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Chapter Eight

Love Anyway

Watching the news about the U.S. war in Iraq, I became resigned to the fact that I would get the inevitable phone call, as happened during the war in Kosovo. It came in January 2004: “Sir, we’ve received orders on you, and you’re being sent to Iraq.”

Because I had expected to get called up, I’d been meeting with the folks at Heart to Heart and also with Docs Who Care, a medical group that provides emergency room doctors to small, under-served communities. Even though I knew the order was coming, the two weeks’ notice certainly helped get my priorities in order!

Pre-mobilization occurred at Fort Bliss, Texas, and included anthrax and smallpox vaccinations, weapons practice, briefings, equipment procurement (including a gas mask and chemical protective suit), a new ID card containing DNA samples for identification, and tons of paperwork.

With mixed emotions, I headed for Iraq. When I was deployed as an Army Reserve doctor to Kosovo, NATO bombings had brought the hostilities between the Albanians and the Serbs to a standstill. Things remained tense, but the war was not raging as it was in Iraq. I shed many tears as I said goodbye to my wife and children, my family and friends, my church and the terrific people with whom I work. But, while my heart was heavy, it was also full of love and life and peace and purpose. To be honest, I felt excited and enthusiastic.

I believe that everything we do in life and everything that happens to us is part of a bigger story. My going to Iraq was part of that story. The night before our departure from Fort Bliss, I drove around the little nearby town and heard church bells ringing. It was a small Catholic Church. I went in and sat in the back row. The text was 1 Corinthians 13, the well-known chapter on love. It ends with these words: “We have three things to do: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.” That would be my mission in Iraq.

No matter what else I would be called upon to do there, I wanted to love every person I met or served, whether a wounded American soldier, an Iraqi prisoner, or an innocent civilian. Whatever we might think about this war, surely we can agree that everything we do in this conflict must flow from a loving heart.

My church experience allowed me to have a profound sense of peace as I went forth, and reminded me to love all the people, all the time.

One of the chaplains held a communion service for several dozen of us in a corner of the terminal before we boarded the plane. We arrived in the blazing sunlight of Kuwait about twenty-four hours later, and the next morning I was on a flight to Baghdad. Heart to Heart was able to send along thousands of dollars’ worth of donated antibiotics for the local clinics.

My assignment was to be the field doctor for a battalion near the Iranian border, heading a medical team that included a physician’s assistant and five medics. My normal duties were to care for soldiers in the medical tent, provide supervision and training to the medics, and visit two camps to care for prisoners. None of it was routine. We worked seven days a week in shifts of twelve to fifteen hours each day. To help distinguish one day from another, the days became known for the unique thing that happened—laundry day, chapel day, and so on.

We were kept busy treating soldiers who had been wounded in firefights, attacks on their convoys, and other violent exchanges. Many died. Our camp was well fortified and protected, so we were never attacked and we slept well. Nearby camps like ours were attacked, with devastating results.

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Occasionally I provided medical backup for a mission with the soldiers. One such mission was a surprise sweep in the middle of the night; a group of tanks, mortar platoons, and assault soldiers went to a village suspected of harboring the men who had attacked a nearby military base. When we got close to the village, we extinguished our lights and used night-vision goggles to navigate. Following a detailed plan, each team of soldiers knew which houses to search and in which order to search them. It happened quickly, quietly, smoothly.

Within two hours the sweep was complete, the soldiers having apprehended two men hiding with an enormous cache of weapons. There were no more attacks on our bases in that area.

One of the Iraqi detainees developed a severe abdominal infection, which we tried to treat at the field hospital. But he was in worse shape than we could handle, so we requested transport to take him to the military hospital in Baghdad. In wartime, there is no routine transport. On the road everything is a potential target, and this transport meant organizing a convoy of vehicles involving dozens of soldiers. Without the convoy, this man would die. The convoy was immediately approved.

On the day we were scheduled to go, however, the mission was scrapped. The convoy coming to our camp the night before had been hit by a bomb. It was the third time in five days that one of our convoys had been hit, so we waited until a nearby combat unit could beef up security. A day later we were able to head out.

As I sat in the back of a Humvee with this very sick Iraqi prisoner of war, I asked myself the question that every soldier in that convoy was probably asking: Why are we doing this for someone we consider our enemy? It seemed unfair. I could see risking the lives of Americans for another American. But for an enemy?

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I felt very lonely and homesick. There I was in an armored vehicle, wearing fifty pounds of body armor, helmet, weapon— full “battle rattle”—and standing next to me was the machine gunner, constantly spinning, looking for snipers, motioning for vehicles to move out of the way and screaming at drivers who didn’t respond. We drove as fast as we could, Humvees tailgating one another to present a more difficult target and to prevent a suicide-bomb–rigged car from getting between us. In front was a soldier monitoring the radio, relaying messages from the Humvees ahead of us to the gunner and me.

Feeling sorry for myself, I took out my MP3 player. Soldiers need to be alert and vigilant, but I thought “What’s the big deal? I’m the senior officer on this convoy, and no one is going to say anything to me about it.” So I poked the earphones under my helmet and into my ears, and turned on the music.

My son-in-law, Eric, had loaded my player with about a thousand songs. Since it was Sunday, I decided to listen to the first religious song I came to. It was the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir singing Lanny Wolfe’s “Surely the Presence of the Lord Is in This Place.” I had heard Wolfe’s song hundreds of times before, but on that day, in that place, the words were a potent reminder for me.

Speeding toward Baghdad, crammed into the back of a Humvee, with many lives in the balance, I sensed the presence of God as never before. I literally felt enveloped by God: God around me, God above me, God in me.

Tears running down my dusty cheeks, I peered through the thick bullet-proof window at Iraqis in their native dress, at their mud-walled houses, at children playing, at the tall and stately palm trees. And, just as surely as I felt the presence of God in that Humvee, I sensed God’s presence in all that I looked upon here, in this desolate country, with the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds.

God loves Iraq.

Then I thought of what this convoy was doing, and the words of Jesus came to me: “Greater love has no man than this, that he be willing to lay down his life for another.” I was filled with a deep sense of peace. I was still worried about the road ahead, but I had a sense that everything was going to be fine, no matter what happened. I was proud of every gunner and driver in every one of the Humvees that day. They were putting their lives at risk to do something honorable and noble and sacred. And I knew that God profoundly loves every person on both sides of this war.

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This sense of peace and contentment lasted throughout my time in Iraq. It had nothing to do with bravery or courage. I was able to find an oasis from the danger every now and then in a secluded place at the edge of the camp, amid some beautiful wildflowers. It was there that I read these words from the Bible: “Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. I’ve learned by now to be quite content whatever my circumstances. . . . Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am.”²

My time in Iraq ended a few weeks early when our medical team responded to a serious car accident on the highway. Since it was outside the camp, we were required to wear full battle gear. There was some concern that this might not be an accident but an ambush, so we were told that a quick reaction force (QRF) team was already on the scene securing the area.

When we got to the accident site, the QRF was not there. We had beaten them to the scene. We had to act fast, since we were in enemy territory with only a couple of soldiers to protect us. It was pitch black and as the ambulance rolled to a stop we opened the back doors and jumped out. My 52-year-old left knee, which I had injured in college thirty years before, couldn’t handle the jump with all of the extra gear. It just gave out. We cared for the accident victims and got back to the camp safely. I figured that I had just twisted my knee and it would get better on its own.

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A few days later, as I was working in the emergency room in Baghdad, one of the orthopedic doctors saw me limping and insisted on examining my knee. He said I had torn the cartilage and needed to have it repaired as soon as possible. So I went to Iraq as a doctor and left as a patient. Within a few days I was on a MEDEVAC flight to Germany, then flown to San Antonio, Texas, for knee surgery.

Before I left, I met with military officials to discuss my returning on a Heart To Heart mission with aid for the Iraqis. The officials were responsive, partly because some remembered what happened after my time in Kosovo, and they have developed respect for humanitarian missions.

The Saturday before I left was one of the most amazing days of my life. I was scheduled to see patients and make rounds at the prisoner camp. One of the Iraqi prisoners pulled me aside when I was finished, telling me it was an Iraqi tradition to give a good friend a gift. He stunned me by slowly slipping his wedding band off: “This is my wedding ring. I haven’t seen my wife in many years, and I probably will never see her again. I’d like to give it to you.”

Speechless at first, I finally replied “No, you need to keep this. Your wife will want you to have it—I think you’ll see her again. You’ll find her.”

What he told me has haunted me. He said he didn’t think he would live long enough to see her. He felt that he would be killed very soon. We hugged and said a tearful goodbye, and then I walked out of the POW compound.

I can debate the war with anyone, now that I have seen it first-hand. For me, personally, my purpose was to serve—despite the debate—ally and enemy alike. I was brought up in a home where my parents read the Bible. As a child it was perplexing to hear the words “Love your enemy.” How is that possible?

The writer Wendell Berry describes this same tension in his novel Jayber Crow. The narrator describes his frustration as his small town prepared to go to war during World War II. The narrator had been raised with “Love your enemy,” as I had been.

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“Did I think that the great organizations of the world could love their enemies? I did not,” he wrote. “I didn’t think great organizations could love anything.”

The narrator asked, What caused this war?

“It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies. I was glad enough that I had not become a preacher, and so would not have to go through a war pretending that Jesus had not told us to love our enemies.”³

I just cannot escape those words: Love your enemy. I don’t understand them. I resist them. But if our lives are going to be committed to serving others, some of those “others” will be our enemy.

The words of Jesus are paraphrased this way in a book called The Message: “Give away your life. . . . What you have is all you’ll ever get. And it’s trouble ahead if you’re satisfied with yourself. Your self will not satisfy you for long. Life is not about us. It’s not a popularity contest. Our task is to be true, not popular. Love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you. It’s an opportunity, so use the occasion to live the servant life. If you only love the lovable, do you expect a medal? Live generously. Generosity begets generosity.”⁴

I would add the following: You can make a living, which is to measure what you get—or you can have a life, which is to measure what you give.

The concept of loving enemies becomes a little easier, I believe, when we take seriously that “Life is not about us.” When we begin to get the message that we are not the center of the universe, we can begin to get over ourselves. Seeing enemies and loving them is a measure of how well we are doing.

Anne Lamott writes about the difficulty she had with this concept, especially when she realized it was non-negotiable.

“It meant trying to respect them,” she said, of those she considered her enemies. “It meant identifying with their humanity and weaknesses. It didn’t mean unconditional acceptance of their crazy behavior. They were still accountable for the atrocities they’d perpetrated, as you were accountable for yours. But you worked at doing better, at loving them, for the profoundest spiritual reason: You were trying not to make things worse.”⁵

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When Adolph Coors IV was a boy growing up in Colorado, an escaped prisoner ambushed his father on his way to work early one morning. Seven months later his father’s remains were found near a dump site, forty miles away. The young boy’s mother was despondent and turned to alcohol. Adolph eventually joined the Marines and became obsessed with muscles and power. When he got out of the Marines, his obsession turned to money and power, just a minor tweak of the original obsession.

After a near-fatal car accident and a realization that his marriage was failing, Coors had a conversion experience and came to a similar conclusion as the angel in the Tolstoy story: He saw that living for others was the key to a happy life. But there was one aspect of his life that still plagued him. He desperately hated the man who killed his father.

The man had been captured in Canada and sentenced to life in prison in Colorado.

“I hated the man,” Coors said. “But hatred is like a treacherous acid, which cannot be poured without spilling on the raw heart that holds it. I can speak from experience that hate hurts the hater far more than the person being hated.”

With help from others, Coors eventually went to the prison to see his father’s killer. The prisoner refused to see him. Three separate times he refused. So Coors sent him a letter, asking him to forgive the hatred he had harbored for so many years. Coors added that he forgave the man for the pain and suffering he had caused the Coors family. The hatred in Coors’ heart was replaced with love.⁶

How can this be?

It’s about being changed from the outside in. As we reach out to address needs of others, our own lives are changed dramatically. “Within the context of action one experiences the mystical presence of God,” said sociologist Tony Campolo.⁷ This is what I mean when I say “Love anyway.” When we begin to act as if we love, whether we feel like it or not, we begin to truly love.

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“Maybe you don’t have to love your enemies,” said Jayber Crow. “Maybe you just have to act like you do. And maybe you have to start early.”⁸

Loving enemies, or loving and acting despite the circumstances, involves a decision on our part. Many people don’t do it simply because they don’t know it is an option. Or they think it would be too difficult. But everything is too difficult if we only think about doing it. Things become much simpler when we decide to try something, and then actually try it. We can start where we are.

This kind of action requires a decision that, over time, becomes easier to make. The Dalai Lama tells of a Tibetan Buddhist monk who had been in Chinese prisons as a political prisoner and in labor camps for twenty years. “Once I asked him what was the most difficult situation he faced in prison,” the Dalai Lama said. “Surprisingly, he said that he felt the greatest danger was of losing compassion for the Chinese.”⁹

In a different Tolstoy story from that cited in the Introduction, one called “Master and Man,” the main character, a greedy merchant named Brekhunoff, and his hired hand, a simpleton named Nikita, head for a village in a brutal snowstorm. Brekhunoff leaves the sled with Nikita in it and, concerned only with himself, tries to go through the storm alone on the horse. Unable to make any progress, he returns to the sled, where Nikita has nearly frozen to death. At first Brekhunoff tries to protect the servant as he would any of his property. But in the act of offering his warm body to the peasant, and feeling Nikita revive, Brekhunoff is transformed.

“Then he began to think about his money, his store, his house, his sales and purchases, and [his competitor’s] millions,” Tolstoy wrote. “He could not understand how that man whom men called Vassili Brekhunoff could bear to interest himself in such things as he did.” Life for Brekhunoff had been measured in what he could acquire. But as he gives himself in service to Nikita, he is fulfilled.¹⁰

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The decision to love others, particularly adversaries, came to Bud Anderson in Auburn, California, several years ago when a drunk driver crashed into the car carrying the entire Anderson family on their way to church one Sunday morning. Bud held his injured son in the street, unaware that the 10-year-old boy had already died. A 6-year-old daughter died en route to the hospital. Two other children were seriously injured. The scene on the road was so gruesome that the first Highway Patrol officer to arrive took a look in the car and drove away to direct traffic instead. He resigned from the force the next day.

“Dad’s sorrow was overwhelming,” said Ted Anderson, one of the children who was injured, who is now a university professor. “How do you go on after that?”

Two things helped prevent the Anderson family from feeling bitterness and malice toward the drunk driver who killed two of their children. One was a verse from the Bible that Bud had read all his life: “Love your enemies.” The other was that Bud discovered that the driver had a family, a wife and two teenagers, and they had fallen on hard times. The man had recently lost his job and was about to lose the family’s trailer home as well.

His predicament moved Bud to visit the man in jail.

“I told him I wasn’t going to hurt him or his family,” Bud said. “I told him I forgave him. He was dumbfounded.”

At the sentencing, the judge asked Anderson what he believed the punishment should be.

“I said ‘Nothing you do could bring my children back, so instead of tearing his family apart, and leaving two families with significant losses, I think we should help him.’”

The judge sentenced the man to six months of weekends in jail so he could find a new job and support his family.

“We could not have done that without the right spirit,” Anderson said. “One man who stopped at the accident site told me that if this had happened to his family he would have killed the drunk driver right there in the street. The love of God keeps you from reacting that way.”

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Examples like this make me think that, maybe, with practice and with the desire, it is truly possible to love one’s enemy.

When the apartheid system collapsed in South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was charged with reconciling blacks and whites. They were to bring about justice and determine punishment. John Roth, in his book Choosing Against War, describes an elderly black woman whose son had been shot by white police officers, who then set the boy’s body on fire and celebrated around it. Years later, the same men took her husband and set him on fire, after tying him to a pile of wood and dousing him with gasoline.

The commission had her face the leader of the group, a man named Van de Broek, as it prepared to sentence him. The men had confessed their guilt, and the commission asked the woman what she considered an appropriate punishment.

“I want three things,” she said. “I want Mr. Van de Broek to take me to the place where they burned my husband’s body. I would like to gather up the dust and give him a decent burial.

“Second, Mr. Van de Broek took all my family away from me, and I still have a lot to give. Twice a month, I would like him to come to the ghetto and spend the day with me so I can be a mother to him.

“Third, I would like Mr. Van de Broek to know he is forgiven by God and that I forgive him too. And, I would like someone to come and lead me by the hand to where Mr. Van de Broek is so that I can embrace him and he can know my forgiveness is real.”¹¹

I’ll be the first to admit that this kind of response is uncommon. It doesn’t seem humanly possible. But many of us don’t even think of this kind of action as an alternative. Not only is it an alternative, it is a way of acting that takes us out of living for ourselves and into living for others.

In the book Father Joe, writer Tony Hendra discusses this paradox with his mentor, who tells Hendra “True courage is not to hate our enemy, any more than to fight and kill him. To love him, to love in the teeth of his hate—that is real bravery. That ought to earn people medals.”¹²

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This kind of behavior isn’t rewarded by medals or salaries or elected office. But it can change our lives, and our world.

Anyway: The Paradoxical Commandments was written by Kent Keith. A copy of his commandments hangs in a prominent place in one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages in Calcutta:

People are illogical, unreasonable and self-centered.

Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.

Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.

Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.

Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.

Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.

Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.

Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.

Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.

Help people anyway.

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Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.

Give the world the best you have anyway.¹³

Keith says that these commandments focus on something other than what the culture seems to value (celebrity, influence, money). Instead, the focus is on helping, loving, improving, persevering, looking out for those who can’t look out for themselves. It is a change in focus, he claims, from looking inward to looking outside of ourselves. When we make a difference in the lives of others, he says, we make our own lives different—for the better.¹⁴

Helping others see that it is possible to live this way is one of the great favors we can do for people around us. Psychiatrist Scott Peck, the well-known author, told of a woman patient who was suffering from extreme depression. She called him on the day of her appointment to tell him she wouldn’t be able to make it because her car had broken down. Peck told her he was willing to pick her up if she didn’t mind waiting in the car while he briefly visited a couple of patients in a nearby hospital.

When they got to the hospital, Peck had an inspiration. He suggested that the woman make his hospital calls. An hour and a half later the woman returned to the car in a buoyant mood. She said trying to cheer up those two patients had lifted her own spirits and she felt wonderful.

Peck said to her: “Now we know how to get you out of your depression. Now we know the cure for your problem.”

To which the woman replied, “You don’t expect me to do that every day, do you?”¹⁵

I had the option of letting the enemy Iraqi die from his abdominal infection. Adolph Coors IV had the option of continuing to hate his father’s killer. Bud Anderson had the option of bitterly arguing for a lengthy prison sentence for his children’s killer. The South African woman had the option of asking that her family’s killers be locked away forever.

These are legitimate options, and similar ones are exercised every day by people around the world. If we are serious about finding meaning and significance in our lives, though, there are other options. They include loving, forgiving, and serving. By choosing them we will come to know what we were put on this earth to do.

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When I revisited the Shabiu family in Kosovo as a civilian, a couple of years had passed since their daughter Merita was murdered. After being with them most of the day, I asked how they felt about Merita’s killer, who is serving a sentence of life without parole in a United States federal penitentiary.

“Do you have a message you would like me to take to him when I return to the United States?” I asked. Merita’s parents discussed my question in their native Albanian language for several minutes.

Then I asked a different question.

“Do you think he should be killed for what he did to your daughter?”

More discussion.

Finally Merita’s father said “He is already paying the price for his actions. We don’t see the purpose of two mothers weeping. One is enough.”

That’s loving anyway.