To the editor:

I am compelled to write in response to some reactions I have received to the article about my poems on facial damage and reconstruction in World War I (Dec. 6). Patricia Duff did an incredible job of digesting and presenting the welter of information I threw at her in the interview, but she assumed, from the depth of my feeling, that I am a principled pacifist, opposed to all wars.

I am not. I have Quaker friends who are, and I admire them greatly. They are committed to peace, and it affects how they live their whole lives. My commitment in these poems is, rather, to reality. They are propelled primarily by horror, sorrow and pity.

The fact is that war is, and has always been, filled with blood, killing, deaths of both combatants and civilians, dismemberment, and destruction. It is not a clean, beautiful, heroic enterprise. The physical damage, and the horror, is greatest for those on the ground, even when death is delivered from a distance. It leaves them a life-long legacy, or leads them to end their lives too soon.

Questions of morality are a separate matter. I can’t walk through a Holocaust Museum and believe that World War II was unnecessary.

The second part of the book, or possibly another book, will be more about the miraculous facial reconstructions and survival, and the positive qualities of the human spirit. (The photographs and records of the facial surgeries, by the way, are housed at the Gillies Archives in Sidcup, Kent, not at the Imperial War Museum.)

We ignore the reality of war at our peril. Never having seen the effects of enemy bombing on our own soil (with the exception of 9/11), it is easier for us, especially civilians, to think of war as a solution to all kinds of problems. When we enter the enterprise of war, we should at least fully acknowledge what we are doing — face up to it.

Ann Gerike

Coupeville