Somebody’s gotta stop those lying bastards.
—Cindy Sheehan, addressing the Veterans for Peace Convention, Irving, Texas,
August 5, 2005, the day before she went to Crawford
Beware of mothers who have nothing left to lose.
On the eve of President Bush’s January 2005 inauguration, Cindy Sheehan and Celeste Zappala set out on a mission. For weeks they had been trying to arrange a personal meeting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They e-mailed, wrote letters, called. Rumsfeld never responded.
So on January 19, 2005, the pair headed to the Pentagon holding photos of their sons who were killed in Iraq. “The real reason I wanted to meet with Rumsfeld was so he could see the face of my son, Specialist Casey Sheehan, who was killed in Sadr City,” Sheehan said. “I wanted him to look me in the face and see my red swollen eyes and to see all the lines that grief has etched. I wanted him to see the unbearable pain his ignorance and arrogance has caused me and my family. I wanted him to know that his actions have terrible consequences.”1 Joining Sheehan and Zappala was a group of military families and former soldiers who opposed the Bush administration’s war policies, including ex–Army ranger Stan Goff.
Goff recalled what happened next. As the group left the Pentagon parking lot, they suddenly saw through the driving snow “a phalanx of black clad, armed and body-armored police waiting for us, the blue lights whipping around on top of their cruisers.”2
Sheehan—who was not yet a household name—never made it inside the Pentagon that day.
Just weeks before, Specialist Thomas Jerry Wilson had a chance to do what Sheehan and Zappala never got to do: question Donald Rumsfeld about the administration’s war policies. An active-duty member of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, the 31-year-old Tennessean had the temerity to question his boss during a televised event from Kuwait.
“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?” Wilson asked. “We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry us north.”3
Rumsfeld famously replied, “You go to war with the army you have.”
While Rumsfeld, standing in the glare of TV lights, was forced to answer that question, he never had to answer to the mothers who were turned away at gunpoint from the Pentagon, leaving only a stack of photos of the sons they no longer have. The heavily armed police who greeted the grieving mothers probably had better armor than Casey Sheehan did in Iraq.
On April 4, 2004, five days after arriving in Baghdad, Casey was on patrol in the Sadr City section of Baghdad. Shiite militiamen loyal to the cleric Muqtada al Sadr ambushed his vehicle, repeatedly firing rocket-propelled grenades. Casey stood little chance of surviving the attack.
“They didn’t even have their armor from Kuwait yet. They didn’t have their tanks. They didn’t have their Bradleys,” Sheehan told Democracy Now! “And they sent our children to be sacrificial lambs, to be slaughtered in the city. And it just really proves that our babies, our precious, precious children are nothing but cannon fodder to these people.”4
U.S. Army specialist Tomas Young was also in Sadr City that day. He recalled driving in a similarly unprotected vehicle. “The truck had no canvas top to it, so it was just open. Nor did it have any armor on the sides,” Young said.5 The soldiers were sitting
ducks. Young was shot, but he survived—barely. He was paralyzed from the chest down after being struck by a round from an AK-47 while sitting in the open truck bed. He had been in Iraq for just four days.
Though Young never met Casey, he, like so many others, would meet Casey’s mother in Crawford, Texas. While the media largely ignored her previous efforts to question the men who sent her son to war, nobody could ignore the determination of Cindy Sheehan in the first week of August 2005.
On August 2, President Bush left Washington for Crawford to start the longest presidential vacation in history. By the end of his retreat that summer, he would have spent a year—more than a fifth of his presidency—in Crawford.
The following day, August 3, fourteen Marines from a unit based in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, Ohio, died when their lightly armored amphibious assault vehicle was hit. It was the deadliest roadside bombing of the war to that point. Six other Marines from the same unit died earlier in the week. Later that day, President Bush said, “I hear all the time, well, when are you bringing the troops home? And my answer to you is, as soon as possible, but not before the mission is complete.”
On August 4, President Bush held a joint press conference in Crawford with Colombian president Alvaro Uribe where they conflated the so-called wars on terror and drugs. Bush used the opportunity to send a message to the families of the dead Marines: “Take comfort in the understanding that the sacrifice was made in a noble cause.”
On August 5, Cindy Sheehan had had enough. There were only so many times she could relive her son’s death. She addressed the Veterans for Peace convention in Irving and announced that she would head to Crawford the next day. She didn’t even know where the place was, but she vowed to stay until President Bush would meet her and answer one question: For what noble cause did my son die?
On August 6, Sheehan arrived in Crawford and set up what became known as Camp Casey. Her month-long vigil outside Bush’s estate had begun.
The fiercely tenacious tall woman with short blond hair is an unlikely activist. A stay-at-home mother of four from California, she was a youth minister at her local Catholic church, where her son Casey was an altar boy. He joined the Army in 2000 and reen-listed in 2003. She tried to dissuade him from going into the military, but he felt it would help give him some direction.
“Casey was such a gentle, kind, loving person. He never even got in one fistfight his whole life,” Sheehan told Democracy Now! in Texas at her protest. “Nobody even hated him enough to punch him, let alone kill him. And that’s what George Bush did. He put our kids in another person’s country, and Casey was killed by insurgents. He wasn’t killed by terrorists. He was killed by Shiite militia who wanted him out of the country. When Casey was told that he was going to be welcomed with chocolates and flowers as a liberator, well, the people of Iraq saw it differently. They saw him as an occupier.”6
Sheehan’s presence on the side of the road in Crawford offered a stark contrast with Bush, who was enjoying his vacation while 160,000 American troops were under fire in Iraq. Cindy Sheehan said she can never fully enjoy another vacation again. “This is really hard. Not only am I trying to stop the war, but I am grieving my son every day,” she said. “Every day I wake up, it’s like April 4 all over again. I have to realize that I have to go for another day without my son and it’s really, really hard. And then I do this,” she said, pointing to the protesters who had gathered around her in Texas, “on top of that.”
The picture of this grieving mother demanding answers from a war president was too much for Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. He and Rush Limbaugh launched a relentless right-wing smear campaign against her. O’Reilly called her actions “treasonous.” Limbaugh dismissed Sheehan’s protests as “the latest effort made by the coordinated left.”
The Gold Star Mother was unbowed. “I believe that it is my right and responsibility as an American to question our government when our government is wrong. I’m not one of the immature patriots who say, ‘My country, right or wrong.’ Because my country is wrong now. And the policies of my country are responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people, and I won’t stand by and let that happen anymore. I believe that anybody who tries to tell me that I don’t have the right to say what I’m saying, they’re unpatriotic. They’re un-American. And their attacks are not going to stop me.”7
Beware of reporters in the dead of a Texas summer trying to cover a president on the longest presidential vacation in history, who prides himself on divulging nothing to the media, while just down the road sits a determined mother with a single request: to ask the president a question. On August 13, the media finally repeated her question to President Bush. He responded, “I think it’s important for me to be thoughtful and sensitive to those who have got something to say. But I think it’s also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life.” As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, Bush spent that day going on a two-hour mountain bike ride with journalists and aides, attending a Little League baseball game, having lunch with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, taking a nap, going fishing, and reading. Yes, reading.8
A few days later, Cindy had to leave Crawford suddenly to care for her mother, who had just suffered a stroke. At the airport, she said she was determined to come back, but said that the peace camp would continue because the movement was much larger than her.
Cindy Sheehan lit a flame that blazed across the country. By the time Democracy Now! arrived in Crawford, hundreds of people were there. Veterans came. Active-duty soldiers showed up. Ordinary citizens gathered. And more mothers—mothers from every walk of life—arrived.
Democracy Now! broadcast next to the ditch on the road where the families had taken up residence in the hundred-degree sun— Cindy said it was nothing compared to what the soldiers face in Iraq right now. Some of the remarkable women of what became known as Camp Casey shared their stories.
Nadia McCaffrey’s son, Patrick, joined the Army National Guard the day after the 9/11 attacks. She said he was living the perfect life: He had two little kids, a wife, and was very happy. But immediately after 9/11, he felt he had to give something back. He thought that if he joined the Army National Guard and there were disasters at home, he would be there to help. He never dreamed he would be deployed to Iraq. When he was called up to go to Iraq, she sat with him. Patrick said again and again that it was his duty to protect those in his unit. Then he left.
Patrick McCaffrey was killed a few months after Casey Sheehan. Nadia McCaffrey immediately decided she would challenge President Bush’s executive order banning photographs of the flag-draped caskets of returning soldiers. The casualties of Bush’s war are invisible. Even injured soldiers are out of sight when they return. They are brought back under the cover of night to be treated in underfunded Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals.
The Bush administration knows the power of images—and so does Nadia McCaffrey. Defying President Bush, she invited the press to Sacramento International Airport and allowed them to take pictures of her son’s coffin as it came off the plane. She said it was a gesture for her grandchildren. It was also a gesture for the world.
Nadia talked about the e-mails that Patrick sent home. He wrote, “I don’t understand why we’re here. They hate us. They just hate us.” But Patrick never stopped trying to reach out to the Iraqis he met. Among his last e-mails were requests for candy for the children, and for deflated soccer balls. The last picture of him was taken a few hours before he died. He was holding white flowers that the children had given him.
And then there was Becky Lourey. She is a Minnesota state senator who introduced an antiwar resolution in her state legislature just before the invasion of Iraq. Her son Matt was in the military.
In December 2003, Becky Lourey attended a meeting of the National Council of State Legislatures. Donald Rumsfeld was addressing state lawmakers from around the country. A number of legislators in attendance used the opportunity to tell him that their communities were in financial crisis while billions were being spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lourey decided to express her concerns to Rumsfeld about war profiteering by Halliburton, which by that time had already landed $5 billion in contracts for the war on Iraq: “I thought that I would suggest an area where perhaps you could find some savings in the military. And I want you to know that my second son is flying helicopters in Baghdad, so every time a report comes out, I hold my breath until I find out whether or not it is his plane that has gone down.”
She added, “I wrote a resolution in the Minnesota Senate against going to war unilaterally.” The crowd broke into applause.
“That’s why we went in with thirty-two other countries,” Rumsfeld shot back.
Lourey continued, “I’m very upset about the services to our servicemen that Halliburton is providing. . . . It is a great concern when our servicemen and -women are over there, and an entity, non-bid, such as Halliburton, is not doing the job that our own Army had always done much better.”
Rumsfeld replied, “There has not, to my knowledge, been any overpayment, and I wouldn’t want your comment to leave these good folks with a misimpression.”9
Seventeen months after she confronted the defense secretary, Becky Lourey’s son lay dead in the sands of Iraq. His helicopter was shot down by small-arms fire. Three months later, Becky came to Crawford to stand with Cindy Sheehan. And to speak up for her son.
Becky said of her encounter with Rumsfeld, “I remember thinking, he’s like a massive tree, and I’m just shoving my fist into the tree and getting nothing but scratches from the bark. I remember thinking, How are we going to move away from this, you know, the whole way that he talks about morality? . . . How do we counter all of these things? . . . Because it’s not just all of the service people who are dying now. It is why they are dying, and what’s going to be happening. Who are going to be our leaders?”
Becky, Cindy, and Nadia are answering those questions. They are the leaders, these mothers who have lost their sons, and who are speaking out.
Coleen Rowley accompanied Becky Lourey on her trip to Crawford. Rowley was Person of the Year in Time magazine in 2002. She is the FBI whistle-blower who said the U.S. government had been warned before the 9/11 attacks, and charged that her investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker, who was arrested before 9/11, had been blocked by her FBI superiors. At Camp Casey, she pointed out that she had also spoken out a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq was launched. She warned that launching an attack on Iraq would undermine counterterrorism efforts. She said before the invasion, “A continuing question that needs to be asked and answered from the people who are waging the war in Iraq is, ‘How is this making us safer?’ ” She said the media were not terribly interested in her comments then.
Coleen Rowley was not the only one within the government saying that the evidence linking Iraq to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction just didn’t add up. Throughout the military and intelligence services, people were saying the same thing. Like Rowley, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter had been a media darling, especially when he quit the UN weapons inspection program in 1998 and declared that the Clinton administration was not being aggressive enough in confronting Saddam Hussein. But when Ritter, a former intelligence officer in the Marines, insisted in 2003 that Iraq did not have WMDs and spoke out forcefully
against a military invasion, he became a media pariah. Joe Scarborough, host of the MSNBC show Scarborough Country, said on April 9, 2003, that Ritter “played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein.” He ridiculed Ritter for predicting that “the United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs, defeated.”10
Instead of seriously considering the views of war skeptics, the networks provided a megaphone for a small circle of pundits, who know so little about so much, who cheerlead for war. Consider a sample of what American pundits had to say in 2003, as collected by the media watch group FAIR:11
This is what passes for a “mainstream” media today: jingoistic cheerleaders who beat the drums for war. The real mainstream are those opposed to war. They are not a fringe minority or a silent majority. They are a silenced majority—silenced by the corporate media.
Celeste Zappala has experienced this phenomenon firsthand. Her son, Sergeant Sherwood Baker, was killed in Iraq on April 26, 2004, in an explosion in Baghdad. Baker was the first member of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard to die in combat since World War II. His mother was the cofounder of Gold Star Families for Peace, with Cindy Sheehan. On Democracy Now!, she responded to an MSNBC commentator who referred to the mothers in Crawford as “extremists”:
“I proudly wear the badge of being a person for peace. People can criticize. It’s okay. They need to do that. They get paid to do that. . . . But I would say to any of those folks, especially the rabid commentators: talk to me after you have a loved one serving. Then we can have a different conversation.”
She continued, “What does that mean, ‘antiwar extremist’? I’m a peace extremist, you know? I want people to start taking responsibility for the behavior of their nation. I want my representatives to get a spine and stand up and start leading. I want accountability for all the terrible mistakes that have occurred that have put us in this dreadful situation.”
We also found Patricia Roberts in the ditch in Crawford. Her son, Jamaal Addison, was the first soldier from Georgia killed in Iraq. As an African-American woman, she felt it was particularly important for her to be there. “I believe that this is a poor man’s war. They have solicited the minorities to go in, and if you look at all of the statistics, you have more minorities die in this war than [anyone] else. . . . You have wiped out generations of minorities. So I think that because it’s us that’s dying, we need to be the ones speaking out and standing up more than anyone else.”
Mimi Evans was also staying in that ditch outside President Bush’s vacation home. Her son had just been deployed. She kissed him good-bye on Monday, and on Tuesday, she came to join Cindy at Crawford. She’d just learned that her son and his wife were expecting their first child.
“My son is going to Iraq based on lies. It’s very clear. I wanted to believe and my son wanted to believe, too. But nothing has come forward—nothing—to show any of us mothers that our sons are going there to fight for a noble cause. My son is going there not for weapons of mass destruction. Not because we’ve declared war. Not because a mushroom cloud is imminent. And not to fight terrorism—because no Iraqis were involved in 9/11 or in London or in Spain. And I really want to know why he’s going. I think that’s a fair question.”
In late August 2005, this contingent of military families piled into vans to deliver a letter to President Bush to demand that he meet with the grieving mothers. They made their way to the Secret Service checkpoint and they all got out of the vans that had PEACE emblazoned on the side. They walked beneath the searing midday sun bearing the letter and some roses. The Secret Service refused to take the letter and ordered them to step back across the road. And then two of the mothers stepped forward.
Mimi Evans and Beatrice Saldivar, whose nephew Daniel Torres had recently died in Iraq, put their arms around each other. They clutched the letter and the rose and they walked across the street. As the Secret Service agents ordered them to “get back, get back,” they put the letter down on the road. The agents told them not to dare leave it there. But the women did it anyway.
The Secret Service agents looked confused and disturbed. They did not know what to do, especially with reporters looking on. Beatrice asked them to pick up the letter just as so many soldiers have had to pick up the pieces of their fallen comrades on the roads in Iraq. “It’s the least you can do to pick up the letter and give it to the president,” said Beatrice. But the Secret Service agents refused and ordered them to leave.
These are the women of Cindy’s Crawford, who are refusing to grieve politely and in silence.
Then there are the men who have returned from Iraq. Army Specialist Tomas Young decided to spend his honeymoon in Crawford. Sitting in his wheelchair, he talked about his experience in Sadr City: “All of the higher-ups were trying to tell us that the Iraqis were just mindless terrorists who wanted to come over and destroy the American way of life and that we were going to defend freedom. That was definitely the rah-rah, gung ho kind of attitude they were trying to instill in us so that we could feel more comfortable with going in and, I guess, killing them.”
Cindy Sheehan said of Young, “Tomas has more courage and integrity in his pinky than George Bush has in his entire body.” She proposed building a veterans’ rehabilitation center near Bush’s vacation home “so for the rest of his life, George Bush will have to look and see what his policies did.”
Charlie Anderson was another soldier recently returned from Iraq who stayed at Camp Casey. “We’re seeing a Veterans Administration that is being horribly underfunded. It’s been ignored for years. Right now, the Veterans Administration needs $1 billion just to provide services for the veterans that are going to be entering the system next year. We need $4 billion in the Veterans Administration to be able to provide care for all veterans for a reasonable amount of time, for the veterans that are going to enter from this conflict, as well as those that are seeking treatment from previous conflicts,” Anderson said. “The VA is in crisis now. We don’t need yellow ribbons. We need help. We need jobs. We need health care. We need education. We need the promises fulfilled that were made to us when we signed our enlistment contracts.”
Cindy Sheehan’s mission since her son’s death in Iraq is to make sure there is a face—of a mother, a soldier, a movement—on every casualty in Iraq. Sheehan and the other military families ensure that everywhere Bush goes, he is confronted with those faces. So when Bush returned to Crawford for Thanksgiving in November 2005, Cindy was there. When he delivered his State of the Union address in Congress in January 2006, Cindy was there. She was wearing a black T-shirt that said in bold white letters, “2,245 dead. How many more?” Capitol Police arrested her for wearing the shirt, only to drop charges and apologize the next day. In March 2006, Sheehan was arrested at the U.S. mission to the United Nations while trying to deliver a petition with more than 60,000 signatures calling for the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq. Police manhandled Sheehan, tearing ligaments in her shoulder.
The venues change, but Sheehan’s focus does not. As she said at Camp Casey in August 2005, “I know we speak for thousands of [military families] when we want to know ‘What is the noble cause our children died for, what is the noble cause they are still fighting for and dying for every day?’ And that is what we want— answers to these questions. And there’s millions of Americans here with us—thousands here actually in Crawford—who want the same answers. They don’t have what I like to call ‘skin in the game,’ but we are all affected. Our entire humanity is affected when one country wages an illegal and immoral war on another country. And that’s why America is behind us, saying we want the answers to those questions, too.”
In March 2006, near the second anniversary of her son’s death, Cindy Sheehan wrote an open letter explaining why she continues her struggle: “I started working for peace shortly after Casey was killed to be sure that Casey would not be forgotten by America, that he would not just be a number. I started this so Casey’s sacrifice would count for love and peace; not hatred, killing, and lies. I started on my journey for peace to make sure it didn’t happen to other Caseys and their families. Casey and the millions of others who have been tragically killed by our leaders in worship of greed for money and power will never die as long as there are people working for peace and justice. This is their gift to us. Let’s never forget them. Their deaths can’t be in vain.”12