Saluting one man's calm spirit in the depths of a crazy war

Features Column
Saluting one man's calm spirit in the depths of a crazy war
MICHELE LANDSBERG
05/23/1987
The Globe and Mail
Page A2
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MICHELE LANDSBERG NEW YORK
" Ben Linder . Presente]" says the man on the podium. It is the Nicaraguan way of saluting someone who has fallen in the war, and insisting that his or her spirit still lives.
Ben Linder , of course, is not materially present, because he is dead and buried, and this is his memorial service, at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side.
Mr. Linder, a slight, bespectacled 27-year-old engineer from Seattle, was killed in a contra raid on April 28 as he worked at a hydroelectric project in the rough, remote hills of northern Nicaragua. As he lay wounded in the field, a rebel shot him pointblank in the head.
"I once drove Ben in my jeep up to El Cua, where he was working, and he showed me this tiny Swiss generator, made in 1955, that he was trying to fix," said George Moore, a speaker at the memorial service. "He was trying to bring light to about 2,000 farmhouses. . . ."
The Iran-contra hearings go on and on in Washington, but the deeper puzzle of all the deaths inflicted on Nicaragua remains unsolved. To destroy a small, poverty-stricken country, the mighty United States has been willing to lie, cheat, beg, steal, murder, arm its enemies, subvert and bully its allies, corrupt its foreign policy and traduce its democracy. All this for Nicaragua - when no blood-soaked Latin tyrant (and there have been plenty of them) ever evoked more than the mildest U.S. rebuke.
The sheer, mad disproportion of the Reaganite attack is wearying. One feels hopeless against such rabid perseverance. Almost 70 per cent of Americans are consistently opposed to aid for the Nicaraguan rebels, known as contras, but even this has no effect on Washington.
At Mr. Linder's memorial service, the old stalwarts of the Vietnam protest years - Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore, Rabbi Balfour Brickner - spoke first, and their rhetoric, too, seemed tired and stale. A grey-haired folkie sang, too glibly; there was prolonged, sentimental applause for some white-haired veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Then everything changed. Mr. Linder's young friends rose, one by one, to pay tribute to him. They had fresh faces, shiny hair and no rhetoric at all. Amy King, a friend of Ben's older sister, remembered "Little Ben . . . it was a family joke that he was the perennial kid brother. I could never believe that he was more than 13. We joked: 'You mean, the Nicaraguan people need a 13-year-old engineer?' Now I have to catch up to him." She was trying hard, she said, to learn from Ben's parents. They, in this terrible moment, wanted Americans to remember the thousands of Nicaraguan dead, and to keep the death of their American son in some kind of perspective.
Alison Quam, who was Ben's girl friend for seven years, looking very young and slender in a grey dress, talked about a letter he sent her four years ago from Nicaragua, to be opened only in case of "emergency." "Last week," said Ms Quam, her voice wavering, "I opened the letter." She read us bits of it: "Keep on walking, Alison . . . live your life energetically and joyfully. . . ."
This part of the service was almost unbearable, because now Ben Linder was a real person: a young man who did clown tricks for village children, who seemed to have a radiantly calm, unpretentious spirit, who was happy to be working with an unsullied purpose for $13 a month. He knew he was on a contra death list, and was afraid but quietly determined to keep on.
"He was good friends with my 2-year-old son," said Alice Christov, who was an ABC radio reporter in Nicaragua. "I thought they would always be friends." Ms Christov talked about the contras, and how she had seen babies and mothers they murdered. "I say to my fellow journalists, you can be a good journalist and tell the truth, even when your own country is in the wrong."
The dispirited detachment that had hung over me earlier began to lift. It was almost possible to believe, listening to these fresh voices, that the United States could change, and that the undercurrent had already begun to shift. Later Mr. Linder's friend George Moore told me: "I believe that the opposition is growing, in church movements and on campuses, and that within two years the people's resistance to the war will change from a passive to an active one."
By the time the service ended, a current of enraged grief ran through the crowd. And when the last singer said, quietly but resonantly, " Ben Linder . Presente]" mine were not the only eyes that stung with tears.
I came home, still shaken by the young man's death, and found my husband watching the TV news. The blond, handsome, angry face of Florida Representative Connie Mack filled the screen. "You asked for it," he was yelling in cold-steel tones. The camera moved to the shocked faces of Mr. Linder's parents, who had gone to the subcommittee on foreign affairs to talk about how the contras shot their son in the head as he lay on the ground. "You come here to blame your country, the President and the people who are fighting for freedom," the Republican congressman ranted. He accused them of "politicizing" their grief.
The contras are terrorists - bumbling, corrupt, but crudely vicious. They rob, rape and murder Nicaraguan peasants. Their Washington sponsors seem like lunatics, or worse. I turned off the television and went to bed. A question danced before me in the dark.
What has Canada said publicly to the United States about this crazy war?
The answer came at me in the dark. Canada has maintained a cowardly public silence. Canada has said nothing. Canada is complicit.