Soldier Turned Peacemaker: How War Wrecked Her for Peace
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Diana wears her heart on her sleeve—the same place she used to wear her country’s flag.
It’s difficult to imagine Diana as a soldier. She laughs and cries easily (especially when talking about her soul-deep yearning to bring healing and peace to people in the margins); she is humble, self-effacing, uses cutesy midwestern sayings that my great-grandmother used, and is… dare I say… adorable?
At least until you get to know her. That’s when it becomes clear the warmth she radiates—the warmth that drew you to her in the first place—comes from a fire that burns in her belly. A healing fire of justice that burns away hatred and unmakes violence with love.
Diana is a peacemaker. The best one I’ve ever known.
When I ask what peacemaking means to her, she says, “Asking people to reimagine who their enemy is by learning to see themselves in the stories of people they’ve been told to hate or fear. Reimagining those stories… that’s peacemaking to me.”
Diana explains that the process of reimagining people’s stories as your own is restorative and healing, but she says it also “helps redraw power dynamics,” which leads to justice.
Peacemaking, healing, storytelling, restoration, and justice… this is Diana’s vision. Not only for her local community (Duluth, MN) but also for her country and the world.
It’s a big vision—some might even consider it idealistic or naive. It’s the sort of vision that people who pride themselves on being “realists” might roll their eyes at and mutter something about “bleeding hearts” who have their “heads in the clouds.”
But for Diana, nothing could be further from the truth. Her vision for peace was born with her army-issued boots firmly on the ground in Iraq, and it wasn’t her heart that was bleeding... it was the body of a soldier she was fighting like hell to save.
Only this soldier was wearing the “wrong” uniform. Her commanders and her country has told her he was her enemy. But when she looked into his eyes, she saw a man with a story like hers. A man who God had made. A man who was her neighbor, whom she was supposed to love.
In that moment, and in a cascade of moments that followed during her deployment in Iraq, she saw the effects of violence with crystal clarity.
She was never the same after that.
“Violence demolished my faith, my values, and my belief in the goodness of people,” she says of her time at war. “And its effects still wound me to this day.”
The words choke in her throat on their way out.
Miraculously, though, it was those terrible, destructive, far-reaching effects of violence that brought her to peace—what she sees as “the opposite of violence.”
For Diana, finding her passion for peacemaking was a two-step process. First, she gave up violence in one fell swoop—she stopped loading her gun while on active duty in the battlefield, stopped wearing her flak jacket, and decided that she could never take a life. Not even if she was forced to choose between her life and someone else’s. And somehow, that was the simpler part for Diana.
“[My kids] will only follow me where I go. If I sit home every day feeling like I can’t make a difference... so will they.”
It was the second step, figuring out the “what now?” when she got home from war, that has proven to be a long, twisty, and sometimes uphill journey.
After arriving home, Diana decided fairly quickly that when she wasn’t a soldier living in a war zone, peacemaking had to involve more than abstaining from violence. She wanted active peacemaking... the “active unmaking of violence,” she says. But what does that look like?
For Diana, it looks like listening and learning from people who have experienced violence. Hearing and restoring their stories in a way that helps them heal. Sitting with people in their pain and refusing to let them suffer alone.
For years, she did this as a sexual assault nurse—sitting with, listening to, and treating people in the moments immediately after their darkest and painful experiences. These days, it takes many different forms—from telling her story and standing with marginalized people in her community, to fighting for justice in her kids’ school and intentionally raising two boys to know what it means to live well.
Basically, Diana is in it. Every chance she gets. Listening, learning, loving, no matter how hard it is.
Diana’s sons at the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
If there’s a vigil for a national tragedy—Diana is there. If there’s an opportunity to show up for those with less privilege—Diana is there. When the new Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama last year (the first memorial dedicated to the legacy of slavery, lynching, racial segregation, and police brutality against people of color) Diana pulled her boys out of school, hopped on a bus with their local NAACP chapter, and drove 20+ hours to go see it.
She also speaks at events all around the country helping people step out of their black and white worldview into the gray-tinged, tension-filled reality of truth. She tells her story and challenges people to grapple with the paradox that she is both a soldier and a peacemaker. That she wants peace, justice, and racial reconciliation in the U.S. because she loves her country. That fighting for her country with sacrifice is just as noble as fighting for her country with bullets.
Her voice swells with emotion when I ask what that sacrifice looks like.
“Well, I lose my sense of feeling sure and happy. I walk towards people in their pain, I sit in their pain with them, and… it sucks! It’s HARD.”
She goes on to explain that since getting involved in this work, she has lost her sense of innocence… her perception that she bears no blame for injustice.
“I’ve had to acknowledge my complicity [in injustice] which has taken away my sense I’m a good person. I’ve lost my fancy-free happiness because I carry the weight of other people’s stories… and now that I know, I have to do something about it. I can’t just walk away because [hearing their stories makes me] interconnected with their pain.”
I ask if it’s worth it and she half-heartedly laughs through the tears I can hear her trying to hold back.
“It totally is. The true-est, most beautiful truth is found in the pain,” she tells me. “It’s true connection, happiness, truth, and life.”
And while unmaking violence and restoring stories is painful at times, Diana says it also gives her a new, more beautiful perspective of the world around her. She tells me that actively working in the issues she cares about makes it easier for her to love people and gives her an overall sense of joy and hope in her every day… it makes her feels alive.
“Asking people to reimagine who their enemy is by learning to see themselves in the stories of people they’ve been told to hate or fear. Reimagining those stories… that’s peacemaking to me.”
In addition, Diana tells me the pain and hardness of this work are worth it because she wants to give her kids something better.
“They’ll only follow me where I go,” she explains. “If I sit home every day feeling like I can’t make a difference,” she says, “so will they.”
So in an effort to give them a good life, Diana decided to spend her days with her kids “showing and equipping and training them how to show up in the pain to change the story. Because that’s real good.”
A few weeks ago while on a breakfast date with her younger son, Diana tells me they had a conversation that made every hard day worthwhile. Her son was filling out a little homework sheet and one of the questions was “Who do you know that’s changing the world?” and without hesitation, he went “Pshhh... easy. My mom.” and scribbled down her name on his worksheet.
At this point in the conversation, we both lose all pretense of holding back our tears. We’re both crying, feeling the weight of that moment and how worthwhile it made every painful story she’s ever heard and held.
“For that,” she says through her tears, “I’ll do this stuff every day and twice on Sunday.”
And we laugh while we cry… our tears full of the painful worthwhileness of peacemaking.
Follow Diana on Instagram.
