Military Families vs. the War

Organized Opposition Is Small, but Some See It as
Historic

By Paula Span Washington Post Staff Writer

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.

(c) 2004 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48217-2004Mar10.html