Camp Casey Visits Kansas City, Missouri
Late this afternoon, about 100 people gathered at the traditional spot for demonstrations in KC (the horse fountain at the Plaza, for those of you who know the city). We had beautiful weather, thousands of cars driving by, and two visitors from Camp Casey. They were just fresh out of the Camp, so they were a bit bug-eyed at being back in a big city again.
I’m hoping one of you who went to Crawford may be able to identify these wonderful people from my description of one of them and my mis-spelling of the other’s name.
First up was a pretty young woman with long red hair representing Military Families Against the War. She was with Cindy for 22 days. She told us that a total of about l0,000 people had visited the camp, which I thought was amazing. She told us her husband is going to be deployed in November and that he supports her all the way.
“People ask me how I can spend 22 days in a ditch and then go on this speaking tour and be away from him,” she said. “But if I do this, maybe he won’t go, or maybe some others won’t have to go,or maybe others won’t get killed like Casey did. If so, then every day I spend away from him was worth it.”
Later, she said,”People ask me, why Cindy? And I say, there was a pool of grief in this country made by the tears of mothers and fathers and wives and husbands, of sisters and brothers and children, and Cindy’s tears fell into it and it overflowed. . .and now it’s going to flood into Washington D.C.”
The next visitor from Camp Casey was a young Iraqi vet from Chicago, Cody Camacho (sp?). Cody told of his own depression and his fears of the the toxins in his body. He told of how one day at Camp Casey a Vietnam vet sat down beside him and Cody thought, well, good, maybe he’ll give me some advice about how to handle all this. But the Vietnam vet just sat there until finally he took off his sunglasses and Cody saw that he was weeping. And the Vietnam vet said it was only at that moment that he let himself feel what he had been enduring for the last 30 years.
Cody said that when he heard that, “It dawned on me what I was supposed to do.”
And so here he is in Kansas City.
“Bring my brothers and sisters home right now!” he called out to us.
They left Camp Casey with $450 and that’s not going to take them to Washington. If you get to meet any of these buses, please take some dollars to give them. A friend of mine whose son is in Iraq right now (getting home in less than a week!! Please be safe!)was passing around the bucket for contributions. “I forgot to bring any money,” I said to her. “Borrow some!” she ordered me, and so I did.
One last note: there were many supportive honks from the drivers going by. Another friend who was holding a sign by the road told me that only one person gave her the finger. “That’s a whole lot better than before the war,” she said. And it only took us thousands of deaths to get here.