Captive writer renews hope for war’s end

Editor’s note: As this column went to press, the kidnappers’ Friday deadline had passed, but there was no word on Jill Carroll’s condition.

It was her eyes that caught me first.

Bright and clear as polished river stones, they shine from the pages of the newspapers I read. They’re the eyes of her generation — steady, delighted, confident.

Then there was her name: Jill Carroll.

It sounded so familiar it made me wrack my brain. Did she dance with one of my daughters? Play basketball with another? Or was she enrolled in one of the college journalism classes I taught?

And by the morning last week I awoke to hear her mother’s voice on the radio, appealing to her captors in Iraq, I’d become entirely hooked on her tale.

Maybe it was her resemblance to my own daughters; maybe it was because one of them was flying halfway around the world herself last week.

Whatever it was, whenever that striking young woman’s face appeared last week, I could not look away.

Since the beginning of time, mothers and fathers have sent their grown children out into the forest, over the seas and into the war zones. But it’s never before happened to the generation I personally helped to raise.

And that makes reading the war news all the harder.

Now American soldiers in Iraq carry the names that filled our daughters’ kindergarten classrooms at Wilson School. There are the Jeremys and the Jasons, the Ambers and the Jills. And if they aren’t facing life-threatening duty as soldiers, they’re showing up as relief workers and journalists. They’re no longer sitting cross-legged on mats in Mrs. Cady’s classroom singing “The Wheels On The Bus.” Some of them are simply trying to stay alive.

Others have joined the new globalization in less hazardous ways. They’re teaching English as a second language or serving in the Peace Corps. They’re volunteering in NGOs and they’re studying abroad. The wheels on their buses have taken them all over the world.

Last week, it was the plight of Jill, a 28-year-old freelance journalist and a Michigan daughter, it turns out, whose gaze caught my eye.

She went to Iraq to tell the world the stories of the people who live there, and, as CNN reported, to find her “fate.” It turned out to lie this week in the hands of kidnappers who abducted her in Baghdad.

As I looked into her eyes on the newspaper page, I remembered a conversation I had on New Year’s Eve. Flushed with hope, or champagne, I floated the notion that maybe one day war will truly end. That one day it may go the way of slavery — an outdated idea that human beings can no longer stomach.

Perhaps one day we’ll decide there are better, more humane ways to solve problems between nations. And then, I said, feeling rather like one of those flaky ‘60s-era types poking daisies into the ends of soldiers’ rifles, perhaps war itself will disappear.

I faced a tough crowd that night. My friends and family reached agreement on one point: War, they said, was simply a part of the human condition.

But last week a newspaper headline revived my hope. “Wars are on the wane worldwide,” it said. “It seems that armed combat is falling out of fashion,” wrote Knight Ridder’s Frank Greve.

He quoted war historian John Mueller of Ohio State University who believes that in developed countries, war has become as obsolete as slavery or dueling. He calls the change “one of the most important developments in the history of the world.”

Despite the war in Iraq, there are dramatically fewer armed conflicts underway in the world than in the early ‘90s. And the countries of Europe have stopped turning to bloody battles to solve disputes along their borders.

Perhaps my New Year’s Eve notions weren’t so airy-fairy after all. Perhaps there is reason for the hope I struggled to articulate that night.

I thought of Jill Carroll, the talented, kidnapped journalist and the way I followed her story as the week wound down. I watched videos from CNN and checked out online newspapers in locations where she has lived and worked. Everywhere her bright eyes locked with mine.

And as I watched, in a video released by her kidnappers, her gaze turned dull and weary.

In 2006, through the technology of around-the-clock Internet and cable news coverage, we can watch the confident gazes of American young people turn to fear and horror.

No wonder Americans’ taste for war declined so quickly in this conflict. No wonder the battles keep receding around the globe. We can no longer stand to look into our children’s eyes.

For this generation we so carefully raised, for the Jeremys and the Jasons, the Ambers and the Jills, the end of all war, I fear, lies somewhere beyond the bounds of this new year.

And when we return their steady gaze, we know: That’s not nearly soon enough.