Ray Maida is the father of a fallen soldier

[undeterred]

He is a retired police detective here in Madison WI, whose 22 year old son was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on May 26, 2005. I live in Madison and I will never forget the picture of Ray and another son Chris on the front page of the newspaper around the time of his death... their faces said it all. I went to hear him speak on Thursday night at a meeting of the local Military Families for Peace group. There were about 150 people in attendance. His presentation was full of pictures of Mark and his military unit, also of Mark with friends and family. By the end of the evening I felt like I knew this young man.

Ray Maida trains police officers, and is a fantastic speaker. He is a Vietnam veteran who supported the choices of two of his sons to do military service. Since Mark's death he has begun to question everything about this war and to talk about it publicly. His grief over the loss of his son is palpable, but so is his anger toward the military establishment. His son had almost completed his 3 year assignment, and were it not for a bureaucratic mishap, he would have been back in Madison going to technical college instead of in Iraq.

Ray Maida is angry about a lot of things, but especially how poorly the military takes care of its own, both in training and on the front lines. Both his sons served in unarmored humvees, and brought some of their own equipment because the military did not supply it.

They have never had a call from someone his son reported to in Iraq describing what happened the night he died. This is a standard thing that the military is supposed to do for families, and they are supposed to be available to answer questions. He pieced it all
together from the stories of the other young men in the unit. The military did not handle returning the body well.

Chris Maida did a 7 month tour of duty in Iraq also, and he spoke for part of the time. He lost 4 friends in his unit. He knows that the number counted do not include those who die after they leave Iraq. Another brother gave him a book to read on depleted uranium, as neither he nor anyone in his unit knew what it was. Chris now attends peace vigils and carries a picture of his brother.

The Maida family was at the Peace Rally in DC and have met Cindy Sheehan, as well as the young men who were injured the night his son was killed. He is a peace protester of a very different stripe than Cindy, with a message that is less focused on Bush, and more on the total incompetence of the military under Bush. I am so sorry for his loss, but I am so glad that he is adding his voice to the antiwar movement.

[Tom Rinaldo]

1. That Bush rushed into a war that never should have been fought ,

based on lies, without providing troops with the right equipment, without sufficient forces for the aftermath that Bush refused to believe would be as difficult as he was warned it would be, and without even the decency to attend one funeral of the fallen as even a "symbolic gesture", is an unmeasurable outrage, almost as unmeasurable as the grief families such as the one that you here so well describe are experiencing now with their personal losses.

[undeterred]

2. I came as a total stranger but was in tears

through most of the talk. Its not death itself, but the complete wastefulness of this kind of death, that is impossible to accept. I don't think that the Bushies could handle it if they began to understand all the pain they have caused in this world.

[undeterred]

3. kick!

:patriot:

[Rene]

4. and bushco failed to guard hundreds of munitions dumps . Now

all of that weaponry and explosives is being used to kill our troops and innocent Iraqis.
They broke the UN seals on the storage facilities, but didn't empty them out or blow them up.
WHY didn't the military commanders realize they had to do something about protecting those sites?????