Death and dishonor in Texas

A soldier is killed in a war and his mother is granted a meeting with the president of the United States.

A California woman named Cindy Sheehan has been camping outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, for more than a week, saying she won’t leave until she meets with him again. She wants to tell the president that the war in Iraq is wrong, that he should use her son’s sacrifice to promote peace, she says.

Meanwhile, rumors circulate that celebrities such as Susan Sarandon may flock to the mother’s vigil, which has swelled to some 300 anti-war demonstrators and counting. The president hasn’t surrendered yet to this nightmare of a public relations battle, although I’ll bet his handlers are sweating from more than the Texas heat.

The story of a grieving mother seeking an audience with the most powerful man on Earth as he zips by her in an SUV is tailor-made for our Oprah-esque times, and the media-savvy Ms. Sheehan has so far appeared on every major television and radio network and in newspapers around the world. She has a Web site and a public relations assistant financed by an anti-war group. She’s being encouraged by heavyweight pundits such as Maureen Dowd, who mocked the president for not meeting with her and wrote that he “prefers his sympathy to be carefully choreographed.” Ms. Dowd is a smart woman, but in this case seems confused about who’s staging the scene in Crawford.

Just as this story gains the steam its choreographers seek, I received a letter over the weekend from a man named Kelsey McMillan of Katy, Texas. Mr. McMillan is the official historian of the 389th Bombardment Group of the U.S. Air Force, and he somehow came across a column I wrote in 1996 about my uncle, Richard Williamson, a World War II bomber pilot who was killed in 1943 during a raid on the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. My uncle was 22 when he died, two years younger than Ms. Sheehan’s son, Casey.

“I was delighted to find this personal history about Williamson for our archives,” Mr. McMillan wrote. “I am hoping that you will help me fill some gaps in our history of Williamson and the James Gunn crew.”

Mr. McMillan wrote that none of the men killed on the Gunn crew is listed on the Roll of Honor of the Second Air Division Memorial Library, and that he’s seeking documentation to prove that my uncle and his crew deserve to be listed on the Roll of Honor. He was also seeking more information — copies of my uncle’s awards and decorations; any newspaper articles that reported my uncle missing (there was a single, brief story back in 1943); and photos of my Uncle Dick. He also asked if he could speak to me or a member of my family about anything we know regarding his service.

I was moved by Mr. McMillan’s letter and thankful that he and others like him help keep alive the memories of the men who died for our country. I was also struck by the juxtaposition of his letter from Texas and the media spectacle unfolding in Texas, by the ludicrous idea of my grieving grandmother demanding an audience with President Roosevelt when she received the curt Western Union telegram in 1943, informing her that her son was missing in action. Imagine it. And imagine, in a media age that saturates us with 24-hour pathos, that a World War II historian must seek information about the exploits of a bomber pilot from a niece who never even knew him.

We seek sentiment now, in 2005. Privately, in meetings that are closed to the press, President Bush has sat down with about 900 families of some 270 soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many families have described these meetings as cathartic; family members interviewed by Newsweek say they have been struck by the president’s emotionalism and his sincerity, the magazine reported.

“It felt like he could have been my dad,” Crystal Owen, who lost her husband in Iraq, told Newsweek, saying the president apologized repeatedly for her husband’s death and grabbed her hands when she cried. “It was like we were old friends. It almost makes me sad. In a way, I wish he weren’t the president, just so I could talk to him all the time.”

This week, Cindy Sheehan is calling for President Bush’s impeachment and for Israel to get out of Gaza and the West Bank. According to Maureen Dowd, Ms. Sheehan’s “moral authority” is absolute because she has a son who was killed in Iraq. I’d say she has a right to protest, certainly, and to disagree with George Bush. Whether she has a right to more face time with the president of the United States is questionable, with all due respect to the “moral authority” of Ms. Sheehan and her PR firm.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of a man who was killed in a war. He was a soldier, and soldiers sometimes die, and it’s awful when they do. But turning his death into a spectacle for CNN — into a ploy to falsely portray the president as unfeeling — does nothing to honor this young man or his sacrifice. And I can’t help but wonder if a grown man who volunteered for the Armed Forces and was killed in the service of his country would appreciate the prospect of his mother pitching a tent — and a fit — outside the president’s ranch.

But turning his death into a spectacle for CNN — into a ploy to falsely portray the president as unfeeling — does nothing to honor this young man or his sacrifice. And I can’t help but wonder if a grown man who volunteered for the Armed Forces and was killed in the service of his country would appreciate the prospect of his mother pitching a tent — and a fit — outside the president’s ranch.

Exactly. Cindy Sheehan's "protest" is a sham. Despite demanding a meeting with thr President, the fact is (and everyone knows it, including the MSM) that she already met with the President and her accounts of that meeting at the time do not jive with what she is saying now. There are literally hundreds of parents of soldiers lost in this conflict who have not met with the President once and now she is demanding another meeting so she can attack him.

In addition, Cindy has been coached for the last several months by a far left PR firm to get her ready for these antics. It is a coreiographed and contrived protest that seeks to use her "grieving mom" image in order to push the most hateful and virulent anti-American themse that did not take hold in the general population when the likes of Michael Moore pushed them.

Cindy's messages are full of hate and very bad language. She calls the president a liar (using all types of adjectives), she calls him a murderer, she calls him the worst of all terrorists. She has likened Rumsfeld and Condi to Hitler and Stalin. Hitler and Stalin brutally subjected and killed millions of their own...Cindy is free to spew her vitriol outside of the President's ranch...how can anyone take someone who makes such comparisons seriously? Yet the complicit MSM, who knows all of these things, gives her air time and serves up softball interviews to help her spread this absolute disgusting spectacle.

She has said that this nation is not worth dieing for and has blatanly given out flyers at her speaking engagements asking if we should in fact support the Iraqi insurgents, the very people who killed her son.

This is an absolute wresting and perversion of a mother's grief...and has nothing to do with grief. It is hate, hate of everything her son committed himself to and died defending. IMHO, that is what really is eating at Cindy.

Her handlers hope to use her status as a grieving mother to shield her from scrutiny and dispute...but it is not going to work.

Here's my open letter to Cindy Sheehan

That sentiment is being shared and arrived at by more and more people as the true nature of her "protest" and the motivations for it are revealed. Cindy Sheehan herself is a willing member of the extreme far left and has desecrated her loyal American son's memory and last full measure of devotion and has abandoned her husband of 28 years and family for this hateful, anti-American cause. May God have mercy on her soul...and may he giv eour people the wisdom to see through it and turn our backs on it.

And I can’t help but wonder if a grown man who volunteered for the Armed Forces and was killed in the service of his country would appreciate the prospect of his mother pitching a tent — and a fit — outside the president’s ranch.

I passed a group of sign-carrying appeasers staging an impromptu anti-war demonstration (excuse me...anti-Bush demonstration -- I sincerely doubt they'd be against this war if it were being directed by Bill Clinton) last evening, and one of them was displaying a sign which read "War is Child Abuse." What I take from that message is that we are sending people's children over to Iraq to kill and be killed. In these people's fevered delusions, they refuse to recognize that our armed forces are completely voluntary. Cindy Sheenan's son chose to enter the Army when he could have enlisted in the Air Force or Navy and been more out of harm's way. Her protest not only dishonors his memory and service, it dishonors his personal choice, made as an adult to be involved in the front lines of his nation's policy against terror.

And something else nags at me in watching this spectacle of a mentally imbalanced woman being used by the leftwing of this nation: I can't help but think that her son enlisted in part to get away from her.

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