Casualties mount, and doubts grow
boston.com
Deadly Iraqi aftermath tests families, a nation
By Yvonne Abraham
Boston Globe Staff
11/2/2003
COLORADO SPRINGS -- One man came from a tidy new subdivision by his Army base, the blue Rockies close and clear, as if painted on the sky. He was 29 and big, a cowboy who rode bulls before he became a father of three, though he lied about it to keep his wife from worrying. Military for life, he arrived in Iraq armed with certainties: He was meant for this war. The other man came from a railroad town on the Ohio River, a place where the grit from decades of hauling steel and freight coats the streets and lines the faces of men who fill windowless bars with smoke and worry. He was 21, tall and thin, always pulling things apart: remote controls, engines, his experiences. In Iraq, he counted the days, eager to shuck his uniform.
As different as the towns they came from, Staff Sergeant William Latham, of Colorado Springs and Private First Class Tim R. Brown Jr., of Conway, Pa., saluted the same flag and answered to the same commander in chief. And well after an official end was declared to major hostilities there, Iraq claimed both their lives. Latham died on June 18 after being hit by shrapnel in a weapons raid in Ramadi. Brown died on Aug. 12 when a roadside explosive struck his Humvee in Taji.
The two men left behind funeral flags tightly folded into plump triangles, snapshots of mugging comrades, women who loved them. They also left an unease which public opinion polls say is growing nationally, as the drip-drip of casualties continues six months after many soldiers' families expected them home.
The places that mourn Latham and Brown tell the story of the nation's shifting attitudes, the soldiers' deaths crystallizing misgivings about the war, even in communities where doubt was once scarce. In Colorado Springs and Conway, the war in Iraq found plenty of support and still does. Patriotism, loyalty to the troops, and hatred of Saddam Hussein run deep across political affiliations in those two key electoral states.
But so does discomfort with American troops' continued presence in Iraq. The soldiers lost and the money poured into Iraq since President Bush marked the official end of the war on May 1 have turned some against the occupation, and against the president himself, praised in both places for his conduct of the war, but criticized for his handling of its aftermath.
For the families that have lost loved ones in Iraq, the misgivings are more than questions of politics and public opinion.
`He had so much love' As a child, Tim R. Brown Jr. was "happy and withdrawn," said his stepmother, Pam Brown Lois, who had raised him since he was 7. But he was open, too, the kind of child who collected surrogate parents.
"He was a wonderful person. He had so much love and so much more to give," said Lois, 40, a blonde who wears one of the dog tags Brown gave her before he was deployed. Her modest house in Baden, just south of Conway, is crammed with pictures of her boy: the pudgy preteen, the handsome prom date, the athletic soldier wearing black sunglasses in the desert.
Brown had joined the Army at 18, Lois said, because he needed direction. He wanted to travel and to attend college, and he knew the Army would lead him to both. But he sometimes struggled with his choice. Home on leave in the summer of 2002, he considered not returning to his unit, until Lois helped persuade him to return. The memory pains her now.
He was sent to Iraq in April.
"He loved being there, you know?" said Lois, tears sliding down her cheeks. "He hated what we were doing, the killing, the destroying. But he knew we were over there to give them freedom."
When his term was to be up on Feb. 10, his 22d birthday, Brown wanted to leave the service, but told Lois he would return to Iraq to rebuild what he had helped destroy.
But on Aug. 13, an Army officer in a dress uniform tapped Lois on the shoulder as she was mowing her lawn. She knew immediately, dropping to the ground and wailing, "No, no, no, no, no," begging him not to say what she somehow had felt in her spine hours before.
Her stepson's death and those of the soldiers lost since have ruptured Lois's faith in their cause.
"On the terms that the president told us we were going to war, I backed it," she said. "But we had more of our soldiers killed since this war has been over [than before], and there were no weapons of mass destruction, and all these things we were told we were going to war for. For what? I don't understand why we continue to let our men and women be killed over there."
`I'm just like every other wife' Curled up in an armchair in her Colorado living room, a portrait of her husband above her, Melissa Latham said she sometimes understands how people could feel that way. She knows there are thousands of other women whose husbands are based at Fort Carson -- as was her husband, William -- who see no point in soldiers continuing to risk ambushes and suicide attacks in Iraq. But Latham, 33, a former soldier herself, will not budge on the war.
"The night that my husband left, he sat down with the kids and told them that he had to go get a bad man out of power, so the children would be able to play in the street," she recalled. "And you know, it's the truth. . . . I think we're doing a lot of good; we just don't see it right now."
The shrapnel that pierced Latham's skull in mid-May was no bigger than the tip of Melissa's little finger. By the time his wife arrived at his bedside at a military hospital in Germany, William Latham was semiconscious, but he was still her husband, the man she married on her lunch break at a Clarksville, Tenn., courthouse in 1993, just five weeks after they met. He even flipped off his nurse, appalling and delighting his wife. Only when she saw the fluid in the tube from his head run red did Melissa concede she could lose him.
"Not a day went by that we didn't tell each other we loved each other," she said, crying, shifting between past and present tenses. "He's my best friend. I complain to him about everything. I'm just like every other wife."
Her children are taking it hard, she said, especially Jeremy, her youngest, who is 6. It is for her children and other soldiers' children that she worries when she hears talk of mistakes and quagmires.
"Our kids ask us, `Mom, if it's wrong, why are our daddies still over there?' " she said. "And we don't have an answer for it, and it makes it hard for us."
Fort Carson has sent more than 13,000 soldiers to Iraq and has lost 21 of them to enemy fire and accidents thus far. More than 100 soldiers from the base have returned home with serious injuries.
On Colorado Springs's Tejon Street, a wide, handsome strip of sidewalk bistros, expensive gift shops, and two Starbucks stores a few blocks apart, people understand military life. And though they have seen more casualties there than in most of the country, they say combat deaths are a fact of life, a risk for which soldiers sign up.
"This is part of the military," said Bill Studt, 59, a candy salesman. "Certainly, the losses are unfortunate. The price we're paying is a difficult one to accept, but ultimately, the price could be much more somewhere down the road."
Some of the merchants and shoppers on Tejon said the media have focused too closely on the Iraq casualties and have failed to report enough stories about all of the successes of the United States and its allies in Iraq. In early October, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld stood before thousands of soldiers at Fort Carson to thank them for their sacrifices, and to make that very argument. Iraq has yielded "thousands of incredible projects and humanitarian stories, but no one is telling those stories," he said. At the Wal-Mart Supercenter in nearby Fountain, some of the sales assistants with husbands in Iraq feel that not enough attention has been paid to the casualties lately. Many partners of Fort Carson soldiers are on edge, frustrated by slow mail and delayed leaves. They want their husbands and wives home. But few of the soldiers' wives, who roll their eyes when asked their opinion on the war, will say how they feel about the conflict now.
"Being a military wife, there are certain things I have to keep personal," said Mary McCambridge, whose husband Robert left for Iraq on April 6. "I 100 percent support my husband in what he's doing, but I don't understand the reasoning behind it. There's been a lot of uncalled-for deaths."
Even in a heavily Republican, military town like Colorado Springs, cracks have opened between some voters and their president.
"The campaign was brilliant, but the aftermath is a mess," said Robert Menslage, 69, a retired electrician and Air Force veteran who voted for Bush in 2000. Asked if he would vote for him next year, Menslage said, "Hell, no!"
Support tempered by grief Six states away, in Conway, Pa., Bush was never as popular as he has been in Colorado Springs. But workers in this dense, Democratic town, where just about everybody knew Tim R. Brown Jr., enthusiastically backed the war. Many of the men and women in western Pennsylvania, as in central Colorado, believe that Hussein was directly connected to the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Brown helped out sometimes at D.E. Monaci and Sons, the stone supplier where a billboard reads: "Dreams Come True: Granite Countertops." There, they still support the military effort in Iraq and Bush, even though they lost the man who manager Tempest Monaci said was "like the light of the day."
"What Bush is doing, I'm all for it," said Tempest's mother, Elizabeth Monaci, 67. "Of course, we're going to lose kids. I lost my brother -- he was 19 -- in the German war. That's all part of saving us. We all miss Tim and love him. He gave up his life for us, so we can be free."
But for others in Conway, Brown's death made the distant datelines and dust-filled television images suddenly too real. At Haglan's Cafe, a smoky bar where the Thursday spaghetti special costs $1.95 (each meatball is 50 cents extra), Jessica Haglan, 31, blamed the president not just for the protracted aftermath in Iraq, but for the so-called war on terror itself.
"[After Tim's death], I started thinking about it," said Haglan, who was tending the bar recently. "I don't think they should even be there. If Bush hadn't been president, none of [the terrorist attacks] would have happened. They don't like him."
Patriotism runs through this population of 2,200 as dependably as the trains that hurtle over the tracks in its rail yard. Many here are descended from Czechoslovakian and other Eastern European immigrants, and plenty of them are veterans.
But some of the veterans in Conway believe that the troops are being let down by politicians who are running the occupation too gingerly. If soldiers were given the freedom to fight the enemy more aggressively in Iraq, there would be fewer casualties, they say.
"It's just like Vietnam," said J. C. Ross, 62, a retired freight conductor and Vietnam veteran who is adamant that the president is ultimately responsible for the war's protracted aftermath. "He is the main man. If you remember correctly, Bush says it's all over. Now, who knows? And it's getting uglier by the day."
Economic anxiety is as common in Conway as the flags that sprout from its brick porches and front gardens: Many of its residents have seen steel mills close and jobs lost. The Conway yard was recently taken over by Norfolk Southern, and the men who park themselves daily on bar stools at Haglan's and the Conway Croatian Club fear layoffs and worse times are coming. From where they sit, American taxpayers can ill afford to pay the $87 billion tab for reconstructing an oil-rich country like Iraq.
"I don't know why we can't take care of our own problems here, instead of blowing that place up and rebuilding it," said Roger McKee, whose family was close to Brown.
At first, the 48-year-old, who services locomotives, was all for the war. "Bush made it sound good, put it that way," McKee said. "Saddam Hussein was going to bring a lot of terror to the US -- bin Laden, and the works. Now it seems like there's a lot of senseless American deaths. It seems like it's never going to end."
Lives changed forever Melissa Latham would give anything to be worrying about when hostilities in Iraq will end. She would swap places in a minute with her girlfriends who have husbands still there, to be tensing up when the telephone rings, holding her breath until the gray car used for official Army business passes by her place.
Instead, she is trying to hold herself and her family together without William. She does not have it in her to cook much any more, so the family often slides into a booth at Popeyes for chicken and biscuits, as they did on a recent Tuesday afternoon.
There, Melissa listened intently as her children Patricia, 10, and Travis, 9, excitedly discussed George Washington's wooden teeth, trying to outdo each other for her. She threatened to take points away when they misbehaved.
She called Jeremy "little man," and he scolded her: "Only daddy calls me little man!" And a few times, Melissa Latham seemed to disappear, absently stirring the gravy around and around in her mashed potatoes, staring out the window with sad eyes, her shoulders drooping.
The family marked what would have been William Latham's 30th birthday in July, with cake and balloons at his Denver graveside. A family trip to Walt Disney World and its merciful distractions will replace Christmas.
Aug. 20 marked 10 years since the Lathams' courthouse wedding. Standing alone in her front yard, Melissa sent two "Happy Anniversary" balloons into the sky.
Yvonne Abraham can be reached at abraham@globe.com.
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