Thomas Breen photos
Stephen Kobasa, Allie Perry at final stone laying at B’way Triangle.
Twenty years to the day after the United States first bombed the Taliban, New Haveners officially put an end to one home front of the Afghanistan War — by laying a final stone commemorating last month’s military and civilian deaths from “forever wars” in the Middle East.
A dozen anti-war activists turned up Thursday night for that somber, cathartic ritual at the Broadway Triangle bounded by Broadway, Elm Street, and Park Street.
Some form of this group has been laying a stone every month at this site since December 2007. For the last time, Thursday night they placed atop a roughly 200-piece cairn a round, smooth stone inscribed in white with the number of U.S. military, Iraqi civilian, and Afghan civilian deaths from the month prior.
Ioanna Gutas on Thursday night.
“Our last stone: September 2021,” Ioanna Gutas read as her peace compatriots stood in a circle around the diamond-shaped, makeshift memorial.
“No U.S. military killed. Civilians in Iraq: 40. In Afghanistan: 200.”
Stephen Kobasa.
As the sun set, lights flickered on from Broadway’s shops and restaurants. The shadow cast by the nearby 20-foot-tall Civil War memorial grew longer. All eyes remained fixed on the pile of stones that had just received its final tribute.
“I learned a long time ago that there are things that are futile, but necessary. They have to be done,” said Stephen Kobasa, who helped found the memorial 14 years ago and who has attended nearly every stone-laying ceremony at the site on the first Monday of the month at 6 p.m. ever since.
“The witness has to be given. And the fact that we have done something to remember the dead is no small thing. It’s not everything. It hasn’t changed the outcome. But it has testified to another way of seeing the world, and I think we can lift that up and celebrate that.”
Allie Perry.
Allie Perry, a minister at Shalom United Church of Christ who has also been coming to the peace memorial for its 14-year existence, agreed.
“For me, coming each month has been a discipline. We insisted that [this war] be visible,” she said. The counts written on each stone piled in the cairn are more than just numbers. Gathering at this site every month “brought home that every number on there is a person, is a son, a daughter, a mother, a father.”
Kobasa said back in 2006, when an interfaith group called Reclaiming the Prophetic Peace gathered on the in front of United Church on the Green to read the names of every American, Iraqi, and Afghan who had been killed in the wars to date.
The group initially wanted to set up a more permanent memorial on the Green. They wound up moving over to the Broadway Triangle instead when the Green’s proprietors turned them away from the first spot, and the city’s Parks Commission ultimately granted them approval for the second. Each month, the group would use websites like Iraq Body Count and Airwars, and United Nations reports to piece together as accurate a number as they could of recent war-related deaths.
With the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan on Aug. 31 and the two-decade anniversary of the first post‑9/11 bombing of the Taliban on Thursday, the group decided to put an end to their 14-years-and-counting monthly ritual.
That doesn’t mean that America’s fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere are truly over, he noted. But it does mean that it’s time for this particular ritual to come to an end.
Attendees went in a circle Thursday night to talk about what this monthly gathering has meant to them as America’s wars overseas dragged on and on and on.
“It’s been a revolving pulpit to say: This is horrible,” one attendee said. “We came here together to make a very simple statement: Please cut it out.”
For Gutas, this monthly ritual has reminded her that this country has “not stopped being at war” since the end of World War II. There is a war machine in this country that profits off of perpetual destruction overseas, she said. That persists by “having populace in constant fear.”
For another attendee, this gathering has been a reminder of the ever-rising civilian body count abroad that many in the United States have turned a blind eye to over the past two decades. “Americans were horrified by 9/11,” he said, but paid little attention to the much larger number of Iraqi and Afghan civilian deaths that resulted from this country’s bombings and occupation. “I don’t get where so much venom comes from.”
The final stone.
Perry ended Thursday’s gathering by reading a poem called “Some” by Daniel Berrigan, which is dedicated to the Plowshares 8 group of anti-nuclear weapon activists.
Perry read:
Some stood up once, and sat down.
Some walked a mile, and walked away.
Some stood up twice, then sat down.
“It’s too much,” they cried.
Some walked two miles, then walked away.
“I’ve had it,” they cried,
Some stood and stood and stood.
They were taken for fools,
they were taken for being taken in.
Some walked and walked and walked –
they walked the earth,
they walked the waters,
they walked the air.
“Why do you stand?” they were asked, and
“Why do you walk?”
“Because of the children,” they said, and
“Because of the heart, and
“Because of the bread,”
“Because the cause is
the heart’s beat, and
the children born, and
the risen bread.”
The majority of the persons involved in the 9/11 plane hijackings were Saudi Arabians, they were not from Afghanistan, nor were they from Iraq. And yet we invaded and occupied and killed so many in those countries instead, because we didn't want to upset the Saudi government or jeopardize our oil imports.
I'm glad the war in Afghanistan is over, and I pray for American to end our involvement and occupation and interference in other countries around the globe. We need to end the military industrial complex and concentrate on the war against the global covid pandemic by helping the world to get immunized and help global poverty by giving humanitarian aid to countries in need and to help out our own county's people who are struggling with poverty and the global warming disasters like fires, floods and storms that have wreaked havoc on so much of our country this year.