Nadia McCaffrey gets to the point in radio interview

MON MAY 26, 2008
Memorial Day: The Past and the Present

Legacy Player:
Memorial Day originated after the Civil War, but a somber remembrance of fallen soldiers has also become a cheerful greeting of summer. Monday, on To the Point, how well does America honor those who've died for their country? Also, the GI Bill and the presidential campaign.
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One Mother's War
Robert Durell / LAT
Nadia McCaffrey, who now operates a nonprofit grief counseling program and has become a leader in the Northern California antiwar movement, has been a lifelong pacifist and opposed her son's enlistment from the beginning.
By Jeff Nachtigal, Special to the Times
January 30, 2005
TRACY, Calif. -- On the day her son Patrick McCaffrey died on a blacktop farm road in northern Iraq, Nadia McCaffrey's war began.

Her first act was to invite the press to the Sacramento Airport when her 34-year-old son's flag draped-coffin was brought home at the end of June 2004.


"Patrick was not a private person. All his life he loved people," Nadia McCaffrey explained. "Why should I hide him when he comes home? He would not have wanted that."

At a time when the Pentagon was attempting to keep photographs of the returning coffins out of the American press, the Sacramento Airport scene attracted international attention.

From the first interviews with newspaper obituary writers, Nadia was outspoken about her own opposition to the war as well as her son's growing reservations at the time he was killed.

"Patrick was overwhelmed by the hatred there for Americans and Europeans," Nadia told a reporter for The Times. "He was so ashamed by the prisoner abuse scandal. He even sent me an e-mail to tell me that not all the soldiers were like that. He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there. Even so, he wanted to be a good soldier."

go here for more
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-guard30jan30-sb,1,3668041.story

Published on Saturday, July 3, 2004 by the Independent/UK
The Son Who Came Home for the Fourth of July
Last week Nadia McCaffrey defied President Bush by allowing the media to view the coffin of her son, Patrick, killed in action in Iraq. Andrew Buncombe was invited to attend his funeral in Tracy, California



The photographs of Patrick McCaffrey laid out on the table at the front of the reception hall were the record of a life cut short. There were pictures of Patrick as a young boy, a head of curly brown hair, posing in his judo outfit. There was one of him dressed to play American football and another, taken a few years later, of Patrick wearing a tuxedo and probably heading out to the high school prom. There was one of him with his family - a wife, a little girl and a son so proud that his father was a member of the California National Guard that he had asked for his own set of dog-tags.


Finally there was a photograph of Patrick with his unit in Iraq. It had been taken shortly before the ambush in which Patrick was killed. In the picture he is laughing with his friends. He was 34-years-old and - according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count website - the 848th American soldier to die in Iraq.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0703-04.htm

Veteran's Village
Sgt Patrick R McCaffrey Sr
Foundation for War Veterans
http://www.veteransvillage.org/