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"FacebookPinterest\n\nAfter Brian Montgomery and the ve other snipers from the 3/25 were ambushed on August 1, the Islamic extremist group Ansar al-Sunnah released a gruesome video of what appeared to be the body of Corporal Jeffrey A. Boskovitch, who had somehow gotten separated from the other snipers during the attack. (The Pentagon has not released many details about the incident, and we may never know precisely what happened.) The video is chilling. It shows hazy shots of a group of six uniformed men, presumably the Marine snipers, on foot in the desert with a caption that reads \"These are the crusaders.\" Then there are wobbly images of insurgents ring mortars, with haunting Arabic music celebrating jihad and breathless shouts of \"Allahu Akbar.\" Then that nightmare image of the lifeless, desecrated body of a young American Marine and, in a pointed display of disrespect, a hand coming in from outside the frame and cutting the dog tags off his neck.\n\nAt daybreak on August 3, a convoy of Marines left their base at Al Hadithah Dam in search of the insurgents. Fifteen men piled into an amphibious assault vehicle (an amtrac, essentially a lightly armored troop-carrying boat on wheels designed for amphibious landings). Just past 6 a.m., after several lead vehicles in the convoy had already rattled past, the amtrac drove over a huge roadside bomb made up of three antitank mines, and the twenty-ve-ton vehicle was thrown high into the sky. It came back to the ground split in two and engulfed in ames. All but one of the Marines on board were killed, nine of them reservists from Lima Company.\n\nIn early October, the rest of Lima Company came home to Columbus. They carried with them parts of Edward August Schroeder II, or Augie to all his friends (\"Foggy without the F,\" he used to say). I'd attended Augie's funeral back in August and met several times with his parents, Paul Schroeder and Rosemary Palmer, at their home in Cleveland. After Lima Company's joyous arrival ceremony in Columbus, I drove back to Cleveland, past Amish in horse-drawn buggies and alfalfa elds and the Wonder Bread and Budweiser factories, to see them once more, on the day their son would have returned home.\n\n\"Remember Augie's casket you saw at the funeral?\" Rosemary Palmer asks me as I step inside. She points at two urns on a living room table. \"He just keeps coming back.\"\n\nSitting on their front porch under a apping Marine Corps ag,\n\nRosemary and Paul are the picture of midwestern moderation and grace. Like all the grieving families I've met, they are especially focused on their nal correspondence with their son. Augie had been frustrated that his unit was forced to return again and again to Euphrates River towns to clear out insurgents they'd already cleared out. In his last conversation with his father, Augie had said that the tactic of sweeping towns and then withdrawing only to return again was becoming \"less and less worth it.\"\n\nPaul is a thoughtful, restrained man who teaches a thirty-six-week Bible-study course at Church of the Saviour in Cleveland Heights (where Rosemary chairs the Membership and Evangelism Committee), but his anger toward the Bush administration is palpable. \"I blame Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, and George Bush for the death of my son,\" he says slowly and quietly. \"I don't think Bush is supporting the troops. He claims he is, but he's not. Otherwise he would have had enough troops there so that IED that blew up my son would not have been in the road. I use my son as an example, but multiply that by 2,000.\"\n\nThe day after they buried Augie, Rosemary and Paul went public with their critique, reading a statement from their front lawn to a collection of local reporters. Even amid the intense coverage of Ohio's losses that week, Paul's statement stood out for its controlled, articulate fury. \"Mr. President, our son was a Marine,\" Paul said. \"He was obliged to do his duty without public complaint and did that faithfully. We, sir, are not so constrained. Now you have to deal with us and a growing number of Americans who think you have created a mess that you do not have the capacity to end.\" And this: \"We ask you to recognize that our comments are not just those of grieving parents. They are based on anger, Mr. President, not grief. Anger is an honest emotion when someone's family has been violated.\"\n\nThat word violated struck me, and I asked him later to describe what he was feeling. \"The emotion swings from the depths of sadness almost immediately to very severe anger,\" he said. \"I've never experienced that before. Usually you go from one emotion to another over a course of time, but this is immediate. And I'm not naive enough to think that time is going to cure that. This is the rest of my life I'll be like this.\"\n\nRosemary and Paul recognize how unwelcome their message is to many people here in Ohio. Rosemary grew up in rural Wayne County, between Cleveland and Columbus (\"the middle of the middle,\" she calls it), and she vividly remembers being afraid to oppose the war in Vietnam for fear of losing her job, even her mortgage.\n\nBut they agree that grief is stronger than fear. \"Prior to Augie's death, I was afraid of my mortality,\" Paul says. \"But since his death, I am no longer afraid. I have lost the fear of what people might think of what I say. There's nothing more that can be taken away from me. I'm not afraid to die. Because if I die, I'd get to see Augie again, and there is nothing in the world I'd rather do right now than hug him.\"\n\nDespite their strong faith, Rosemary and Paul are deeply offended by the direction much of the religious rhetoric that surrounds them has taken. \"The religious right should read their Bible a bit more carefully,\" Paul says. \"Listen to what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. You're not going to nd a George Bush in that sermon. It's a gospel of love. That's God's grace. A lot of churches are forgetting the most important element of Christianity, and that's grace. Fear is not grace. Does that mean you don't punish culprits who are responsible for 9/11? No, you have to punish them. But don't punish everybody. We're killing a lot of Iraqis who had nothing to do with 9/11. Don't kill innocents and create chaos. Look at how we go about spreading our gospel of Western democracy: We're demanding almost permanent war to demonstrate and ercise our power.\"\n\nHe is most provoked by the manner in which he believes religious faith has been exploited politically in order to muzzle opposition to the war that killed his son. \"When Bush wraps himself in Christian faith, combines it with patriotism, and says they come from the same place, that implies that if you question or oppose him you are unpatriotic and ungodly, not just of a different opinion. That negates the power of my own faith. It negates the faith of people who disagree with him. I resent it. There's something horrible about that. It's un-American. It's certainly anti-Christian.\"\n\nRosemary and Paul say they have been inundated with phone calls and e-mails from other military parents, thanking them for speaking publicly. \"People are starting to stand up,\" Rosemary says. \"I think there comes a tipping point, a time when it's been long enough and there's been enough kids that have died and there's been enough families affected. If our son had died as one, Paul and I could have called the media and they would say, &#145;Oh, too bad. Yeah, one story. Good-bye.' But sixteen, it's a spectacular number. At that number, people go, &#145;Oh, my God!' \"\n\nAs political fate would have it, in the middle of the worst week of the war in the most consequential and precariously balanced swing state in the country, a special election for an open congressional seat took place outside Cincinnati. On August 2, the day after the six snipers fell and the day before the amtrac was bombed, Paul Hackett, a major in the Marine Reserves who volunteered for Iraq duty last year and served in Ramadi and Fallujah, ran as a Democrat in one of the most solidly Republican districts in the country. (George W. Bush won there by a two-to-one margin in 2004.) Hackett, a political novice, shocked everyone by coming within 3,800 votes of taking the seat, and he's now planning on running for the Senate in 2006.\n\nHackett is six feet two, lean, and exuberantly bellicose. The day I visited him, he held court in his suburban living room in bare feet and shorts. In between cleaning chocolate off the faces of his three kids, greeting the babysitter, attending to a campaign staffer, and unsuccessfully responding to his wife's signals for him to get ready for a dinner party, Hackett unleashed a withering critique of the president, the war, and the home front.\n\n\"We're in &#145;patriotism lite,' \" he says of America's attitude toward the Iraq War. \"People put a yellow ribbon on their SUV and they're convinced that makes you a patriot\u2014but by virtue of your zip code, you know your kid's not going, while other people's kids in the eld don't have enough gear.\" I ask him what he thinks of the Bush administration's policy prohibiting pictures of coffins returning home from Iraq at Dover Air Force Base. Maybe if people saw the bodies come home, I suggest, as people are now doing in Ohio, they'd pay closer attention? \"I don't think most Americans want to see the coffins,\" Hackett replies. \"I don't think they want to be confronted with it: &#145;As long as I have a remote control in my right hand and a cold beer in my left, I'm good to go; don't bother me with this.' \"\n\nHackett goes out of his way to make sure it is immediately understood that he is not antiwar\u2014that, in fact, he delights in war. \"Look, Marines like combat,\" he says. \"That's just a fact. It's a self-selecting group of guys, and when you get into battle, it's conrmed that you love it as much as you thought you would. I want to tell you something: I loved being in Fallujah. This is what we train for, what we do. We're professionals. If it's Somalia, ne; Iraq, ne; Afghanistan, ne. I enjoyed it.\"\n\nSo how do you separate your critique of the war from your respect for the troops ghting it? \"Real simple,\" he says. \"Real simple. The military has been misused by this administration. Bush has to swallow his own words. In 2000 he said, &#145;I will not use the military to nation-build.' Excuse me, Mr. President, what are you doing? We're nation building. We're building schools, infrastructure, forming a democracy\u2014so we think\u2014that they don't want. It's not in their culture. It ain't gonna work. By any standard military denition, we have succeeded in nothing in Iraq. We don't even hold any ground. We can't drive the roads over there safely. We stopped Fallujah in November. Guess what. It's a hotbed of insurgency again.\"\n\nIt's not a new criticism, but the fact that it's coming from a Marine vet like Hackett, as opposed to a dovish professional politician like Russ Feingold or Howard Dean, makes an enormous difference in its credibility. \"How we get used has nothing to do with who we are,\" Hackett says. \"That's the difference. Marines are a tool. If I criticize the war, that doesn't mean I don't like the tool. I am the tool. I'm gung ho as hell. I love the Marine Corps.\"\n\nHackett famously called Bush a chicken hawk during the campaign and has subsequently stated that he \"meant it when I said it, stand by it, say it again.\" He tells me now: \"Bush didn't serve his country during the dening war of his generation. That makes him a chicken hawk. He's been less than forthright about his service, which in my book makes him dishonest. And he's mentally lazy at best. He lacks any interest in inquiry, as reected by the fact that he signs off on whatever avor of the day to explain why we're in Iraq.\" And then this\u2014precisely the kind of raw rhetoric that will either make him the next Democratic hero or will be his undoing: \"Bush is a fraud. He wants to be perceived as a macho guy, but he didn't have the stones to serve in his generation's war. He didn't have the balls to do it. Point fucking blank. He didn't have the balls. Because he wanted to drink alcohol and snort cocaine and party. Well, I didn't do that.\"\n\nIt's certainly as vitriolic as any partisan screed, but like Michael Coleman and Paul Schroeder and Rosemary Palmer, Hackett has had to ght through his fear of dissenting in the face of all the patriotism, genuine and manufactured, around him. \"With the families so supportive and the churches so supportive, it's intimidating, I will tell you,\" Hackett says. \"The rst couple times I took some hard swings at Bush\u2014you know, there was a moment of pause. But then I said to myself, I've been shot at\u2014and then it wasn't all that scary. I go home, my wife loves me, my kids love me. What I believe in is much more important to me than some sort of political threat that I might say something impolitic.\"\n\nThe fact that his own party hasn't found the same courage to speak out effectively provokes almost as much wrath as do Republican hawks who've never served. \"I have issues with liberals who want to speak on our behalf,\" Hackett says, \"because as I hear it\u2014and I might be wrong, but if I hear it this way, chances are others hear it this way, too\u2014a lot of liberals, what I hear them saying is &#145;All war is bad.' What the hell does that mean: All war is bad? So Adolf Hitler just keeps traipsing through Europe? I don't think so.\n\n \"Democrats don't speak the language of the military, and they don't even come close to speaking the language of Marines. If they got that, they could at least be listened to. First, some Democrats have recently been ragging on the young soldiers at Guant\u00E1namo Bay. Hang on. Time out. Never criticize the troops; criticize the leadership. Whose fault is it at Abu Ghraib? The generals and senior officers. Second, when you talk about Marines, don't call us soldiers. It chips away at your credibility. Young Marines, they're thinking, &#145;Man, he doesn't even know we're Marines; he's calling me a soldier.' Republicans, on the other hand, always refer to us as &#145;servicemen and women,' or &#145;soldiers,' or &#145;sailors,' or &#145;airmen and women,' or &#145;Marines.' They don't refer to everyone over in Iraq as &#145;soldiers.' \"\n\nI ask him if he agrees with Paul Schroeder that there aren't enough Marines to do the job effectively in Al Anbar and in Iraq in general\u2014and if that's the case, what should we do? \"Of course there aren't enough Marines,\" he says. \"Everybody knows that. Look, the war's over. The question is, how do we get everybody home in one piece?\"\n\nThe full article can be found in the December 2005 issue of  GQ."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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