“It’s the guns they say — and maybe they are right.”
But it wasn’t for me. As a combat soldier who took the bullets out of my gun in the middle of a dark night in a dusty tent on the battlefield of the Iraq war, it wasn’t the gun, for me. What I did was a symptom of a much bigger battle that I had just lost. Everything I thought I knew about right and wrong, loving God, and serving my country didn’t survive that battle. God confronted me with an undeniable love that embraced my enemy as much as it embraced me. I couldn’t argue with it, because the truth of it made my chest ache like a rollercoaster dropping me to the ground after launching me 100 feet in the air. I saw that perfect love casts out fear, and like a summer streak of lightning lighting up the night sky overhead, I couldn’t unsee it. Laying down my gun was one of the aftershocks of being confronted with the most powerful weapon on the planet: unconditional love.
We had just landed in Iraq. I was 23 years old with a combat medic bag strapped to my back; I had been deployed to the Iraq war as part of the preemptive strike. America hadn’t declared war. Instead we pushed over a hundred thousand soldiers into the country overnight, and I was one of them.
It was the night before we convoyed and drove into enemy territory. We were in a hot tent, late at night, getting briefed on how our mission would go the next day.
The commander went on to describe a tactic the enemy used to interrupt the American invasion. They would push Iraqi children in front of military convoys; when the trucks slowed or stopped to avoid hitting the children, the enemy would attack the last trucks in the convoy. Being at the end of the convoy made the soldiers sitting ducks: they couldn’t move forward to get away, and with no other trucks behind them, they were easily ambushed. The commander barked over the voices of a hundred soldiers in the tent, “I repeat: If you slow the convoy to avoid harming a child, you will be responsible for your battle buddies getting ambushed. If anybody isn’t able to do their duty and protect their battle buddies, stand up now and identify yourself.”
His words hung in the air, suspended by a growing feeling of dread. I wasn’t sure I could run over a child to obey this direct order from my commander. I believed in sacrificing to serve my country, even taking a life to save a life, but this? This pricked at my conscience. I knew it wasn’t an option to stand up and say — as the lone female soldier in the company — that I wouldn’t put the lives of my battle buddies first and do my duty. It would be a betrayal. But getting up the next day and choosing to run over a child didn’t feel possible either. Looking down at my sand-encrusted combat boots, I felt my heart pounding as I gripped the knobby seam of my dusty uniform pants. The tent was filled with a suffocating silence. No one moved.
Before I could decide whether to stand up and identify myself or stay silent and do my duty, the first sergeant’s voice boomed over my head like a firing cannon: “Dismissed.” A wave of soldiers shuffled to their feet and poured out of the hot, dusty tent into the night air. The moment of decision was gone, and I exhaled a small breath of cowardly relief. But I still didn’t know what I would do if a child were pushed in front of my convoy the next day. I had eight hours to decide.
Eight hours wasn’t long enough to decide if I could follow my orders to run over a child if necessary. The convoy briefing was over, but my night was just beginning. Walking back to my tent, I kept my head down, avoiding the other soldiers joking around me. The tension crackled as everyone geared up for driving into enemy territory the next day. The more dangerous the mission, the louder the jokes — that’s how we handled fear.
Inside the tent I found my green cot. Underneath it I lined up my medic bag, rucksack, flak vest, and nine-millimeter Beretta, ready for tomorrow’s mission. I lay down on top of my sleeping bag, trying to trick myself into sleeping. The commander’s words were lodged in my brain: “You have to do your duty, even if it means running over a child.”
Everything I believed about being a soldier and a Christian reassured me that this was okay. Soldiers did hard things. I knew that. That’s why my Baptist church honored them and clapped for them. My mother and father stood up in the sanctuary on Veterans Day to be honored for their military service. And their fathers and brothers and cousins could stand up next to them, representing our family’s commitment to enlisting. I was a third-generation Army veteran. My grandmother had sent three of her five children into basic training, and I was just one of her three grandchildren now on active duty in Iraq. My family tree was like a human flagpole for the American flag.
But something was crushing my chest in a vise grip and it wouldn’t let me sleep. Or even breathe. As I stared up into the darkness of the green camouflage tent, my cot felt as stiff and confining as a coffin. Arms folded across my chest, I lay motionless, like a corpse. I struggled to shield myself from the indecision beating me up on the inside. How could I choose between the lives of my fellow soldiers and an Iraqi child? The impossibility of the choice was breaking me apart on the inside. Whose life would I protect, and whose would I take?
Hoping no one would hear me, I whispered a tiny prayer, “Oh, God, oh, God, help me,” into the dark. As I prayed for the tension in my chest to release, I heard something in the dark: “But I love them.
I love them, too, Diana.” I froze. The words halted the wrestling match inside me. Even though I know no words were actually spoken aloud, they seemed to echo all around me.
God was stepping into the middle of the darkened tent with me, but instead of comforting me, God was challenging me. If God loved “them,” what did that mean for me and my orders? Was God challenging my loyalty to the “us” that I knew and loved? My uniform, my country, and my faith community had taught me that to serve my country is to serve God. I tried to understand. If God loved an Iraqi child in the same sacrificial way that God loved me, what was I supposed to do in eight short hours if a child was pushed in front of the convoy? This was the first time I felt caught between what God was asking of me and what my country required of me.
After that night, I knew that I would give my life for anyone. I would step in front of a bullet for a fellow soldier, Iraqi civilian, anyone. But I would never take a life. I would fight, but with sacrifice instead of bullets.
But what was I going to do now as a soldier in the middle of a war, told by God to love my enemies?
The next 397 days of serving as a combat medic in a war refusing to kill wasn’t easy. I was scared every day, not knowing if I would get killed by lunchtime or find myself unable to keep a fellow soldier alive. But knowing how I would show up in an unpredictable war was how I used my freedom. There are things we can do that are costlier to our souls than losing our lives. Even if I lost my life, I wouldn’t really lose. Because love never fails.
No child was pushed in front of our convoy that day. But as we rolled through the desert my eye caught two little girls running on the side of the road. I couldn’t stop looking at their bright eyes. They reminded me of a roadside diner back home, lit up on the side of the road, beckoning you to come in with its warmth. How could anyone be willing to run them over or push them in front of a truck? The violence that war was asking of human beings made my bones ache.
Coming home, I didn’t know how to explain that war and peace are different sides of the same coin. That peace is patriotic, and as often as we talk about war we should also be talking about peace. All soldiers believe in peace: that is why we are willing to go to war. No one goes to war expecting to get more war. We believe peace is possible and it’s worth fighting for.
But back in the U.S., I didn’t feel like I had the freedom to support the troops and speak out against the violence of this war and the guns that were daily taking lives. I felt as if even the combat medal I wore wouldn’t grant me the freedom to speak the truth out loud without being branded a peace-loving hippie or seen as disloyal to my country, the family who raised me, or my faith. So I stayed quiet about my experience in Iraq. I traded my battlefield truth for the safety of belonging.
Coming home from Iraq, I made a new family. The man I fell in love with in a single day wrote to me for the year I was deployed and married me when I got home. We had two little boys in two years who called us Mom and Dad, and we were in love with life.
Waging peace looks a lot different back home than it did on the battlefield of Iraq. As a little family, we committed to showing up for anyone and everyone if they asked, blackmailing ourselves to love first and asking questions later.
This meant that the usual strings attached to who we showed up for — like agreement, sharing the same faith or politics, or being friends — would no longer apply. Choosing to love first meant everyone would be in our jurisdiction to love. No one would be outside of our “yes.” When a group in our community raised their hand and asked people to show up for them when violence hit them, we would do it. We decided that we would be the first to love, every single time, because Love Never Fails. We were going to throw kindness around like confetti, to love like it was growing on trees, without needing to determine if the person in front of us deserved it or not. This would be our family’s battle cry.
Committing ahead of time to show up with people meant our decision was already made. We stopped talking about what peace might mean and started being the peace that our neighbors and community needed.We did it because peace isn’t the absence of conflict, it’s showing up in the middle of it. Waging peace meant our faith was no longer a weapon used to divide “us” from “them”; it became a blank check.
So when Michael Brown was murdered and his mama asked the whole country to “Say his name,” I did something I had never seen anyone in my Baptist church or family do: I marched with protesters. I was scared and nervous. We put puffy jackets on our kindergartner and preschooler and wrapped our hands together as we marched through our city to say Black Lives Matter. And the day after the New Zealand shooting, we showed up at the local mosque, so that our neighbors could feel safe to pray because they knew we would put our bodies alongside them and say no to violence. We lit candles after the Pulse night club shooting and listened to the bell being rung for all 49 lives that were taken. We sang the kaddish with our Jewish neighbors as they mourned the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting.
Choosing to wage peace also meant going back to Iraq, this time working for the thriving and restoration of the place and people where I had been part of waging war. Drinking tea in Syrian refugee camps, helping ladies bake peace into their futures by empowering them to build businesses together instead of apart: collaboration instead of competition. Being invited into my Iraqi friend Ihsan’s home and holding his babies was part of repairing my war story. He was 17 years old when I was stationed near his village during the war. Now we are both working for a peace worthy of his kids and my kids. Unmaking violence meant giving kids in Iran life-saving heart surgeries because caring for each other’s kids is how we refuse to let our governments or our faith tell us who to hate or fear. This is how we erase the dividing lines telling us whose kids are worthy to survive and whose are disposable.
Now I’ve been in two out of the three countries that a U.S. president dubbed “the axis of evil.” The most evil I’ve witnessed was people believing in their right to eliminate each other for their own benefit. I learned that idea growing up in my small country Baptist church in America, not in Iraq or Iran. God, guns, and country was as foundational as the national anthem being played before summer baseball games. So normal, you hardly even hear it after awhile.
Guns aren’t our culture, they are our tradition. It comes from wanting what we don’t have and using violence to get it. But we can’t bring peace on earth when we use weapons designed to kill. We can’t build up God’s kingdom of love, mercy, forgiveness, and self-sacrificial love using a tool of death and fear-mongering. Peace isn’t winning, and justice doesn’t require killing. We will know justice when we make a peace where everyone gets to stay alive.
Waging peace answered the questions my soul had been asking after laying down my weapon on the battlefield of Iraq. “Now what? How do I love my enemies here?” The answer was simple, but the reality of living it out changed my life more than I had ever bargained for. Violence is our only enemy. People are our most sacred responsibility.
I went to war knowing what I would die for, but now I know what I’m living for: to be the first to love, every single time.
Run after it for all you’re worth.
If “justice doesn’t require killing” it seems that in Ukraine, the people will have to tolerate a form of slavery, at least for a while, until they can develop nonviolent means of dealing with the injustice of the Russian military.