Two thousand dead - and for what?

Ellis Henican

October 26, 2005

Two thousand is too many names already. Elaine Brower is certain about that.

So why should "James Brower" be added to the death list? His mother wants to know.

"God forbid he goes over there and something happens to him," she was saying yesterday as more grim news arrived from Iraq. "I'll go off. I will. The way I'll react, they'll think Cindy Sheehan is a butterfly."

All over America, moms and dads of U.S. military personnel were paying close attention as the official war-in-Iraq death roster reached another milestone. Two thousand dead - and for what?

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But no one was asking the question with any more urgency than this New York mom. The wife of a retired police lieutenant, Brower works in the city comptroller's office, lives on Staten Island and can't stop thinking about her 24-year-old son.

James is a police officer at Brooklyn's 72nd Precinct and a member of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He's already done one active-duty tour in Afghanistan. Come Dec. 1, he's heading back to war - Iraq, this time.

"Tell me, please," his mother said, sitting across the street from her office in lower Manhattan. "What can I do to make sure he comes back alive?"

She's already done the practical things.

She's tried to talk him out of going. She bought him $2,000 worth of body armor and high-tech goggles, life-or-death gear the Marine Corps still does not provide.

When James transferred to another Marine unit, making his war-zone call-up all but certain - "I screamed and I cried for 24 hours and beat up on him the way only a mother can."

None of it worked, of course. He's shipping out five weeks from now for the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, Calif. From there, it's straight to Iraq.

His mother still remembers the 3 a.m. calls from Afghanistan. "He'd say, 'Yeah, Mom, I was carrying ammo. I stepped into a hole and broke my ankle. But I kept running. They needed the ammo.' Then, I'd get up in the morning and go to work, where people were talking about things like what was on TV last night."

Her son, she said, shares her skepticism about the war in Iraq. Lots of his fellow Marines do. Support for some broader policy is not what motivates them.

"Really, they don't train these guys to protect their country," Elaine Brower said. "They train them to protect each other. I asked James, 'Why are you going back?' He said, 'My buddies are over there, and I need to protect them.'"

So his mother protests. At the kitchen table on Staten Island. At the anti-war rallies that she and her daughter, Tanya, have started to attend.

And none of it has persuaded her son to stay home.

From the day he graduated from Curtis High School, a gung-ho member of the ROTC, he was always ready to go fight beside his fellow Marines, whatever his mother and his sister might think.

"He says, 'You don't understand. Grandma understands.' I tell him, 'I raised you. I signed the papers for you to go in at 17. I didn't sleep the whole time you were in Afghanistan. I understand.'"

And when she hears about the duty that awaits him now, Elaine Brower knows it will be even riskier than before.

"Two-by-two convoys," she said. "Not normal platoons. Him and a buddy, going all over the place, just the two of them. Does that sound safe to you?"

As Brower was talking about her son and his immediate future, the chief spokesman for the U.S. forces in Iraq was sending out a war-related message of his own. Don't pay too much attention to the body count, the military flak said.

"The 2,000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone," Army Lt. Col. Steve Boylan wrote in an e-mail to war reporters. "It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives."

Special agendas? Like trying to salvage America's good name?

Like keeping their children alive? Ulterior motives?

One New York mother had a different question yesterday.

"How many more have to die?" Elaine Brower asked.