The Human Factor

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Considering the human factor
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What I really want to know is whether that pain of loss in wartime ever
really goes away

Charles M. Madigan

August 23, 2005

Sometimes you get yourself in a mood that just won't let you go, and my
mood about Cindy Sheehan and what has flowed from her decision to
protest the death of her son by camping out at President Bush's ranch in
Crawford, Texas, is becoming one of those things.

A little over two years ago, I went to Bedford, Va., to talk to some
women and men who had lost friends on D-Day. Bedford had 35 young men in
the first wave of soldiers to push onto the beach, all National
Guardsmen, and 19 of them were killed in very short order. More died later.

What I really wanted to know was whether that pain of loss in wartime
ever really goes away.

Before the Iraq war death notices started coming in, I wanted to remind
people that each loss is an individual loss, that it breaks hearts
forever, one at a time.

It is so much more than a number.

The little town sits in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a place
where your eye falls kindly on everything from the 19th Century
architecture to the forests along the range.

It seemed the kind of place just invented for storytelling.

Many people in the South have a gift for measured speaking that makes
it easy to take notes or listen for nuance, for suggestion, for that
taste of cadence.

It makes you think, "Well, this lovely woman could just as well be
singing," or, "You could dance to the way that man talks."

I chased around town looking for the right women.

Elizabeth worked at the drugstore in the telegraph booth on D-Day, and
she got the first word of Bedford's loss some time later when she
turned her machine on in the morning and the messages from the Department of
War to the families of dead soldiers started printing out.

Imagine that, sitting there in your little booth and seeing the names
of fellows that you maybe had dated, maybe had kissed under a
streetlight one hot summer night, maybe danced with, or kissed goodbye when the
troop train pulled out of Bedford so long ago.

"The secretary of war regrets ..."

It's a lot of heartbreak for a little town.

It must have been awful to be there in the weeks after D-Day and find
out about those deaths. Even all these years later, some of the women
still grew teary when they talked about their dead boyfriends, how this
one had a chest wound and had drowned on the beach when the tide came in
and washed his stretcher away.

"You just don't get over that," one of them told me.

The elderly woman who headed the draft board at the time recalled the
farmer who came bursting into the draft office with his loaded shotgun,
ready to kill everyone. Two of his sons had been sent off to war, and
one wasn't coming back. He was talked out of it.

How many times did those kinds of things play out? How noble did it all
seem a decade or so later, when the flags stopped waving and what you
were left with was an overwhelming loneliness for someone you will never
see again on this Earth?

That is why I am taking this opportunity to quietly curse Cindy
Sheehan's critics in word and thought far too inappropriate to be published in
a newspaper.

Sheehan made the choice to protest by plunking herself down in Crawford
and demanding to see Bush so she could ask him exactly why her son,
Casey, 24, was killed in an ambush in Baghdad's Sadr City in April 2004.

The reporters descended on her the way buzzards float down to pick at
roadkill. Supporters eager to voice their concerns about the war, toss
some rhetoric at Bush and maybe get some time on TV showed up too.

Sheehan has now become one of those unfortunate media creatures, which
diminishes her message and her impact.

She has complicated matters with her own comments about the president
as terrorist and her thoughts about Zionist conspiracies.

Those remarks have opened the door to White House apologists of many
stripes, who stepped in to criticize her quite aggressively, just as they
seem to mysteriously step in to criticize anyone with unkind words or
difficult questions for the president. Fine, that's how they play the
game.

Anyhow, Sheehan became a certified, confusing, big-time media event.

Let me say this, Cindy Sheehan, so you can use it later.

I am sorry you lost your son. There will be this empty space around you
for the rest of your life.

I know a place you can go down in the Blue Ridge where all the sweet
women will weep with you and share their memories later, perhaps when you
need them the most.

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Charles M. Madigan, the Tribune's Perspective editor, is also author of
The Rambling Gleaner at chicagotribune.com/gleaner.