Gold Star Families for Peace

This is from Nick and is about the Gold Star Familes for Peace and the soldiers who leave behind loved ones.

Nick's address to the Spiritual Activism Conference

As we gather tomorrow, friends of Karen Meredith, whose only child, Lt. Ken Ballard, would have turned 28 on Thursday, will release 28 gold balloons south of here in Mountain View. Ken was killed in action in Iraq on May 30, 2004. While we were talking here yesterday, my friend Karen was taking a trip to the beach to yell at the sky, to tell God how angry she is.

My name is Nick Arnett and I am speaking to you on behalf of an organization that nobody wants to qualify for – Gold Star Families for Peace. We are families of soldiers killed in action, primarily in Iraq. I have a niece who became a widow at the age of 21, last November 10th when someone in Fallujah, Iraq fired a rocket-powered grenade at her husband, Lance Corporal Wes Canning, United States Marine Corps. Wes was trading places in the turret of his amphibious armored vehicle with another young man named Wes, Wes Campbell, who was horribly and permanently injured, losing part of his skull.

A few days later I was in Friendswood, Texas, where Wes grew up, where he enlisted in the Marines while still in high school because, he told me, he wanted to see the world. Just before Wes and Chayla were married, I asked him if he would have enlisted if he’d known we would attack Iraq. He said he wasn’t sure, but he said that if he had known he would meet Chayla, fall in love with her and marry her, he never would have signed up. He had already served one tour in Iraq, with the first troops into Baghdad and Tikrit, and I told him that I knew, from working as a paramedic many years ago, what it’s like to feel helpless in a situation where you’re supposed to be in control. When I said the word “helpless,” our eyes met and it was clear that although I barely knew this young man in the ordinary sense, he was my brother in a way that we don’t have words to explain.

Wes volunteered to go back to Iraq. The young man who told me he wouldn’t have enlisted if he’d known he would marry Chayla volunteered to go back. This made no sense to me until I discovered that that the part of me that is still a paramedic is telling me to go there, too. While the rest of us were observing a sad anniversary on September 11thlast year, Wes was on a plane to Iraq. All day, I thought, this time he knows what he’s getting into. He was laying down his life for his friends and there is no greater love.

On November 12th at about 10:20 in the evening, our phone rang. It was for my wife and I asked who was calling. “It’s Megan, calling for Chayla.” Megan is Chablis' best friend. When you join our military, they ask your next of kin who should come along if they have to notify you. That was Megan’s job. When Chayla had came home that Friday night, she was carrying a bag of baby clothes. She and Wes didn’t have kids, she wasn’t pregnant, but there was a sale, so she’d bought some for when he came home because they wanted to have a big family. Chayla wanted to be a teacher, but she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to do that now, because whenever she is around children, she cries.

A few days later, at Wes’ parents’ house, after we buried him, Chayla was telling me that the Marines had asked her if she would like to be notified if and when they found anymore pieces of his body because when that RPG hit him, he was thrown 20 feet and blown to bits. One of my prayers is that some day soon, Fallujah is a peaceful enough place that our family can go visit his other grave, the ground in the desert sanctified by the blood of Wes and his friends.

If you are uncomfortable with the details I’m giving, upset by how much I am sharing, let me tell you why I have decided to offer so much. It is because we are family and family deserves the truth. Painful truth when withheld keeps us apart. When we share our suffering, we create bonds of friendship and love. You have come here in a spirit of self-sacrifice, giving up whatever else you could have been doing these four days. Although I disagree completely with the policies that sent Wes to Iraq, I treasure the spirit of self-sacrifice that led him to lay down his life for his friends. You have come here in the same spirit and I thank you for it. We honor those who gave it all when we let that spirit live on through us.

I have a neighbor, Dolores, who begged her son Erik not to re-enlist after 9/11. But he did and on his eighth day in Iraq, flying his very first mission, an off-course helicopter collided with the one he was flying and he was killed. As a result, she had a chance to meet the president of the United States. She told him how angry and unhappy she is about this war and showed him a picture of Erik. He wrote, "Best always" on it and handed it back to her. Best always!

I want to challenge you to figure out how to join us in our grief, to lead our nation and world in healing, peacemaking rituals in which grow closer by sharing our suffering. We in Gold Star Families need this. You need this. The world needs this. Jim Wallis says that religion is always personal, but never private. The same is true of a soldier who is killed in action. Each one has an immediate family. But we are also a national family and a global family. I want to challenge you to end policies that isolate us, such as the secrecy when our heroes’ bodies come home. There is a policy, which nobody seems admit exists, that the department of defense offers no help for the Gold Star families to contact each other, which is why projects like Eyes Wide Open and Arlington West are so important. More than one million U.S. soldiers have served in Iraq – can we tell a million families that if they hang a blue star banner on their house, their neighbors will offer compassion and not judgment?

Will you lead our nation and our world to adopt and celebrate, even for an hour or a day, the lives of Wes, Erik, Casey, Mike, Travis, Sherwood, Patrick and all the others, to share our grief because they are your sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews? And let us remember that the human family is bigger than just one nation, so that we might share in the grief of our brothers and sisters in Iraq and so many places where we rarely turn our eyes. Let us grieve not just for the people we have lost, but also for the innocence that our children lose when we give them immoral orders and they follow them. Give us the courage to speak the words of another of my heroes, Archbishop Oscar Romero, in his final sermon before he was assassinated.”

“No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.”

All of humanity is a Gold Star family.

Thank you for listening. Help us tell our stories. Help the world listen. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening.


This is the talk I gave last Friday. It was interrupted by a very long-standing ovation after the first sentence of the second paragraph. I take that applause not for myself, but for the spirit of self-sacrifice and determination that led Wes and so many others to give their lives for their friends, a spirit that is thriving in many of the rest of us.