Twenty-two-year-old Marine Jared Hubbard was killed in Iraq in 2004. His brother, Nathan, an Army officer, died there this week when the Black Hawk helicopter in which he was riding crashed, claiming the lives of Hubbard and 13 more soldiers. He was 21.
 
A third brother, Jason, 33, went to Iraq in 2005. His mother told the Fresno Bee at that time that the elder brother wanted to protect Nathan from Jared’s fate.
 
The Hubbard’s third son is now on his way home to Clovis, California, to bury another sibling.
 
Clovis Police spokeswoman Janet Stoll-Lee said the family is taking this “very, very hard.” The parents, Jeff Hubbard, a retired 30-year police veteran, and his wife, Peggy have been in seclusion. Yet as a mother, Peg is the person I would most like to hear from.
 
America needs to know — if she would tell us — what she is feeling in the depths of her broken heart.
 
Losing a child changes a parent forever. It is impossible to fathom what losing two children in the space of three years would do, but sacrificing one’s children for a wasteful, ridiculous war that even generals now admit cannot be won must inflict incalculable damage.
 
The deaths of two of the Hubbards’ sons made me think that we haven’t heard from enough mothers about the war in Iraq. I’d like more women to come forward — mothers, wives, and lovers of the men who have been sacrificed in the so-called “war on terror,” in which imaginary “weapons of mass destruction” killed our best and brightest, sent to Iraq by a commander-in-chief too cowardly to go to war himself when it was his turn.
 
We need to hear the rage of women who have lost, for no good reason, the men they love. I want their wails and sobs to fill America’s streets, its airwaves, every chapel, cathedral, temple, and mosque. Campuses, state houses, town halls and chambers of Congress should be overrun with their outrage.
 
I long for their sobs and their anger to drown out the cowardly silence of the political whores that have allowed this war to go on and on.
 
I want Peg Hubbard to tell us how it feels to send a third son back to war after lowering two others into the ground. I’d like to hear what thoughts fill her nights and days. Women like her should break their silence and unfurl their devastation.
 
It’s hard to love a country that doesn’t love you back. It’s folly to respect a government that has little respect for your children
 
If men don’t have the courage to say this, maybe the women who gave birth to the men will speak out, so that the deaths of our soldiers will have more meaning.