June 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Commemorating the Victims of War, Celebrating Compassion for All

Addresss by Richard Bennett at the Unitarian Fellowship in Fayetteville, AR, Memorial Day weekend 2002.

Fayetteville's Clarence Craft won the Congressional Medal of Honor for extraordinary physical bravery during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. President Harry Truman personally presented him with the award.

Craft single-handedly attacked a heavily fortified hilltop. From the US Army official commendation: "He stood up in full view of the enemy and began shooting with deadly marksmanship whenever he saw a hostile movement. He steadily advanced up the hill, killing Japanese soldiers with rapid fire, driving others to cover in their strong trenches, unhesitatingly facing alone the strength that had previously beaten back attacks in battalion strength." After throwing two cases of grenades brought to him by soldiers of his company, he attacked the main enemy trench as confusion and panic seized the defenders. "Straddling the excavation, he pumped rifle fire into the Japanese at point-blank range, killing many and causing others to flee down the trench," where they took cover in a cave. Craft threw a satchel explosive into the cave, "sealing up the Japanese in a tomb." During the incident he also wiped out another heavy machine gun. The Japanese were routed, and their entire defense line crumbled.

Asked why he took such risks, how he found the courage, he declared: "I just kind of saw red when my buddy got hit, and I turned and took off for those damned Japs."

In 1999 a Fayetteville park was named in his honor. On that occasion, students from the Woodland Junior High choir sang familiar martial songs; a color guard from the University of Arkansas Air Force ROTC posted the colors. The ROTC Commander expressed the feelings of the audience, I feel sure, when he declared: "It is an honor to recognize a hero who put his life on the line."

In 2002 Arkansas lawmakers seek to name the Fayetteville post office on Joyce Street after him. Congressman Boozman of the 3rd District stated his intent to inspire youngsters to emulate Craft, that "some mom would tell a kid this is Clarence Craft and he was a patriot."

Craft died this year at the age of 80 and was buried with full military honors in the US Military Cemetery in Fayetteville where he is memorialized among other veterans of the country's many wars. His combat heroism represents an ancient warrior code celebrated in countless writings from Homer's Iliad to the present. But a new, alternative code appeared during the last century, and at Okinawa.

The Cornerstone of Peace

Had Clarence Craft been killed by that last machine gun or when he exploded that cave, he would have been memorialized in a way astonishingly different from that of Fayetteville's Military Cemetery. His name would have appeared in the Okinawan memorial to the Battle, the "Cornerstone of Peace." This cenotaph, composed of huge slabs of granite and an eternal flame, located on the southern tip of the island, may indicate, I hope signals, a new stage in human consciousness.

In all previous monuments to war dead, nations honored only their own dead, and only combatants. Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe celebrated originally his 660 generals (the Unknown Soldier and names of other soldiers were added later) and 128 battles. The utterly different but equally impressive Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, significantly expands consciousness: it lists the dead officers and soldiers equally in the chronological order of their deaths. But both the Arc de Triomphe and the Vietnam War Memorial honor only their own nation's dead. Only their nation's dead deserved honor. I believe this practice, by honoring only one nation's war heroes, entrenches nationalism and engenders wars. In the war monuments and cemeteries of the past, nationalistic patriotism and past aggression, despite their woeful consequences, foster acceptance of war and prepare for future wars. (I define patriotism as love of one's place--and nationalism as belief in the superiority of one's nation.)

"Stop the Cycle of Violence" -- Students at the University of Pennsylvania on April 16 planted ninety life-sized gravestones in the center of the Penn campus, forty-five bearing the names of victims of the September 11th attacks, and forty-five bearing the names of Afghani citizens killed during US bombing. A candlelight vigil acknowledged all life lost on September 11th and in the United States' War on Terrorism. Photo: Ben Bressman

The commemoration of war dead changed in 1995. An extraordinary, new perspective already evolving in the consciousness of humankind expressed by the Vietnam War Memorial was publicly revealed with the creation by the people of Okinawa of the "Cornerstone of Peace." On Okinawa, for the first time, with 234,183 names, all the dead soldiers are named--all, not only the Japanese soldiers, but the United States and British soldiers too. But there is significantly more: All the civilians killed in the last major campaign of World War II are listed, and not only the Okinawans, but also the Korean forced laborers. And still more: all the Okinawan civilians who died war-related deaths throughout the Pacific War are named.

Adair, Arais, Ishi, Kim, Lee, Smith, Suzuki, the 114 slabs of black granite bear the names of all the victims, the separate groups in alphabetical order--some 13,000 US military, 80,000 Japanese soldiers, and some 147,000 Okinawan civilians who died during the war and the Battle. For the first time, the chief victims of war--the civilian men, women, and children slaughtered by the combatants--receive their remembrance in this monument motivated by a profound disgust with wars. In this monument, peace is truly the subject, peace is the yearning, peace is the hope. The names proclaim all to be equal victims of war; the names of the victims cry out against war.

But in its universal mourning, the "Cornerstone of Peace" paradoxically also celebrates. It solemnizes the hope that a fundamental change is occurring in human consciousness--moving slowly, like the separation of continents, or the accumulation of snowflakes prior to an avalanche, or the melting of an iceberg, but evolving away from war. In the past, in all nations, leaders and their followers have told their own national war stories, national war histories, national war myths, to reinforce their nation's readiness to kill. And the narratives, the histories, and the myths are reinforced in the memorials to the nation's dead: by monuments and cemeteries and cenotaphs to revere the heroic nation's heroic dead, strengthen the national will, and prepare for the next war.

In contrast, the "Cornerstone of Peace" looks forward to a future without the hatred that teaches soldiers to kill without remorse. It proclaims to future generations hope for a different world.

But, most important, the "Cornerstone of Peace" encourages us to act upon our hope. We can reject the teaching that war is inevitable. We can believe that human biology makes warfare possible, but not inevitable. We can abhor patriotic or religious legitimizing of the mass murder of innocent life--whether by extermination camps or by dropping bombs--in the pursuit, leaders always say, of a just cause. We can acknowledge the victimization of all in wars, not only the civilians on both sides, but the soldiers too. We can embrace the unity of humanity, as we affirm the essential dignity of all people.

Heroes for the Future

No scorn for Clarence Craft's incomparable physical courage is intended. He was raised in a world that believed in war and justified killing. He did his warrior duty as that world taught him and continues to teach its youth.

But Clarence Craft, Congressional Medal of Honor Winner, should not be the model in a nuclear world. Another kind of heroism is needed against weapons of mass destruction. Such courage, such heroism, is found particularly in opponents of war, the advocates of nonviolence, such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., or the advocates of education and negotiation, such as former Senator J. William Fulbright. In fact they constitute a sizeable minority of the citizens of many countries: people like Stephen Biko, Albert Einstein, St. Francis of Assisi, the Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Toyohiko Kagawa, Krishnamurti, Oscar Romero, Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer, Leo Tolstoy, St. Catherine of Siena, Anne Frank, Rosika Schwimmer, Bertha von Suttner. . . They understood the compassionate message of the "Cornerstone of Peace."

This prayer for peace comes from Okinawa:

It is true
That human beings cause war.
But is it not equally true
That we the human beings
Can and must prevent it?

That we must, especially after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nobody denies; and we can. We have models of the new human being, the new Adam and Eve. Because of Father Berrigan, César Chávez, John Lennon, A. J. Muste, and Chief Seattle, of Jane Addams, Emily Balch, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Day, and Muriel Rukeyser, we know we can turn from the aggression and killing of the past. Our ancestors knew it, for that knowledge is the central moral value of literature that teaches us how to transcend our narrow selves, to put ourselves in the place of others, to imagine their pains and pleasures. Instead of national anthems, flags, and slogans, we can learn the humanity of others, even of enemies. The histories of war that perpetuate war give the perspectives of the warriors. That is the old humanity. But the new we find by imagining the experiences of the children Koei Kinjo or Teruko Uku and of the other children who survived, as recounted in An Oral History of the Battle of Okinawa.

Clarence Craft, Citizen

To some extent, Clarence Craft learned that message before he died. There were two Clarence Crafts. He was not only a war hero. At the dedication of the park named after him, one speaker called him "a hero for his 8500 hours as a respected and beloved volunteer at the VA Medical Center in Fayetteville." So much was he respected for his service as a volunteer that the VA Center named its primary care facility after him in 1998. Because of this, because Clarence Craft had learned to serve ill and dying fellow veterans, I can imagine he had also transcended the old nationalist tunnel vision. I can imagine him possessing the empathy expressed by the "Cornerstone of Peace." I can believe he had imagined the children and mothers and old people who took refuge in the cemetery tombs during the Battle, or who tried to survive in the cliffside caves below the monument as US cruisers fired point blank during the last days of the Battle.

I can imagine that before he died, he could even see and feel for the Japanese soldiers who had tried to kill him out of similar desperation, anger, and patriotic national feeling. If true, then he had become another harbinger of reconstituted humanity.

--Dick Bennett

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