A Mother's Pain

By Thomas Dimopoulos

Earlier this month, on a rain-soaked Friday night in Schuylerville, two men were watching a high school football game and talking about who they were going to vote for on Election Day.

'It's because of the media that everybody thinks things are going bad over there in Iraq,' one snorted. 'They never tell you about any of the good things.'

His friend nodded and watched the home team quarterback fire a perfect spiral down field.

'I'll tell you something else,' the man continued. 'If Kerry wins- mark my words- then for sure you're going to have a draft. You won't see that with Bush. But you don't hear about that. All you ever hear is negative stuff.'

Down the road from the football field and onto Route 4, the sound from the grandstand grows faint. Here, you will find the permanent address of Nathan Patrick Brown. He grew up in South Glens Falls, but his eternal residence is 200 Duell Road, Schuylerville, Section 7, Site 268, Gerald B.H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery.

Brown was killed last April, on Easter Sunday, when a rocket-propelled grenade hit his Humvee in Samsara, Iraq, 60 miles north of Baghdad.
The high-riding, slow-moving vehicles nicknamed 'RPG magnets' by the troops themselves, Staff Sgt. Troy Mechanick told the New York Daily News. Riding in the vehicle alongside Brown - whom he described as 'the perfect kid' - Mechanick was seriously wounded, but lived to tell about it.
There was the promise unfulfilled that the troops would be given armored vehicles when they headed into Iraq. 'They lied to us,' Mechanick said.
When U.S. Rep. John Sweeney visited Iraq last week, he tried to find out why Brown's outfit was sent on patrol in unarmored vehicles. He came home with no answer, he said. He was only told that the lieutenant colonel who sent Brown's unit on patrol has since been relieved of
command.

Nathan Brown would have been 22 years old had he been alive today, the same age as Jenna and Barbara Bush. Most likely, he would be sitting behind his classroom desk at Adirondack Community College. In between studying, there would be the preparations for his wedding to his sweetheart, a Queensbury girl named Sara.
Instead, her final words to him float eternally on a Web site called Fallen Heroes.
'Dearest Nathan Patrick, I loved you with all my heart,' it reads. 'You were my everything. This life will never be the same without you in it.'

Brown's parents were posthumously presented with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and a New York State Medal of Valor. A letter also arrived from the president. Delivered by a driver from Federal Express.
His mother, Kathy, said the Family Readiness Group out of the National Guard Armory in Glens Falls has been an immense support to her. And she worries that her son's death was for naught. So, she manages the strength to stand up in the middle of a ferocious storm of public opinion to say that this war is no fight for freedom.

'I don't think President Bush is doing a good job, and I don't think he should be re-elected,' said the mother, Kathy Brown. 'He misled us into a war. So what was the reason for going into Iraq? We got Saddam Hussein. But shouldn't we have been going after Bin Laden? Isn't Bin Laden the one who organized the whole thing?'

On the road from the football field to where Nathan Brown rests, if the mother's words are thought simply, as just more 'negative stuff,' there are other words that have defined the invasion of Iraq thus far: Shock and Awe. Slam Dunk. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Abu Ghraib. Mission Accomplished.

'God blessed me with the short time you were here and he blessed me the day I gave birth to you,' posted Kathy Brown on a Web site called Military Chapel, an epitaph in cyberspace from mother to son. 'I always said (I would) take care of you. Now I say watch over all of us.'

Originally published in The Saratogian, Oct. 29, 2004.