Don’t look too closely at war
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We were sitting alone in a lunchroom at a TV station where Northern California families of slain American soldiers had recently gathered for a town hall meeting. There was still about 30 minutes until taping would begin for the show, “Next of Kin.” So Kesterson and I slipped away for a quiet place to talk.
Her 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 eight days. She found out the way parents always find out.
A knock on their door. For her, it came around 8:25 p.m. on Nov. 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 his door to tell him his son had died, he took a hammer to their van, poured gasoline into it, set it on fire and got in.”
Her face remained expressionless, but her eyes lifted to meet mine, as if to say, “Do you get it? That’s what it feels like.”
Later, during the show, I saw a picture of Erik, good-looking, square-jawed and smiling. But what I really saw on the screen was my own son. My own only child.
That’s why we don’t look too closely, I think, on those occasions when the names and photos of the dead appear in print. We don’t want to get too close to that pain. That’s why neighbors have been giving Kesterson a wide berth. They don’t know what to say, but they also don’t 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.
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 isn’t a horrifying disaster.
The Bush 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 a 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 three or four hours.
“All of our children have given their futures, and our futures,’ Kesterson said, 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 won’t be. But it is always somebody’s child.
The number of dead Americans in the Iraqi war passed the 1,000 mark recently, and kept going.
More knocks on the door. More gentle suggestions to sit down.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is joanryan@sfchronicle.com.