The written testimony of
Families of the Fallen for Change
in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
January 15, 2007
Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Chairman
And Members, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
United States Senate
Mr. Chairman and Committee Members:
Recognizing error, cutting losses, altering course, is not something governments are good at. Changing course requires considerable self-confidence on the part of leaders, something we are hoping you have today.
We are the parents of Marine Lance Corporal Edward “Augie” Schroeder who was killed August 3, 2005 near Haditha, Iraq while deployed with the Third Battalion, 25th Marines, a reserve unit based in Brook Park, Ohio.
In November 2005 we founded Families of the Fallen for Change, a non-profit organization that seeks to bring about change in overall Iraq policy and strategy. Today, Families of the Fallen for Change has more than 1,500 members nationwide, half of whom are veterans.
Though we are not novices at foreign relations (one doctorate in international relations and several years of living and working abroad), we remain amateurs in Middle East affairs in comparison to those who have testified and are scheduled to testify before the Committee.
Thus we do not speak from the head, so to speak, but from the heart, and our hearts are broken. Though family members of American service men and women who have been killed in Iraq may differ on the validity of American efforts there, I am certain that their hearts too are broken.
We grieve as each additional American KIA is announced, for we feel the pain of each new broken heart added to the list.
Further, we understand that the families and friends of the 140,000 or so Americans remaining in Iraq -- and those of others about to be deployed -- are living each day with the anxiety that comes from fear their loved one may be killed or grievously injured.
In our last conversation with Augie, he said
“Pop, the closer we get to leaving, it’s clear this is less and less worth the cost.”
He described his unit’s repeated efforts to clear the same cities and towns of insurgents, only to leave and let the insurgents come back. Augie said: “We don’t have enough troops to do this. We can’t hold these places.”
He went on: “Two guys were killed walking past a wall. The wall just blew up. We all walked past that wall everyday. It could have been any one of us. It’s just a crap shoot.”
We heard the fear in his voice. We’ve seen a haunted expression in some of the last photos taken of him. We felt the helplessness of being unable to do anything to take care of our only son.
Augie’s KIA number was 1,824 if we go alphabetically (he died with 13 comrades in a single explosion). Today, that number is 3,020. In Augie’s estimation, the efforts in Iraq were not worth the cost nearly 1,200 deaths ago. In his estimation, survival for American Marines and soldiers in Iraq was “just a crap shoot.” To be sure, this is the case in any war, and we believe that at times war is necessary. But in the case of Iraq, it was not.
It is obvious from the reaction of many Committee members and others in Congress that you understand the human costs of this war. For the sake of urgency, however, there is a need to consider these costs in terms of what lies ahead. At the current daily Killed in Action rate of 2.34 since the war started (according to http://icasualties.org/oif/):
These estimates do not consider that attacks on American troops could escalate, which would push the daily KIA rate higher. It also does not consider the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have been killed, wounded or displaced.
Nonetheless, additional American lives will be lost after a majority of the American public, the American military, and Members of Congress have recognized that this war cannot be won militarily and that a political solution must be sought as soon as possible.
These lives are worth much more than Secretary of State Rice’s concern about negotiating a political solution from a “supplicant” position.
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, it is long past time to withdraw our troops. It is a moral imperative that we do so.
In the last 18 months, we have given a lot of thought to one question: Why did our son die?
We don’t mean the manner of his death. We don’t mean the reasons why he joined the Marines. And we don’t mean the specifics of why and how we got involved in Iraq in the first place.
We’re trying to get at the larger Gestalt, the historical, perhaps even the philosophical reasons that prompted his death.
Augie is part of that long line of ghosts whose lives were taken by the folly of governments.
The lessons of history are seldom heeded. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that “passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.”
Barbara Tuchman, in her book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. (1984, Michael Joseph, Ltd.) wondered why governments pursue policies that are clearly not in the best interests of their nation or the people.
She identifies three stages of folly.
First is a standstill, when principles and boundaries governing a political problem are fixed.
Second, failure and criticism begin to appear, which in her words “rigidify” those principles and boundaries. It is here that changes in policy are possible, but Tuchman calls them “rare as rubies in the backyard.”
More typical in this stage are increased investments along with an increasing need to protect egos that make a change in course next to impossible.
In the third stage, the pursuit of failure enlarges the damages until it causes the fall of Troy or the American humiliation in Vietnam.
So Augie is dead because of folly. American folly that all the world sees. Iraq is just another chapter in Barbara Tuchman’s book.
How sad that we haven’t come any further than the Trojans, who let that horse into the gates.
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, we have a request.
These two parents – and a large number of other parents with whom we have spoken -- turn to you and all members of Congress to consider the lives now at risk. Consider the additional families and the broken hearts they will suffer by inaction or delay.
As soon as possible, bring ‘em home Senators, bring ‘em home.
Thank you.
Paul E. Schroeder
Rosemary A. Palmer
Families of the Fallen for Change