Mourning the Warrior and Questioning the War

Mourning the Warrior,and Questioning the War

By Chris Hedges

When Sue Niederer heard that Laura Bush was planning to speak in nearby Hamilton, N.J., she went to the local Republican headquarters, showed various forms of identification and took a ticket. Along with hundreds of Bush supporters, she found a spot in the Colonial Fire Hall last Thursday morning before the first lady was introduced.

But Mrs. Niederer, 55, had no intention of chanting praise for Mrs. Bush or her husband. Clutching an Army cap and a rolled-up T-shirt, she had come on another mission, one that has defined her life since her only son, Second Lt. Seth J. Dvorin, 24, was killed. He died in February when a roadside bomb exploded in an Iraqi town she says she cannot pronounce…..

“I wanted to confront Mrs. Bush because she, too, is a mother,” she said at the small office here where she works as a real estate agent. “I thought she might understand the pain we mothers are undergoing. I thought she might be able to hear me.”

As Mrs. Bush was lauding her husband’s war on terror, Mrs. Niederer slipped on the shirt, which bore a photo of the lieutenant and the words “President Bush killed my son.” Standing at the back of the crowd, she interrupted Mrs. Bush, shouting that if the war was warranted, “Why don’t your children serve?”

“She did not answer,” Mrs. Niederer said. “She looked stunned.”

Suddenly, Mrs. Niederer recalled, she was surrounded by “men in dark suits with little earpieces” as well as angry Bush supporters. She was escorted from the hall, and as she tried to speak with reporters outside, she was arrested, handcuffed, taken to the Hamilton police station and charged with trespassing. She was released soon afterward, and prosecutors later dropped the charge.

Mrs. Niederer is an unlikely firebrand, a woman who grew up in a Conservative Jewish household in Brooklyn and has spent her adult life substitute teaching, working in real estate and raising two children in Hopewell, a suburb near Princeton. She said she had never been arrested before or even been politically active. Now she frequently joins protests against the war and is active in Military Families Speak Out, a nationwide antiwar group.

She says she was opposed to the war from the start, not believing that Iraq posed a threat to the United States. Her son’s qualms were more practical; when he was deployed from Fort Drum, N.Y., in September 2003, after finishing officer training school, he told his mother that he felt he had not been properly trained or equipped for combat.

Yet Lieutenant Dvorin loved his first few weeks in Iraq, telling her in phone calls and e-mail messages that he felt he was helping rebuild the country. “He was ecstatic,” she recalled. “He was the liaison with the community. But in the middle of October his letters and messages suddenly changed. He was depressed. I asked him what was wrong, and he was evasive. He did not want to talk.”

After he was killed, she said, she learned that he had been ordered in October to lead a platoon to search for homemade bombs left on roadsides. Lieutenant Dvorin was wounded in an explosion in November. When he returned on home leave in January, three weeks before his death, he wept in the arms of his stepfather, telling him he was afraid and did not want to return. He said nothing to his mother until they were at the airport in Baltimore.

“I asked him if he wanted to go back,” she said. “Seth said no. He told me we were losing the war. He told me we could not win a war when we did not know who our enemies were. He told me it was a waste, but he also told me he had to return to get the 18 men in his platoon home safely.”

SOON after he died, Mrs. Niederer said, she and her son’s widow ran into a wall of military bureaucracy. As an observant Jew, Mrs. Niederer asked that her son not be embalmed or undergo an autopsy, requests that she said were ignored. She asked to go to Dover Air Force Base to meet her son’s coffin, but says she was told that was against the rules. And she says she has tried reaching members of her son’s platoon to learn the circumstances of his death, especially after the Army told her he had been killed trying to defuse a bomb.

“He had no training in bomb detection or in defusing bombs,” she said. “He did not have proper equipment. When I complained in public about the inadequate training and lack of equipment, the Army changed the story. They told me he was not trying to defuse a bomb. I still don’t know how he died. They won’t let me speak to or contact members of his platoon.”

Asked about her accusations, Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the 10th Mountain Division and Fort Drum, said in a statement yesterday that Lieutenant Dvorin “was well trained and fully integrated into his unit,” and that he “died leading his soldiers in combat.”

Outside her office, Mrs. Niederer sat, swinging from anger to tears and back again, as low storm clouds cast a pall over the parking lot. “My goal is to bring the troops home as quickly as possible,” she said. “This was Seth’s wish. I can’t save my son, but I can save someone else’s son. Seth’s mission is mine.”