La Voz

De Anza English professor Mary Ellen Goodwin wanted to take a summer trip. She considered traveling to Amish country, or New Orleans. But in the end, she decided she'd rather spend her vacation in a ditch.

For two weeks, Goodwin camped in Crawford, Texas, just down the road from President Bush's ranch, next to Cindy Sheehan and the thousands who joined her hoping to bring an end to the continuing war in Iraq.

Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq in 2004, began her encampment in the ditch along the gravel road leading to the president's ranch on August 6, after Bush did not take time from his five-week vacation to meet with her to respond to questions about the war and her son's death. "I want the President to tell me what this 'noble cause' is that my son died for," Sheehan told the Associated Press.

"I didn't really decide to go there. It was a calling," Goodwin said of her decision to travel to Camp Casey, named after Sheehan's deceased son.

"Over the last five years, I've felt our country has been hijacked. It's not the direction I believed our country should go in," Goodwin said. "It's not the way I want it to go, so what am I going to do to change it? I can sit here and complain about George Bush, the administration, the war. But in the end, what am I going to do about it? There's not much I can do as an individual, but when you have thousands of individuals, they can move mountains. They can make change."

Goodwin left the Bay Area on August 17 at 1 p.m. with Jesse Dyen, a musician from Oakland who replied to her online post for a rideshare to Camp Casey. They arrived 32 hours later.

"Going down to Texas was about hope. Something was finally really happening," she said. "We could run to Canada or Mexico or wherever, but what good will that do? I think it's worth our effort to try to change things."

Goodwin said that it's not the military she opposes. "It's not our military. We need them. It's the administration and how they are using the military. The experience wasn't to go down there and protest and make friends. It was to go and make sense of the madness that is going on out there."

Goodwin and Dyen were among the first to settle at Camp Casey II, an acre of open space bordering Bush's ranch, offered by a local landowner as a second site to the original roadside ditch, which had become crowded with anti-war activists in the 11 days since Sheehan arrived.

Fueled by donations from all over the world, Camp Casey II became an improvised small-scale society, according to Goodwin, complete with large tents for shelter, a full kitchen, a PA system, a medical tent, plenty of port-o-potties and shuttles running between camps.

"We took care of each other," Goodwin said. "And there was no problem we couldn't handle."

Someone always emptied the trash. Someone directed traffic. Someone stayed at the information booth to help new arrivals. There was coffee every morning. "People just took it upon themselves to do what needed to be done," said Dyen.

Amid hard work, relentless fire ants, snakes and 100-plus degree temperatures Goodwin found transcendental moments.

Everyday she changed the rubber bands holding together the white crosses set up in rows by Veterans for Peace, each cross representing a soldier killed in Iraq. "The heat was so much that the rubber bands just disintegrated, so they had to be changed. That was a special time of the day for me," she said. "The crosses were a constant reminder that what we were doing there was so important."

For the first time since the war began -- nearly two and a half years ago, nearly 2000 American deaths and countless Iraqi deaths later -- Goodwin said she finally believes the movement to end it is making progress.

"No one else could break down this barrier," Goodwin said about Sheehan. "I think that's because she really is just a grieving mother. She really believes that we need to do better for our children. We didn't raise our children to die for someone else's greed."

Goodwin saw Sheehan's struggle as an opportunity to reclaim her country.

"The message is 'take our country back.' What is it that the people of the United States really want? Is it the Bush agenda? In my heart, I really don't believe that is what people want. Coming out of the experience, I felt like I had a right again to claim this as my country," she said.

"I think that fifty years from now, people will go to Crawford, Texas and stand on that corner and say, 'something happened here.' I've come away with a new sense of purpose."

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