War, peace and a side of gravy

TILLICUM, Wash. -- Eric Salinas used to sit at the counter at Galloping Gerties Restaurant almost every morning. The Tillicum restaurant's staff called him "Mr. Hot Sauce" because the Army specialist dumped so much of the red stuff on his omelet. Gerties owner Sue Rothwell learned of Salinas' death from a roadside bomb blast in Baghdad in August 2007 in the newspaper. William Jared Crouch visited the restaurant for his last meal before deploying to Iraq. He died in Al Hadid in June 2007, another victim of a roadside bomb. The next month, Rothwell struck up a conversation with a group who had dropped in for lunch. It was Crouch's family. They were eating at Gerties before attending his memorial service at Fort Lewis."They told me that their son loved to eat here and they thanked me," she said. "I wasn't sure what to say. I should be thanking them."The deaths -- and every other death of Fort Lewis soldiers, coalition troops and Iraqi civilians -- reaffirmed Rothwell's belief that the invasion in Iraq was a mistake and that President Bush bungled the war.That's not exactly a popular stance with the crowd at Gerties, which sits across the Freedom Bridge from Fort Lewis and draws 80 percent of its clientele from the post. Soldiers wearing desert camouflage fill chairs and cram into booths during the breakfast and lunch rushes. Majors and privates chat casually over a plate of biscuits and gravy. Most of them don't seem to know or care about Rothwell's political leanings."We came here before we deployed and after we deployed," said Capt. Zane Galvach of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, a unit of the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. "That lady has waited on us since the first day I arrived at Fort Lewis" in June 2005.But while Rothwell remains pro-military, she isn't a fan of the commander-in-chief.Campaign signs for Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry hang in Rothwell's office near the lounge. She's searching for a Barack Obama sign. She taped the message "Peace is Patriotic / We Support the Troops" on a bookcase. Growing up with the Vietnam War galvanized Rothwell's beliefs. She bristles at being called a pacifist and settles on an "anti-war realist," because she knows wars can be unavoidable. "It was kind of like my mom's karmic joke on me," said Rothwell, laughing. Her mother opened the restaurant in 1952. "She took someone opposed to war, a child of the '60s and gave me a restaurant serving the troops."Her politics, though, rarely leave her office, and few doubt her dedication to service members.A scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings about Fort Lewis sits on a shelf near the south wall of the restaurant. Other stories are tacked to a corkboard near the register. Both attract readers.A signboard outside, though, represents the intersection of Rothwell's pro-troops and anti-war beliefs. Each time a Fort Lewis-based soldier dies in war, she updates the sign with the service member's name. The sign also displays a running total of Washington-based soldiers who have died and the total number of troop fatalities.The staff at Gerties didn't do it to garner attention."The soldiers are more than just our customers," said Rod Mason, Rothwell's husband. "They're our friends here. They are a vital part of this place."Many soldiers use Gerties as a place to decompress and usually avoid discussing the war over meals, Rothwell said. She doesn't broach the subject unless someone else does. Yet two exceptions resonate with her. When a crowd of Iraqis and Marines toppled a 40-foot statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Rothwell remembers silence filling the restaurant as soldiers stared at the television.And her July 2007 edition of her newsletter, Galloping With Gertie, took a drastic departure from the usual stories of changes in Tillicum, local gossip and menu updates. Instead, she reprinted letters from grateful families, a story about Crouch's family and the names of the Fort Lewis soldiers who died that May, June and July."There are so many places out there where it seems like the war doesn't exist. You don't have to think about it," she said. "We're not that lucky here. The second you come in here, you see them all in uniform. You know they're coming and going from Iraq and Afghanistan."There's no escaping the war at Gerties."(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)