Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Crawford, Texas,is finally beginning to gather steam -- enough, as Salon's Tim Grieve reports with amazement, for the cable nets to portray her as a "stalker."
Sheehan's journey, her demand to speak to Bush about the death of her son in Iraq, inevitably echoes Lila Lipscomb's desolate face at the White House in Fahrenheit 9/11, as well as Sue Niederer's arrest on "defiant trespass" after making a similar demand of Laura Bush last year. Watch carefully as the group supporting Sheehsn in Iraq grows: will the response echo Kent State, in this 1960s acid-flashback of a war? (The post title reflects a song from the Australian band The Herd: see why, and listen, in the jump.)
I hope Sheehan asks him about the new effort to minimize the official number of troops coming home with PTSD, as the sheer financial strain of all these broken bodies and minds begins to hit. I hope she challenges any Bush promises about troops coming home soon, and will ask about the upcoming increase in troop levels (for the next set of Iraqi elections). The number of "ifs" attached to any actual withdrawal sounds like someone trying to come up with excuses not to get married.
I wonder if Aidan Delgado is going to Crawford too.
Delgado's home in Florida now, after touring the country sharing his slides and experiences from Iraq (including Abu Ghraib). (You can see the slide show here; my revious posts on Aidan: here and here.) And the Sarasota paper offers a profile that paints him as just another college student, albeit one who enlisted in the military at a poetic moment:
CAidan Delgado can be painfully earnest, about everything from serving in Iraq to choosing a pizzeria, but even his serious stories end with a pause, as if to check himself, and then a joke at his own expense.
The more he talks, the more he laughs.
He laughs about being a 23-year-old war veteran who still hears his mother's voice when he watches too much television. He laughs about the liberal parody that is New College of Florida, where he knows at least two students who've taken vows of silence.
And he laughs about the political conservatives who compare him with Sen. John Kerry, which he takes as a great compliment.
One right-wing critic called Delgado a "barking moonbat," which has become a running joke in his family.
"I want to get that on a T-shirt," he says. "The Barking Moonbat."
(.....)Aidan Delgado's melting pot of an American name comes from a Scottish-Irish mother and a Spanish-Cuban father. His parents met in the Peace Corps in Southeast Asia.
As the son of an American diplomat with the U.S. Agency for International Development, Delgado grew up overseas. He lived in Thailand, Senegal and Egypt, where he learned some Arabic and became familiar with Islamic culture.
After high school, he followed his older brother to New College.
Delgado says he was unhappy during his first year in Sarasota. Unstructured college life didn't agree with him. He felt negative and pessimistic.
"A little bit of a chip on my shoulder," he says now.
Delgado decided to break out of his rut by joining the Army Reserve with a few friends. His parents hated the idea. His brother hated the idea. His classmates hated the idea. Perfect.
Delgado's timing, however, couldn't have been worse. He signed papers at the military processing station in Tampa on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
"No joke," he says. "Literally on the day of Sept. 11."
After that, everything changed.
Delgado's unit went to Iraq, where he says he soon became disillusioned. He continued to do his job, which was servicing military vehicles, but refused to carry a rifle. He studied Buddhism and applied for conscientious-objector status, which was granted only after he completed his tour.
"Soon became disillusioned" is a little generic lead for someone who
witnessed so much; who now says calmly, in his slide show, "This is an American soldier scooping out the brains of a detainee." Still it's heartening to see such a warm portrait from his hometown paper.
If he goes to Crawford, I hope he comes with dozens of those "Barking Moonbat" T-shirts. Maybe they should say "It's better to be a moonbat than a starship trooper." Though when asked what it means, the wearer would have to sing this song:
i'm a starship trooper this is my letter to dad,
transferred from saigon to baghdad,
now i'm dead. An allied soldier, the skin folds like a bowler,
i'll bring you back a souvenir of what we stole....
What the man in Crawford stole is already incalculable.
I hope they do get a chance to sing the song to him, though he'll likely go first to his plasma TV, ordering up him the movie by the same name. No wait! that one was anti-war too - made during his daddy's warm-up to the current atrocities.
Interesting. If you haven't seen a movie that's out right now, called "Occupation: Dreamland", I would highly recommend it. It's a documentary-style film shot by a reporter who was embedded with a unit of the 82nd airborne. You get a very clear feeling from the interviews that not nearly as many troops support the Iraq war as many would think.
Posted by: Tim | September 20, 2005 at 10:29 PM