Famed poet Nikki Giovanni sounds part grandmother, part oracle in her matter-of-fact delivery of sage advice and world views.

"We live in a world that wants to pretend it's a strength that you can drop a bomb someplace, but that's a weakness. The strength is that you can live through it," she says via telephone from her fourth-floor office at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., where she is a University Distinguished Professor.

United for Peace and Justice strongly encourages you to support the work that Cindy and the Gold Star Families for Peace, along with Military Families Speak Out, are doing. This action comes at a critical moment and we need to make sure their voices are heard.

I was deployed to Iraq in April 2003 and returned home for a two-week leave in October. Going home gave me the opportunity to put my thoughts in order and to listen to what my conscience had to say. People would ask me about my war experiences and answering them took me back to all the horrors—the firefights, the ambushes, the time I saw a young Iraqi dragged by his shoulders through a pool of his own blood or an innocent man was decapitated by our machine gun fire. The time I saw a soldier broken down inside because he killed a child, or an old man on his knees, crying with his arms raised to the sky, perhaps asking God why we had taken the lifeless body of his son.

I thought of the suffering of a people whose country was in ruins and who were further humiliated by the raids, patrols and curfews of an occupying army.

And I realized that none of the reasons we were told about why we were in Iraq turned out to be true.

Palestinian children have marked the second anniversary of the death of US activist Rachel Corrie, killed during an Israeli army operation in Gaza. The 23-year-old was crushed in disputed circumstances as she tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian home in Rafah refugee camp.