Signs at the Friday evening Walter Reed Vigil
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“Even though the hospital is closing and the vigil may be ending here, [we] will carry on in one way or another because the wars are still going on, the wounded are still happening, the blood is still flowing,” Bruce Wolf said Saturday morning, Aug. 27, as he stood on the 7100 block of Georgia Ave in northwest D.C. watching a parade of ambulances remove the last of the patients from the 102-year-old Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
The night before, Wolf stood at that very same spot, as he has each Friday evening from 7 to 9 p.m. for more than six years. Wolf and his wife, Candace, organize the weekly Walter Reed Vigil which calls for an end to the wars and full benefits and treatment for returning soldiers, many of whom are cared for at Walter Reed. Or at least they were.
As part of the military’s Base Realignment and Closure process, Walter Reed is being shut down. Its medical functions have been moved to military facilities at Fort Belvoir and Bethesda, where the National Naval Medical Center is being renamed Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
On the evening Sept. 30, like the army base it’s named after, the vigil will also come to an end. Wolf discussed the vigil’s beginning in March of 2005.
The war in Iraq was already two years old. It was discovered that wounded soldiers were being brought in in the dead of night and we believed that attention should be brought to that… [I]f we’re going to send people to war, [we] should know if they’re being brought back and what the effects of that war [are].
… We’ve been out here long enough to see too many sad pictures. Pictures of mothers who sit by the side of their sons waiting for them hopefully to one day wake up and be able to recognize them again. Soldiers swathed head to foot in bandages, with their multigenerational family sitting around them, unable to even do anything but sit there by their soldier, who obviously doesn’t even know they’re there.
There’s nothing glorious about war,” said Wolf, who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.
At its best, war is still an abominable thing. It is human beings destroying each other, as well as whole societies and cultures. There’s nothing glorious about it. Even if there was some rationale for being at war, it should always be done with the greatest reluctance and loathing. There’s nothing to parade about, nothing to cheer about.
When people say they support the troops, in our mind that should mean you support them being safe and getting them home again and not forcing them to fight other people who are really not any different than us.
(For the last couple of years, I’ve participated in the Walter Reed Vigil. My favorite sign to hold says “War Sucks.”)
* This post has been edited slightly since its original posting.
Related Stories:
Walter Reed’s Dark Secrets, 10/10/10
Marching Double File Down Georgia Avenue, 10/10/10
Operation Recovery: Stop the Deployment of Traumatized Troops, 10/6/10