Military Families vs. the War
washingtonpost.com
Organized Opposition Is Small, but Some See It as Historic
By Paula Span
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A01
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- On the night last month he learned that his son had died in Iraq, Richard Dvorin couldn't sleep. He lay in bed, "thinking and thinking and thinking," got up at 4 a.m., made a pot of coffee. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to the president.
When the invasion of Iraq began, Dvorin -- a 61-year-old Air Force veteran and a retired cop -- thought the commander in chief deserved his support. "I believed we were destroying part of the axis of evil," he says. "I truly believed that Saddam Hussein was a madman and that he possessed weapons of mass destruction and wouldn't hesitate to use them."
By the time Army 2nd Lt. Seth Dvorin was sent to Iraq last September, however, his father was having doubts. And now that Seth had been killed, at 24, by an "improvised explosive device" south of Baghdad, doubt had turned to anger.
"Where are all the weapons of Mass Destruction?" Richard Dvorin demanded in his letter. "Where are the stockpiles of Chemical and Biological weapons?" His son's life, he wrote, "has been snuffed out in a meaningless war."
His is not the only military family to think so. In suburban Cleveland a few days later, the Rev. Tandy Sloan tuned in to the "Meet the Press" interview with President Bush and felt "disgust." His 19-year-old son, Army Pvt. Brandon Sloan, was killed when his convoy was ambushed last March. "A human being can make mistakes," the Rev. Sloan says of the president. "But if you intentionally mislead people, that's another thing."
In Fullerton, Calif., paralegal student Kimberly Huff, whose Army reservist husband recently returned from Iraq, makes a similar point with a wardrobe of homemade protest T-shirts that say things like "Support Our Troops, Impeach Bush."
The number of military families that oppose Operation Iraqi Freedom, though never measured, is probably small. But a nascent antiwar movement has begun to find a toehold among parents, spouses and other relatives of active-duty, reserve and National Guard troops.
A group called Military Families Speak Out -- which will figure prominently in marches and vigils at Dover Air Force Base, Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the White House next week -- says more than 1,000 families have signed up online and notes that new members join daily. Other outspoken family members -- Dvorin, for example -- have never heard of the group but, for a variety of reasons, share its founders' conviction that the war is a "reckless military misadventure."
Most frequently cited, when military families explain their antiwar sentiments, is the absence to date of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "They'd have these inspections and they'd find nothing," says Jenifer Moss, 29, of Lawton, Okla. Her husband, Army Sgt. Keelan L. Moss, died in November when a missile downed his Chinook helicopter, leaving her with three children and the belief that "he was sent out there on a pretense."
They are also angry at the Bush administration's insistence that its policies are nonetheless justified. Cherice Johnson's husband, Navy Corpsman Michael Vann Johnson Jr., was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade last March. "I'd love to say I back [the president] 100 percent, but I can't," she says, weeping during a telephone interview. "How many more people are going to die because he can't say, 'I'm sorry, I made a terrible mistake'?"
In interviews, families complained about the continued unrest in Iraq; worried about whether their service members had adequate equipment and supplies; feared post-traumatic stress syndrome. One mother who lost a son in Afghanistan last March took deep offense at the launch of a subsequent war when, she feels, the first remains uncompleted.
And, of course, they all watch the casualties mount, to 553 deaths and nearly 3,200 wounded, the Pentagon says.
In South Haven, Mich., Marianne Brown, 52, has joined the weekly peace vigil in front of the closest thing her small town has to a federal building: the post office. Most of the vigil-keepers -- who number 10 or 15 at most, shrinking to three or four stalwarts on the bitterest winter days -- hold a memorial photo of the faces of service members killed in Iraq. But Brown holds a photo of her stepson, Army Reserve Pvt. Michael Shepard, 21, an MP stationed west of Baghdad.
South Haven has not been uniformly receptive. Brown has had her Jeep scratched with a key. She's been shouted at when she goes to the bank. She's been called a traitor. "It's kind of scary, but it's changing," she says. "We used to get a lot more attitude. Now we're getting more thumbs-ups. I think it's slowly seeping in that this [war] was based on something other than what we were told."
A Way to Connect
It's the power of the Internet that's allowed relatives in far-flung places to know that others are also suspicious, bitter or ready to march on Washington. "That kind of sentiment has probably been there in every war we've ever had, but this time they have a ready means of identifying one another," says John Guilmartin, a military historian at Ohio State University and a decorated Vietnam War veteran.
Military Families Speak Out started before the invasion with two families, added 200 more when the first troops crossed into Iraq and another 200 when the bombing began. There were spikes in Web traffic and membership registration when the president declared the end of major combat and when he invited Iraqi insurgents to "Bring 'em on."
Even those who aren't affiliated with a peace group (Moss and Johnson are not; Brown is) use the Net to bolster their opinions, stoke their outrage or find others who share their beliefs.
When Seth Dvorin died, sympathetic Web sites picked up local newspaper stories about his divorced parents' outspoken responses. A few days after his funeral, his mother, Sue Niederer, was startled to get a call from a stranger in Columbus, Ohio. Jackie Donoghue has a son serving in the same region of Iraq and had looked up Niederer's phone number online. "I just wanted to console her," Donoghue says. "I wanted to tell her she wasn't alone, that other people with sons and daughters in the service feel the same way."
Of course, most people with relatives in wartime service, a group historically more likely to express approval than distrust, don't feel the same way. Though public support for the war was found to have declined in the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, most military families say their support for the action and the president remains unwavering.
They think the weapons he warned of may have been moved or may yet turn up. Some feel Hussein's tyranny was in itself ample justification for war, even if the weapons are never found. They believe that their loved ones are helping to liberate a tortured nation and that there's more good news from Iraq than the news media have reported.
The night before Pfc. Jesse Givens, a 34-year-old Army tank driver, left for Iraq, he sat down with his 6-year-old son to explain. "He said, 'There's a bad guy over there and he hurts mommies and little kids and he has to be stopped,' " his widow, Melissa Givens, 27, of Fountain, Colo., remembers. Now, "the times I start to feel like I'm against it -- because my husband's gone and he's never coming back -- I hear what he said."
Christine Dooley, who's 22 and living in Murrysville, Pa., with an infant daughter, is mourning the loss of her husband, Army Staff Sgt. Micheal Dooley, 23, killed in June. "The fact that I lost Micheal does not change my feelings about what we needed to do over there at all," Dooley says via e-mail. "Many Americans forget that we were attacked on 9/11. . . . We need to kick some butt and clean up!"
Another group of families can probably empathize with Cathy Neighbor. A 45-year-old truck driver in rural New Lexington, Ohio, she's too overwhelmed by grief for her paratrooper son to figure out what she thinks about the war that took his life. Army Cpl. Gavin Neighbor was 20 when he was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade in June.
"I still don't know what to feel," his mother says haltingly. Some days she questions why the troops were sent to Iraq; on others, she thinks they should have been. "I'm angry as hell and I'm proud as hell," she says. "And everyone says my son's a hero, and I didn't want him to be a hero."
'Unprecedented'
Yet even if the opponents represent only a sliver of military families, the emergence of organized antiwar opinion among this traditionally conservative group is something the country hasn't seen before, several historians and political scientists believe.
During the Vietnam War, a handful of Gold Star Mothers who had lost sons in the war marched with Vietnam Vets Against the War and other antiwar groups, says David Cline, now president of Veterans for Peace and an early member of Vietnam Vets. But there were only at most a couple of dozen such mothers, by his recollection, and they never created a nationwide network. The National League of Families, formed to bring political attention to prisoners of war and troops missing in action, had considerable influence but was not critical of the war itself.
And those activists, like Vietnam Vets Against the War as a national group, arose years after the first American losses in Vietnam, by which point a considerable part of the public had already lost faith in the war. For military families to organize against the Iraq war beforehand and during its first year, Cline observes, is like "Vietnam on speed."
"This is unprecedented," says Ronald H. Spector, a military historian at George Washington University. "If military families are having serious doubts about the war and don't see a reason for their relatives to go over there, that's quite significant."
How much influence they may have is another question. Small minorities can have political impact, says Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver, a former National Security Council staffer. They can gain public and media attention because "they can presume to speak with greater moral authority. . . . The picture of an angry father can resonate in a way it doesn't when it's somebody else."
Feaver doesn't expect antiwar military families to make much of a difference yet on their own. (For one thing, they don't all share the same goal. Military Families Speak Out has called for a full troop withdrawal, but some non-member families believe the best tribute to their lost soldiers is to ensure that Iraq gets stabilized and rebuilt.) But "if what we're seeing is the beginnings of a cancer of doubt," Feaver adds, "that could have serious consequences."
A Sore Subject
When Army 1st Lt. Jennifer Kaylor, stationed at Fort Myer, Va., gets together with her mother-in-law, Fairfax schoolteacher Roxanne Kaylor, they chat about their pets. They talk about Jennifer Kaylor's job and her plans to eventually continue her education. "I encourage her to think about her future," Roxanne Kaylor says.
What they don't discuss is the war in Iraq, where Army 1st Lt. Jeffrey J. Kaylor, 24, Jennifer's husband of just nine months and Roxanne's only son, was killed in a grenade attack in April. "I honestly believe that this was the best way for us to prevent anything resembling September 11th occurring on our soil again," Jennifer Kaylor says via e-mail. Her mother-in-law, on the other hand, has grown so incensed about the war that she contacted a lawyer to see whether casualty families such as hers could bring a class-action lawsuit against Bush. (You can't sue the president, the lawyer told her.)
That loved ones risked their lives -- or lost them -- for an unjust cause, as some family members contend, is a difficult view for anyone with a military connection to express. Even those willing to march with placards or wear their antiwar sentiments on their chests try to tread gingerly.
They don't want to undermine their service members, imperil their future military careers, or hurt other military families who are frightened or grieving. The military culture strongly discourages questioning a war while troops are in the field. Several relatives interviewed for this story asked that the names of their service members not be published, lest they suffer repercussions.
Jose Caldas, 44, a systems analyst in Atlanta, lost his nephew, Army Capt. Ernesto Blanco, 28, in December; a homemade bomb detonated as his Humvee passed. Caldas's son, Alec, 22, is in the Army Signal Corps at Fort Bragg and expects to be deployed to Iraq as well. Jose Caldas, a Navy veteran, has been writing his U.S. senators and representative to urge that the country's leaders be held accountable for what he deems a dreadful miscalculation.
But he is cautious about what he says to his son. "You're asking a lot of these guys," he explains. "They have to believe in what they're doing. If you don't have faith that what you're doing is right, you can't be committed and risk your life."
In Madison, Wis., retired psychologist Jane Jensen, 70, leads a military families support group that meets each Thursday evening at the United Church of Christ: mostly parents, one wife, some brothers, a grandmother. Her own son, Lt. Col. Garrett Jensen, 42, a Black Hawk helicopter pilot with the Army National Guard, expects to leave Kuwait for Iraq this month.
Her group of about 25 regulars includes a number from families that back the war, Jenson says. They can probably tell, from the Kerry campaign button she always wears, that she disagrees. She plans to join a nearby antiwar demonstration later this month, but none of the other group members has agreed to join her.
Still, they put such differences aside to talk about their service members, exchange information, pass around fresh photos. "Our group is very kind, very polite. Nobody wants to hurt anyone's feelings," Jensen says.
Sometimes feelings get hurt anyway. Nancy Lessin, stepmother of a Marine who has returned from Iraq and co-founder of Military Families Speak Out, has gotten a number of nasty e-mails; she has also reported three death threats to the Boston police.
Kimberly Huff, of the antiwar T-shirts, no longer attends meetings of the Family Readiness Group in Riverside, Calif., which supports relatives of her husband's Army Reserve unit. She was an active member for 10 months, until her shirts, and the interviews she gave at an antiwar rally in Los Angeles, made her "kind of a black sheep," Huff says. "They stopped calling to see how I was. . . . I was kind of ignored at meetings." Now she feels more alone, though unrepentant.
And hurt feelings may increase as the presidential election nears. Many of these family members, even those with no history of political involvement, say they'll work to defeat Bush in November.
John Bugay Jr., 44, a suburban Pittsburgh marketing writer and self-described conservative who hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1980, is sufficiently disillusioned by the war that he spent eight bucks to register the domain name republicansforkerry.org. "I felt betrayed by this president's administration," Bugay says. "He didn't count the costs."
Such sentiments have caused a stir at his evangelical Christian church; they also caused a public argument with his wife, an Army reservist who spent five months in Iraq, at a neighborhood birthday party. Now they don't discuss the war either.
Other antiwar families plan to register voters, write letters to newspapers, and volunteer for local and national candidates. First, they'll mark the war's anniversary this month by joining protests across the country.
Richard Dvorin has not received a reply to the letter he sent the president about his son, Seth. He doesn't expect to. But Sue Niederer, Seth Dvorin's mother, eventually learned about Military Families Speak Out and will join its march at Dover Air Force Base on Sunday.
It's one of the few places where she can say of her son, "He died a hero, but he died in vain" -- and people will understand how she feels.
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