Published on Friday, December 26, 2003 by the Los Angeles Times
Antiwar Family's Conflict
Fervent peace activists sort through complex emotions as they mourn a son killed in Iraq. He died a hero, they say -- a parents' contradiction.
By Tomas Alex Tizon
KENT, Wash. — Joe Colgan glances at it almost every time he walks into his bedroom: a cardboard box sitting inconspicuously in a corner. It's a care
package he had prepared for his son Ben.
Inside are items Ben requested: a couple of books, pistachios, canned
salmon, beef jerky and a big bag of candy from Costco. Ben liked to pass
out candy to children in the street. Joe assembled the package on Nov. 1,
not knowing that on the same day, 6,800 miles away in Baghdad, Ben, a second lieutenant in the Army, would be killed by a roadside bomb.
More than a month and a half later, Joe still doesn't know what to do with the box. "I know I should give it away," he says, "but I can't seem to let it go yet."
The grief is still settling, like a slow sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and somehow, for Joe, the package is something to hold on to. In
the midst of their anguish, Joe and Patricia Colgan have clung tightly to
one other thing: the idea that their son Ben died a hero.
It's a simple idea born out of complicated emotions. The Colgans are
longtime peace activists who have opposed the war in Iraq from the
beginning. They marched in antiwar demonstrations before Ben was deployed
to Baghdad. Joe and Patricia Colgan still believe the war to be
"completely wrong" and "unjust."
"I know it seems like a contradiction. How can your son be a hero in an
unjust war?" Joe says. "It's the contradiction of a parent. We had a son
in the Army, and we supported him no matter what. He did what the commander in chief wanted. He died doing what he believed in; he died doing what he loved. That's a hero."
In the next breath, Joe Colgan, 62, holds his head in his hands.
"I'm still sorting it out," he says softly.
Patricia Colgan, 60, says she, too, has lingering questions. "After the war started, I prayed every day on my way to work: 'Sweet Jesus, please protect Ben; please put your arms around Ben; please don't take him yet,'" she says. "That prayer wasn't answered. I don't know why."
Ben Colgan, 30, was slain on the first day of the deadliest month for U.S.
forces in Iraq since the war began. November saw 77 U.S. service members
killed. A total of 466 soldiers have died in Iraq, 328 of them since the
end of major combat on May 1. For families across the nation, as with the
Colgans, the war reached home.
It was a wet Sunday morning on Nov. 2 when the metallic gray pickup parked
outside the Colgan home in an older, wooded subdivision in this working-class town south of Seattle.
Two Army chaplains got out and knocked on the front door. Even before they
spoke, Patricia spotted the gold crosses on their lapels and sensed why
they were there. She let out a cry. Joe rushed into the living room and saw the uniformed figures in the doorway.
"I don't want to hear it," he said to the chaplains. "I don't want to hear
it." He took a few steps and raised a fist in the air as if to strike a wall, but held back. The chaplains described the little they knew about the circumstances of Ben's death, and informed the Colgans that the Army had given him a posthumous promotion to first lieutenant. They said his body would be shipped home in about a week.
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