[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 18434]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     THE AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN IRAQ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, tonight, I will read an article that was 
written by Joan Ryan, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, that 
was in the newspaper on September 9, 2004. Joan was talking before a TV 
show, and she wrote an article about the conversation she had with 
Dolores Kesterson, and these are Joan's words: ``Dolores Kesterson 
wanted to know if I had read about the father in Florida. Dolores's 29-
year-old son, Erik, her only child, was killed almost 10 months ago 
when his Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Mosul during a firefight. He 
had been in Iraq just 8 days.
  ``She found out the ways parents always find out, a knock on their 
door. For her, it came around 8:25 the night of November 15 as she was 
washing her dinner dishes. A man and a woman from the Army stood in the 
doorway. They gently suggested she sit down. `This father in Florida,' 
she was telling me, `when the Marines came to the door to tell him his 
son had died, took a hammer to their van, poured gasoline into it, set 
it on fire and got in.'''

                              {time}  2245

  Her face remained expressionless, but her eyes lifted to meet mine as 
if to say, do you get it? That is what it feels like.
  Later, during the show, I saw a picture of Eric: good-looking, 
square-jawed, and smiling. But what I really saw on the screen was my 
own son, my own only child.
  That is why we do not look too closely, I think, on those occasions 
when the names and photos of the dead appear in print. We do not want 
to get too close to that pain. That is why neighbors have been giving 
Kesterson a wide berth. They do not know what to say, but they also do 
not want to think too hard about what she has lost: not a soldier, but 
a boy, who once slept in footie pajamas, who waved at her from the 
merry-go-round, who liked her cooking more than any on Earth.
  The only way to make this war at all tolerable is to allow it to be a 
televised blur of road-side bombings, insurgent militia and thick 
reports issued from Washington at regular enough intervals to keep the 
talking heads occupied on the Sunday morning shows.
  When embedded reporters covered the start of this war, the big 
picture issues, namely, the shaky rationale for the war, were buried 
beneath the stories of individual military units. This is why embedding 
reporters was such a brilliant stroke. The unwavering focus on the grit 
and courage of the American soldiers made it nearly impossible to 
criticize the war publicly.
  Now that those soldiers are dying, the lens has gone panoramic. The 
farther we stay from Erik Kesterson and Steven Bridges and Jimmy 
Arroyave and Arron Clark and Ken Ballard, the easier to imagine that 
this war is not a horrifying disaster.
  The Bush administration is so determined to keep us from thinking 
about dead soldiers that it even will not allow photographs of flag-
draped coffins being transported back to the United States. ``Maybe if 
everyone could see them, they would realize that they are somebody's 
children,'' one parent at the town hall meeting said, which is exactly 
the point. This administration would rather we not listen too closely 
to Mark Crowley tell us that his 18-year-old son, just 10 months out of 
high school, was killed on patrol, or that his gunner, who weathered 
six hits to his machine gun, was killed when the seventh bullet went 
through his head.
  It would rather we not listen to Cindy Sheehan holding her son's 
childhood Teddy bear, say that she sleeps only when she takes a pill, 
and even then, just 3 or 4 hours. ``It gets worse every day,'' she said 
Tuesday night. Her son, Casey, died in April.
  All of our children have given their futures, and our futures, 
Kesterson satisfied, finally raising her hand to speak on camera toward 
the end of the show: ``There will be no grandchildren. These young men 
had so much more to give. They could have been great. They are not just 
wooden pieces pushed around a war table like a game.''
  Somewhere, there is a mother hearing on the news that there have been 
casualties in Mosul or Fallujah or Baghdad. She prays, ``Please, don't 
let it be my child.'' Maybe this time it will not be, but it is always 
somebody's child.
  The number of dead Americans in the Iraqi war passed the 1,000 mark 
this Tuesday, before the show's taping, and kept going. More knocks on 
the door, more gentle suggestions to sit down.
  Mr. Speaker, there is a smarter, safer way for America to conduct 
itself in Iraq. The course the Bush administration currently has us on 
is not it.

                          ____________________