Why Did He DOT It? Because Of The War, The New/Old War

I SAW a young man die Monday. He set himself on fire in the center of Amherst, my little college town in western Massachusetts, protesting the war against Iraq. I had never seen anyone die before.

On the frozen ground near his blackened body lay a piece of cardboard with a single word on it: PEACE, handwritten in block letters 4 or 5 inches high, and filled in with designs and colors. It was careful work, it took time, it took thought.

Taped neatly above the single word was a Massachusetts driver's license, shiny and untouched by the flames. Before the police rushed over and shouted at me to get out of there, I made out a young man's face, unshaven, framed by medium-length light-brown hair, nice-looking. I almost saw his name.

Later, in the press conference that followed, the police said he poured two cans of paint thinner over himself and lit one match, which blew out. Then he lit another before any passersby understood what was happening and tried to stop him.

Before the fire, I was drinking coffee and looking out the window of Bonducci's, a small cafe on the town's main street. Across that street, Pleasant Street, is the Town Common, two block-sized fields of grass in the center of town.

I saw a small column of black smoke rising from one side of the Common, the side where the Town Fair is held in the spring, and the mud runs thick; where Rotary sponsors the annual Teddy Bear Festival each August, when nothing else is happening in Amherst.

From my window perch I saw people beating on the flames with their jackets. No one in the cafe seemed concerned by the smoke. Local wisdom was that some bored students had set a bonfire on a steel-gray winter afternoon. Then somebody said he thought there was a person inside the pile of rags, but that couldn't be.

I stepped outside for a better view. By now a policeman had arrived and was spraying the pile with a fire extinguisher, turning the smoke into churning white billows. An ambulance screamed toward the scene.

Now concerned, I crossed Pleasant Street and walked the 100 yards to the fire.

I saw a body curled up, lying on its right side, one leg sticking straight out from the bottom of the pile of charred rags, the other drawn tightly to the chest. I saw a blackened hand, three stiff, curled fingers opening and closing very slowly.

And I saw a face. It was charcoal black. The round head had no hair on it. I couldn't see any eyes; they looked closed. The mouth was opened in an ``O,'' and the person was gasping, quietly.

Paramedics from the town ambulance poured saline solution from small plastic bottles onto the steaming body - first step in treating the burns? The gasps slowed. I saw perhaps a dozen of them before they stopped, before the fingers grasping at nothing became still. It felt like a very long time.

A paramedic in a yellow coat placed two fingers gently on the body's neck. As he raised his eyes to look toward the ambulance, he shook his head softly, just once right and once left. A second paramedic brought over a clean white sheet, and they covered the body.

It was like watching a sunfish die on the beach, like when I was a kid. Suddenly it stops. Just like that. The life is gone, and something's different.

My friend Dean's jacket burned with the man. Dean happened to be walking by when the flames went up, and tried to put him out. A couple of other people did, too. Later, when he could talk, Dean said his reaction was, ``No! You can't do this!''

I didn't think he would die. Not right there, not in the middle of Amherst, on Presidents Day. I was already wondering about burn-trauma centers and what they would do. It took some time before I accepted that the sheet was not there to keep him protected from the cold, from the light snowflakes that had begun to drift down from the sky - slow, frozen tears.

Why did he do it? We all knew. No one had to say it. The war. The war that's a source of anger and divisiveness among my friends. The war that's causing depression in me and among many people I know.

Last Friday I stopped listening to the news. I couldn't stand the pain of knowing about the deaths and destruction and not being able to stop it. I was too angry and felt frustrated and powerless. I don't know about him, except that he was a young man and I saw him die.

Was he overwhelmed by the pain? Was this the only action he felt he could do? Was he so disgusted by the acts of men that he couldn't bear to live on this Earth any longer? I can understand that.

I often let my mind drift off into outer space, and I look at the planet from there. I see death raining down from the sky in the Middle East, in the name of freedom.

I see Lithuanians, crying for freedom, being shot down in cold blood. I see South African blacks slaughtering one another in the name of freedom. I see thousands dying of cholera in Peru, because of poverty.

Closer to home, I see young men and women sleeping in doorways in New York and Los Angeles.

I see billions of dollars being spent by angry, hateful men for killing, and I see hundreds of thousands of our own young men and women going off to fight battles of wars long gone - some of them are eager to go.

They don't know about death. Iraq is Vietnam, it is Korea, it is the Second World War. The same old men are fighting those same old wars all over again, hoping to get it ``right'' this time. What if they do? Then what?

Every day and night, dozens of mammoth C5-A Galaxy transport planes rumble overhead above my little town, on their way from Westover Air Force Base to the Middle East, carrying more soldiers and supplies. I wish they didn't look so beautiful as they move lazily across the sky.

As the young man's body lay still, a C5-A flew overhead, invisible above the low clouds. But I recognized its sound of imminent death, be it that of Iraqis or Americans. Now I know what death looks like, even what it smells like.

It just keeps on going. He stopped the cycle for himself, but the daily news of death, poverty and destruction continues for the rest of us. I can't see it stopping in my lifetime. Guess he didn't want to stick around to see if maybe I'm wrong. (God, I pray that I am.)

The rest of us remain, for now, to ponder the self-immolation of what was perhaps a very brave, very pained, and very mixed-up young man. Or was he?

There weren't any cameras, no CNN on the spot to bring his horrible death live to America's TV screens. It was just a handful of people in a small New England town who happened to be there, and who had the stomach to look, and to feel the pain of another human being dying, by choice, in front of our eyes, because he couldn't stand it anymore.

I didn't have to go to the Middle East to see the horror of the face of war.

Eddy Goldberg is a writer who lives in Amherst, Mass. The fire victim was identified as Gregory D. Levey, 30. He was the son of Robert Levey, The Boston Globe's restaurant critic, and the stepson of Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist.