Protests mark war anniversary

Ohio has lost 166 soldiers in the war.

Associated Press

A makeshift graveyard of white wooden tombstones and a two-mile display of about 4,000 T-shirts were among dozens of events across Ohio on Wednesday marking the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq.

Ohio ranks among states with the largest numbers of military installations, deployments and war casualties. It has lost 166 soldiers in the war.

An anti-war group in Cincinnati organized the T-shirt display, which will include shirts of various colors that people bring from home and hang on clothesline.

“They are to represent just the regular, ordinary human beings who join our U.S. military and who have lost their lives,” said Alice Gerdeman, coordinator of the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center in Cincinnati.

Gerdeman said the group wants the T-shirt campaign to include foreign soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed in the war.

“But that would stretch from here past Chicago, so obviously we can’t do that,” she said.

In downtown Toledo, organizers of the Northwest Ohio Peace Coalition planted almost 5,000 white wooden tombstones in orderly rows on a county courthouse lawn, honoring soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The group has been erecting the military tribute since 2005.

The Central Ohio Peace Network is planning a march through the streets of Columbus, while Faith Communities Uniting for Peace, an interfaith coalition of nearly a dozen churches of various faiths in central Ohio, will host a prayer service.

“We don’t subscribe to the position of Iraq being in a much worse place if we leave,” said Leslie Stansbery, a retired Presbyterian pastor and member of the group. “We feel Iraq is in a much worse place because we went there as a U.S. government, and we never should’ve been there in the first place.”

In Dayton, volunteers plan to read the names of the American casualties during a 10-hour vigil sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, and Military Families Speak Out, an anti-war group of military families who have lost loved ones in Iraq.

“We want people to look at these people who have died as more than a number,” said Barbara Roberts, of the Quaker group’s Dayton branch.

The reading will be followed by a program on the human and economic costs of war.

A new report by the National Priorities Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research group, estimates the war has cost Ohio $18.3 billion since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

The Oberlin chapter of Ohio Veterans for Peace, a group of U.S. war veterans opposed to the Iraq conflict, was to join an outdoor vigil Wednesday night near Oberlin College.

“There is no solution. We’ve created a horror story [in Iraq],” said Michael Kay, 80, the group’s post commander and a World War II veteran. “To continue pursuing this policy is to magnify what we’ve done.”

Peggy Buryj, of Canton, lost her 21-year-old son, Army Pfc. Jesse Buryj, when he was killed by friendly fire in 2004. The Army initially said he was killed when his armored vehicle was hit by a truck driven by an insurgent.

But Buryj was shot in the back by either the U.S. troops around him or Polish troops nearby, the military later said.

“People say it’s a good war. It’s not a good war, it’s a necessary war,” Peggy Buryj said. “And I still believe that.”

Buryj said she understands that people have the right to protest the war — “that’s what my son died for,” she explained. But that doesn’t erase the pain she feels every time a protester says her son died “for lies.”

“It hurts. It hurts a lot,” Buryj said. “People think my son died for nothing. Well, he didn’t live for nothing, and he did not die for nothing.”