A family casualty changes everything

At an age when most women become invisible in this country, 57-year-old Rosemary Palmer is emerging for all the world to see.

Over the past two weeks, her face has become a map of where she’s been and where she is going. Photographers have chronicled her journey from grief-stricken mother of a fallen Marine to a woman of courage resolved to fight the war on her own terms.

She’s a little nervous, but she’s going public. The way she sees it, the worst that could happen already has.

Palmer’s 23-year-old son, Lance Cpl. Edward “Augie” Schroeder II, was one of the 14 men in the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment who were killed on Aug. 3 by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

What she most feared had come to pass.

“There were so many days when I would continue working until they finally kicked me out and told me to go home,” she said, recalling her son’s time in Iraq. “I was just so afraid to find that car in my driveway.”

That car she feared, the one bringing two Marines and the news that changes a parent’s world forever, pulled up to her Cleveland home on the morning of Aug. 4.

Palmer and her husband, Paul Schroeder, responded differently in the first hours after the devastating news. Schroeder issued an angry statement that morning condemning the war and those who support it.

Palmer granted a few tearful interviews, but her activism percolated. She waited until her son’s casket was lowered into the ground.

The day after his funeral, Augie’s mother held a news conference.

With Schroeder at her side, Palmer attacked the strategy of the war. “We have to fight this war properly or get out,” she said.

Both parents spoke, but stories around the country focused on Palmer. She had come a long way from the young woman too afraid of public scorn to protest the Vietnam War.

“I was a scaredy-cat back then,” she said. “I was young with a new mortgage living in a conservative town.”

She was not media savvy, either.

“When I lived in New Jersey, I did a short stint on a school board,” she said. “Every time they pointed a TV camera at me, I thought I was going to throw up. I was very uncomfortable, very nervous.”

This is different.

“This is not my story,” she said. “This is about Augie, and about all the men and women still fighting in Iraq. Now I feel like, `You got a microphone? I’ve got something to say.”’

She attracts comparisons to another outspoken mother, Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq last year. Sheehan camped outside the vacationing president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, vowing to stay until Bush met with her. Sheehan left Thursday after her mother suffered a stroke.

They are different mothers, different women, Palmer said.

“I don’t have the same message. She’s willing to be a lightning rod. What’s happening to her now, with all the criticism, is starting to make me nervous.”

So far, the response to Palmer has been positive. She knows that could change.

“People start thinking ‘enough already,’ and they start looking for the clay feet, which we all have,” she said.

It’s a risk Palmer continues to take.

When she and her husband learned that more than a thousand vigils were planned last week to support Sheehan, they decided to attend one of them in Cleveland Heights.

“I was actually a little nervous,” she said. “Some of us are having flashbacks to the whole Vietnam thing.”

This is different, she decided again.

“I was hoping the vigils would embolden others to speak out.”

She quoted the line her son loved from a song by Social Distortion: “Reach for the sky, ‘cause tomorrow may never come.”

Her voice softened as she recalled sharing that message in an online chat room with other mothers of young Marines.

“Even though my son has no tomorrow,” she told them, “I hope your children have many tomorrows.”

That is the hope that drives Rosemary Palmer now.

That is why she is no longer afraid.