Iraq war just doesn’t add up for mother

Mary Cameron strikes me as just the person I’d hire to audit my company’s books, – if I had a company, that is.

We met for coffee recently in the Davenport Hotel lobby. Mary smiled warmly over her latte, her blue eyes twinkling. She wore a professional black plaid jacket, polished gold earrings and her short brown hair swept away from her face.

She’s the picture of the conservative baby boomer CPA – restrained, smart, responsible.

At a Spokane accounting firm called Moss-Adams, she manages audits of internal controls required of public companies ever since the Enron scandal. She’s also a board member of Women Helping Women, a group of high-powered local women who raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for social services for Spokane women and children every year. And more importantly, she’s the mother of a 21-year-old lance corporal in the Marine Reserves named Brett Cameron.

We’ve met on this recent afternoon so that Cameron can tell me about the private, internal audit she’s been conducting on the Iraq war.

For her, it just doesn’t add up. Not the beginning of this war, certainly, and not its current state either. She regards both through her reasonable accountant’s eyes, and she’s dumbfounded.

“I’m seeing billions and billions being spent over there,” she says. “And then we have $81 billion going to Hurricane Katrina relief… Where are these dollars coming from?”

The president needs to convince other countries to join the war effort or develop an exit strategy. Now, she says.

Cameron’s capable of a complex emotional and intellectual math.

“I can support you and not support the war,” she tells her son. “I see those as two separate things… I just think it’s wrong.”

A Marine recruiter started calling her son during his junior year at Gonzaga Prep.

“He was just so persistent,” Cameron says. “He would call Brett every day. We would sort of intercept the calls, but it was such a passion for Brett.”

Brett believed the recruiter’s sense of urgency. He rushed to make a decision at the end of his junior year.

“This is what I want to do,” she remembers her son saying. “Please don’t stop me.”

Internally, she examined her own reactions: She was glad he found his passion and she wanted to support it. But please, God, did it have to be this?

Last fall Brett left for Iraq with the Marine Reserves of “Papa Battery.” There he patrolled the perimeter of Al Asad Airbase, and life daily ricocheted him back and forth between two emotional states: bored to death or scared to death. There was very little in between.

Cameron watched the television news during those months as if it were a horror film, between splayed fingers. And then came the day last March when she swam through the crowds to reach her son’s bus to welcome him home. “The happiest day of my life,” she says, her voice catching.

This summer she watched as another military mom, Cindy Sheehan, lead a protest of the war outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and later helped lead thousands of anti-war protestors in Washington, D.C.

“I respect her a lot,” Cameron says. “She’s grieving in a way that I never hope to experience.”

Now Brett’s a student at the University of Montana, planning one day to enter the construction business. He has four more years in the active reserves, and he thinks he’s likely to be sent back to Iraq.

His mother admires her brave, kindhearted son. “He’s keeping his commitment even though it’s god-awful and it’s wrong and it’s uncomfortable and it’s scary,” she says.

Cameron remembers attending a couple of protests of the Vietnam War while she was in college. Her husband-to-be served as a machine gunner in the jungle at the time. He wore a St. Christopher medal from his mom that Brett later wore in Iraq.

Now Cameron thinks she’s in denial over the prospect of their son returning to the war. She remembers the options of her college days, and gently jokes with Brett.

“I tell him when he gets the letter, we’re going to Canada,” she says with a grin.

“He says, ‘No, we’re NOT going to Canada.’

“I’m like, ‘Have you been to Vancouver lately? They have a wonderful zoo there.’ “

Mary Cameron doesn’t plan to join Sheehan’s protests. She won’t risk embarrassing her son. But this Marycliff High School graduate remains convinced: Human beings have got to find a better way than war to solve problems.

She falls back an accountant’s logic:

“At some point, everybody’s going to have to come to the table and sign some concessions and reach an agreement,” she says. “Can’t you do that before thousands of people die?”