Hearing a scream in the night

I heard the screams of Jack Hensley in my sleep last night.

They pierced a dreamless moment in the wee hours of morning and shocked me awake. I sat up, listening, thinking at first that it might have been a noise in the house I mistook for a scream, or a coyote howling in the fields beyond our yard.

Finally convinced that the sound involved no danger to us, I settled back. And as I lay there thinking about it, I realized suddenly that I had re-created in my sleep the terrified screams of an American beheaded in Iraq.

I hadn’t actually heard him scream. A news report described the video released by his killers, and the scream was mentioned. It was the mention that haunted me and became real in the core of my subconscious.

Hensley, 48, was an ordinary kind of guy. A postman, a teacher, a bar owner. There was little to distinguish him from other civilians who have gone to Iraq for a variety of reasons, to help rebuild a shattered country, to make money or to taunt the dangers that exist everywhere.

The others beheaded by Islamic militants, beginning with Danny Pearl, were similarly members of a vast homogeneous section of humanity who aspired only to exist. One doubts that there were future kings or presidents among them. They were us.

Hensley’s death, and a radio commentator’s brief description of the piercing screams, brought home a realization that the murders have become a part of our daily lives. News reports of a child run down by a drunk driver are sad and deplorable, but we breathe a sigh of relief to know it is someone else’s child, not ours. And so it is with the horror in Iraq. War is hell, but there’s a lawn to mow and dinner to cook.

Life goes on in our cities and our neighborhoods in the relative safety of heavy security, but for Hensley and the others who were murdered only because they were in the way of forces beyond their control, there will be no tomorrow.

They will never again smell a rose or hear a barking dog or make love or have a beer or shop for a new car or rake leaves or celebrate a holiday or hear laughter or cry at a movie or listen to music or sing in a choir or nap on the couch or attend a concert or picnic on the beach or feel the sun or walk in the rain or hike through the woods.

Others, at this writing, await similar agony at the hands of masked and hooded murderers. To the demands of the killers, we reply in the cool tones of policymakers that we don’t negotiate with terrorists. One can understand the rationale behind the doctrine, that if we give in this time, the terrorists will realize the success of their strategy and do it again and again. But, I wonder, won’t they do it again and again anyhow?

I fear that they stand as firmly in support of their policy as we stand in support of ours. Their demands must be met, or they will kill in a way that is sure to horrify. We will not be intimidated by dying screams of terror, because intellectually we realize that time is on our side, if not on the side of the Jack Hensleys of the world. Sadly, policymakers, in their obsession with the “big picture,” fail to consider those in the smaller picture, who are the fragile human elements of a conflict forged in steel.

In the case of Iraq, workers are drawn there from throughout the world for all the reasons mentioned, despite the fact that they could become pawns in a deadly game. The Philippine government saved one man by pulling out of the so-called coalition that has found itself knee deep in the blood of innocents from both sides of the ideological struggle. Spain removed its soldiers after bombs of Islamic militants shattered its commuter-filled trains and took the lives of more than 200 of its citizens.

But negotiations are not in the master plan of those who support the intentions of our leaders to win in the Middle East at any cost, although winning, in the long haul, is no longer an option, anymore than it was in Korea or Vietnam or, for the Russians, in Afghanistan.

The screams of an ordinary man from an ordinary neighborhood are the sounds of policy, the political strategy of diminishing the will of our enemies, no matter how many heads are sliced off by the assassins in black. But this is a holy war, rooted in the fanatic religious emotions that are too deep to be penetrated by doctrinaire thinking.

We will hear more screams as the months go by, but until they begin to pierce the sleep of those who decide policy, the horror will continue. And at some point, like car horns in a traffic jam, they’ll become meaningless to a desensitized world. Governments will sustain themselves, absolute in their beliefs, and life will go on beyond the murders of those whose final agonies linger in the night.