thedrifter
01-24-09, 06:21 AM
January 25, 2009
Parenting | The Home Front
Soldiers and Protesters, Seeking Common Ground
By MICHAEL WINERIP
TEANECK, N.J.
EVERY Wednesday since mid-August 2005 — approximately 175 straight Wednesdays — a couple of dozen women and men have gathered in front of the National Guard Armory here for 90 minutes, starting at 4:30 p.m., to hold a peace vigil against the war. They carry signs that Paula Rogovin, a teacher, always keeps handy in the trunk of her Toyota, demanding that the troops be brought home. They hold four-foot-high numbers updating the latest death toll of American soldiers that Tom Urgo, a plumber, painted and lacquered.
They urge passing motorists to honk if they oppose the war. “We had honks from the very beginning, but not honks like this,” John Fenton, a retired postal worker, said during a vigil last month. “I would say the honks really started to increase after the 2006 election.”
Ms. Rogovin picked the armory because it’s convenient — she lives in town — and because the symbolism is strong. The National Guard has traditionally been deployed to keep domestic peace during floods, hurricanes and riots, but for this war, record numbers have been sent overseas to fight, including 2,850 last year and 300 from this armory, the largest mobilization of the New Jersey Guard since World War II.
On the face of it, you’d think the protesters and the National Guard members are divided and separate, antiwar outside the armory, pro-war inside.
But that is not so.
There is much common ground between the two groups.
About once a month, before the vigil, Ms. Rogovin and a half dozen other protesters go inside to donate diapers and groceries to the armory’s food pantry for Guard families who are struggling financially while their loved ones are in Iraq.
During the December drop-off, the protesters were warmly welcomed by National Guard leaders. “How you guys doing?” said Master Sgt. Minnie Hiller-Cousins, who runs the Teaneck Armory’s family assistance program and has herself served in Iraq. “I thank you all so much for helping our families.” Then she gave the vigil organizer a hug.
As for the protesters, many are themselves veterans, and they speak respectfully of the National Guard soldiers. “We’re not against the National Guard,” Ms. Rogovin said. “We have loved ones in the military.”
Ms. Rogovin has a son in the Marines who has done two tours in Iraq. Mr. Urgo, who brings the death toll numbers each week, was a Vietnam combat veteran. And Mr. Fenton, who urges passers-by to honk, lost his son, Matthew, 24, a Marine sergeant, to a suicide bomber in Falluja in 2006.
For her part, Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said that based on her talks with the National Guard family members with whom she works so closely, a majority have the same view of the war that the American public has expressed in opinion polls — they’re against it. “They think it, but most are afraid to say it out loud,” Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said.
AT first, the protesters and National Guard were divided and separate. “I didn’t want any part of them,” Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said. “We thought they hated us. We felt they were picketing against us.”
The sergeant has been in the Guard 29 years and did not have to serve in Iraq. But during a 2004 mobilization, at the age of 50, she requested to go, because she felt that she had helped train so many soldiers for war, it would have been hypocritical not to do her share. When she returned from Baghdad at the end of 2005, to her job as director of family assistance — essentially the morale officer for the families left behind — she was not happy to see a peace vigil outside her armory.
Mostly, she ignored it. The vigil is held on a far corner, a football field’s length from the lot where Guard members park. She felt that the vigil was bad for morale and that her job of keeping up the families’ spirits was hard enough without a weekly reminder of public opposition to the war.
On the Wednesdays after Memorial Day in 2007 and 2008, the protesters held larger vigils, with about 300 people ringing the armory, holding up the names of every soldier killed in Iraq, which angered Sergeant Hiller-Cousins and other Guard members.
Ms. Rogovin said: “Someone at the armory came out to speak to us. They said they’re concerned the names of the dead will upset the National Guard. I said, ‘Of course they’ll be upset, it’s very upsetting.’ ”
Last spring, for the Memorial Day vigil, Guard members were told not to report to work, to avoid a possible confrontation with the hundreds of protesters. “I was mad about that,” Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said. “We’re the Army, how come we let them push us around?”
But about that time, the sergeant was walking in front of the armory during a vigil and noticed a sign one woman was carrying that said, “Support Our Troops, Bring Them Home Now.”
That was Ms. Rogovin. The sergeant noticed that she was the same woman who was donating food. “Until then, I had blinders on,” Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said. “It took me awhile to see they’re not protesting against us.”
She began talking to the protesters when they came in with donations. Several vigil regulars are Vietnam veterans — Mr. Urgo; Connie Enright, a retired police officer; Jan Barry, a retired Bergen Record reporter; Walt Nygard, a route driver for a vending company. Sergeant Hiller-Cousins spoke with them about her uncle, also a Vietnam veteran.
During one visit, Mr. Fenton told the sergeant how his son had been the gunner on a Humvee when a single piece of shrapnel tore through both hemispheres of his brain and killed him. “There were five Marines in that Humvee, and Matthew was the only one killed,” he said. “Of course, I’ll never be the same again.”
The sergeant is herself in counseling for post-traumatic stress from her combat tour, and she was moved by Mr. Fenton’s words. “I looked in his eyes and there were tears and pain when he told about his son. Here was a guy who had to be so angry about the death of his child, but he was coming in to bring us food.”
According to a CNN poll last month, about two-thirds of Americans oppose the Iraq war.
Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said she believes that part of the reason a common ground was reached here is that many of the National Guard families themselves feel ambivalence about the war.
It is, of course, impossible to know. Part of the American military’s professionalism is training soldiers to carry out the president’s mission regardless of their own politics. Soldiers are generally reluctant to discuss their views publicly with reporters, and certainly a majority may feel like Sgt. John Roldan, a guardsman from Cliffside Park, N.J., doing his second tour of Iraq, who says: “I agree with the war, it’s a good thing. You see all the suffering over there, I think we’re making a difference.”
ON the other hand, the National Guard members and their families are not isolated on military bases; they are citizen-soldiers with civilian jobs who live in the community when not mobilized. Their state, New Jersey, voted heavily for the man with the stronger antiwar policy, Barack Obama, 57 to 42 percent over John McCain, the war hero.
The typical active-duty Army soldier is 27, and the general public in that age group voted 66 to 32 percent for Mr. Obama, according to national exit polls of 18- to 29-year-olds. (In contrast, in 1972, during the Vietnam War, that same age group voted for Richard Nixon over George McGovern, the peace candidate, 52 to 46 percent.)
Mary Hamilton, a nurse from Demarest, N.J., joined the Teaneck vigil about the same time her son, Staff Sgt. Jesse Hamilton of the Army, left to fight in Iraq. Sergeant Hamilton spent a year working with a unit of 10 American soldiers, training Iraqi military personnel. At the start, he said, he disagreed with his mother and was gung ho for the war, as was the majority of his unit. By the end of his tour in 2006, he said, he had turned “completely against the war,” as had most of his unit. After nine years in the Army, he has finished his military service and is a civilian again, working in financial planning.
“I consider myself a moderate politically,” he said, “but Bush has pushed me unnaturally to the left.” He voted for Barack Obama. As for his mom taking part in the vigil, he said, “I love it.”
Specialist Gregg Walls, an accountant from Teaneck, is currently stationed in Iraq with the New Jersey Guard. His wife, Iris, is strongly against the war, but in an interview, while he was home on a two-week leave this month, Specialist Walls would not discuss his opinion: “I’m a soldier, I have a job to do. That’s all I’ll say.” Asked how the soldiers he knows in his unit feel about the war, he said, “We don’t want to be there, we want to be home.” He did say he voted by absentee ballot from Camp Bucca for Mr. Obama, and watched the victory speech on his computer election night. “It was tough not to get misty, I will say that,” Specialist Walls said.
Mr. Barry, the retired reporter, is a well-known figure in the peace movement, a founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the 1960s and a regular at the Teaneck vigils. He says the Iraq war protests are less likely to criticize soldiers for fighting the war and more aimed at the political leaders who sent the soldiers to fight: “There was more hostility in the late ’60s, between people in the peace movement and the veterans. I think more people from this generation are trying to be more receptive to listening to other people’s points of view.”
Joseph Nygard, 27, who served 16 months in Afghanistan with the Army, said he likes that his parents, Nancy and Walt Nygard, are regulars at the vigil. “We have pretty much the same feelings about the war,” he said. At one point during his tour, he flew home to Newark, on leave from Afghanistan. “When we landed, the pilot made an announcement: ‘Please stay seated and let the soldiers leave first.’ We got up and everyone on the plane clapped for us. It was a great feeling.” Asked how he would describe the American public’s attitude, he answered, “I’d say, ‘End the war, support the troops.’ ”
FOR 36 years, Ms. Rogovin, 61, has been a New York City elementary school teacher. She is the Bergen County, N.J., coordinator for Military Families Speak Out and started the weekly protest here after visiting the vigil near President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex., held by Cindy Sheehan, whose son, Casey, was killed in Iraq in 2004.
A daughter of the highly regarded social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin (still alive at 99), Ms. Rogovin has long been involved in liberal activist causes, including protesting the Vietnam War; fighting for better neighborhood day care and health care in Upper Manhattan; and ending apartheid in South Africa.
For the first vigil here, she had just six people, including Nancy and Walt Nygard. “Nancy worked for a contractor who was renovating a bathroom in my home,” said Ms. Rogovin. “I mentioned it to her and she said, ‘My son’s going, I should get involved.’ I talk to everybody, that’s how you get people.”
In 2006, she phoned Mr. Fenton and invited him to join, after reading a news story about his son being killed.
“We met at a diner,” Mr. Fenton said. “I just didn’t want to join without understanding what it is. I didn’t want Matthew or myself to be in a position to be used.” He was impressed that so many other parents in the vigil, including Ms. Rogovin, had children in the Marines or Army. “Twenty years from now most people will forget this war,” he said. “Not me. Losing my son Matthew is the biggest disaster of my life.”
Ms. Rogovin supports efforts in New Jersey and several other states to bring National Guard members home, arguing that the authorization to send them overseas has expired. These efforts are given little chance, but, she says, she does not get discouraged. “Never, I’m not cut out that way.”
Sergeant Hiller-Cousins helps keep National Guard families’ spirits up by holding monthly dinners and social events at the armory, and Ms. Rogovin does the same for her vigil regulars, hosting pot-luck dinners at her home. “We’ve become a tight social group,” Ms. Nygard said.
Ms. Rogovin believes her vigil and others like it have helped shift public opinion, and, at least locally, there is some evidence that’s true. She and other vigil members have met several times with their local congressman, Steven R. Rothman, a Democrat, who initially was a strong supporter of the Iraq war. Bob Decheine, the congressman’s chief of staff, said those meetings helped change his boss’s position in 2006.
“Steve did have several terrific conversations with Paula and her group, and that definitely played a significant role in the evolution of his thinking about the war,” Mr. Decheine said.
Quietly, subtly, the weekly vigil has helped people here recognize common ground. Terry Moore, a teacher at Stillman Elementary, has brought his social action club — World Improvement by Tenafly Students — to the vigil several times, and before each visit, his third, fourth and fifth graders collect canned goods to drop off at the armory for National Guard families.
And recently, when Nora Lennon, treasurer of the Ladies Auxiliary of American Legion Post 128 of Teaneck, had a $100 check for the National Guard families, she asked her neighbor Paula Rogovin to drop it off when she went over to the armory for her Wednesday vigil.
Ellie
Parenting | The Home Front
Soldiers and Protesters, Seeking Common Ground
By MICHAEL WINERIP
TEANECK, N.J.
EVERY Wednesday since mid-August 2005 — approximately 175 straight Wednesdays — a couple of dozen women and men have gathered in front of the National Guard Armory here for 90 minutes, starting at 4:30 p.m., to hold a peace vigil against the war. They carry signs that Paula Rogovin, a teacher, always keeps handy in the trunk of her Toyota, demanding that the troops be brought home. They hold four-foot-high numbers updating the latest death toll of American soldiers that Tom Urgo, a plumber, painted and lacquered.
They urge passing motorists to honk if they oppose the war. “We had honks from the very beginning, but not honks like this,” John Fenton, a retired postal worker, said during a vigil last month. “I would say the honks really started to increase after the 2006 election.”
Ms. Rogovin picked the armory because it’s convenient — she lives in town — and because the symbolism is strong. The National Guard has traditionally been deployed to keep domestic peace during floods, hurricanes and riots, but for this war, record numbers have been sent overseas to fight, including 2,850 last year and 300 from this armory, the largest mobilization of the New Jersey Guard since World War II.
On the face of it, you’d think the protesters and the National Guard members are divided and separate, antiwar outside the armory, pro-war inside.
But that is not so.
There is much common ground between the two groups.
About once a month, before the vigil, Ms. Rogovin and a half dozen other protesters go inside to donate diapers and groceries to the armory’s food pantry for Guard families who are struggling financially while their loved ones are in Iraq.
During the December drop-off, the protesters were warmly welcomed by National Guard leaders. “How you guys doing?” said Master Sgt. Minnie Hiller-Cousins, who runs the Teaneck Armory’s family assistance program and has herself served in Iraq. “I thank you all so much for helping our families.” Then she gave the vigil organizer a hug.
As for the protesters, many are themselves veterans, and they speak respectfully of the National Guard soldiers. “We’re not against the National Guard,” Ms. Rogovin said. “We have loved ones in the military.”
Ms. Rogovin has a son in the Marines who has done two tours in Iraq. Mr. Urgo, who brings the death toll numbers each week, was a Vietnam combat veteran. And Mr. Fenton, who urges passers-by to honk, lost his son, Matthew, 24, a Marine sergeant, to a suicide bomber in Falluja in 2006.
For her part, Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said that based on her talks with the National Guard family members with whom she works so closely, a majority have the same view of the war that the American public has expressed in opinion polls — they’re against it. “They think it, but most are afraid to say it out loud,” Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said.
AT first, the protesters and National Guard were divided and separate. “I didn’t want any part of them,” Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said. “We thought they hated us. We felt they were picketing against us.”
The sergeant has been in the Guard 29 years and did not have to serve in Iraq. But during a 2004 mobilization, at the age of 50, she requested to go, because she felt that she had helped train so many soldiers for war, it would have been hypocritical not to do her share. When she returned from Baghdad at the end of 2005, to her job as director of family assistance — essentially the morale officer for the families left behind — she was not happy to see a peace vigil outside her armory.
Mostly, she ignored it. The vigil is held on a far corner, a football field’s length from the lot where Guard members park. She felt that the vigil was bad for morale and that her job of keeping up the families’ spirits was hard enough without a weekly reminder of public opposition to the war.
On the Wednesdays after Memorial Day in 2007 and 2008, the protesters held larger vigils, with about 300 people ringing the armory, holding up the names of every soldier killed in Iraq, which angered Sergeant Hiller-Cousins and other Guard members.
Ms. Rogovin said: “Someone at the armory came out to speak to us. They said they’re concerned the names of the dead will upset the National Guard. I said, ‘Of course they’ll be upset, it’s very upsetting.’ ”
Last spring, for the Memorial Day vigil, Guard members were told not to report to work, to avoid a possible confrontation with the hundreds of protesters. “I was mad about that,” Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said. “We’re the Army, how come we let them push us around?”
But about that time, the sergeant was walking in front of the armory during a vigil and noticed a sign one woman was carrying that said, “Support Our Troops, Bring Them Home Now.”
That was Ms. Rogovin. The sergeant noticed that she was the same woman who was donating food. “Until then, I had blinders on,” Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said. “It took me awhile to see they’re not protesting against us.”
She began talking to the protesters when they came in with donations. Several vigil regulars are Vietnam veterans — Mr. Urgo; Connie Enright, a retired police officer; Jan Barry, a retired Bergen Record reporter; Walt Nygard, a route driver for a vending company. Sergeant Hiller-Cousins spoke with them about her uncle, also a Vietnam veteran.
During one visit, Mr. Fenton told the sergeant how his son had been the gunner on a Humvee when a single piece of shrapnel tore through both hemispheres of his brain and killed him. “There were five Marines in that Humvee, and Matthew was the only one killed,” he said. “Of course, I’ll never be the same again.”
The sergeant is herself in counseling for post-traumatic stress from her combat tour, and she was moved by Mr. Fenton’s words. “I looked in his eyes and there were tears and pain when he told about his son. Here was a guy who had to be so angry about the death of his child, but he was coming in to bring us food.”
According to a CNN poll last month, about two-thirds of Americans oppose the Iraq war.
Sergeant Hiller-Cousins said she believes that part of the reason a common ground was reached here is that many of the National Guard families themselves feel ambivalence about the war.
It is, of course, impossible to know. Part of the American military’s professionalism is training soldiers to carry out the president’s mission regardless of their own politics. Soldiers are generally reluctant to discuss their views publicly with reporters, and certainly a majority may feel like Sgt. John Roldan, a guardsman from Cliffside Park, N.J., doing his second tour of Iraq, who says: “I agree with the war, it’s a good thing. You see all the suffering over there, I think we’re making a difference.”
ON the other hand, the National Guard members and their families are not isolated on military bases; they are citizen-soldiers with civilian jobs who live in the community when not mobilized. Their state, New Jersey, voted heavily for the man with the stronger antiwar policy, Barack Obama, 57 to 42 percent over John McCain, the war hero.
The typical active-duty Army soldier is 27, and the general public in that age group voted 66 to 32 percent for Mr. Obama, according to national exit polls of 18- to 29-year-olds. (In contrast, in 1972, during the Vietnam War, that same age group voted for Richard Nixon over George McGovern, the peace candidate, 52 to 46 percent.)
Mary Hamilton, a nurse from Demarest, N.J., joined the Teaneck vigil about the same time her son, Staff Sgt. Jesse Hamilton of the Army, left to fight in Iraq. Sergeant Hamilton spent a year working with a unit of 10 American soldiers, training Iraqi military personnel. At the start, he said, he disagreed with his mother and was gung ho for the war, as was the majority of his unit. By the end of his tour in 2006, he said, he had turned “completely against the war,” as had most of his unit. After nine years in the Army, he has finished his military service and is a civilian again, working in financial planning.
“I consider myself a moderate politically,” he said, “but Bush has pushed me unnaturally to the left.” He voted for Barack Obama. As for his mom taking part in the vigil, he said, “I love it.”
Specialist Gregg Walls, an accountant from Teaneck, is currently stationed in Iraq with the New Jersey Guard. His wife, Iris, is strongly against the war, but in an interview, while he was home on a two-week leave this month, Specialist Walls would not discuss his opinion: “I’m a soldier, I have a job to do. That’s all I’ll say.” Asked how the soldiers he knows in his unit feel about the war, he said, “We don’t want to be there, we want to be home.” He did say he voted by absentee ballot from Camp Bucca for Mr. Obama, and watched the victory speech on his computer election night. “It was tough not to get misty, I will say that,” Specialist Walls said.
Mr. Barry, the retired reporter, is a well-known figure in the peace movement, a founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the 1960s and a regular at the Teaneck vigils. He says the Iraq war protests are less likely to criticize soldiers for fighting the war and more aimed at the political leaders who sent the soldiers to fight: “There was more hostility in the late ’60s, between people in the peace movement and the veterans. I think more people from this generation are trying to be more receptive to listening to other people’s points of view.”
Joseph Nygard, 27, who served 16 months in Afghanistan with the Army, said he likes that his parents, Nancy and Walt Nygard, are regulars at the vigil. “We have pretty much the same feelings about the war,” he said. At one point during his tour, he flew home to Newark, on leave from Afghanistan. “When we landed, the pilot made an announcement: ‘Please stay seated and let the soldiers leave first.’ We got up and everyone on the plane clapped for us. It was a great feeling.” Asked how he would describe the American public’s attitude, he answered, “I’d say, ‘End the war, support the troops.’ ”
FOR 36 years, Ms. Rogovin, 61, has been a New York City elementary school teacher. She is the Bergen County, N.J., coordinator for Military Families Speak Out and started the weekly protest here after visiting the vigil near President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex., held by Cindy Sheehan, whose son, Casey, was killed in Iraq in 2004.
A daughter of the highly regarded social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin (still alive at 99), Ms. Rogovin has long been involved in liberal activist causes, including protesting the Vietnam War; fighting for better neighborhood day care and health care in Upper Manhattan; and ending apartheid in South Africa.
For the first vigil here, she had just six people, including Nancy and Walt Nygard. “Nancy worked for a contractor who was renovating a bathroom in my home,” said Ms. Rogovin. “I mentioned it to her and she said, ‘My son’s going, I should get involved.’ I talk to everybody, that’s how you get people.”
In 2006, she phoned Mr. Fenton and invited him to join, after reading a news story about his son being killed.
“We met at a diner,” Mr. Fenton said. “I just didn’t want to join without understanding what it is. I didn’t want Matthew or myself to be in a position to be used.” He was impressed that so many other parents in the vigil, including Ms. Rogovin, had children in the Marines or Army. “Twenty years from now most people will forget this war,” he said. “Not me. Losing my son Matthew is the biggest disaster of my life.”
Ms. Rogovin supports efforts in New Jersey and several other states to bring National Guard members home, arguing that the authorization to send them overseas has expired. These efforts are given little chance, but, she says, she does not get discouraged. “Never, I’m not cut out that way.”
Sergeant Hiller-Cousins helps keep National Guard families’ spirits up by holding monthly dinners and social events at the armory, and Ms. Rogovin does the same for her vigil regulars, hosting pot-luck dinners at her home. “We’ve become a tight social group,” Ms. Nygard said.
Ms. Rogovin believes her vigil and others like it have helped shift public opinion, and, at least locally, there is some evidence that’s true. She and other vigil members have met several times with their local congressman, Steven R. Rothman, a Democrat, who initially was a strong supporter of the Iraq war. Bob Decheine, the congressman’s chief of staff, said those meetings helped change his boss’s position in 2006.
“Steve did have several terrific conversations with Paula and her group, and that definitely played a significant role in the evolution of his thinking about the war,” Mr. Decheine said.
Quietly, subtly, the weekly vigil has helped people here recognize common ground. Terry Moore, a teacher at Stillman Elementary, has brought his social action club — World Improvement by Tenafly Students — to the vigil several times, and before each visit, his third, fourth and fifth graders collect canned goods to drop off at the armory for National Guard families.
And recently, when Nora Lennon, treasurer of the Ladies Auxiliary of American Legion Post 128 of Teaneck, had a $100 check for the National Guard families, she asked her neighbor Paula Rogovin to drop it off when she went over to the armory for her Wednesday vigil.
Ellie