| David Vest | |||
| Loved to Death | |||
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Originally published in the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer Throw a stone into a pool, watch the ripples widen. The other day, down the street from me, a woman I know came out of the grocery store just in time to watch an execution-style killing of a hostage attempting to escape. A prisoner of war shot while fleeing captivity. Killed for trying to leave an abusive relationship. On a Sunday afternoon. Did I say prisoner of war? Make that prisoner of love. It's hard to know the difference sometimes. I should be able to tell the difference. My father was a prisoner of war. Three days after Omaha Beach, Wilburn Vest was captured by Hitler's retreating army, taken to Paris, put in a boxcar, and sent to a camp in Germany, where they showed him what happened to prisoners who try to escape. He tried anyway. Once, he got away into France, where a kind family hid him in the barn. When the Germans found him there, they made him watch while they shot the whole family. "See what you did?" they told him. His twin sister Wilma, who lives in Smith's Station, Alabama, says he came home weighing 92 pounds. What Mary Beth (not her real name) saw at the grocery store was the other kind of prisoner, the one trying to leave an abusive relationship. The gunman had made death threats, we learned later. He had come around earlier, saying "I love you" and waving a bullet-riddled paper target to show his intentions. The victim had gone to the police and appealed to anyone who would listen. The last people to hear the cry for help were the 30-some-odd folks in the parking lot who saw the killing, some of them women, some of them children in strollers. One brave man approached the gunman, unarmed, begging him to leave. But the killer ignored him. There was nothing anyone could do. Mary Beth saw it all. She knows about hostages. She watched for two hours until the medical examiner finally arrived on the scene. Then she went home and watched the murder again and again in her mind, until it dissolved into another scene. One that happened long, long ago. Throw a stone into a pool. An abandoned swimming pool. She was 8 years old when she stopped to look through the big iron fence toward the two-story L-shaped clubhouse by the pool. She saw a man push someone through the glass of the second-story window. The victim fell to the pavement dead. Mary Beth looked up again. She recognized the man standing in the window. He had been molesting her for months. She ran, but not fast enough or far enough. The murderer dragged her by the hair up the stairs and over to the broken window. He warned her that if she ever told anyone, he'd snap her neck and stuff her little body into a storage closet where no one would ever find her. So she never told. She didn't tell her raging father, who was himself molested by a priest in Philadelphia. (Watch the ripples widen.) Nor could she tell her husband, who said nothing but smashed the furniture when she said she wasn't happy and wanted to leave him. She got the message, all right. When she finally left, it was on his terms. And she didn't tell her boyfriend, who beat her up and stalked her until she had to go into hiding. Somewhere she found the strength to make it on her own, to put it all behind her and get on with her life. Until one day, feeling safe at last, she went out to buy groceries. On a Sunday afternoon. I keep my dad's war medals in a little box. There among the bronze stars and the campaign ribbons is the last one he got, the prisoner of war medal. Somehow it seemed to mean more to him than the ones for heroism. You don't get a medal for going grocery shopping. Or for telling your story, like Mary Beth, reliving it all because you think it might help someone else. But for a prisoner of domestic violence, it can take real courage just to answer the phone. They get the message that they aren't safe anywhere. Two decades ago, when we saw pictures of American hostages being abused in Teheran, we were enraged. There they were, on the other side of the planet, blindfolded, guns to their heads. We rejoiced when they came home, just as we rejoiced and were thankful when hostages and prisoners come home from Germany, Korea, and Vietnam. We tied ribbons around trees and said we'd never again let anyone treat Americans that way. But what if the hostages are already at home? What if they live next door? We don't hold parades to honor the valor of women trying to leave abusive relationships or protect their children from a sexual predator. Yet a woman is battered every nine seconds in this country, and the most dangerous time for her is when she tries to leave and get to safety. If it were only a matter of a few bad apples, it might be different. But our newspapers are filled regularly with stories of men who have gone after their runaway domestic hostages and killed them. And often their children as well. And, finally, sometimes, themselves. It doesn't begin with killing, of course. Maybe the first stone is asking where she's been. Telling her you don't like her friends. Calling her a feminazi if she claims that she has rights, too. Arguing that you're paying the cost to be the boss, that a man's home is his castle. Watch the ripples widen -- until finally, as the song says, "You belong to me." Most men would never abuse a woman. They don't think highly of men who do. But how did so many of us learn to take hostages rather than partners? In the state where Mary Beth lives -- Texas -- over 1,000 women were killed in the 1990s by men who said they loved them -- husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends. A lover is supposed to be someone who loves you, not someone who kills you. I think of the children who were there outside the grocery store, who saw what Mary Beth saw. I wonder what stories they'll be telling, 30 years from now. It's time we freed the hostages. We can support those underground railway stations known as women's shelters. We can tell judges, cops and lawmakers we're proud of them for getting tough on domestic violence. Above all, we can make sure our sons know that love is not a battlefield. The only way to avoid watching the ripples widen into ever-greater circles is to make sure no one casts the first stone. |
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