"For no good reason"

Military families opposed to the war face a double anguish: Losing their loved ones for a cause they don't believe in.

By Michelle Goldberg

Apr 1, 2003 | Military families who oppose the war in Iraq say there's a special horror in watching this campaign unfold. Like everyone else who has a relative serving in the Gulf, they're beset by a sickening anxiety that builds as the troops move toward Baghdad -- and that paralyzes them every time another casualty is reported. For those who believe the war is unjust, though, there's no pride in a righteous cause to ease the terror, no patriotic sense of shared sacrifice to make sense of their families' disruptions. There is just the helpless feeling that their loved ones might lose their lives for nothing.

"It hurts a lot, sacrificing our children for a war that Bush took us into," says Peter Hansen, a Navy dad in Palm Springs, Calif. "I picture my son going off to World War II and I really think I would feel differently. I'm not a pacifist, but I really feel something stinks about this, and every day I get more confirmation. I have an intuitive sense that Bush is not a good man."

"I keep thinking if I had belief in a just political cause, this would be a lot easier, but there really isn't any place to turn," says Melissa Halvorson, a graduate student in education at the State University of New York at New Paltz whose 30-year-old husband, a Marine reservist, left for Kuwait last week. "It's a little bit lonely. It would be easier to be waving a flag."

For several hundred military families against the war, a way to combat that loneliness has been to band together under the name Military Families Speak Out. The group is part activist organization, part support network -- some members have participated in teach-ins and protests with veterans groups, but others just look to its Web site and e-mails to counter what Joyce Dreysus, a military mom in Gainesville, Fla., calls "crippling, paralyzing isolation."

It's an isolation compounded by splits within families. Some antiwar military families say their children or siblings secretly share their views, but for others, a relative's antiwar stance is a betrayal. "This is not just dividing the world, this is not just dividing the population of the United States, this has come down to dividing families," says Connie Moss, a 44-year-old mother of six in rural Virginia whose 23-year-old son is stationed in the Gulf and enthusiastic about the war. For these families, it can be hard to know what to hope for -- a devastating air assault that will cripple Iraqi resistance? A campaign that aims to protect civilians but leaves troops more vulnerable?

"I support my son and the troops 150 percent, but I also have tremendous feelings of empathy and compassion for the Iraqi people," says Dreysus. "There's a tremendous amount of conflict and confusion. It's like a paradox that you're holding inside your heart."

Such ambivalence is often absent from public debate, where antiwar protests and rallies to support the troops are often characterized as being mutually exclusive. It's as if to love a soldier is to love the war he's fighting, and to oppose the war is to demean the honor of the troops. Those who hate the war that their relatives have been ordered to fight feel their voices are being ignored, and they're increasingly desperate to be heard. A query posted to the Military Families Speak Out mailing list garners dozens of responses from people who describe themselves as the furious, frustrated, terrified families of men on the road to Baghdad. They say they feel marginalized by the media and unwelcome in military communities.

"The other night on television, they said, 'Here there was an antiwar demonstration, while here is what some people are doing to support our troops,'" Nancy Lessin recalls indignantly. "That formulation is absolutely wrong, and we're trying to correct it everywhere we go."

Lessin, whose stepson Joe Richardson is a Marine serving in the Gulf, founded Military Families Speak Out in January along with her husband, Charley Richardson, and Jeffrey McKenzie, the father of a 26-year-old pilot deployed with a Marine unit. The three met at the Oct. 26 antiwar demonstration in Washington. Since January, they say, several hundred families have joined their mailing list, with between five and 10 new ones signing up every day since the war began.

"The hardest thing by far would be to lose Joe in a war that was unjust and unnecessary," Lessin says. "In that case, we think we would never, ever recover from our grief and never let go of our anger. That anger would be directed at this administration and the Congress that abdicated its responsibility and allowed this to happen."

Some families suspect lawmakers acquiesced too easily to the president's war plan because their loved ones' lives aren't at stake. Members of Military Families Speak Out repeatedly mention that only one person in Congress has a son serving in the armed forces. "I want people to be aware that this mandatory patriotism is crap," says Halvorson. "The people who initiated this war have never even come close to the military. None have families in the military. They don't stand to lose anything."

Next Page: "I don't want to support the killing of all these Iraqis to save my son"

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