The Guns May Be Silent But for Some, There Is No Cease-Fire

In the Wake of War, Survivors Still Struggle

"While this war is difficult," President Bush said this month, "it is not endless."

"Not endless." So odd-sounding. So counterintuitive. Some people who have survived wars in foreign lands are struck by the phrase. War, they say, never really ends. War keeps going long after bombs have stopped and troop levels are reduced. Long after refugees return and motherless children grow up.

War leaves survivors powerless against its memories, its futile silence. There's a father who won't speak of war. But his daughter can see it in him every day as this man educated in Vietnam goes to a factory job in Michigan, where people make fun of his English. A girl from Cambodia hides, terrified here in America, when she hears Fourth of July fireworks that remind her of bombs. It leaves a boy with no mother -- just the memory of her warning him that war would eventually come to his village in Sudan and the enemy would "pour fire" on them from the sky.

War, sanitized by distance, lives abstractly on television; you watch it from your brown corduroy sofa, in your cul-de-sac, flipping channels. You have the luxury of hitting the remote and turning the volume low as you hear another report of U.S. soldiers killed, Iraqis killed, insurgents, roadside bombs, corpses. Or change the channel, skip the carnage. Or watch, and listen, because something -- you don't know what -- draws you in.

You wonder what war feels like to those who have survived it in their homelands, have written about it, have made it their mission to always remember so that others will never forget.

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"The soldiers walked around the neighborhood, knocking on all the doors, telling people to leave. Those who refused were shot dead right on their doorsteps," Loung Ung wrote in her book "First They Killed My Father."

Ung escaped Cambodia as a child when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975. She fled with her family.

"Yesterday," she wrote, "I was playing hopscotch with my friends. Today we are running from soldiers with guns. . . . Pa whispers that from now on we are to give the soldiers anything they want or they will shoot us. We walk from the break of day until the dark of evening. When night comes, we rest by the roadside near a temple. We unpack the dried fish and rice and eat in silence. Gone is the air of mystery and excitement; now I am simply afraid."

Ung now lives in Cleveland, where she owns a Belgian beer bar and an Italian restaurant. So far from war, you say. But she says no. "When I hear politicians talk about war ending or not ending, my first thought is, it is really too bad so few of them have personally experienced war," Ung says. "We are ruled by a group of many armchair soldiers. War doesn't end."

The idea for a second book she wrote was prompted by Bush's 2003 "mission accomplished" announcement. At that moment she thought, " 'Oh my gosh, there are people who believe this and think this is true.' But I know 25 years after my war, it doesn't end just because the guns have fallen silent, doesn't end just because peace treaties have been signed. It doesn't end in my life. It is too bad so many people talk about it without having firsthand experience of it."

Her war goes on, living as if it were a close relative who remembers what you remember, someone who was there when the most horrible thing in your life happened, and knows all the details.