Thoughts on a Soldier’s Mom
Cindy Sheehan
As we were driving north to spend a few days on a lake, I heard a live interview with Cindy Sheehan on the Jack Rice show on WCCO radio. I had read about her protest earlier in the week and had my usual kneejerk pity response to parents of dead soldiers. To listen to this mom live on the radio was painful at first, especially considering that my own very much alive teenage son was seated behind me as we drove along. I always feel a little guilty to be enjoying my own children when hearing the pain of parents who’ve lost children. Both of my teenagers, coming soon into enlistment age, were held captive to their parents’ radio choice and listened to her comments.
As Army Specialist Casey Sheehan’s mom continued, it was apparent to all of us that she had made the leap somewhere from grieving mom to vengeful citizen. Please know that I am not “pro-war”. War is horrible and it is the sometimes necessary result of living in our fallen world. She made personal attacks against our president and spoke in a way that seemed detached from reality. Did her grief drive her to that place of detachment? I don’t think so. She didn’t speak in a sad or tearful way at all. The statements she made were canned, unreasonable and irresponsible. I don’t have a transcript, but she repeated the same lines she’s been using for the past several days: the President killed my son, the troops must be ordered home right now, etc. She then switched geared to claim that the recruiter lied to her son. Even my 13 year young son commented that her argument should be with the Army recruiter and not the President. It is no wonder that the President has wisely decided not to participate in her performance. A great illustration of her current state of mind is in a recent Time Magazine online article posted on 8-14-05:
Cindy Sheehan, 48, is not a natural-born revolutionary. She speaks in a high, almost childlike voice. She says like as often as any teenager, as in, “This whole thing was like so freaking spur of the moment.” When her supporters gather to discuss strategy, Sheehan is not to be found in the circle of beach chairs; she is 50 yards up the road, doing yet another interview, hugging yet another stranger. But here she is, the mother of Casey, 24, who died in Iraq last year, and now the central character in the strange, swirling protest she initiated two miles down the road from President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Sheehan is unflinching about why she’s here. She says George W. Bush killed her son. She demands that U.S. troops come home now, and she insists on telling that to Bush personally. She speaks without caveat. “I’m not afraid of anything since my son was killed,” she says. But she has never been one to move quietly through life. Father Michael McFadden, a priest she once worked for, calls her “very defiant, very stubborn, very strong willed” when dealing with authority. When a soldier from the local base comes by to argue with her, she asks him to go for a walk. She puts her arm around him. Soon they are hugging. Her friends call her Attila the Honey.
Back home in California, her family is imploding under its grief. Sheehan lost her job at Napa County Health and Human Services because of all her absences, she says. Husband Pat, 52, couldn’t bear having Casey’s things at home and put most of them in storage. “We grieved in totally different ways,” Cindy says. “He wanted to grieve by distracting himself. I wanted to immerse myself.” A car tinkerer, he added two 1969 VW Bugs to his collection recently and diverted some of his sorrow into them. The couple separated in June.
Daughter Carly, 24, wrote a poem that begins, “Have you ever heard the sound of a mother screaming for her son?” Surviving son Andy, 21, supports his mother in principle but recently sent her a long e-mail imploring her “to come home because you need to support us at home,” he says. Casey’s aunt Cherie Quartarolo e-mailed a California radio station last week to rebuke Cindy, writing, “She appears to be promoting her own personal agenda at the expense of her son’s good name.” (short excerpt)
Army Specialist Casey Sheehan
Please also read Terrie Rosas’ excellent post, Forgive the Mother, But Don’t Forget the Son at EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION blog She writes:
Cindy Sheehan has personalized her grief in the most politically punitive way. She is using her grief in a calculated effort to take down the Commander-in-Chief, without any apparent regard for the effects of her increasingly inflammatory rhetoric on the sons and daughters of America still serving in Iraq. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Mrs. Sheehan made a tearful anti-war commercial against President Bush. Recently she changed her version of the meeting she had with the President last year.
I have seen a mother’s grief at close range, but I cannot testify to it. I cannot and will not second-guess Cindy Sheehan’s grief, which is compounded by the sudden loss of her son at a great distance away and in a cause with which she passionately disagreed even before his tragic death. But I do not accept that every political action she consciously decides to take springs naturally and purely from her grief.
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