A Mother And the President

(2 of 3)

But the people who did come made it seem different from other antiwar spasms. A retired postal worker drove from San Diego for 26 hours. A local soldier who had just returned from Iraq appeared with his mom. And a truck driver--a former Marine who had never been to an antiwar protest before--decided to pull his 18-wheeler full of frozen pizzas into Crawford just to shake Sheehan's hand.

At her roadside uprising, Sheehan feels only muted satisfaction. Sitting in a van, momentarily insulated from followers and other reporters, she says more than once that she feels like a failure. Even if the troops came back tomorrow, it would still be too late for her son. "I really failed Casey. I really did," she says, tearing up. Throughout his childhood in California, Casey and his mother were close. An altar boy for 10 years, Casey enlisted in 2000 hoping to make a career as a military chaplain's assistant. He had decided to wait to have sex until he was married. "He took lots of heat for that in the Army. Pat and I always wondered why he would even tell anyone he was still a virgin," Sheehan wrote on TruthOut.org "but he did."

Casey Sheehan was killed in Sadr City on April 4, 2004, less than a month after he arrived in Iraq as a humvee mechanic. He had gone out on a voluntary mission to rescue injured soldiers when his unit was ambushed. Six other soldiers died with him. Says his brother Andy: "He lived to help people, and he died helping people." On the day he died, Cindy saw a burning humvee on CNN and says she knew instinctively that her son was among the dead.

Sheehan's impulsive decision to come to Crawford--with five people, some chairs and no flashlights--has spawned a small phenomenon. A busload of counterprotesters, organized by a conservative radio personality in Dallas, arrived to sing God Bless America. A Japanese peace-activist group donated money for Porta Potties. Chad Griffin, a Los Angeles--based p.r. agent who worked in the Clinton White House, came up with the idea of cutting an ad featuring Sheehan's plea to speak with Bush. With $12,000 in donations, the ad is running in Crawford.

That's exactly the kind of move the White House hopes will play into its hands. Once Sheehan starts acting like a politician, say some Republicans and even some Democrats, she will become just another voice in the debate--easy, in other words, to neutralize. But until then, Bush's team cannot fire back hard, as it usually does when it is criticized. Sheehan must be handled, as an adviser to the President put it, "very carefully." And that's what it has been struggling to do. Top officials went out to talk to Sheehan but failed to appease her. The President acknowledged her obliquely last week in response to a question about Iraq, saying he shared her pain. The White House, quantifying his compassion, put out a list of the meetings Bush has held with families. (He has met with the relatives of 272 deceased U.S. soldiers so far.) A senior aide who was present at many of the meetings estimates that a little less than 10% of the relatives tell Bush their loved ones died in vain. "He's had a couple wives who were very upset," says the aide. "They didn't yell at him or hit him or anything like that. But on more than one occasion, they've made very clear their position."