This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Episode Transcript
Lee
Diana
For about 10 years, I was quiet about my desert experience.
Lee
That's Diana Oestreich, a combat veteran of the Iraq War. “Desert experience” is one of those so-called pregnant phrases, eliciting all manner of biblical narratives. Moses fled to Midian after murdering a man, Elijah goes to the wilderness and is fed by the ravens, Jesus fasts for 40 days in the desert, gravely tempted. All of them come through on the other side clarified, directed. When Diana went to the Iraqi desert...
Diana
My sergeant had said that it's an enemy tactic to push little Iraqi children in front of American convoys in order to slow the convoy, and then they ambush from the rear.
Lee
And then he said...
Diana
“It's your duty to keep the convoy rolling at all costs tomorrow.” I was blindsided by this command. That really was the night that changed the trajectory of my life and of my faith.
Lee
And the unfolding months of Diana's service in the wilderness entailed seemingly impossible convictions and some wild experiences requiring immense courage. In today's episode, we discuss her time in the desert of Iraq as a US soldier, as recounted in her new book, Waging Peace: One Soldier's Story of Putting Love First. Our interview, coming right up.
Diana Oestreich is a combat veteran of the Iraq war, a peace activist, sexual assault nurse, and the key relationship officer at Preemptive Love, a global relief organization working to end war. And Diana is most recently the author of a new book entitled Waging Peace: One Soldier's Story of Putting Love First. Welcome Diana.
Diana
Thank you so much, Lee. I'm glad to be here.
Lee
Your book begins telling the story of your own experience in being deployed to the Iraq War with a sort of a crisis moment in your life unfolding at a safety briefing prior to a 4:00 AM convoy into an active war zone the next morning. How does that play into a key moment in your life?
Diana
Well, I think like most things that challenge us and changes forever, we don't see it coming. We 100 percent are blindsided by this, and that night, I was blindsided by this command that my sergeant had said, that it's an enemy tactic to push little Iraqi children in front of American convoys in order to slow the convoy, and then they ambush from the rear. And he had said, “It's your duty to keep the convoy rolling at all costs tomorrow.” And in that moment, all these things that I believed were true, and I knew I had to do, just didn't line up for me. And so it was. You know, most things happen at night when you're all by yourself and you have to make a decision in a few short hours. And that really was the night that changed the trajectory of my life and of my faith, and who I saw as an enemy and who I refused to see as an enemy anymore.
Lee
Tell us a little bit more about the particulars of the ways in which you process that. And how did you think through the yielding and submitting to what was being asked of you, and/or refusing to submit to what was asked of you?
Diana
Well, like most things, I was scared to speak up. So we left the briefing, and I knew I had a choice. I knew that I had been given a direct order, and there is no thanks in the military. If you don't obey orders, there are consequences. And so I went back to my tent, and I remember just laying on my cot, and just crying, and just asking God. I'm like, “God, help,” because I knew what I believed to be my duty, and I knew what I had signed up to do for my country, but I also could not imagine taking the life of a child. And so at one point, I just heard this soft voice that just said, “Diana, I love them too.” And that just rang so true to my spirit, and it rang true to what I knew of God and of God's voice in my life. And that's when I knew that God loved my enemies just as much as he loved me, that he was cradling their children and their future just as carefully as I believe God cared about my future. And so I knew in that moment that, even though I had already given my yes to my country to take a life, that God was asking me for something, and I had a choice. And I remember kind of telling God, I'm like, “No, God, we believe in hard, hard things.” Like, this is what soldiers have to do; like, this is okay, my faith says this is okay. And I just remember God saying, “Diana, but I love them too.” So never before had my country required something of me that God was asking me not to do. It was the first time I really felt the allegiance, where I couldn't satisfy both. Before, my country and my faith were one in the same. They never really competed. And in this moment I knew. It was kind of like one of those Burning Bush moments where... I think the Burning Bush is about us realizing that we have to make a choice. It's not God just getting our attention. We have to accept that either we will walk towards it, or we will act like we didn't see it and walk on by. And so that night, I knew that I was going to have to take back my allegiance I had already given away and signed the line of my country, and I was going to have to give it back to God. And no matter what it costs me, that's something that I was going to have to do.
Lee
So what happens in the next subsequent days or weeks or months following that, in the sort of concrete, practical implications of that Burning Bush moment?
Diana
So I decided that between me and God, I would never take a life, that I would give my life for anyone. I would give it for stepping in front of a bullet, from a fellow soldier to an Iraqi. It didn't matter. But I was going to wage war with sacrifice instead of bullets. But practically, I just knew that I wasn't going to take a life. And so that night, it meant that the next day, no matter what happened, I wasn't going to run over a child. Thankfully, I didn't have to make that choice that day, but I had already made my choice, and it ended up with me taking the bullets out of my weapon at one point. And it sounds a little counterintuitive, like, is this just a death wish in the middle of a war? But it was a liberation. It was a coming alive. If I was a citizen of the kingdom of life, then I couldn't deal in death, and really losing my life wasn't the only thing I had to lose. And honestly, it really changed how I showed up in war. It actually gave me a freedom. I woke up with less fear clawing in my belly. Not because the war was any nicer than it was before. I didn't know if I would get killed by lunchtime, but I did know how I was going to show up in war. And that's what gave me a peace that I never had before.
Lee
So what did that peace look like, and what are some examples of the ways in which you had that or experienced that?
Diana
Well, I was a medic--a combat medic--so that meant that I didn't work in a clinic or a tent or anything like that. I was tasked with the soldiers that had the most dangerous mission for the day. So I would jump in the Humvee with them, and you need a medic on site to try to save a life. It's called the golden 10 minutes in trauma. If you can keep someone alive for 10 minutes, they've got a chance. So that was my job. So I had a lot of fear and terror that I wasn't going to be able to keep one of my soldiers alive, that I wasn't going to get to bring them back to their families. So I fear all the time, and I was a nurse, so I knew enough to know that I didn't have enough to keep them alive in my medic backpack. But when I decided how I was going to show up in this war, and who I was going to be, I feel like that gave me a peace that I knew what I was going to give. And I was going to give my all, whether that was stepping in front of a bullet, whether that was trying to save a life, no matter what the cost. I feel like something changed to where, instead of trying to protect my life at all costs and doing whatever it would take, I had this switch that felt like I had something extravagant to give away. And I think that change from fear-based to abundance all of a sudden changed the game. Pretty soon, the people who I was told to see as my enemies, I kind of noticed they were just like me. They had families. They were a little scared. They were just trying to stay alive, too. And I started to find a connection to the people around me, instead of a suspicion.
Lee
So Diana went about her work showing up, paying attention, and one day she was out on a patrol on this...
Diana
Kind of a little dirt road village. It was just this little dirt path, and there's probably like six or seven little huts kind of spaced out along this road. And I was pretty far from where my unit was rebuilding a road. They were kind of down at the bottom of the village. Nobody could see me. And for whatever reason, I did not have a battle buddy with me. You're always supposed to stay in pairs. And this is at a time where there's a lot of guerrilla warfare. Just the week before, there were some soldiers that had gotten taken hostage, and we couldn't find them for a week, and all they found were body parts. So taking US soldiers and not hearing from them again was a reality in my world. It wasn't just a possibility. And all of a sudden I heard this little squeak of the metal corrugated door opening, and I saw this shadowy woman beckon to me through the classic two-finger... you know, you just know. Any place in the world, this is the “come over here.” And in a moment, all of my trainings said, “Run. Do not go over there.” All my military training, everything I knew that said to stay alive said, “No one knows where you are.” So I see this woman, and I see her invite me in. All of a sudden, my feet just stick to the floor like cement, and I'm like, “Oh my gosh. If I go in there, she could just be the bait. There could be an enemy right behind the door, and nobody would hear from me again.” And so in that moment, I should just act like I didn't see that, because everything in me says it's not the safest thing, and in fact, it could cost me everything. And at the same time, all of a sudden, I just kind of had this feeling, this sense that something was happening and I shouldn't miss it. I kind of had that firework-in-my-chest feeling, and I knew that I was either going to stick to the script and play it safe, or I was going to make a decision that I didn't know where it would land me. But I did it. I knew I was going to. I decided to walk in and accept that invitation. And it ended up being the invitation that really changed how I saw Iraqis, how I saw the people I was told were my enemy. She invited me in, and I also was thinking, she should not invite a soldier into the safety of her home. I was wearing a weapon, all the battle rattle from head to toe. She didn't know I was safe, but she really was the first person who offered me that preemptive love and that preemptive trust that said, “I'm going to choose you, even before I know if you're trustworthy. And I'm going to choose you, even if I don't know if you're going to hurt me or not.”
Lee
This was a moment, Diana says, that changed her life.
Diana
She hugged me, and I met her family, and that ended up being a place that I spent time throughout the war. And it really was the place that rearranged how I saw the huge family: that we were family, even though I had not met her before, even though we look different, worship differently, we're on totally different sides of this conflict, I experienced belonging and family with her.
Lee
As I was reading that story in your book, I wrote out in the margin, “Courage of a woman and a woman.” And it struck me. I wonder if that... I don't think that could have happened between a man and a woman in that context. I don't know. Maybe, but I suspect that maybe not. And I don't know that it could happen between a man and a man. But I was struck by this profound act of courage on both of your parts between a woman and a woman. Did you ever find out what motivated her or drove her to invite you in?
Diana
I didn't, but she is the person that I most want to thank in the world. I feel like she just saw me as a human being first. She saw me as a woman far away from home. I was 23 years old, like a baby, and she just saw my humanity before she saw my uniform, before she saw my country. And I really believe that because of her belief, because of how she chose to be courageous with her love--and fight not just for her family or her grandkids, but also for me--that's why... I'm a mom right now of two kids who is fully alive, and I'm not bitter, and I'm not really stuck in a lot of baggage that comes from war. She kind of rescued me, and I didn't know I needed rescuing, but I'm still grateful 17 years later that she offered me that humanity. She offered me a different way to see myself. And you've been in the Middle East, but you know how if you visit one person's house, then you have to visit the next person's house? And now you've drank tea in seven people's houses, and they're all related. I did notice we kept going to the next person's house, and I'm like, “Why do these women seem to all have her really amazing smile?” And it turns out they're her daughters. I think that she taught me how to live in the middle of a war. Because Americans invading Iraq was not her first war. She was part of the Iran-Iraq war. She was somebody who had lived through violence, and she had lived through what happens to communities, because all war is fought in someone's neighborhood. It's all fought in someone's community. She had just figured out in some ways that she was going to fight--not just for her kids to have a future--but she really was going to fight for all of us to have a future.
Lee
You tell another story of courage about having to face down a full-bird colonel.
Diana
So, [name of Iraqi woman] was kind of the matriarch. And her husband... the story that was always told was that he was a POW from the Iran-Iraq war. My Arabic was never good enough, and I never really got into it, but she really was the protector. She was the decision maker of that whole village, and one day when I had come in for tea, she had brought another woman with her, and the whole mood of the room just got quiet, and that tense quiet, where you know someone's going to tell you bad news, and you're going to have to own your reaction. And I remember she brought this woman who just looked really distraught, and this tiny, tiny bundle she had started to unwrap. It turns out it was a baby, and it was the skinniest baby I've ever seen in my life. And I was a nurse before I had left. You just got the sense for when babies were fighting for their life, and when babies were losing that fight, when they just started to stop, and their eyes got glassy, and they stopped breathing very hard. And I didn't know what to do. All I knew was that everything looked bad on this baby. And if I left this baby and came back the next day, I couldn't say that it would still be alive. And so I just ran out and I said, “I'll be back.” And I knew that as a combat medic, one of my tasks is that if ever life, limb, or eyesight is in danger on the battlefield, I can make any call, and I knew that this baby's life was on the line. And so, in this region, they wear this black cloak, and it's really from head to toe, and it's just this big black cloak. And so I knew I had a chance of getting this baby back to our camp to be seen by the air force clinic. But I knew that if anyone saw [name of Iraqi woman] in her big black robe at all the checkpoints, they would just assume that she had a bomb or a microwave hidden beneath these yards of fabric. I just knew it. She didn't know that, but I knew. But I also knew that [name of Iraqi woman] had to come, because if this little baby Muhammad didn't make it, I could not bring this baby back not alive. She would need to come, and she would need to bear witness to what happened, because she would need to help her community grieve this baby. So the miracle happened. I begged and begged and begged, and everybody said, “No, no, no, we don't need to take care of this baby.” And everybody had said no, and my very last person to ask was this full-bird colonel at this little Air Force tent hospital within our own camp. So they kind of had their own thing within our camp. The full-bird colonel absolutely said no, like a hundred percent no. I was supposed to leave, because he had just told me what was what and handed it to me. But I knew that this was this baby's last chance to have a yes. And I knew that he could not keep struggling to breathe forever. And so I just dug in, and I just wouldn't leave. This guy is like six feet, you know, and I'm five feet, and I'm in the Army, and the Air Force are typically seen as smarter and better. Army folk were pretty trenchy people. So I was a fly in his world.
Lee
So despite being looked down upon, Diana pulled out the code...
Diana
... that superseded his, which he was not happy about. But he gave me the yes, and we got baby Muhammad through three checkpoints. And we got him in there, and they took care of him, and we got to bring home a baby that was breathing, that you could see was going to make it. And he also chewed me out really bad, but at the same time, he said that baby wouldn't have made it another 24 hours. And we got to bring baby Muhammad alive. It was just like that biblical scene where you sit down, and all of a sudden little girls are spraying perfume on me and putting these fake rings on my fingers and trying to put my hair in a clippy. And I was like, “What is happening?” And then I remembered those old Bible stories where when they celebrated, they would perfume the person and put rings on their fingers. That was one of the most beautiful moments that I can say I saw good happen instead of death happen in the middle of a war.
Lee
That's beautiful.
You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We're most grateful to have you joining us. Remember, you can find our links, photos, books, and related videos from our extensive YouTube channel all at tokensshow.com/podcast. This is our interview with Diana Oestreich on her new book, Waging Peace: One Soldier's Story of Putting Love First. Coming up, we talk about the practice of courage, being a woman in the military, and Diana's work as a sexual assault nurse. Part two in just a moment.
You're listening to Tokens and our interview with Diana Oestreich, author of Waging Peace: One Soldier's Story of Putting Love First. Please be advised that part two includes discussion of sexual assault.
Several times already, the word fear has been raised, and I've raised the word courage in observing these stories. So for you, what have been key ways of learning to cultivate courage?
Diana
I think that one of the ways that I have stepped into courage is realizing what it's not, because my culture says that courage is winning, and courage is powering over someone else, and courage is getting what you want or what you need. And I think in the middle of the war I saw the things that I had always looked to courage for weren't really courageous. Anybody could shoot anybody. That's not an act of courage. Anybody could be afraid and torture another person. That's not courage. I started to see the things that I'd always thought were courageous as pretty baseline human reactions to fear. But when I started to realize that courage was moving towards somebody who I didn't know to trust yet, that started to be courage for me. And courage was not dismissing somebody who worships totally differently than me, not dismissing their humanity, but leaning into it. That was courage for me. And then when I came back from the war, those same things changed things for me. There were people that I just didn't notice in my community. I just totally didn't notice that people were on the margins and that violence was happening to them. But since courage now meant that I was going to see the people that I didn't before, that I was going to move towards people who violence was affecting them and their kids, that allowed me to show up with people. And now courage meant that I would show up, and it had nothing to do with agreement. I would stand alongside people in pain. That's now what courage meant to me. And so I think the way that it changed for me was that my commitment to what was courageous absolutely changed for me from what I really saw growing up and what my culture thought was courageous. I find that I see more courage, and it actually gives me more courage to show up the next time when things seem overwhelming, and the next time somebody says, “We're scared, will you come listen to us?”
Lee
Yeah. And it seems, too, that you've had lots of opportunities to continue to observe things from a sort of minority perspective, in the sense that you're seeing a lot of these things as a woman in the military and in your work as a sexual assault nurse. Both of those would seem both simultaneously doing such courageous work and further training in such courage. What are some of the kinds of things you've learned and observed from that perspective?
Diana
Well, I was a woman in the military a good 17 or 20 years ago. I think everybody looks at things and they're like, “How it is now is how it's always been.” And it wasn't for me. When I joined the military, no one told me that the military hated women, and that it had come down from Congress that women were now going to be included, and they were going to desegregate basic trainings, because we're going to train the way we fight. And there's a lot of history and a lot of culture and a lot of male culture that is humiliated. They're the warriors. They're the ones who go off to war. They're the ones who sacrifice for their country. They're the ones who get the valor. And if a girl can do what they can do, somehow that is humiliating and they ain't happy about that. So one statistic I'll throw out for you, just to give an overview of women in the military, is they found that over half of all the women deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan--over half of them--were sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers in their chain of command.
Lee
Half?
Diana
Over half!
Lee
Oh my goodness.
Diana
Which means that is a culture. And I do think that because in the military we learn how to wage war, we learn about weapons of war, and assault and rape are historic weapons of war--and this is not just against women; men raping men is a way to humiliate and dominate--and it is a weapon of war. And so, I wish people would have told me that. I did not know that going into basic training. So being a woman in the military was the first place that I started to get a taste of what it would feel like to be not just a minority, but someone who is not welcome here. Some big wig in Congress said that women could now train with men in basic training, and you walk in and realize, like, they are not happy that I'm here. And I remember one time it was Martin Luther King day when I was in basic training, and they offered that we could fall out of our formation and go to this service, and just anything to get away, we always went. If there was anything to do, you did it. And so I just remember being like, “Great!” And so I snap up, I fall out, and I go to the other formation, and all of a sudden I look around me, and I'm like, “I am the only white person in this whole formation.” And I just got this icy feeling, this fear, and I was like, “Oh no, what if this isn't for me? I'm not supposed to be here.” And I didn't even know it, because I'm from Minnesota, and I don't know things. But I remember I was just frozen, and one of my battle buddies--she's African-American--she just leaned over and she's like, “Diana, this is what we feel like every single day.” And I never forgot that feeling of: nobody wants me here, and I don't know that I'm supposed to be here, and I'm just hoping that no one calls me out and tells me to get out of this formation and I don't belong. So that was really the first time that I started to get a taste of what it feels like to experience a bit of being a minority. What's it like to be in a place that was barred? Women weren't allowed to be in the military. Even when my mom served, she served in the Women's Army Corps. They wouldn't let them be in the military. So that's the first place I really started to be exposed to understanding racism, and what it feels like not to be safe in your own body, and what it feels like to have to kind of pay to be there? You don't get the same protections of the rules as everybody else, because you're not really supposed to be here, so you have to take it if you want to be here.
Lee
Yeah. Other lessons learned from working with victims of sexual assault?
Diana
One of the things that I knew was that I had been part of violence in the Iraq War. And then when I'd come home, I was really committed to unmaking violence, and so that's how I started working with Preemptive Love. So I didn't want to just unmake violence where I waged war, in Iraq, but I also wanted to unmake violence in my own city, which led me to signing up to be a sexual assault nurse. And so, as I showed up in the emergency room for women and kids and everybody who had been assaulted, one of the things that I noticed was that 95% of the kids and the women and the boys were all minorities. And my city is over 95% white. So I'm like, “This just doesn't make sense that this is who I'm seeing.” And then, one of the things that I learned about sexual assault is that perpetrators choose victims who they know that society won't believe. They specifically choose people who society sees as not valuable, as not trustworthy, as kind of a problem. So that's why they choose kids, because society doesn't always believe that kids can tell the truth. That's why people who have Down Syndrome are seven times more likely to be assaulted. Why? Because society doesn't believe people with disabilities, though they should. So I started seeing women and women of color be the primary group that was being targeted. And I think that was probably one of the most heartbreaking, truly hard things for me to accept: my culture, by their biases, by how they saw people--if you had any type of addiction, if you had any type of this--perpetrators chose those people, because they would be seen as the problem, so they wouldn't be believed by the police. So knowing that our prejudices and our racism and how we see people with different abilities and the young--that those actually made them more prone to violence--that was a game changer for me. It's just this hierarchy of who is seen as valuable in our culture, and knowing that I was seeing more violence be targeted towards this group--also the unsheltered; if you're homeless--they were being targeted. And I feel like that was the worst education that I desperately needed. It's still hard for me.
Lee
So you come back to the United States after your deployment with this sort of revelatory experience and change of conviction. What was your experience as you would begin to share your convictions about non-violence or peaceableness back in your home context?
Diana
Well, I didn't for about 10 years, because I had come home from war before they had really talked much about decompression or PTSD. I had been in war over a year, and we came back, and in less than a week, they'd sent us back to our homes, back to our cities, back to our colleges. So I knew--because I had come from a faith culture that saw peacemakers as people of poor character and people who didn't understand sacrifice and didn't love America--I knew that it was kind of a dirty word. And so for about 10 years, I was quiet about my desert experience. I was quiet about laying down my weapon, because I knew that if I told the people--my family, people in my faith community--I knew that it would cost me belonging, because I knew that my group saw peacemakers as other. If you did non-violence, you were other. You are no longer part of the us, and I just really needed to belong. I needed it, so I was quiet. So up until probably four years ago, I started working with Preemptive Love, and they were like, “Oh, I think you should tell your story.” There was a speaking event, and I was like, “Are you sure?” They're like, “Yeah.” And I realized that that was my very first time ever writing down what had happened in the war, ever writing down how I actually changed and what I actually did.
Lee
And this was 13 or 14 years after it happened?
Diana
Oh yeah. So I'm telling it on a stage at this chapel's speaking event, and some students afterwards are like, “Whoa,” you know, because I had said I'm a third generation Army veteran and they're like, “What does your family think about your story?” And I was like, “I don't know. You're the first to hear it.” Well, it's on iTunes. So that was my first time talking about it. And I know that I create a lot of tension for people, because as a soldier, they may really respect me, but when I say I'm a peacemaker too, then they're like, “Oh, I don't know what to do with you.” And then when I talk to people who believe in nonviolence, they also think that's great, but I mention I was a soldier, they're like, “How could you?” So I live in a tension, but I do believe that every time we talk about war, we should be talking about peace. It's not disrespectful to soldiers to talk about peace, and in fact, if we really honored soldiers' lives, we'd be working for peace like their lives depend on it.
Lee
Which they do, right?
Diana
They do, but the only pushback I've ever gotten is always in churches when I talk about nonviolence. And it's always an allegiance issue. They're like, “Well, how are you loyal to the troops in saying what you're saying?” And I'm like, “I am the troop! I'm standing in front of you!” But I understand that tension. I live in that tension of being someone who believes in nonviolence and knowing that that feels like betrayal to some people in my life, that I won't put my country first. I won't put anyone first, except for this Prince of Peace, this way that I believe that is the new way to live.
Lee
Years ago ,when I was a rookie faculty member and came into the community I'm proud to be a part of now, there was a full, colonel, lifetime, military career man. We became, in those years, very good friends. And one of the things I discovered with him is that he was able to have much more level-headed conversations about the just war tradition or political realism or non-violence than people who have never been in the military. My experience has been that a lot of the people who have been in the military--especially people who've gone through some sort of officer training--they've had, at some point, to grapple with the questions of how do they make sense of, with any integrity, doing what they do. And they've come to different conclusions than I would come to or perhaps you would come to, but they can appreciate, I think, a different perspective, and they don't feel so threatened by it. But it seems like a lot of times, people--again, I'm just speaking from my own experience--that people who have not been through that experience can get very, very defensive, and they just simply do not want to have this conversation, and they don't want to even entertain the possibility that Christian discipleship might entail a commitment to nonviolence.
Diana
Right. And one of the big invitations for my book is... I play the part where people can be like, “Oh my gosh, I can't believe she said that,” or, “I can't believe she did that,” and they can see that, for a lot of people, I start where they start: in a culture of God, guns, and country. And they're like, “Okay, I get that, because I come from that culture.” And they can also see the invitation to live differently, and to love differently, and not leave yourself behind. You don't have to leave who you are. I wasn't a bad person. I didn't become a good person. I'm the same person, but I was given a greater invitation to love my neighbor in a practical sense. So I hope it's an invitation for people that if I, as a soldier, can wrestle with this... and now I'm just going to say it: combat is different. There are combat soldiers, and there are other soldiers, and it is not the same experience. And I believe that that's just a truth, and that it's okay that we accept that there is a difference in experience. So as a combat veteran, if I can wrestle with these things, then I think it allows other people to come to the conversation without defensiveness because they don't have to be worried they're going to offend the troops, because I am the troop, and I'm bringing up the conversation, and I also want really good things for veterans. I want them to thrive. I think a lot of veterans have been suffocated, like they can't tell about their story if it doesn't line up with the movies other people have watched. For them to be healthy, whole, and thriving, people are going to have to let them tell other stories. They're going to have to honor that veterans themselves have different opinions after experiencing combat. And I hope that that is an invitation to love the veterans in your life differently, to listen to them differently, to offer them that they don't have to line up with your politics or your opinions, and you can still honor them.
Lee
Preemptive Loved: you want to share a little bit about the work that you all are doing in the world?
Diana
Yeah. Preemptive Love: we started in the middle of the Iraq War, 2007 in Iraq, knowing that there's so much violence between the countries of Iraq and America, and that we can take people who have experienced violence from each other, and we can create new stories. And so we really want to end war, and that means we have to start to talk about the ideas that lead us to war, because I think at this point in time, they say America's only not been in a war for 16 years, and so I think we haven't even really tried peace. I have a dream to give my sons something different than a war, and that means that we're going to start having conversations, or start thinking about our ideas of: How do we end up handing every generation a war, and what could it be like if we didn't hand them a war that they would have to carry, and maybe carry themselves, and maybe their friends and family? That really decimates a generation. It's a painful thing to carry.
Lee
Uh, they can learn more about Preemptive Love at preemptivelove.org. Very good. We've been talking to Diana Oestreich, a combat veteran of the Iraq war, a peace activist, sexual assault nurse, and the key relationship officer at Preemptive Love, a global relief organization working to end war. And we've been talking with Diana about her new book, Waging Peace: One Soldier's Story of Putting Love First. Thank you, Diana. It's an honor to get to talk with you today.
Diana
Thank you so much, Lee. It's been great getting to be here.
Lee
You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life. You can learn more about Diana's work by visiting preemptivelove.org. Thank you for joining us. Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Please remember to refer us to a fellow podcast listener. If you've got feedback, we'd love to hear from you. Email us text or attach a voice memo, and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
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The live performance of Angelina Baker was taped in Lubbock, Texas, by our most outstanding Horeb Mountain Boys. That night in Lubbock, our ensemble included Jeff Taylor, Chris Brown, Jake Workman, Tyler Summers, Scott Mulvahill, Ashley Bayne, and Stuart Dunn. Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
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