One-time Iraq war protest becomes enduring icon

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- It started as a one-time protest, a way to express outrage for a war and to honor those who died fighting it. No one thought it would go on this long.But as interest grew, one Sunday turned into two, then a month, and a year. The names of the fallen kept coming. Staff Sgt. Richard A. Burdick. Sgt. Uday Singh. Capt. Ernesto M. Blanco.Each name meant a new cross to plant in the sand and each weekend the field of white crosses crept farther across the beach.Before long, the tiny anti-war protest in Santa Barbara was dubbed "Arlington West," an impermanent shadow of Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington. It expanded beyond proportions even the creators envisioned, with the 3,024 crosses taking up more than an acre of sand in the shadow of Stearns Wharf.Now, five years after the war in Iraq started and as the U.S. toll reached 4,000, what began as a modest demonstration has become a cultural icon.It is a place where parents, spouses and friends come to grieve and find their loved ones' names on 20-inch pine crosses. Duplicate memorials have popped up in dozens of locations around the country, but the original is the biggest and most consistent."I had no idea that it would ever get this big or last this long or go this far," said Steve Sherrill, a Santa Barbara woodworker who started the memorial several months after the war began in March 2003. "When I first started this, myself and six of my friends, I had no vision for the future, no dream it would still be there 4-1/2 years later."Sherrill started the memorial after he learned the government was not allowing photographs of fallen troops' coffins. To him, it was if they were trying to cover up the true cost of the war by hiding how many Americans died fighting it. The Pentagon said it did so out of respect for the fallen and their families.Sherrill, now 60, did his fair share of protesting the Vietnam War, and he wanted to express his frustration with this war. So he made 340 crosses and put them in the sand in November 2003.People seemed to like it, so he decided to do it the next week, and the next, and the next. The Santa Barbara chapter of Veterans for Peace adopted the project, helping to solicit volunteers to put up and take down the crosses every Sunday.What started as a protest turned into more of a memorial, Sherrill said. The organizers spent less time telling visitors what they thought of the war and more time listening to what people had to say. And when word of the project got out, people started coming.A woman named Cindy Sheehan heard about the display and came down to spend Mother's Day beside the cross for her son, Casey. Months later, she became an internationally known crusader against the war.Jane Bright, whose son, Evan Ashcraft, died in the war, sits by her son's cross, but the days are hard on her, she said. Seeing all those crosses surrounding her son's magnifies the pain that every mother who lost a child is feeling."The fact that there are so many kids who won't see their fathers, so many parents who won't see their children grow, so many parents who won't see their children grow old," the Newbury Park resident said. "It's a very sad thing; it's incredibly sad for anyone."The memorial affects those who set up the crosses, too.Rod Edwards began helping put up the crosses a few weeks after Arlington West began and has missed only a handful of days sinceEvery Sunday, he makes sure the crosses of three soldiers are together because the mother of one requested it. Dangling from one cross are pictures of one of the soldiers who taught his fellow troops how to knit in Iraq."It's an emotional thing," he said of seeing so many come, kneel in the sand and sob. "We usually come away in tears after something like that."As the war continued, the organizers needed to streamline the mechanics of storing, transporting and putting out the thousands of crosses. After 3,024 crosses were made, there was no more room in the trailer used to move the memorial back and forth every weekend, so a decision was made to stop there and simply change a number on a sign every week.Sherrill said the group is committed to doing this every weekend until the troops come home. And so, every weekend, a tape player quietly plays taps, continuously on a 90-minute loop. The tape is flipped over and it starts all over again.(Contact Zeke Barlow of the Ventura County Star in California at XX(at)xxx.com.)