Nov. 14— Debbie Roath’s husband Jeffrey was activated
by the Army Reserves in January and was sent to the Middle East in April.
While she has stayed home in Marshall, Missouri, to raise their five
children, he has helped the 129th Transportation Company haul golf carts,
motor boats and SUVs (as well as M1-70 Abrams tanks) across Iraq’s
dangerous highways.
Roath, 40, who voted for Bush in 2000, is now one of the leaders in
a highly vocal online campaign to bring her husband’s unit home.
“Our husbands’ and our soldiers’ lives are being put
in danger,” she says. “And I don’t see any reason for
that except greed.”
As the United States first long-term occupation of another country since
Vietnam becomes bloodier and more chaotic, military family members like
Roath are beginning to raise their voices in the belief that supporting
the troops ultimately means ending the war.
“I think it has a tremendous impact in how the anti-war movement
is received by public and Congress,” says Ben Chitty of Vietnam
Veterans Against the War. “Family members and returning vets provide
political credibility.”
“It [the military families movement] is relatively small right
now,” adds Professor Robert Buzzanko, author of Masters of War:
Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era. “But as more
reserves get called in and more soldiers get killed, it can only grow.
It’s serious.”
Buzzanko notes that President Lyndon Johnson repeatedly refused to call
up the reserves at the height of the Vietnam War for fear of the social
disruption it would cause. After Vietnam, the Pentagon set in place
a political tripwire by reconfiguring its forces so that it would be
impossible to carry out a military occupation without quickly resorting
to large numbers of reserves to carry out day-to-day tasks —engineering,
policing, medical support, transportation, public relations, and civil
administration.
The Bush administration crossed that threshold in mid-September when
it announced that 20,000 reserves currently stationed in Iraq and Kuwait
would have their overseas deployment extended from six months to 12
and that their total mobilization could be extended to a full 24 months.
Members of Congress were besieged with complaints from across the country.
129bringthemhome.com’s online petition drive received 8,000 signatures
overnight. The military brass openly speculated there would be a mass
exodus of Guard and Reserve troops at the end of their current deployments.
“Extending arduous tours of duty in the middle of a deployment
demonstrates not only poor planning, but a complete disregard for the
families of service members who are already making tremendous personal
and financial sacrifices,” a former Navy recruiter wrote on 129bringthemhome.com.
At home, Roath tried to explain the situation to her five children.
“They cried and they were angry. They don’t understand why
the military and our president lied to them.”
Other military family members are also raising their voices.
Fernando Suarez del Solar of Escondido, California, started Fundación
Guerrero Azteca this spring after the Marines refused to pay the full
burial costs for his son Jesús, who was killed by an unexploded
cluster bomb one week into the war. Guerrero Azteca assists other Spanish-speaking
families with burial costs and with psychological counseling. Suarez
has since traveled to Baghdad and spoken before Congress as a passionate
critic of the war.
“In war there are no winners, only victims,” he says. “They
[the troops] are the first victims of this crime.”
Kimberly Huff, 32, is one of the leaders of the 437th Medical Company’s
Family Readiness Group (FRG), which helps military families cope with
the day-to-day stress of deployment. Military officials usually attend
the FRG’s monthly get-togethers. They admonish family members not
to talk about the war with the press lest they “compromise the
mission.” “I think the first reaction of most people is to
obey,” Huff says.
Huff’s response: she wears T-shirts that say, “My husband
is a political prisoner in Bush’s army” and regularly speaks
out at local anti-war rallies.
“I don’t want people to forget about our troops,” says
Huff, who will mark her second wedding anniversary on Nov. 29. “They’re
still over there. And they need to come home.”
Huff’s one-woman campaign extends to the freeways of Southern California
where passing motorists can read the yellow chalk messages on all five
windows of her Chevy Blazer.
“I get all sorts of honks and waves of approval as I drive the
freeways,” Huff says. “I had one woman approach me in the
parking lot the other day and say, ‘I thought the war was over
but I guess I was wrong.’”
Adele Kubein, 50, writes letters constantly to local newspapers and
to her elected representatives. Her daughter joined the Oregon National
Guard five years ago. She already had wild-land firefighting experience
and needed money to finish college. When Kubein asked her daughter if
she was sure she wanted to join, she replied, “Oh, Mom, there’s
never going to be another war.” Now she finds herself stationed
in the northern city of Mosul where her unit comes under nightly mortar
and sniper fire.
“A lot of those guys had never prepared for something like this,”
Kubein notes. “They were supposed to build roads and fight fires
in Oregon, not be killing kids or getting shot at all the time.”
Last November, Nancy Lessin and Charley Richardson started Military
Families Speak Out (www.mfso.org) after their son was deployed to the
Persian Gulf with the Marines. The Internet-based advocacy group’s
list serve has since grown to more than a thousand members.
“We get so many emails from people who say ‘Thank God I found
you because I thought I was the only person connected with the military
who felt like this,” Richardson, 50, says.
Still, Richardson acknowledges dissent among military families remains
the exception not the rule.
“It’s very hard to believe that your loved one is in harm’s
way for no good reason,” Richardson says. “It’s easier
psychologically to believe in the war.”
Source: NYCIndypendent, a publication of the New York Independent Media
Center, http://nyc.indymedia.org
