'Hey, Nick. Your mom's here.'

We've all seen the kiddies at anti-war Hate-America protests holding signs and chanting alongside their activtist parents and we've wondered what happens to these children, are they the next generation of protesters? Sometimes they become Army Rangers.

This story in today's SF Chronicle is maddening on so many levels that one doesn't know where to begin:

Susan Galleymore had traveled 7,472 miles from Alameda to search for her son in Iraq and was close to finding him. The Army Ranger had urged her not to come. He wouldn't even tell her where he was stationed. It was too dangerous, he said.

But on Feb. 1, seven days after she arrived, the 48-year-old woman was outside the U.S. military base where her son might be. Her car idled among a dozen waiting to be inspected. She stepped out, her face covered in a borrowed hijab, the traditional head scarf worn by Muslim women. She approached a gun- toting U.S. soldier as he inspected a car.

"I'm coming up behind you, I mean you no harm," she said. She pulled out her U.S. passport. "I have business here and I want to speak to your sergeant."

"Ma'am," the guard said firmly, as he whirled toward her. "Get back in your car, ma'am!"

Galleymore held her ground. Six soldiers moved toward her. "I will do that as soon as I talk to your sergeant," she said, and pulled down her hijab.

"You're American," one of the soldiers said.

The tension melted. Soon, she was inside the gate, hugging her son.

Doesn't that give you the warm fuzzies? This stupid cow distracts a sentry in midst of a search and exposes herself and the men guarding the entry to an attack, yet the author purrs approval. It doesn't seem to occur to Galleymore or the Code Pink sponsors that when they enter a war zone, should things go wrong, they needlessly risk other mother's sons.

At wit's end, she decided that the only way to calm her fears was to go to Iraq. She got in touch with Code Pink, which has led about a dozen parents to Iraq over the past few months. After holding a fund-raiser, which netted half of the trip's $2,200 cost, she left for Iraq on Jan. 24.

Her goal was to interview Iraqi mothers and to find her son -- even though three days before she left, he had begged her not to come. It was too dangerous; the landscape was littered with bandits and homemade explosive devices, he said.

Nick was prophetic. During their 12-hour ride into Baghdad from Jordan, one of the three cars in the convoy was pulled over and its occupants robbed. No one was hurt.

Wits end? These people are witless and selfish beyond belief.

Galleymore had done what some military parents only consider during their sleepless nights: She went to Iraq to find her son and see for herself how he was doing. And the 90 minutes they spent together, she said, was well worth the danger.

"I wouldn't change a thing," Galleymore said. "But I felt sad when I went home. I was going back to my safe little home, while all of these lives are being destroyed over there."

The weeks before and after Galleymore's 10-day visit to Iraq have been a complex transformation from the personal to the political. Her quest to find out about her son has evolved into trying to understand what Iraqi mothers, as well as other U.S. military parents, are going through.

That journey has been by turns lonely, satisfying and moving. It has cost her close friendships, given her new ones and complicated her relationship with her active-duty son Nick. Some objected to her post-trip writings about Iraqis who told her of how "jittery GIs shoot Iraqi civilians in the streets," as she mentioned in one online essay.

Galleymore's trip is not about her son, it's about her politics and the useful fools at Code Pink preying on distraught military parents to further their political goals. Galleymore cannot accept that her adult son made a choice she doesn't agree with so she pursues him as if he were a child. Failing to convince her son she uses him shamelessly, denoucing all he stands for, the mission he feels is important and necessary, as she churns out anti-war propaganda in the name of motherhood.

In one essay, Galleymore asked for others to appreciate that the soldiers are in a dilemma, "caught in a military culture that encourages the numbing of most emotions but anger. Whip up enough anger in young men emotionally isolated, denied friends, family, lovers, even civilians clothes, physically exhaust them, nourish them inadequately, expose them to extreme temperatures and violent behavior, confine them to base and portray everyone else as murderous and you create impossible stress."

Nick told his mother that wasn't his experience. She doesn't know how they'll get along when he returns.

"I don't know if he hasn't been responding to my e-mails because he can't, or because of something else," Galleymore said.

Even after meeting halfway around the world, Galleymore's relationship with her son is in some ways as complicated as it was before he left. But she knows they'll eventually understand each other; they're mother and child. She hopes that Americans eventually achieve the same with Iraqis.

Not by abandoning them to the feckless thieves at the UN and the waiting Ba'athist thugs, fundemental clerics and Islamo-terrorists that will fill the vacuum. She weeps crocodile tears for the people of Iraq, her motives are for regime change here, not in Iraq.

Apparently the author knows nothing of Operation Give and other good works Americans and Iraqs are doing together. How easily he accepts Galleymore's anti-American, anti-military point of view as the norm reveals his bias. I am sure there wasn't a dry eye in the house this morning when this piece of slanted journalism hit the doorsteps. Tomorrow's Letters to the Editor will run hot with outrage and applause for Galleymore, just as they have been demanding we pull out of Iraq since the savagery in Fallujah occured.

Of course the next terrorist scare at SFO or the Golden Gate Bridge, these same folks will be lighting up the phones and editorial pages demanding a quicker military response.

Posted by feste at April 3, 2004 01:21 PM | TrackBack