untitled

Deaths and missing weapons demand accountability
By Dante Zappala
Originally published January 19, 2005

LAST WEEK, the White House announced, with little fanfare, that the two-year
search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had finally ended, and it
acknowledged that no such weapons existed there at the time of the U.S.
invasion in 2003.
For many, this may be a story of only passing interest. But for me and my
family, it resonates with profound depth.

My brother was Sgt. Sherwood Baker. He was a member of the Pennsylvania
National Guard deployed a year ago with his unit out of Wilkes-Barre. He
said goodbye to his wife and 9-year-old son, boarded a bus and went to Fort
Dix, N.J., to be hastily retrained. His seven years of Guard training as a
forward observer was practically worthless because he would not face combat.
All he needed to do was learn how to not die.

He received a crash course in convoy security, including practice in running
over cardboard cutouts of children. We bought him a GPS unit and
walkie-talkies because he wasn't supplied with them. In Iraq, Sherwood
was assigned to the Iraq Survey Group and joined the search for weapons of
mass destruction.

David Kay, who led the group until January 2004, had already stated that
they did not exist. Former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix had expressed
serious doubts about their presence during prewar inspections.

On April 26, 2004, the Iraq Survey Group was still on its fruitless but
dangerous search. My brother stood atop his Humvee, securing the perimeter
in front of a suspect building in Baghdad. But as soldiers entered the
building, it exploded; the official cause is still not known. Sherwood was
struck by debris in the back of his head and neck, and he was killed.

Since that day, my family and I have lived with the grief of losing a loved
one. We have struggled to explain his death to his son. I have moved from
frustration to disappointment to anger. And now I have arrived at a place
not of understanding but of hope -- blind hope that this will change.

The Iraq Survey Group's final report, which was filed in October but
revealed only Jan. 12, confirmed what we knew all along. And as my mother
cried in the kitchen, the nation barely blinked.

I am left now with a single word seared into my consciousness:
accountability. The chance to hold this administration's feet to that flame
has passed. But what of our citizenry? We are the ones who truly failed. We
shut down our ability to think critically, to listen, to converse and to
act. We are to blame.

Even with every prewar assumption having been proved false, today more than
130,000 U.S. soldiers are trying to stay alive in a foreign desert with no
clear mission at hand.

At home, the sidelines are overcrowded with patriots. In the end, however,
it is not their family members who are at risk, and they do not sit up at
night pleading with fate to spare them.

Change is vital. We must remind ourselves that the war with Iraq was not a
mistake but rather a flagrant abuse of power by our leaders -- and a case of
shameful negligence by the rest of us for letting it happen. The consequence
is more than a quagmire. The consequence is the death of our national
treasure -- our soldiers.

We are all accountable. We all share the responsibility of what has been
destroyed in our name. Let us begin to right the wrongs we have done to our
country by accepting that responsibility.

Dante Zappala is a part-time teacher in Los Angeles. This article first
appeared in the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.