Veterans, Grieving Families Give Somber Mood to Iraq Protest

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Veterans, Grieving Families Give Somber Mood to Iraq War Protest
by Sarah Ferguson


Veteran Tomas Jones, 25, was paralyzed by a bullet in Iraq.
Sarah Ferguson
Organizers with the dueling anti-war groups United for Peace and Justice and International ANSWER estimated the crowd size for Saturday’s march on Washington, D.C., at 300,000—making it the largest demonstration since start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Capitol police gave a loose estimate of 150,000—still a heap larger than the 4,000 or so who turned out for the Pentagon’s pro-war “Freedom Walk” on 9-11.

It was another lap around the Capitol for the antiwar crowd, but the mood was very different this time. In contrast to the strident rhetoric and near giddy denunciations of President Bush that have marked previous demonstrations (particularly those organized by ANSWER), Saturday’s protest was sobered by the presence of hundreds of military family members and alienated Iraq war vets, whose voices have given the antiwar movement a new center of gravity.

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The protest was diverse, from radicals bearing posters of Malcolm X to scores of students holding “College, Not Combat!” signs and veterans of previous anti-war demos sporting “Impeach Bush!” signs and placards that read “Thank you Cindy!” and “Cindy for president.” There were also lots of middle class folks and people who’d never bothered to make a D.C. protest before, like Robert Munroe, who took a bus up from Florida because, he said: “I’m sick of it, I’m fed up.” He carried a sign that asked simply: “Why?”

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Jones says he never wanted to go to Iraq; he enlisted two days after 9-11 because he wanted to hunt down terrorists in Afghanistan. Last month, he joined the pilgrimage to Crawford to ask Bush why he sent him to fight the wrong war. “Bush said he wouldn’t meet with Cindy because he’d already met with her in 2004,” Jones says. “I figured my life has been severely impacted. So I wanted to hear his excuse about not meeting with me.”

http://villagevoice.com/news/0539,fergusonmarc,68195,2.html