What I learned from Cindy Sheehan

I went to a candlelight vigil last night to support Cindy Sheehan. The California woman’s son, Casey, was killed in Iraq. She is camped out near George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, demanding that he take time out from his vacation to answer her questions.

The vigil I attended was not the solemn affair I had expected. It was more of a war protest with candles. That’s not what had drawn me to the vigil, although I have always believed the invasion of Iraq was unjustified.

I went because Cindy Sheehan made me think of her son, Casey, and what it must have been like for him and for thousands of other young people like him.

The soldiers in Iraq have been told the same lies we all were told about weapons of mass destruction. They were told the same lies linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11/2001. So many of them enlisted after 9/11, wanting to fight back against the enemy, wanting to protect their families and their country, wanting to make a difference.

They were noble and brave for signing up. And their nobility and bravery has been used, not to fight the real enemy they were willing to risk their lives to defend us against, but to attack a country that had done nothing to harm us. Some of them, like Sheehan’s son Casey, died.

Sheehan has faced the reality that her son died for a lie. What must that feel like? How can anyone who hasn’t experienced it possibly know?

I can understand why many if not most soldiers and their families cannot tolerate seeing what Sheehan sees, that the war was based on lies. I can understand why, if you hold those lies up to the light for them to get a better look, they will close their eyes. It’s difficult enough to be over there, or have someone you love over there, at continual risk of being killed or maimed. It would be almost unbearable if, on top of that, you were forced to acknowledge that the killing and maiming and fear and bombing and pain had nothing to do with protecting America or punishing those who attacked us.

This is how Cindy Sheehan’s stand has touched me, what it has made me see. Going to the local vigil last night, well, that really didn’t seem like much of anything except an excuse to piggyback general anti-war messages on top of her very personal one. The support vigils were about getting as many people as possible together at once.

But Cindy Sheehan made me, and I suspect a great many others, think, not in general terms of the injustice of this war, but of how the lies of power-hungry old men in Washington killed one noble young man and devastated one mother. It’s made me think of all the other noble young men, all the other grieving mothers, one after another after another. If the images this conjures for all of us become almost unbearable, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe our discomfort will cause more of us to demand that it stop. And maybe that will save the lives of some Caseys still in Iraq.