PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE DAY THE WAR BEGAN: JANUARY 16, 1991 : THE DAUGHTER

War crystallizes emotions. It makes us focus on our core beliefs and wrestle with questions that usually only the philosophers ponder:

Who am I to take the life of another human being?

Which ends justify what means?

Am I my sister and my brother’s keeper, and, if so, when?

In the months since the United States sent troops to the Persian Gulf, Americans have talked about these personal questions in their typically open way. We are not an inherently introspective people.

It is almost a cliche, but we are a nation not of brooders but of doers. In this case, however, most of us, removed from the policy-making arena and the skies or sands of battle can only think and talk.

Until Jan. 16, I had clung to the idea that I personally had some control over my life--that I could face such philosophical questions free of the demands of politics. When that wave of planes left for Iraq, that naive notion was destroyed as surely as the targets those F-15s hit.

Other people debated war in the gulf; other people decided to wage it. And now other people must fight it.

Until that defining moment, I, and I am sure many other people, had indulged in a massive case of denial. Rational people would not go to war, would not commit the United States, Great Britain, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia and so many other countries immediately concerned to unalterable change, to death from the skies. After Jan. 16, we found ourselves wondering about the definition of rationality.

I cannot possibly know the emotions felt by mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, of the men and women who have been doing that fighting. I do not know whether they, too, feel my powerlessness. I can draw only on personal history to explain my own feeling. One day in history changed my life--Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941.

My father was called to active Army Air Corps duty not long after Dec. 7. I was 10 months old the day that war began; he was 33.

A lieutenant when he went in, my father rose to major and became a base safety officer on Saipan, an island in the Pacific. Most of my memories of him during World War II remain fleeting, and many of those images come from my photograph album, not from my mind.

My mother and I moved with him from duty station to duty station before he shipped out to the Pacific, and once he left, we moved in with my grandmother in a country town in southwestern Virginia.

For a suburban child, that period of life turned out to be one of inestimable value: It gave me an understanding of community, a sense of the rhythms of rural life. I was part of three generations of family, with cousins in abundance, in a way I have rarely been since. Is that a beneficial byproduct of war?

But what of my father and my mother, separated by war? What say did they have in their futures? Again, only fleeting memories--a uniform passing through a doorway, a parade of soldiers up Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda, Md., when the men came home.

My father rarely talked about war, at least not to me, although he did speak once about how they prepared for air raids on Saipan. Clearly, he did not glory in war.

He made a career in the new U.S. Air Force, and he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. I am very proud of him. His medals hang on the wall of the room in which my mother watches television about the gulf war.

What I fully realized this past week is that the day the United States went to war in 1941 changed my roots, changed my upbringing. So, too, Jan. 16 will change the lives of millions of people in ways that they barely know this week.

My reaction to the attack on Iraq is dictated by the father who went away to war in my childhood, the mother and grandmother who watched after me, the crew-cut high school friend who played the guitar and who died in Vietnam, the college friends with whom I marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.

Make no mistake about it: I think the United States should have given sanctions, and peace, more of a chance. What sense I have that a tyrant had to be stopped is tempered by my anger that we acted in defense of nations in which I cannot walk down the street unless draped in black, in which I might be treated as chattel.

Our reactions are also dictated by primal needs. We cling to one another for support, for a sense of community. On Jan. 16, the need to be with family, to talk to friends--to not be alone--reasserted itself. The filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing when they said, “E.T., phone home.”

Just as in other crises--earthquakes, blizzards, hurricanes, even power blackouts, we reach out more to others--to strangers, to co-workers, to intimates--perhaps because we see ever clearer the possibility of loss. We give more of ourselves, and we get back the support we need.

When this is over--whenever that is--if we remember that spirit of caring--if we remember better the needs of our friends and our relatives, of those who are close to us and those who simply live close to us--then Jan. 16 will have changed our lives in ways other than the obvious military events might dictate. It is, I think, the only way we can regain some sense of control over our lives.