Showdown at the ranch
Mount Airy family joins dozens of anti-war protestors in Crawford
Celeste Zappala, fourth from right, and son Dante, third from right, both of Mount Airy, react to the passing of President Bush’s motorcade outside the presidential ranch in Crawford, Texas last Friday. The protest by family members of soldiers killed in Iraq has drawn national attention — and a counter-rally from conservatives.
(Associated Press photo by LM Otero)
by MICHAEL J. MISHAK
Celeste Zappala never thought she would spend her vacation with President Bush. But the veteran peace activist from Mount Airy found herself camped out on a country road in rural Texas last week, just outside the president’s Crawford ranch.
The death of her adopted son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, had brought her there. Baker, a Pennsylvania National Guardsman, was killed in Baghdad last year while providing security for the Iraq Survey Group, a coalition-led team charged with searching for weapons of mass destruction.
He was the first member of the state Guard to die in combat since World War II. His military service was extended when the Iraq war began in March 2003, just weeks before he was set to be discharged.
Zappala, traveling with her son Dante, touched down in Texas last Tuesday to join Cindy Sheehan, the California mother of a fallen soldier who started a roadside vigil near Bush’s ranch on Aug. 6. Despite losing her luggage, she bought a Bible and headed for Crawford. There, Zappala spent the first of five nights under a tent with Sheehan, with whom she co-founded Gold Star Families for Peace last November.
The two had been working together through another anti-war group, Military Families Speak Out.
By the time of Zappala’s arrival, Sheehan’s protest had already attracted national media coverage and a caravan of bereaved military families. Dubbed “Camp Casey” after Sheehan’s 24-year-old son who was killed in Sadr City last year, a growing group of protestors dug in along Prairie Chapel Road to demand a face-to-face meeting with the president.
It was not the first time Zappala and Sheehan had sought accountability from the administration.
In January, after months of trying in vain to land a meeting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the two traveled to the Pentagon in driving snows to personally force the issue, but were turned away by armed guards.
Unlike Sheehan, who met with Bush in June 2004 in one of the president’s many closed-door sessions with grieving families, Zappala has not had the benefit of speaking with her son’s commander in chief. In fact, she said she has never even received a letter or a phone call from the White House since Baker was killed on April 26, 2004.
Celeste Zappala, of Mount Airy, looks on with her son Dante at the roadside vigil last week outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Her adopted son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was killed in Iraq last year. (Photo by Theo Rigby)
For Zappala and her two sons, Dante and Raphael, Bush’s five-week vacation, the longest of any president in history, proved the perfect opportunity.
“My family has never had any meeting with the president. We would love a chance to have a sit-down with him,” Dante said last Wednesday, on a cell phone from Waco, where he was gathering rain gear and supplies for the gathering protestors. “And he’s on vacation down here at his ranch so we figure he’s got the time now to do it.”
At the campsite, Celeste Zappala was helping to organize the new arrivals as they filtered in from places like Hinesville, Ga. and Silvis, Ill. “We hope to draw attention to the war and to ask the question: ‘What is the noble cause these people are dying for,’” she said, wind whipping her cell phone.
Asked what she would tell the president if granted an audience, Zappala said, “I would want him to understand what it’s like to lose a loved one. I want him to look me in the face and know that I don’t believe that he sent Sherwood for a noble cause.”
Among the protestors, Zappala said, is an overwhelming sense that Bush has refused to listen to critical voices. “I’m a dissenting voice. I’m a legitimate person. I have a right to tell him that I don’t agree with him, that I think what he’s doing is wrong and that we have to find a better way to do this,” she said. “Otherwise, we’re doomed.”
The tragedy of Zappala’s loss is underscored by her lifelong dedication to peace activism. A self-described “flower child,” she took all three of her children to anti-war demonstrations in Washington, D.C. Her appearance at the vigil last week is part of a promise she made upon her son’s death to speak truth to power. “Nothing makes it better,” she said. “The vigil just made my commitment to my promise to him stronger.”
The protest continued to grow last Thursday as Bush met with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss the war, among other foreign policy concerns.
After meeting with his national security team, Bush told reporters at a brief news conference, “I sympathize with Mrs. Sheehan. I’ve thought long and hard about her position. I’ve heard her position from others, which is: ‘Get out of Iraq now.’ And it would be a mistake for the security of this country.”
The statement came on a day when local dailies fronted the news that five Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers had been killed in two insurgent attacks earlier in the week. The deaths brought to seven the number of state Guardsmen killed in Iraq in just four days. Six were from the Philadelphia area.
The Pentagon’s quiet plans to significantly scale down the U.S. troop presence in Iraq by mid-2006 and the administration’s shift in thinking toward the insurgency (from military to political defeat) underscore the anti-war movement’s longstanding call for a withdrawal, Dante Zappala said.
“I don’t see how having more soldiers die is going to honor the fallen. At some point the killing is going to have to stop,” he said. “There is no military solution. That’s not coming from the left wing or the peaceniks, it’s coming from the U.S. military. The best thing to do is to bring the troops home and take care of them when they get here.”
The vigil, which had drawn more than 100 supporters and counter-rallies by week’s end, comes at a time when public support for the war is at an all-time low.
Mounting casualties have placed Bush on the hot seat. Sheehan was attending the Veterans for Peace convention earlier this month in Dallas when the news hit that 14 Marines from one Ohio unit had been killed in action. She quickly left for Crawford.
“Eventually [Bush] is going to have to face these families,” Dante Zappala said. “Whether it be seeing them on the side of the road or at events throughout the country wherever he goes, he’s already faced with it.”
But, after weathering five days of torrential rains, fire ants and the Texas heat, the meeting never came. The Zappala family and the president crossed paths briefly last Friday as the Bush’s motorcade sped past the vigil on the way to a local Republican fundraiser.
Standing with Sheehan amid a group of protestors, Celeste Zappala peered into the limousine’s tinted glass, clutching a banner and flashing a peace sign. The crowd started to scream at the president. Some chanted “Talk to Cindy,” Zappala recalled. One protestor shouted “You killed my son.” Others were more whimsical, she said, with one man asking, “Can we use your pool?”
Zappala said she urged those around her to channel their anger into song. The group broke into a religious hymn. “It was really an intense moment,” Zappala said.
“What I hope to accomplish as a person of faith is to say we have to find a better way,” she had said two days earlier. “War, violence, chaos and revenge do not move the cause for peace.”
On Monday, Celeste, executive director of the Mayor’s Commission on Services to the Aging, was back at work. “I’m so tired,” she said in a brief interview, clearly exhausted from the whirlwind week in Texas. “I’ve never lived so intensely since Sherwood was killed. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
For perspective, Celeste said she had slept no more than four hours at a time over the last week. Last Thursday, she awoke at 5 a.m. By 6:30 a.m. she had already done four interviews.
Now, trying to return a barrage of phone calls, she hopes to get some rest before Wednesday when she will speak at a vigil at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown
