Military Families Take Iraq Personally
WASHINGTON, Dec. 9, 2006 — -- As pressure builds on the Bush administration to withdraw from Iraq, few Americans have more at stake than the families of the nearly 3,000 American troops who have died there.
Leaders in the incoming Congress, to be controlled by Democrats, are calling for hearings into an exit strategy from Iraq. The November election that put them in charge of Capitol Hill was widely viewed as a rejection of the president's management of the war. Increasingly, Americans want their troops out.
Some families of fallen soldiers have joined the call to pull out troops. However, many others fear that if an American pullout leads to an all-out civil war, the deaths of their husbands, wives, sons and daughters will have served no purpose.
Sgt. Patrick Tainsh was hit in the throat by shrapnel from a roadside bomb during an insurgent attack in Baghdad. But the gunner fired 400 rounds from the top of his Humvee, saving his entire convoy. He died in the commander's arms.
His mother grows angry when she hears calls for a withdrawal from Iraq.
"It's absolutely bloodcurdling," said Deborah Tainsh of Georgia. "The bottom line is we can't be pulling out of there with this undone. It would dishonor all of us who have given blood out there."
John Holley's 21-year-old son, Matthew, was killed after just five weeks in Iraq last year. The San Diego father successfully lobbied Congress to send slain soldiers home with more dignity. A few weeks ago, Holley, a former soldier himself, flew to Erbil, Iraq, to see the land where his son died.
All the recent talk of withdrawal infuriates him.
"It's a knee-jerk hysteria," he said. "For us to retreat, basically, in the face of the enemy, is unconscionable."
That sentiment is by no means universal.
Celeste Zappala doesn't want another American mother to hear that her son died on Iraqi soil. Zappala's son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, became the first Pennsylvania National Guardsman killed in combat since World War II. He was protecting members of the Iraq Survey Group as they searched a warehouse for weapons of mass destruction two years ago. He was killed by a bomb.
"It wasn't a good cause. He died unnecessarily," she said. "He was the kind of person who would take care of the people around him, and I knew he was doing that. But his death didn't do a damned thing for the country of Iraq."
She hopes a new study on U.S. policy in Iraq, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, will persuade President Bush to bring the troops home quickly.
"These people are not casual losses. They are loved by the people they left behind. And I think it's just obscene that this thing goes on and on," Zappala said as she stared at his picture. "They don't know what to do. They're waiting for the Baker report to save them."
Gilda Carbanaro agrees. The Bethesda, Md., teacher watched life ebb from her son's body at a German hospital in May. Twenty-eight-year-old Alex Carbanaro was injured by a roadside bomb. It was his second time to Iraq, and the second time he'd been wounded.
"It's too little and too late, is my first reaction. At the same time we must get them out," she said. "It's going to be a disaster if we get out. But it's going to be a disaster if we leave our children there. There is such pain every time I go to Arlington to visit my son and see a fresh row of graves of kids that were born in 1984. This is not right."