Tears of the Rose

Tears of the Rose

I took this image the day after I returned home from the first Persian Gulf War. I had been involved in war of one sort or another for nearly twenty years, at that point, and the idealism, the certainty that God was on our side, had long ago washed away in the simple brutality and pointlessness of it all. Still, I had fought in this last war. I had even volunteered for the opportunity to make this final sea tour of my career. But I was done now. My career had a few short months left to go. My marriage, in its own sort of slow, death-spiral, would only last a short while beyond that. On that first day home I knew these things as certainties.

At a very visceral level war is about survival. It is about either causing or avoiding death. It is about making decisions, each day, that help to save some people and help to destroy others. The hard part, on returning home from war, is to lose that intensity of focus on death. The hard part is understanding that you are now a stranger in a strange land and it is not because those around you have moved away from you, it is because you have moved away from them. The hard part is finding a way back home.

I went out to my car on that first morning home to do some inconsequential chore. In the fifty feet that separated my front door from my car was a small garden that my wife carefully tended. Normally I might pass this by without a glance but, on this day, I paused. After months in the Persian Gulf where, so often, the land had not a single tree or stalk of plant growing upon it, I was stunned by the color and life in this garden. In the middle of the garden was a rose bush with a single rose. I was transfixed by that single rose. To me, at that moment, it was unspeakably beautiful. I stared at that rose for over an hour, scarcely moving. Finally, I decided to take a photograph of it.

In those days photography was no more than a hobby to me. I had often tried to hone my abilities by taking pictures of flowers. I always cut the flowers to take them to a location where it is easier to control the shot. But I couldn't do that in this case. After years at war I had lost the heart to destroy even one rose. So, over the next hour, I tried to set up this shot with the rose in place. Just before I pressed the shutter it began to gently rain. I saw the drops of rain on the petals of the rose and I began to cry. I cried for my career and my marriage which were both ending. I cried for those I knew who had died in the wars. I cried for those people who I did not know whose lives I had worked to take. I cried because it was the only way that I knew to find my way back home again. Then I took the picture that is before you. It is called "Tears of the Rose".