Across America Lara MarloweOne of the protesters at the Republican National Convention was treated more respectfully than others. Fernando Suarez de Solar waited until the auditorium was full, then held up a poster with a photograph of his son, Jesus (20), the first soldier killed in Iraq. Security guards led the grieving father out with only slight pressure at his elbows.
Suarez de Solar is a citizen of Mexico, not the US. He and his family lived in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, until Jesus joined the Marines. Fernando tried to talk his son out of it, but Jesus had seen an eight-year-old child die of a drug overdose and thought he was joining the War on Drugs. Instead, he was bundled off to Iraq.
The Marine Corps told Fernando that his only son, who left a baby boy behind in California, was killed by Iraqis. But the investigative journalist Bob Woodward was "embedded" in the unit and told Suarez de Solar the truth: another US unit had scattered cluster bombs at Diwaniya, in southern Iraq, and Jesus stepped on one. His unit tried to call in helicopters to medevac him, but the radios didn't work. By the time help arrived two hours later, Jesus was dead.
Suarez de Solar has joined other parents of soldiers in Iraq in vocal opposition to the Bush administration's policies. In December 2003, he travelled to Iraq with the pacifist organisation Code Pink, to collect a few grains of sand from the desert where his son died. Knowing that US army recruiters concentrate their efforts on high schools in poor neighbourhoods, Suarez de Solar follows them into the classrooms, arguing with Latino students who are swayed by talk of "defending freedom", in some cases tearing up their applications.
With more than 1,000 US dead in Iraq, grief and loss are worming their way into the American psyche. On August 26th, a three-man Marine Corps team showed up at Carlos Arredondo's home in Hollywood, Florida. By a bitter twist of fate, it was Arredondo's birthday. When he learned that his 20-year-old son, Alexander, had been killed in Iraq, Arredondo seized a propane torch and set fire to himself and the Marines' van. The Marine Corps debated whether to charge him with destroying the van, but thought better of it.
Trauma is also affecting soldiers serving in Iraq "on a scale not seen since Vietnam", Stephen Robinson, the executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Centre in Washington, wrote in a report issued yesterday. A recent study published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that 15.6 per cent of Marines and 17.1 per cent of soldiers surveyed after duty in Iraq "met the screening criteria for major depression, generalised anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder". Forty-seven US soldiers have committed suicide in Iraq or within six months of returning.
A few days ago, a taxi-driver in Colorado Springs told me how a woman passenger, a soldier on her way to the army base at Fort Carson, collapsed in sobs in his cab. "She had just come back from Iraq. She said the insurgents put children and pregnant women in front of US vehicles so they'll stop and the insurgents can attack them. The army had orders to drive over them. She'd seen a lot of Iraqis killed that way, and she'll live with it for the rest of her life."
The US military is ignoring the needs of returning soldiers, Robinson, a veteran of the 1991 Iraq war and a former Pentagon analyst, said in a telephone interview. "There are six to eight-month delays in mental health care, so these guys are self-medicating with alcohol and drugs." And soldiers who do ask for help are stigmatised. In October 2003, Staff Sgt Georg-Andreas Pogany became the first soldier since Vietnam to be charged with cowardice - a crime that can carry the death penalty - after he asked for help with combat stress suffered in Iraq. Charges were dropped in July.
When she learned that her son Nick, a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne, was being sent to Iraq, Susan Galleymore, an Internet project manager in San Francisco, began waking up with nightmares. In the aftermath of a particularly bad dream, she had an inspiration. "I wanted to know what other mothers of soldiers were going through," she says. "So I founded Motherspeak."
Galleymore has since gathered the stories of some 50 mothers, American, Iraqi and Israeli, on her Internet site and is seeking out Afghan and Palestinian mothers too. She is writing a primer with information about depleted uranium, PTSD, and Afghanistan and Iraq - "all the stuff the military doesn't tell you".
Galleymore believes family members must fight the Bush administration's policies. "Mothers can be radicalised fairly easily if their kids are in danger," she says. Last weekend she held a rally at UN Plaza in San Francisco. One of the speakers was Nadia McCaffrey, whose son Patrick, a sergeant in the National Guard, was killed by Iraqis he was training on June 22nd. McCaffrey was the first parent to defy President Bush's ban on media coverage of returning flag-draped coffins, inviting dozens of journalists to his funeral in Sacramento.
The Iraq war is dividing America, but it is also dividing families. Galleymore's son joined the army against her wishes in 1999. When he returned from Afghanistan last year, he told his mother of seeing prisoners with sacks removed from their heads to reveal bruised and bloodied faces.
"He said: 'The military treats this like a game. We have to show them we're stronger than they are'," Galleymore recalls.
"And he kept calling the Afghans 'hajis' in a derogatory way." Before Nick left for Iraq in January, Galleymore pleaded with him: "Don't do anything in this country that you'll be ashamed of in the future." Then she decided to go to Iraq, to see for herself what the war was doing to Iraqis and US forces.
Nick emailed her, saying, "What's this I hear about you coming to Iraq? Don't do it. Iraqi mothers are just fine without you, and if you do come, go to the rifle range and learn how to shoot first." Galleymore had a harrowing journey. One of the cars in her convoy from Amman was robbed at gunpoint by bandits. On the way out, a bomb exploded in a military convoy on the opposite side of the highway from her. But she found Nick, gave him a big hug and spent an hour and a half with her son on an airbase at Balad, in the Sunni triangle.
Nick is at Fort Bragg now, in training with the Special Forces. He hasn't spoken to Susan since June, when they argued about her anti-war activism. A French magazine had published a photograph of mother and son together in Iraq on its cover.
Nick said it endangered his life because "terrorists" might use it to track him down. "I send him emails every couple of weeks," Galleymore says sadly. "But he never answers."
Tomorrow: California is America's window on the future. Lara Marlowe assesses the mood in San Francisco.