A Mother's Courage

Mothers pay a high price in wartime. Mothers send their sons and husbands, and nowadays, daughters, to foreign lands and wait and worry and hope and pray that they come home alive and intact.

War is hell. A man said it, but mothers know what the hell of war feels like, down deep where it hurts all the time.

She was an ordinary woman from California, with a son in the military, subject to the orders of a president hell bent on imperial overreach under the guise of revenge for September 11th. The President said the invasion was necessary for the security of the United States, he said it was about “regime change,” and finding weapons of mass destruction, and bringing freedom to the long suffering people of Iraq. The President denied the most plausible explanation for the adventure: to secure reliable access to some of the largest proven oil reserves on the planet for American oil companies.

The President claimed the mission was accomplished, but the woman from California breathed no easier. Wars are sometimes waged in stages and on shifting battlefields. The “victory” of Shock & Awe – televised and trumpeted like a Super Bowl game – deteriorated into a stalemate, then defeat, but by then, the woman had already received the call and the news.

Her son was dead and her life would never be the same. She had to find meaning in her boy’s death, answer the searing questions, why and for what and for whom? In past wars, answers to those questions might have come easier, but in this new brand of war, a war of choice, pre-emptive and open-ended, based on shifting rationales, all of which unraveled as events on the ground unfolded, meaning came hard, if it came at all. The dead returned home in flag-draped coffins under cover of darkness and secrecy, as if the sponsors of the war were ashamed.

The only constant was Oil. How else to explain why the United States is building permanent military installations in areas with proven oil reserves, or why it is constructing a massive embassy complex on 104 acres in the Green Zone, or why the “Hydrocarbon Law,” drafted to force privatization of Iraq’s oil resources and give foreign oil companies long-term access to Iraq’s oil, was reviewed by the oil companies long before it was seen by Iraq’s parliament?

Imagine the dissonance in her brain, the uneasiness in her soul, forced every day to confront the emptiness and the questions, the constant reminders of her dead son. She was living in the hell of war.

Some women might have retreated inward, suffered in silence or self-imposed exile, but this mother felt the need to act, to communicate her grief and outrage, to challenge the rationale for continuing the military occupation that had claimed her boy. She tried the most direct route, to the Commander-in-Chief himself, and spent the better part of a month camped outside his ranch, hoping for an audience. Media arrived, curious then insatiable, she became renowned, the face of the anti-war movement. Soon she was marching, and speaking, telling her story on prime time media. It’s unlikely that she ever imagined herself in the role she was now playing, but life comes at us hard sometimes, wrenches us from comfortable patterns.

After a time, when her criticisms became too pointed and her face and name over-exposed, the media machine that had thrust her into the spotlight turned on her. The Talk Titans from the Right questioned her patriotism and her motives, called her an “attention whore,” and soon it was all about her and not her dead son and the misbegotten war that took his life.

But mothers like this one don’t give up easily. She stayed in the fire, kept speaking out, marching for peace, and in November 2006 the country came around, voted Democrats into power with an explicit charge to do something about the mess in Iraq.

That they didn’t reflects our sad, dysfunctional political reality, cowardice, and calculation. Too many Democrats lacked Cindy Sheehan’s heart and courage. They should be ashamed. Cindy Sheehan, on the other hand, mother and patriot, has no reason to feel shame.