Essay: Seeking answers to the why of war

I see dead people.

Not so strange, really. I'm a journalist. And for part of my life I was a war reporter. But what is spooky at times is the words that linger on. In the air, on the paper.

"My time is getting short, Mom, pray for me."

"Every time I read about another boy killed I relive my sorrow. But he believed so in what we are doing there."

"They haven't completed the mission, and they have to."

"Was it right? Was it wrong? I don't know. My anger destined me to hell. So many dead. So many killed."

What's scary to me is that the first two entries and the last two were written 40 years - seven American wars - apart.

The first were contents of a 1969 Memorial Day front-page story for the Miami Herald. It was by a Vietnam-reporter colleague and friend who himself very nearly became one of those dead people.

The second two, I saw on a recent front page of a local paper - the words of one of our neighbors who lost her own son in Iraq - and on the walls at Western Nevada College, at the "Always Lost" exhibit now in the main gallery where 4,139 more fallen Americans gaze back at me from the bloody shadows of Babylonia.

One was Noah Pierce, a soldier.

He didn't die from a bullet or bomb. He died from the inside out.

After two tours in Iraq filled his nightmares with enough dead people to explode, he came home and killed himself.

For us.

So that we, our children, lovers, parents, friends, did not have to join the 41 hundreds on the wall next to him.

Cheryl and Tom Softich did know this body, Noah Pierce. They are his mother and stepfather.

WNC took up an informal collection to help them travel here to Carson, so they could explain all that is in his eyes, and read again his oath of honor:

"So when you talk to me I may not seem to pay attention

I may forget to laugh at a joke

Remember freedom isn't free

I would do it all over for you."

Whether you were "over there," whether you wonder if you should be, or pray for those who are, or honor them, or don't think of them much at all because by the grace of God you don't know any of them, you lost more than a soldier when Noah was buried, fellow citizens.

You lost a poet, and a witness. Teresa Breeden's words, on the wall near Noah, spell out our loss in letters like tears:

"as though a forest's thin memory could reinvent the ashes."

We'll never know all that Noah's agony, and his love, would drive him to say. But we still hear his question in the wind - the question from the silent ranks of tens of thousands of servicewomen and men already prostrate in their sacrifice - and we must answer all of them.

Go to that good wall, read his words of American anguish -

"I don't want to die

I don't want to live

but should be dead

I'm already in hell."

- and answer them: After seven wars, and whatever those wars took from us or won for us, why are they all there?

• Bob Cutts is a former journalism instructor at WNC.