Barrington anti-war couple reflect on Iraq's meaning
By Burt Constable
On May 1, 2003, just 23 days after a giddy American TV audience watched Saddam Hussein's statue topple in Baghdad, President George W. Bush wore a flight suit, stood under a “Mission Accomplished” banner and proclaimed, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” Vice President Dick Cheney mocked those critics who had doubted his assertion that the invasion would take “weeks rather than months.”
Paul and Patricia Vogel of Barrington, parents of a son who served in Iraq, didn't think then that they were getting the truth about the war. They became well-known for their opposition.
“Our blood boiled for a while before we spoke up,” Patricia remembers.
Even as the nation has at last officially withdrawn from Iraq and declared an end to the war, their memories from almost a decade ago still simmer.
During the fall of 2003, while their Army Reservist son Aaron was serving our nation in an Iraq still ravaged by combat operations, the Vogels stuck their first U.S. flags into the yard outside their Barrington business. Meant to honor each American military member killed in Iraq, the more than 200 flags they erected that first day represented a painful cost far greater than most Americans had feared about Iraq. Under a sign reading, “Proud of our soldier! Ashamed of our president!” the Vogels kept installing flags to remind people about the cost of the war in Iraq. Not everybody agreed.
“I'd be putting the flags in the ground and people would drive by and flip me off, or yell, ‘Get a job!'” remembers Paul, who now operates his temporary staffing agency out of his office in Rockford.
The Vogels voiced a minority opinion then that often was derided as “unpatriotic” and even “treasonous.” Nine years later, the majority of Americans support the decision to bring our troops home from a war that no longer seems as clear-cut as it did when we were searching for weapons of mass destruction. In a modest ceremony staged Thursday behind heavily fortified blast walls at the Baghdad airport, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta assured about 200 troops in attendance that the lives of 4,500 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis killed there during the war “have not been lost in vain.”
While insisting that the nation should honor every man and woman who died serving our nation, the Vogels still say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. They remember a smirking Bush pretending to search for the weapons of mass destruction in his Oval Office for a video played before laughing journalists at the 2004 White House Correspondents Dinner.
“It was gut-wrenching then,” Patricia says of the war in Iraq, “and it's still gut-wrenching.”
When the Vogels sold their office building in Barrington in 2006, their yard was home to more than 2,000 tiny flags.
“They were crammed in so tight, they would barely flutter,” Patricia remembers.
“For a while, we couldn't get enough American-made flags, so we were importing them from China,” recalls Paul, who finally found a website offering flags made in the U.S. of A. for about two bucks each.
Aligning themselves with peace activists such as the Quaker-founded American Friends Service Committee, the Vogels in September 2004 staged an unprecedented memorial march through Barrington that drew nearly 1,000 people. Part memorial, part anti-war rally, the march featured a crowd carrying lillies and the names of dead soldiers, a horse-drawn carriage carting a flag-draped coffin and plenty of spectators wearing buttons and sporting signs for or against the war.
Taking advantage of his resources in the peace community, Paul flew to Iraq to visit his son. Once, while Paul was attending the Wisconsin funeral of one of Aaron's buddies killed in Iraq, Patricia was arrested during a peace rally in Chicago. She was acquitted, won a small amount in a countersuit for wrongful arrest and donated much of her award money to like-minded charities.
Paul, who is 56 and just missed being drafted for the Vietnam War, successfully lobbied Illinois to lower flags to half-staff after any Illinois soldier was killed. The Vogels eventually burned their tattered flags in accordance with the flag code. They donated the coffin from the parade to the poor family of one of their temporary workers who died unexpectedly. Aaron fulfilled his reserve duty and is now a videographer in California.
The Vogels, members of the Lutheran Church of the Atonement in Barrington, have become activists on behalf of Palestinians. But they can't just “move on” from the war in Iraq. They look back on those painful years of war as one of those teachable moments that transcends politics.
“War is a big deal,” Patricia says. She and her husband say they worry that forgetting the lessons learned from Iraq could lead to a similar war with Iran.
“It's scary. It would not be hard at all to imagine that,” Paul says. “You can't afford to be a passive observer.”