Waging Peace: One Soldier's Story of Putting Love First

By Diana Oestreich and Danielle Strickland

Diana Oestreich, a combat medic in the Army National Guard, enlisted like both her parents before her. But when she was commanded to run over an Iraqi child to keep her convoy rolling and keep her battle buddies safe, she was confronted with a choice she never thought she'd have to make.

Torn between God's call to love her enemy and her country's command to be willing to kill, Diana chose to wage peace in a place of war. For the remainder of her tour of duty, Diana sought to be a peacemaker--leading to an unlikely and beautiful friendship with an Iraqi family.

A beautiful and gut-wrenching memoir, Waging Peace exposes the false divide between loving our country and living out our faith's call to love our enemies--whether we perceive our enemy as the neighbor with an opposing political viewpoint, the clerk wearing a head-covering, or the refugee from a war-torn country. By showing that us-versus-them is a false choice, this book will inspire each of us to choose love over fear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781506463711

Book preview

shine.

Prologue 

If you slow down or stop the convoy to avoid running over a child, you will be responsible for your fellow soldiers getting attacked. I hope you understand your duty. The commander’s words stung me. I was receiving the mandatory safety briefing for the next day’s 4.a.m. convoy into an active war zone in Iraq. The combination of the heat of the tent and the lateness of the hour had been pushing my eyelids closed, but now he had my full attention. Safety briefings followed the same script. We trained as we fought, so even in war, it was routine—never a surprise, until now. His words made the sleepy room of soldiers buzz as if someone had poked a beehive with a stick.

The commander went on to describe a tactic the enemy used to interrupt the American invasion of Iraq. They would push Iraqi children in front of military convoys; when the trucks slowed or stopped to avoid hitting the children, the enemy would attack the last trucks in the convoy. Being at the end of the convoy made the soldiers sitting ducks: they couldn’t move forward to get away, and with no other trucks behind them, they were easily ambushed. The commander barked over the voices of a hundred soldiers in the tent, I repeat: if you slow the convoy to avoid harming a child, you will be responsible for your battle buddies getting ambushed. If anybody isn’t able to do their duty and protect their battle buddies, stand up now and identify yourself.

His words hung in the air, suspended by a growing feeling of dread. I wasn’t sure I could run over a child to obey this direct order from my commander. I believed in sacrificing to serve my country, even taking a life to save a life, but this? This pricked at my conscience. I knew it wasn’t an option to stand up and say—as the lone female soldier in the company—that I wouldn’t put the lives of my battle buddies first and do my duty. It would be a betrayal. But getting up the next day and choosing to run over a child didn’t feel possible either. Looking down at my sand-encrusted combat boots, I felt my heart pounding as I gripped the knobby seam of my dusty uniform pants. The tent was filled with a suffocating silence. No one moved.

Before I could decide whether to stand up and identify myself or stay silent and do my duty, the first sergeant’s voice boomed over my head like a firing cannon: Dismissed. A wave of soldiers shuffled to their feet and poured out of the hot, dusty tent into the night air. The moment of decision was gone, and I exhaled a small breath of cowardly relief. But I still didn’t know what I would do if a child were pushed in front of my convoy the next day. I had eight hours to decide.

1

Boots on the Ground

When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.

—Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

Burning air assaulted my lungs as I tumbled out of the C-130 transport plane into the ink-black desert night. The engines roared like pounding waterfalls, filling up my ears while the runway lights blinked and flashed around me. I sucked in a deep breath, pulling the syrupy thick air into my lungs, while the soles of my dust-colored combat boots turned sticky on the black baked tarmac. The acrid tar smell of the heated runway singed my nose, draping itself like garland across the shoulders of the soldiers of Bravo Company. My company. One hundred soldiers huddled together, waiting to face our first thirty seconds of war. We’d boarded the transport plane in the States—what felt like days or just minutes ago—and were now poured out into a war zone. Unable to see the landscape through the darkness, we stayed frozen in place. Sand-colored uniforms clumped together like human sand castles piled on the runway, waiting for the next order. The dimming roar of the plane’s engine echoed through the night air as it barreled down the runway away from us, turned the corner, and left us standing alone.

Medic! the first sergeant yelled over top of the whine of the departing plane. I want every soldier to have an antidote injector kit in their hands in the next five minutes. Saddam might attack us with poisonous gas.

Keep your gas mask at the ready, barked the sergeant as he piled a mountain of green, wax-coated boxes of chemical-antidote kits into my hands. The gas mask dangling at my hip would allow me to breathe during a chemical attack, filtering out the poison in the air, much as a charcoal filter cleans water. The antidote injectors act like a shot of adrenaline, helping the body fight off the poison’s internal attack. But neither one would save you

Reviews for Waging Peace

[Kristyan Frogley Williams · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Waging Peace is a breathtaking heart-opener. Diana’s writing is an exquisite narrative. She draws you in and sits you down at the table, offering love and possibility. This kind of love can change the world.

[amycoko-731183 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I started this book thinking I would be able to relate to it a bit, as a veteran, but never having been deployed to a warzone, I knew it would be very different from my experiences. This author never believed her National Guard unit would get called up for active duty overseas, as I also had believed as part of the National Guard. After 9/11, everything changed. The author says, “one phone call had cut me off from the life I knew and propelled me forward into a future I didn’t want.” From that point on, I knew that every sentence, every decision could’ve been mine. I mean, not actually, because I was a cook for the Air Force and not a medic for the Army…but our lived experiences could’ve been much more similar. What choices would I have made? How would my life have changed as a result? What would I have taught my children differently had I served during wartime? These are questions I struggled with while reading the book.