Editor’s note: The views expressed in I Am So Popular are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook or beliefs of anyone else in the IST network.

I am writing this week’s installment somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. I just wrapped up a week in Hawaii with my young, hot boyfriend Warren. The trip was everything and then some, with hikes into deep valleys to watch astounding waterfalls, a trek across a still steaming lava crater, a trip to watch 2000 degree liquid lava pour into the ocean in enormous clouds of brilliant orange steam, a day on a black sand beach watching the locals surf big scary waves with the sort of ease most of us can only associate with walking.

We even broke down and went to a beach yesterday, our last full day on the Big Island. It is the sort of beach you conjure when you imagine paradise, the kind of place I had, until yesterday, only seen in the movies. We buried ourselves in wet sand up to our knees and built castles and moats along the water’s edge and jumped big blue and green waves and even, to be silly, took the requisite long romantic walk along the white sand.

We were staying in Hilo, which is on one side of the island, the side opposite of the beach I wanted to visit. To get to the other side, Warren announced we would be taking Saddle Road. Saddle Road, which cuts across the island, is the sort of road, as Warren observed, that makes the dirt mountain road up to Real de Catorce in Mexico seem smooth by comparison.

Our host in Hilo, my old friend Marty, informed me as we set out that there’s an army barracks along the road, the only place in the US where they use live ammo for drills. Sure enough, Warren and I came across the outpost, and even had to pull over for a convoy of low, wide combat vehicles hogging part of our narrow lane. Later, lying on that pristine sand, I looked up from the book I was reading and saw four enormous military helicopters fly close overhead.

This was fitting, given my choice in literature. The book I’m reading is called Final Salute, by Jim Sheeler, and it chronicles the lives and ultimate deaths of several US troops in Iraq, very young men who leave behind very distraught families—including two children not yet born at the time of their fathers’ deaths.

I suppose the book won’t land on any summer beach read lists. And maybe I’m an oddball for wanting to read so much raw pain and trauma while simultaneously trying to spend a week relaxing in paradise. But as it happens, the study of grief is an avocation of mine, a passion fueled both by my own past deep grief and the fact that I have suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for many years.

As with other afflictions, grief and PTSD are not competitive activities. Pain hurts, period. On the other hand—and I will not go into detail about the personal grief and trauma I have suffered— I have to say that what I’ve been through pales, to put it way mildly, in comparison to what these soldiers went through, and what their families continue to go through.

Back when the war first started, I went to protests all the time. My son and I would make signs and t-shirts and I’d take him and his friends down to the capitol and we’d voice our opinions. I also maintained a personal shrine to the fallen in my front yard.

It started out small. I took an old election sign, turned it inside out, and used a Sharpie to write upon it the number of dead US troops. I can’t even remember what the count was when I started, but I think it was under 100. Each week, I’d scrutinize the New York Times for a little feature called Names of the Dead and I’d use that data to update my own. Soon, my little sign was full. So I extended it, adding to the sign, propping up this growing number that stuck out from the original sign using wooden stakes.

The sign grew, stretching further and further across the yard. As the toll neared 1,000, I “borrowed” a COA roadblock, painted it black, and covered it with a poster board with the number 1000 writ huge upon it. Beneath that, I pasted a picture of W, with a little Hitler mustache, and the slogan Got Death?

The sign, which stood prominently near a heavily foot trafficked Hyde Park intersection, got a lot of attention. I’d sit in the house sometimes and watch people stop and look at it. Sometimes I tacked up additional messages. A picture of it appeared in the paper.

Soldiers kept dying.

As the 2004 election approached and everyone supporting one party wanted to punch the shit out of everyone supporting the other party, things happened to my signs. One night, someone tore them down. I put them back up. Someone came by and shredded them, dumped them in the middle of the street.

My neighbor offered to help rebuild my shrine. He had had one of his workers dig a trench, into which he stuck a thick fencepost, which he secured with cement in the ground. To the front of this thick post, he screwed a huge piece of plywood, to which he affixed my American for Peace sign, still leaving me plenty of room to update the death count. The fencepost was reinforced with rebar and steel pipes. The only way anyone could’ve gotten it out was with a jackhammer, which I know for a fact, because that’s how I had to remove it when I moved.

At that point, I added the estimated death count for Iraqi citizens. Of course no one really knew what that was, but I wanted to honor those folks, too. We called the chart the Kill-O-Meter.

When I moved, I had all intentions of putting the sign up in my new yard. But by then, like a lot of people, even my fellow screaming liberals, I had mostly stopped going to protests. I still sent out Bush is a Punk Ass Chump bumper stickers to anyone who asked. (When the LA Times reported a story about me and this sticker, I became forever linked to it, honoring requests as far away as Australia to please send some. If you Google “Bush is a Punk Ass Chump” my name still comes up in the top ten hits. I’m so proud of that fact.) But I never got around to re-erecting the sign.

Fast forward to last week. I was listening to my best friend, Terri Gross, on Fresh Air. (I mean, I feel like she’s my best friend. Don’t you? You know that old question, “If you could invite ten people to dinner from anytime in history, who would it be?” She’d be at the top of my list.) Terri was talking to Jim Sheeler and Steve Beck. Beck is one of the key profiles in Sheeler’s book, and it falls to him (Beck) to knock on people’s doors to tell them their son/husband isn’t coming home from the war, at least not alive.

I was so compelled by what I heard, I immediately got the book. And I do think it should be on everybody’s summer reading list. And I think every high school kid, but especially those considering enlisting, should have to read it. And I think it should be broadcast over every radio station for hours on end.

Interestingly, when I’m not reading Final Salute on this plane (or, okay, I admit it, the latest People magazine with Mariah Carey on the cover) I am listening to the audio version of Geraldine Brooks’ book March, which is told from the perspective of the missing dad in “Little Women.” He was missing because he was off at the Civil War, acting as a chaplain to fallen soldiers. I did not purposefully choose to immerse myself in these books simultaneously, but I have to say they do complement each other nicely (and, as it happens, both authors are Pulitzer winners).

Of all the overlapping themes, what stands out most is that though each is political in the sense that you can’t write about war without being political, neither one is specifically about politics, not in a broad, jingoistic sense, not by a long shot. Instead, each account shows how the personal is political and, more importantly, how the political is intensely personal, illustrated via painstakingly rendered portraits graphically exposing how deeply and endlessly war effects us all.

I am embarrassed to say I no longer know the current number of troops killed since this stupid fucking war was started by that stupid fucking punk ass chump. I can say, my awareness having been re-heightened by Sheeler, that there are at least a couple of soldiers on this plane with me, dressed in their fatigues, perhaps on a short leave, perhaps waiting to be deployed.

I also know that I will not soon forget the many gripping photos in the book, taken by Todd Heisler of the Rocky Mountain News. Of all of these images there is one, a two-page spread, that is utterly indelible. Taken from the tarmac, it shows Marine pallbearers in the cargo hold of a commercial plane, lifting out the coffin of a fallen colleague. From the windows of the plane, one just like this one from which I write, civilians strain and crane to get a look at the procession, an extremely rare moment when the truth of this war is fully accessible.

Spike Gillespie blogs regularly for Launchpad Coworking and at www.spikeg.com. She hosts the Dick Monologues monthly, next show May 28th, Hyde Park Theatre. Email spike@spikeg.com for ticket info.