April 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Dover to D.C: Trail of Mourning and Truth

Stephen Cleghorn is a member of Military Families Speak Out (www.mfso.org) and works for a nonprofit agency that manages the publicly funded homeless programs in Washington, D.C. His stepson is a Major in the US Army and recently returned from duty in Iraq.

It was a somber, somewhat chilly Sunday afternoon, March 14, 2004. We were just beginning to walk our "Trail of Mourning and Truth" that would take us to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the place where bodies of American military personnel are prepared for return to their families.

One of many free downloadable posters from insta-protest, http://64.70.140.219/feb15/

Families may not carry away their own dead. The Pentagon has forbidden it. The sight of flag-draped coffins and grieving families has been rendered officially obscene in the original sense of the word - happening off the public stage.

The next day we would move on to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. where soldiers grievously wounded in Iraq lay recuperating. These soldiers are also officially off limits for visits and interviews, even from groups like Disabled American Veterans, unless an Army public relations officer is present. By late Monday afternoon some of us would stand on a sidewalk near the White House with a small casket full of names of the war dead, risking arrest as we tried to deliver it to President Bush.

Along the route we read aloud the names of American and other "Coalition" soldiers killed in the war and occupation, along with Iraqi names representing the more than 10,000 Iraqis killed since the start of the invasion. We were photographed thousands of times and interviewed by several dozen national and international news media outlets.

That Sunday afternoon I walked beside Jean Prewitt of Birmingham, Alabama, mother of Army Private Kelley S. Prewitt, who was just 24 years old when he died in Iraq three weeks into the war from a serious wound to his leg.

Jean read about Military Families Speak Out in the Washington Post, and decided to seek out others who might understand her grief and anger. She joined the march along the way and so, unlike other grieving families on the march, did not have a wreath prepared with her son's name sash on it. Someone made her a wreath when they realized her circumstances, but had hastily spelled her son's name wrong, and she could not bear that. So she came to the front of the march and picked up a wreath bearing the name of Seth J. Dvorin, also 24 when he was killed, the son of Sue Niederer. We were walking the road leading from the Camden Friends Meeting House to the gate of Dover Air Force Base. There were about 400-500 people marching behind us.

Jean's son bled to death. I did not find this out from Jean. She was pretty quiet that afternoon. I looked it up on the internet a week later and had to cry a bit upon learning the details. I found a picture of Jean in the Birmingham News looking through tears at the flag-draped casket of her son while her sister embraced her.

I had spent hours preparing cards with the names of American soldiers to place in the coffin to be delivered to the White House. One name started to run into another as they went on and on and on; 560 at that time. I suddenly had a sense of this one young man, this Kelley S. Prewitt. Having met his mother, I felt the weight, not of his name card, but of her very particular and heavy sense of loss.

"He was out there all by himself for a long time, crawling, bleeding, asking for help," Jean told the London Free Press a week later. "That just about killed me when I found out. Then two medics risked their lives to get him. They thought he was going to be okay, but he was bleeding a lot. And there was a sandstorm so the helicopter couldn't come for him."

It is the details of a single death that brings the war in Iraq down from the abstract. As I looked cautiously into Jean's deep frown on that Sunday afternoon and heard her speak with those particular inflections of Alabama with which I am so familiar (my mother talked that way), I could imagine the desperate and largely hidden, unhealed grief of other American mothers and fathers. The mothers and fathers of each of the more than 10,000 Iraqis who have been killed in the war since March 19, 2003, must be experiencing similar pain.

What detail of the memory of those lost loved ones would be too much to bear? Would it be how they died? Would it be how they gurgled and cried out with their first breath of life upon exiting the womb?

If I had to say why I wanted to march and caravan with other military families and peace activists from Dover, Delaware to Washington, D.C. on the first anniversary of the war, I would say I needed to draw close to the mothers and other loved ones of fallen soldiers. I needed to be with them as they marched and spoke out to uncover the lies that sent their children to their deaths. I wanted to be there and support them as they courageously showed, in plain sight, the reality of the losses that George W. Bush is still working very hard to hide beneath the flag of our country.

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