THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
A War Monument for Slain Civilians
By John Grant

It's quite a sight: A dozen people, huffing and puffing like oxen along the roadway in a hand-grip yoke arrangement as they pull a 15-foot-long caisson on rubber tires, its cargo a 2,000-pound granite memorial stone carved with the words, "Unknown civilians killed in war."

One might ask: "Huh?"

A group of people connected with the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, Mass., came up with the project, known as Stonewalk, to honor these often forgotten casualties of war. Volunteers are walking the stone from Massachusetts to Arlington National Cemetery, where it will be offered as a gift. The group hopes that it can be placed outside the amphitheater near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

As the war in Kosovo made clear, many civilians die in war. While soldiers are lauded with patriotic honors for their suffering, the recognition of civilian casualties too often gets intentionally lost in euphemistic creations like "collateral damage."

Unless they're useful as propaganda fodder, no one really wants to think about civilian casualties. They are either a horrible mistake or a moral embarrassment.

In the techno-war atmosphere of Vietnam, civilian bodies were used to improve the numbers. According to J. William Gibson, author of The Perfect War, "War-manager pressures for high body counts led to both systematic falsification of battle reports . . . and systematic slaughter of Vietnamese noncombatants."

In his memoir Happy Hunting Ground, Martin Russ puts it in more grim terms: "It's too much to expect an American just out of Hick City High to distinguish between guerrillas and civilians; they all look alike, they all dress alike, they're all gooks."

That, sadly, is the nature of war. At the level of the killing, despite all good intensions on the diplomatic level, there are simply no rules. The killing of innocents is a given.

In the Philadelphia area, members of several veterans groups and others are helping to pull the stone. If all goes well, they will be walking through the Downingtown-Coatesville area today and tomorrow.

Public reception has been quite positive. The police chief in Plainfield, N.J., for example, took the entire Stonewalk crew out to dinner.

What exactly will happen when the Stonewalk caisson reaches the gates of Arlington National Cemetery is not clear. It is hoped that the simplicity of the stone and its nonpolitical message will not be seen as a threat to national security or somehow a dishonor to those in uniform who died in our wars.

The Stonewalk project is not pointing a finger - it is simply acknowledging an indisputable fact.

John Grant is president of the Philadelphia Chapter of Veterans For Peace.