Madison father honors his son by working to end the war in Iraq

Anyone on the right want to slime Ray Maida? Is he a moonbat? Does he dishonor his son's sacrifice? Charlie? Jessica? Who wants to be first?

From Melanie Conklin's column in the Wisconsin State Journal:

Calls are pouring in after retired Madison police detective Ray Maida was interviewed on ABC's "Nightline'' last week, talking about how poorly the U.S. military treated his family in dealing with the death of his son Mark, an Army sergeant in Iraq.

The family never received a call from his commanding officer. Three months after his death, the family learned the details of what happened from an interview in The Washington Post with Terry Rodgers, a soldier and close friend who was with Mark when a bomb exploded their patrolling Humvee. They had only six hours' notice that his body would be arriving at the airport in Milwaukee and also had a difficult time getting his possessions returned.

In the wake of the "Nightline'' show, Maida has been asked to speak around the country, including a request from MoveOn.org to talk when the 2,000th soldier dies in Iraq.

"I just haven't returned the call," says Maida, his voice, understandably, alternating between weary and impassioned. "I can only speak about it once every few days. I can only do it in bits and pieces and then afterward I cry. But I want to share Mark's story." Mark, a 2001 Memorial High School graduate, was killed in May.

The "Nightline'' segment titled, "We regret to inform you..." was anchored by Chris Bury, a UW-Madison alum who was on Madison radio in the late '70s and is the show's main substitute anchor. Maida says the interview took two days and four hours of taping for what was originally intended to be a seven-minute segment.

"The guy who videotaped it said it was the longest interview they'd seen," says Maida, "and 'Nightline' decided to make it the whole show."

Maida and his son Chris, an Iraq war veteran, will be speaking Thursday, Oct. 27, sponsored by Military Families for Peace, at Union South at 7 p.m. They plan to have video and pictures of Mark's life, as well as stories from the large anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., last month, where Maida met Mark's friend from the Post story.

"The reason we speak," says Ray Maida, "is we met Terry Rodgers at the peace rally and he told us how the two of them had discussed how they were going to go to every get-out-of-Iraq rally they could when they got home."