Lost Sons of Scotland

For all the lost sons
The death of her soldier son in Iraq has given Scottish mother the passion to take her anti-war cries public






BY MATTHEW MCALLESTER
STAFF CORRESPONDENT

August 30, 2004, 7:28 PM EDT

GLASGOW, Scotland -- Tony Blair's letter of condolence dropped through the letterbox that morning at 52 Templeland Rd., the run-down, government-owned apartment in one of the poorest corners of Britain that was home to 19-year-old Gordon Gentle.

"It is a heavy responsibility to send young soldiers into war and I assure you I didn't take the decision lightly," Blair had written to Gentle's parents, Rose and George.

Only hours later, Rose found herself in Blair's home at 10 Downing St., sitting on a plush couch next to Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who was filling in for Blair while the prime minister was on a luxury vacation in Italy.

"You can give that back to Tony Blair; it's no good to me," she told Prescott as she threw Blair's letter at him. Her son was the last coalition soldier killed before the handover of power to the interim Iraqi government on June 28. He was the 60th British soldier to die in Iraq. He was Gentle's only son. And she had come to London that day earlier this month to vent her fury and to beg the prime minister to pull Britain's troops out of Iraq so no more mothers would have to go through her hell.

Moments after throwing the letter at an apparently surprised Prescott, the bereaved mother, who works as a cleaner at a shopping center, stood up and walked out on the acting prime minister of her country. Her daughter Maxine, 14, left behind another letter to await the return of the absent Blair.

"I don't just blame his death on the Iraqis that made the bomb," Maxine wrote to Blair. "I blame you, for agreeing with Bush that we had to go to war when we didn't."

By the time the Gentle family woke up the next morning, Rose and Maxine's words, and photographs of them leaving Blair's office, were all over the national news media. Blair and his Labor Party government have long faced massive public opposition to his decision to join the United States in the war in Iraq, but never before had the issue of British casualties struck such a chord. As the months pass and the casualties climb, the parents of soldiers are beginning to speak up -- often against the war. This time, the passion of one grieving mother appeared to carry more weight than any of the anti-war protests mounted by demonstrators in recent months.

"Rose has become the face of ... the moral authority because she has paid the price and in a very short time she has become a representative for the pain and the anger and the outrage that this war has provoked," said the Rev. John Mann, minister at the Gentles' local church, St. James'. Mann is an American Presbyterian minister who left Minneapolis to come to Glasgow, Britain's poorest city, in January so he could "serve a church where no one had voted for George Bush."

"She's the face of loss," Mann said, sitting in his living room, gray Scottish rain keeping his front garden green in a typically wet August. "She is digging in her heels. She's angry and she's going to do something about it. And she has allies that are coming to her cause."

Gentle followed up her visit to Downing Street by declaring that she wasn't going to fade away, that she was going to put together an anti-war coalition of other parents of British troops killed in Iraq. And Tuesday, she is due to announce the details of a lawsuit she plans to file against the British government claiming that the army did not do all it could have and should have to protect her son from the kind of roadside bomb that killed him in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

"I'll give him a run for his money," Gentle said last week, sitting in her flat in the Pollok housing project in south Glasgow, Scotland's largest city. "I think they'll think, 'Oh, a couple of weeks and they'll give up ... ' I'll just keep petitioning and petitioning, putting it under his face every chance I've got."

Grieving mothers of soldiers killed in unpopular wars often find that their voices carry more weight than anyone else's in debates about the justification for war. Four Israeli mothers whose sons died in the occupation of southern Lebanon in the 1980s sparked an ultimately successful campaign to bring about the end of that part of the Arab/Israeli conflict. And director Michael Moore devotes much of the latter portion of his film "Fahrenheit 9/11" to the mother of a soldier from Michigan killed in Iraq.

Critics of both Moore's film and Gentle's public fury have argued that soldiers like Gordon Gentle were adults who made knowing, adult decisions to volunteer for the military. In Gentle's case, he joined the British Army in November 2003, long after the start of the war in Iraq. He arrived in Iraq in May and was dead by the end of June.

One commentator in Britain's Sunday Telegraph wrote: "Soldiers are not like ordinary civilians. They forfeit the right to make the vital decisions over their own lives."

But, like Moore, Rose Gentle and her supporters have criticized the recruitment methods of the British military, saying recruiters deliberately go after working-class youths without the economic choices that a fair society should offer them.

"He's just a classical economical conscript," said George McNeilage, a family friend and local community leader.

Gordon Gentle grew up in Pollok, one of four vast housing projects that circle the traditionally working-class city of Glasgow. His father works fixing roads.

Forty thousand people live in Pollok's high-rise buildings and decaying two-story houses. It's tough enough in the Gentles' neighborhood to have persuaded the elders at St. James' to install metal grates and bars over the stained-glass windows.

Heroin addiction is common, violence endemic. A Bristol University study from 1999 found that Pollok had the fourth highest mortality rate in the United Kingdom, the fifth highest unemployment level and the sixth highest number of permanently sick residents. Other studies estimate that more than 80 percent of residents receive some form of government benefit.

Gordon Gentle was at a local unemployment office to pick up his benefit check of $72 per week when he and a friend spotted the recruiting officers for the Royal Highland Fusilliers. They were, McNeilage says, the only employers ever to set up a table at the office.

"It shows you videos," said Rose Gentle, referring to the army. "Travel and see the world. It doesnae say go away and go straight into a war."

Gordon was paid $450 per week, his mother said, a fortune for a boy from Pollok who left school at 16 and had no prospects of a career. What he most wanted from the army, his parents said, was to learn to drive and to become a mechanic. "That was his main thing: his driving license," his mother said. "He kept saying, 'I'll come back and have a big fancy car.'"

Rose did everything she could to dissuade him from joining up.

"I says, 'You're mad. Don't do it.' I'd have even preferred for him to be a street cleaner. I was watching Iraq on the news, even before Gordon signed up. I thought, 'Why? Why should he be allowed to put other people in when it's not their war, when his own family's sitting in the house?' It's different for him: He's got the money to keep his kids going. We're only working-class people. He can keep his kids home." Blair has four children. His oldest, Euan, 20, is a student at Bristol University and Nicky, 18, is starting at Oxford this fall.

Gordon never read newspapers or watched the news on television, his parents said. He knew nothing about politics or world affairs. He just wanted to get out of Pollok and poverty.

One of the hundreds of letters the family has received since Gordon's death echoes that impulse. "My son has just turned 21," wrote another Glasgow mother whose son is serving in Iraq. "In my eyes they're still little boys who joined the army for a better life away from Glasgow."

Rose Gentle concedes, though, that her son -- a middle child between sisters -- enjoyed the camaraderie of the army. He did get to travel -- to Cyprus and then the Middle East -- and in his eulogy, Mann noted that Gordon "took great pride in his military service." In numerous photographs from his basic training and from Iraq, Gordon looks happy and excited.

His life came to an end on the morning of June 28, as the powerful men in Baghdad were arranging a hurried transfer of sovereignty. Gordon's Land Rover was hit by a roadside bomb, and his chest took most of the blast.

Rose noticed on the news that morning that a British soldier had been killed. She looked at the body lying on the road and then went to work. She was sitting in a cafe before work started when an army officer called her on her cell phone and asked where she was.

On July 7, the American minister presided over the funeral. When Mann, in his Midwest accent, delivered a eulogy to Gordon that was full of fury and grabbed the headlines in Britain, he was speaking to a receptive audience.

"To those whom I would say are ultimately responsible, President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, I have only three words to say and may they someday be inscribed upon the tablet of your hearts."

The American church man paused before his new Scottish flock before saying those three words: "Shame on you."
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.