colombia, knowing that women and children were sleeping inside. "What could I do?" he asked, seemingly addressing me but no doubt his own conscience. "I'd have been court-martialed if I didn't carry out my orders."

Well, I couldn't read the rest of it without logging in and accepting a cookie, so I didn't. I shall content myself with pointing out that all the instances of war he described above are examples of people fleeing either communism or islamofascism, both of which we as Americans fight. McColly only has access to these stories because some of the refugees of these poisonous movements came here, to freedom... a freedom that the communists and islamofascists are determined to eradicate.

Well, I couldn't read the rest of it without logging in and accepting a cookie, so I didn't.

I'll cheat, here's the rest. Maybe Pax Americana wouldn't be such a bad thing for the world?

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Then in the late '90s came the Bosnians. I will never forget one of my best students defiantly pulling up her T-shirt to prove to fellow classmates that the essay she had read to them was not fiction. And there on her stomach was a map of the streets of Sarajevo, a red scramble of scars, indelibly etched to remind her of that day she went out to play hide and seek only to lose her little brother and many of her friends to a mortar that fell on them.

As the war in Iraq approaches, one scene in particular haunts me. It was on the last day of classes six years ago. I had asked my students to read a favorite passage from one of their essays.

One by one they read. One young Polish man read proudly about his stint in the Persian Gulf war and what it was like to roll through the desert at night in his tank. The last to read was one of the oldest students I've ever had, an Iraqi man over 50, who between menial jobs was trying to return to his former career--teaching.

He prefaced his reading with an apology, wanting no one to think that he was not grateful for his family's life in America.

And then, he described huddling around a candle on the floor of his house with his family and his sister's family on the first night of the gulf war. He admitted how ashamed he was as a father, as he sat helpless in the darkness thinking of his sister, who had not come home, and hearing the children whimpering each time bombs shook their house.

The next day, through the shattered city of Baghdad, he went in search for his sister, and in a makeshift morgue in a shoe factory, he found her under a blanket.

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