Psyche, Science, and Society

Lorri Greene: Collateral Damage

October 13th, 2008

Psychologist Lorri Greene has sent me this poem she wrote. It was inspired by the suicide of her patient, as described in her story Stuck Inside the Mobile.

Collateral Damagee

By Lorri A. Greene, Ph.D.

She wasn’t anybody’s soldier, just a 13-year-old rushing to the Gaza market for her mother. Today she celebrates her tenth anniversary. Her father praised her courageous heart, as she awkwardly learned to type. Her mother says praise Allah. If her daughter had been any closer when the Apache helicopters attacked, she might have died. Before, she used to paint brightly colored ceramic dolls. Her grandfather said Allah had blessed her hand. But she had always been left-handed and Allah apparently only blessed the one. Her left hand was just collateral damage.

He wasn’t anybody’s soldier; his arms could barely carry the water bucket. He looked up into the dark sky, his eyes among the first to see the “shock and awe” from Texas. The last thing his eyes ever saw was the sky on fire. Like the amputee, he awakes at night from the pain of that vision, even though there’s nothing there. Because CNN had video of the boy and his face, they flew him to New York City for reconstruction, thanks to an anonymous wealthy American. They also gave him glass eyes. Blue glass eyes that cannot see. His real eyes–the brown ones he was born with–were just a pair of collateral damage.

He was somebody’s soldier, long forgotten. A short Marine. Ideal size for scouting Vietcong tunnels. He was lucky, surviving those hellish nightmares, escaping death in the dank dark stench, surviving Vietnam. You could say he died peacefully in the night. Thirty years after the war, in his California condo, he found his peace in the night. A brave soldier to the end, he put his own knife between his ribs and into his heart and finally the stench and fear from Vietnam soil went away. The last Vietnam soldier to fall. His suicide was just collateral damage.

And on it goes. Innocent people on both sides of the world, all collateral damage?

—————-

Lorri A. Greene, Ph.D., a licensed psychologist, practices in San Diego, California. (www.petbereavement.com). She is also a member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and the California Psychological Association. She can be reached by e-mail at: lgreene98@aol.com.

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