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"FacebookPinterest\n\nHe came to America\u2014illegally, from Mexico\u2014in 1985 and fell in love with his new country. He found work, bought a house, and all three of his kids enlisted in the U.S. military. Then Iraq happened, and one of them got killed. Now Jorge Medina wants somebody to pay.\n\nHe is watching soccer on his television, Mexico beating Bolivia, when the war begins. A newsman interrupts the game, and then there is grainy green video flashing in his living room, and for an instant he does not believe what he is seeing, because a man never believes what was never supposed to be true.\n\n Jorge Medina's children, all three of them, are in the military. He encouraged them to enlist. Soldiers learn discipline, he says. They build character. Soldiers serve their country, which Jorge thinks is both a duty and an honor, especially for his children: America welcomed them from Mexico fifteen years ago, embraced them, and serving is a kind of payback. Jenny, his eldest, is a sergeant with a reserve JAG unit in Miami. Irving is regular army, stationed in Kansas. Irving's twin, Ivan, is in Kuwait with the Tenth Engineering Battalion, Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division. Ivan has been over there since September 2002, and he told his father months ago that American troops would soon be swarming over the border and into Iraq. \"No, no, no,\" Jorge said. \"Bush is not crazy.\" Then Jenny called and said, \"We're going after Saddam,\" and he said it again: \"No. There is no reason. Bush is not crazy.\"\n\n Jorge is not a particularly political person, and he has no real dislike for the president. Nor is he a pacifist. He believes the United States was right to invade Afghanistan, because that's where the terrorists who crashed jetliners into New York and Washington had found shelter. He cried when he watched the towers dissolve into great clouds of dust, and he knew right then that one or two or maybe all three of his children might be sent to war, and he was afraid, truly afraid, but also proud that they would be fighting to defend their country.\n\n But this war, the one on his television, does not make him proud. This war does not make sense to him.\n\n He wonders where Ivan is.\n\n Jorge switches to a cable news channel. He watches the war until four o'clock in the morning, falls asleep for two hours, wakes up, gets ready for work. In the shower, he prays for Ivan and Irving and Jenny. And then he prays for George Bush, too, prays that Bush is not crazy, that he is actually wise, wiser than Jorge Medina can ever know and, if he is not, that God will make him wise.\n\n He drives to work at the Briarwood House Apartments in Goshen, New York, a postcard town sixty miles northwest of Manhattan. He bums a cigarette from one of the other maintenance guys. Jorge doesn't smoke.\n\n He keeps the news on all day, hears every worrying update: The first dead American. The first dead Hispanic American. The announcers on TV never say the names of the dead. Why won't they say the names? Why can't Jorge know his boy's not dead?\n\n He slips into a basement and prays. He prays all day, prays like he's never prayed before, like he'll never pray again.\n\n\n\n Ivan is at the front. He is 21 years old, a small man with dark hair and a slight lisp who wants to be a senator. He does not consider himself a warrior. He enlisted because he wanted money for college and the privilege of saying he'd served his country with honor, which is not at all the same as being a warrior. Ivan, in fact, is a chaplain's assistant who just happened to end up assisting a chaplain attached to a unit out front. Damn the luck.\n\n Irving was supposed to join the army with Ivan, in the spring of 2001, in a buddy program that would have let them train and serve their first post together, except Irving didn't want to be a chaplain's assistant. His father had teased him after Ivan left. \"Your brother, your sister, they both join the army, and you're still here,\" Jorge had said. \"What are you, a coward?\" He'd smiled when he said it, because he really was only teasing. He knows his boy is no coward. Irving was waiting for the recruiters to offer him something better, which they did in August 2001\u2014Thirteen Bravo, field artillery. Irving's a warrior. The twins, Ivan and Irving, are different that way. Weird how it worked out, Irving back in Kansas when the fighting starts.\n\n Weeks pass, slowly, miserably. The Medinas are a close family, always talking, always keeping up; before he went to war, Ivan called home twice a week, even from the Middle East. But now Jorge hasn't heard from him since March 17, two days before the invasion Jorge swore was never going to happen. \"Remember,\" Ivan said over the phone, \"no news is good news. And if there is news, it'll come in a uniform.\"\n\n Jorge tries not to worry. His wife, Ana, tries not to worry. They both worry.\n\n Irving calls. It's his turn. Irving's unit\u2014Fourth Battalion, First Field Artillery Regiment, Third Brigade Combat Team, First Armored Division\u2014will be shipping out soon from Fort Riley. He says, \"Dad, I have to go to Iraq.\"\n\n Jorge says, \"Come home first.\"\n\n So Irving spends his leave at home, which is the top floor of a gray two-family house his father bought when Irving was a senior in high school. It is chilly inside because it is old and none of the walls are insulated, and part of the ceiling in Irving's bedroom is crumbling. Jorge and Ana spent more than ten years saving for the down payment.\n\n Jorge and Irving go to movies and out to dinner. They talk, not so much about Iraq and the war but about anything else. Jorge wants a few days with his son, not with a warrior.\n\n On the last night, he takes Irving into the kitchen. He says a blessing over Irving, mumbles a prayer. He puts his hands, rough and square, on his son's shoulders.\n\n \"Irving,\" Jorge says, \"if you don't want to go, you don't have to. We can leave. We can go to Mexico.\"\n\n It would be so easy, crossing the border. Not like getting out all those years ago. Jorge was a cook in Mexico City with a wife and three young kids when the great earthquake of 1985 hit. The ground cracked open, and the streets buckled, and the restaurant where Jorge worked was buried in the rubble. There was no work, so Jorge went north, rode a bus for two days straight to Tijuana and paid a smuggler $1,500 to get him into America. He had a brother in New York who promised to find him work.\n\n He crawled through a hole in the fence at the border on a moonless night with a dozen other Mexicans. They walked for miles in the high desert, immigration choppers whirring in the distance, searching, searching, then coming too close and the guides ordering everyone onto their bellies in the dirt, telling them not to look up because the spotlights on the helicopters would reflect the whites of their eyes.\n\n The smugglers got him to San Diego that night, then to Los Angeles, then to New York with a plane ticket that had someone else's name on it, but that didn't matter because terrorists wouldn't fly planes into skyscrapers for another sixteen years.\n\n He hopped a bus into Manhattan and a train to Poughkeepsie. His brother picked him up at the station and took him to a restaurant in Wappingers Falls called La Fonda del Sol. The next day, Jorge started washing dishes. He stocked the bar, and sometimes he cooked. He learned a little English from a Danish engineer named Erik, who liked the food at La Fonda.\n\n He worked for two years, did nothing but work, until he had a working permit and enough money to bring his family to America. He rented an apartment on Main Street and enrolled his kids in the Goshen schools, where Irving was a soccer star. He worked at restaurants and in a factory that made seats for cars and did a little catering on the side, working, always working. He saved his money and bought his little house in a run-down neighborhood in a run-down city, and in April 2001 he took an oath and waved a small flag and officially became a citizen of these United States.\n\n Seventeen years busting his hump for the American dream.\n\n Irving,\" he says again, \"we can leave. If you're against this war, you don't have to go.\"\n\n His son shakes his head. Soldiers do not get to choose their wars, he says. Soldiers do not leave fellow soldiers to fight alone.\n\n\n\nIvan finally calls in April, from a palace in Baghdad. His mother answers the phone. He hears relief in her voice. There are soldiers lined up behind him waiting to use the phone, so he only has a few minutes to talk. He does not tell her about the war. He does not tell her about delivering last rites to a specialist from an Army Reserve unit in Oregon, just 19 years old, riding in a truck in a sandstorm so thick no one can see where he's going, and there is a crash, and the kid is pinned in the passenger seat, suffocating, being squeezed to death before he's even fired a shot; doesn't tell her what it's like to look into a man's eyes\u2014a boy's eyes, really\u2014and watch him die, watch him know he's going to die, watch his eyes get wide and listen as he says how sorry he is, tell his family how sorry; doesn't tell her about the Iraqis who race toward checkpoints the soldiers have set up in the road, happy to see the Americans, holding up their palms in greeting, not knowing that they should stop, driving forward until the soldiers get scared and machine-gun an entire family and there is so much blood but one man is still alive, just barely, and he knows a little English, enough to say he doesn't blame the Americans for killing his family; he doesn't tell her about the whoosh that sounded like a small jet and then the whistle of a rocket going over his head and then the tremendous thump that threw him hard onto his shoulder and killed three U.S. soldiers.\n\n He only tells his mother that his shoulder hurts.\n\n That is all Ana needs to know, all she wants to know, really. Ivan has no time to speak to his father, but of course Ana will tell him everything their son has said, and Jorge will imagine the rest. He has no illusions about war, and he knows the narrative being sold by the Pentagon and the president is not real. He knows the mission has not been accomplished, that his boys are in the middle of something extremely ugly. He thinks about foreign soldiers invading his country, marching right into Middletown, New York, dividing the city into sectors marked with barbed wire and blast walls and machine-gun nests, kicking in doors and occasionally, but certainly not on purpose, shooting the wrong people and blowing up the wrong houses....\n\n Jorge would fight them. A man who is proud of his country fights foreign occupiers. And he suspects that most Iraqis, once they are through being grateful, will resent the Americans and start to fight them. Not the dead-enders or the terrorists or whatever Washington is calling them at the beginning of the war, but average people, and the anger and resentment will only grow with every week the soldiers stay.\n\n Jorge's boys are the occupiers, even if they never wanted to be.\n\n Ivan goes to Fallujah, finishes his tour, flies back to the United States in August, and Jorge lights a cigar and throws a big party. Irving stays in Baghdad, where he's been all summer. There is little need for heavy artillery in the capital, so Irving mainly patrols the city. And talks to children. Kids in Baghdad swarm around the soldiers. They all want their picture taken; they want to talk to Joe. There is one boy, Saif, maybe 10 years old, who comes by Irving's base nearly every day. He takes money from Irving and the other soldiers and runs out to buy them sodas from the street vendors, and sometimes Saif brings food that his mother has cooked for the Americans.\n\n Irving calls his sister, Jenny, and tells her about Saif. He sends her a picture of the boy, the two of them standing in front of a bank. Irving is in full battle rattle\u2014fatigues, vest, helmet\u2014but he's smiling, his left arm looped easy over Saif's small shoulders; Saif is in a striped shirt, arms crossed over his chest, oversize shades covering his eyes, his face stern, like a soldier. Irving loves this boy. \"If the protesters saw what I see,\" he tells Jenny, \"they wouldn't protest.\"\n\n A few weeks later, Irving calls Jenny again. It's three o'clock in the morning in Florida, and Irving is weeping. He says there was an attack, that insurgents lobbed a homemade grenade at the American guards. Saif was there. Saif was in the way. The explosion blew his stomach open. He died in Irving's arms.\n\n The war is changing him, and he's not even fighting, not officially.\n\n He tells his sister he loves her, tells her he's proud of her, says all the things he never would have said if he hadn't seen how fragile life is, how tenuous. In November, he sends her a birthday card. \"Some people make such a beautiful difference in the world,\" it says. \"You're one of those wonderful people, and you'll always be special to me.\" Jenny can't remember the last time she got a card like that from Irving.\n\n He sends an e-mail to his best friend on November 13: \"it's been a real experience out here,\" he types. \"i seen some of the saddest things out here. i been here for seven months now. i think we all should be home by march. i'm ready to go home. at first it was exciting, but after being here this long all i want to do is be somewhere where you don't have to look out every time you leave your home.\"\n\n Irving has a shift that night. At 4:30 a.m., he writes a letter to his father. He writes mainly about sports, about the Yankees losing the World Series, about the Cowboys not being as good as Jorge thinks they are, about Club Am\u00E9rica, Irving's favorite team in the Mexican soccer league. Then something else. Maybe he remembers the night in the kitchen, his father telling him he didn't have to go fight a war on the other side of the world. \"Dad,\" he writes, \"although I'm fighting for us, for my new country, I'll never forget where I came from.\"\n\n Jorge and Ana are in Ivan's bedroom, or what will become his bedroom. They've gutted most of the house, started in the summer, where the ceiling was crumbling above Irving's room, and just kept going, tearing plaster and lathe from the studs. Now, late in the afternoon of November 14, Jorge is plucking out the tiny nails left behind.\n\n The doorbell rings. Ana goes down the stairs.\n\n Jorge hears her scream.\n\n Jorge turns toward the door, bounds down the stairs. He sees uniforms. He sees his wife on the bottom step, hears her wailing in Spanish. Not my son. Not my son.\n\n Jorge's arms are up, the hammer still in his right hand. His chest tightens, and then words explode up through his throat, sounds he doesn't think about, just lets erupt.\n\n Fuck your President Bush.\n\n His reflex is rage, not grief. Grief will come, deep and unrelenting. But in this instant, in the exact moment when two uniforms are framed in his doorway, Jorge's instinct is to curse his president.\n\n Jorge's boy is killed, and he is transformed.\n\n The moment passes like flash powder. Jorge catches himself, realizes he has a hammer cocked in his hand. He lowers his arms, holds them out from his body, shows the uniforms he won't swing at them. Then he goes to Ana, wraps himself around her, holds her.\n\n The uniforms\u2014a major and a chaplain from West Point\u2014come upstairs when Jorge invites them. They all sit in the hollowed shell of the living room, and the officers tell Jorge and Ana again how sorry they are. Jorge decides the army has made a mistake, that Irving is not dead at all: He'd told his father he would be in Mosul by now, on a mission up north.\n\n He asks, Are they sure?\n\n They are sure.\n\n He says, No, there must be a mistake.\n\n They tell him there has been no mistake. They tell him Irving was driving a Humvee at the rear of a convoy that morning. A homemade bomb went off just as Irving passed. He was killed instantly; he did not suffer. The uniforms almost always tell the widows and the parents and the children that a soldier died quickly and painlessly. Sometimes it's true. Sometimes it's easier than saying Irving's soldiers tried like hell to save him, that he was alive for ten hours with part of his skull ripped away by shrapnel, that someone watched him die, watched him know he was going to die.\n\n Sometimes it's just easier to say it didn't hurt.\n\n\n\n Irving is a hero for the simple reason that he is dead. The New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune write about him, and the Fox station from New York City sends a crew to Jorge's house. A reporter and a photographer for the local paper, the Times Herald-Record, spend a week with the family at the house and the funeral home and the graveyard. Jorge talks to the reporters. Ana does not. She doesn't speak much English, but it wouldn't matter if she did. What would she say? What could she say? It's just too hard.\n\n The morticians stitch Irving's head to-gether, and there is an open casket at the wake. Hundreds of people come to mourn him, and the Goshen police close off Murray Avenue in front of St. John the Evangelist for the funeral. After the Mass, the hearse leads a procession into the brand-new Orange County Veterans Memorial Cemetery, to a patch of lawn lined with flat grave markers. A bugler plays taps, and a rifle corps fires a salute, and a general hands Ana the tightly folded flag from Irving's coffin and the Bronze Star and Purple Heart the army awarded him after he was dead.\n\n Goshen is a small town, small enough to linger over its war dead. There will be a blood drive in Irving's name and, later that year, a plaque next to the athletic field at the elementary school dedicated to Irving by a local veterans group. One of the old soldiers there will tell Jenny that Irving is in a better place or that God needs him more than we do or some such thing\u2014the precise words don't matter\u2014and she will hear the same things she told Irving when Saif died in his arms. And she will realize how stupid it all sounds.\n\n Two weeks after Irving is killed, the postman drops his last letter home into the mailbox on the front porch. Jorge reads it, but he tells no one about it. Not Ana, not Ivan. For two days, he keeps it to himself. He does not know why; he will never know why.\n\n When Saddam Hussein is captured, a month after Irving is killed, a local reporter calls, and Jorge tells him he is happy. \"You know,\" Jorge says, \"because this man was the cause of my son's death. It was something, at least. I was happy the sacrifice of my son's life was not in vain.\"\n\n Jorge does not believe that. He cannot explain\u2014not to himself, not to a reporter\u2014exactly what Irving died for, which, he allows, means maybe Irving died for no good reason at all. The weapons of mass destruction have not been found. Saddam did not order hijackers to fly jetliners into skyscrapers, and he did not consort with Osama bin Laden. So why, Jorge wonders, are we fighting in Iraq?\n\n In time, he will say it out loud. \"Saying that Irving died in vain,\" Jorge will whisper, \"in some ways... I think so.\"\n\n But that's not what a father says four weeks after his son has died in a war and Saddam Hussein has just been captured. So he says what he's heard other people say; he says what he thinks he ought to say; he says what makes him feel better. He doesn't say what he is not yet ready to admit, because it is simply too terrible.\n\n Time goes on. Wounds harden even if they don't heal. Jorge e-mails an antiwar group and finds he is not the only one who thinks the president lied, and Ivan cofounds a group of his own, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and on the anniversary of the invasion they drive to New York City and march down Madison Avenue. Jorge is at the front of the procession, and afterward he speaks. He calls Bush a liar, but he is singing to the choir. People who march against the war already believe Bush lied.\n\n Then there is another march, at West Point at the end of May; 300 people show up, and Jorge speaks again. He calls Bush a liar again, calls the war illegal. There are stories in the local papers\u2014Middletown, Poughkeepsie, Westchester\u2014but nothing else. That day four more soldiers die in Iraq.\n\n Then Jorge drives home. He cannot afford to be a professional activist, flying around the country telling people who already agree with him how awful it is to lose a son. He grieves mostly in private. He goes to church every Sunday and goes to work every day fixing other people's apartments, and then he comes home and rebuilds his own house, erects new walls and archways, reconfigures the layout so that what was Irving's room is now the front entrance, lays down a new floor. It keeps him busy. It is better to stay busy.\n\n\n\n August comes, and Republicans flood New York City. The protesters come, too, and on the last day of the convention they gather in Union Square. Jorge and Ana and Ivan are there. They are carrying a picture of Irving, his army portrait, and signs they have hand-lettered: Don't let one man's lies take away any more lives and support our troops. Impeach Bush!\n\n Jorge is standing there in the crowd, waving his signs and holding Irving's picture. A woman with a group called CodePink, which has been protesting the war since before it began, comes up to him. Jorge met her at the march in the spring. She asks him if he wants to protest inside.\n\n Inside?\n\n \"Yes, inside,\" she says. \"In Madison Square Garden.\"\n\n Jorge does not think. He says yes.\n\n The lady warns him that he could be arrested.\n\n Jorge nods his head. \"Yes,\" he says. \"I will be arrested.\"\n\n He goes to Staples with her, where they make two black-and-white photocopies of Irving's picture, one of which they tape to the front of Jorge's undershirt, the other to the back. Then they write in black marker on the shirt, Bush lied. My son died. \n\n Jorge buttons his blue long-sleeve shirt, covering the pictures. The woman from CodePink gives him three passes\u2014white, green, orange, each one coded for different levels of access. He goes to the Garden.\n\n The first guards look at Jorge's white pass and wave him through. He moves along, and different guards tell him to empty his pockets, ask him to take off his shoes. He is afraid they will pat him down, feel the thin strips of tape, hear a crinkle of paper. His heart is pounding. Jorge, he tells himself, you don't have to be nervous.\n\n Then he is inside the Garden, on one of the outer concourses. He is met by another CodePink woman. She has long red hair and blue eyes. Jorge thinks she is beautiful.\n\n \"Jorge,\" she whispers, \"you're going to stand up and do whatever you're going to do when General Franks speaks.\"\n\n Jorge shakes his head. He wants to stand up when Bush speaks, stand up when the crazy man who sent his son to die is onstage.\n\n No, she says. She is with CodePink, and she will interrupt Bush.\n\n Jorge is out of his depth, on unfamiliar ground. A useful prop. He will play his role for Irving.\n\n He looks around and sees Mary Lou Retton. He sees a famous boxing referee. He sees people from Texas wearing big white hats, and everywhere he sees rich people. He can tell by their hands. Rich people have soft hands. Jorge, he thinks, you're in enemy territory now.\n\n He finds a seat to the right of the stage. Tommy Franks begins speaking, but Jorge isn't paying attention to the words because he's busy with his shirt, sliding the buttons out of their holes, gently tugging the tails out of his pants, trying not to let anyone see him doing it. Then he hears one line, part of one line, clearly: \"...join them in saluting our commander in chief, George W. Bush.\"\n\n Jorge is on his feet, peeling off his shirt. He yells, the same way he did on his stairs in November, not even thinking of the words, just letting them come out by instinct.\n\n \"George Bush is a liar!\" he screams. \"And if you vote for him, you're a liar, too!\"\n\n He turns, a slow pirouette. People are staring, and he looks at their eyes. He believes they are sad eyes, that all those Republicans are sad for him, sad for his boy. \"Bush's lies killed my son!\"\n\n He hears a man's voice from a few rows away. \"Shut up!\" Then, \"Get the hell out of here!\" Those voices do not sound sad for Jorge or his son.\n\n He makes another twirl, then sits down. Security is coming, men rushing up the aisle. He leaps up, throws his arms out in surrender. The guards grab him, hustle him out into the concourse, Jorge yelling the whole way. \"If you vote for Bush, you're liars like him!\"\n\n Security takes him to a small room deep in the building. Where are you from?, they ask. Who is your wife? Do you have sons?\n\n \"Yes,\" Jorge tells them. \"And one of them died because your president lied.\"\n\n That is all he came to say. That is all he wanted someone, everyone, to hear.\n\n\n\n Exactly a year after Irving Medina typed his last e-mail, the one in which he said he'd seen the saddest things and just wanted to go home, soldiers are knee-deep in Fallujah, still fighting a war that was supposed to be long over. The sky above St. John's is a brilliant cloudless blue, and inside, near the altar, Irving's portrait is perched on an easel for a memorial service that begins at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon.\n\n There is no color guard this time, and the police do not need to block off the streets. This time, eight people come to pray for Irving, including his parents and his twin and his sister. When it's over, Jorge stands in a patch of sun and shrugs. People get busy, he says. People forget.\n\n There is food back at the house. The upstairs is finished, except for the bathroom and the kitchen. On top of the television where Jorge watched the war is a small shrine to Irving: a glass angel, pictures of him with the Goshen High School soccer team and with another soldier, a small stuffed bear dressed in fatigues. The folded flag from his coffin and his medals are on a low wall at the edge of the living room, and in the dining room is the picture of Irving with his arm around Saif.\n\n Jorge is ambivalent about his stunt at the Republican convention. He is proud that he stood up to the president, proud that he ercised the First Amendment right his son died theoretically defending. And yet he is deeply sad. He called the president a liar, and he believes it is true, but no American should ever be forced to believe such a thing. He is proud to be a citizen. He wants to be proud of his president.\n\n He thinks Irving would want to be an American, too. So Ivan and Jenny fill out an application, and they send it in along with a money order for $80. In November, a week after the memorial hardly anyone came to, there is a small ceremony in Manhattan. Two people are being granted citizenship, both of them dead soldiers. The government gives Jorge and Ana a framed certificate and a miniature flag and a letter that says Irving has earned such a high honor because... well, because he got killed.\n\n There is also a letter from the White House. It's a form letter, the same one every new citizen gets, a generic congratulations from George W. Bush, whose signature is inked on by a machine.\n\n Jorge sends it back."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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