Dear Laura and Jenna,

This past Friday, April 25, I delivered a letter [1] to you at your Borders book signing in Washington DC at the promotion of your new children’s book “Read All About It”. It was a beautiful spring afternoon and I had stood for about an hour among your admirers: young couples with children in hand, well-dressed middle-aged women, and teenagers, all twittering excitedly at the prospect of a glance from you and an autograph for their newly-purchased books.

The line was long but I finally reached your table where you both sat, heads-down, busily and competently signing books as they were passed to you by your handlers. “I’m a teacher too”, I said, when I finally reached you. What I really wanted to say was “ I was a mother once”. You both looked up, smiling. Jenna, as you began to sign, you responded to my comment with, “So you know what boys like Tyrone are like!’

The moment I was handed the signed book, I pulled my letter, hidden inside its pages, and handed it to you, asking you to read it. But it was instantly snatched from my hands by one of your people as you paused from your signing. Before I was made to move away, I asked you once more to read it. Your mother was no longer looking at me, instead, she made a studied effort to continue the signing, but you were still looking, Jenna, and you promised to read it.

I am not going to fool myself into believing that you might have actually demanded to have the letter given to you so you could read it. But I would like to challenge you, Jenna, to step out of the bubble in which your family lives, protected and sheltered from the ugly consequences of the past eight years of our disastrous incursion into Iraq.

For far too long, those who have wielded so much power have literally made life and death decisions of far reaching consequences, counting only on the advice of those who would not defy them, those who, for the sake of proximity to power, were willing to sacrifice their own better judgment and in some cases their own good name. The destruction that was wrought in our name in Iraq, with our treasure and with the blood of our children, the destabilization of the Middle East and the accompanying loss of prestige to our country will take generations for us to recover from.

It is not enough to visit a hospital such as Walter Reed or Bethesda Naval or to visit Arlington as a way of gaining insight into the tragedy, although that would go a long way. There is so much you could read to gain insight; in fact, you were literally surrounded there at Borders with expert books on what is happening. I would implore you to break out of that bubble, Jenna and Laura, and “Read All About It.” Because you have no idea…

Many people would tell you that people such as myself are too impacted by their grief to be able to make convincing arguments about whether a war is justifiable. I would say to them that the validity of a rationale to go to war must always be weighed down with a willingness to lose one’s beloved children in it. When a war is a lie, the wealthy, the clever, the shameless, and the well-connected find ways to defend it even as they concoct ways to weasel out of it, much as we saw in Vietnam and continue to see in the debate over Iraq.

So, yes, I was a mother once and there is so much I would love to share with you about what life was like when our son, Sgt Alessandro Carbonaro, a Reconnaissance Marine, was alive and what life is like without him. On a beautiful evening such as last Friday, believe me, I would not have been standing in line for a signature even from the Dalai Lama, no offense. My family and I would have been busy cooking a meal to celebrate the arrival of spring and sharing it with our son and daughter-in-law, appreciating how special life is when you’ve had to deal with the horrors of this war.

I would tell you also that I consider myself among the ‘lucky’ ones who was able to join my son in in a hospital in Landstuhl to be at his side as he lay dying of injuries that I will spare you in describing. Alex had been injured in an IED explosion just weeks into his second deployment, burned over 70 per cent of his body. Needless to say, a part of me died on that spring morning eight days later, when I sat there watching and listening with my head close to his pillow to the last soft sigh of life come out of my son’s mouth.

And that is what war is about, Laura and Jenna; that is the human cost of war. I am only one mother out of the mothers of the 4,050 or so young men and women who have lost their lives to this war and there are many perspectives on our individual grief. But no matter what anybody tells you, the argument for war is bogus if you cannot commit blood to it. Not a single member of your immediate or extended family has gone anywhere near Iraq.

It seems clear to me that President Bush wants to continue this war so that the fiasco of our departure is postponed and handed off to another president. But even if you could put that aside, why would anyone in their right mind continue to support the continuation of our involvement in a war so calamitously managed by the Pentagon that it no longer surprises us when we hear in the news that it recently awarded a $300 million contract to a 22-year-old, resulting in the delivery of substandard weapons to our troops on the front lines. That is only the news of the week. The five years of war have been filled with incredible stories of fraud, abuse, and incompetence.

The consequences of this war will be the inescapable legacy of your family, the die is cast. It is, however, my hope that you will read letters like mine and that in reading them, perhaps one day you will come to understand how so much was lost.

Sincerely,

Gilda Carbonaro
Bethesda, MD