Vet Protests Iraq War 75 Minutes After Mom's Death

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TRENTON -- Disabled Vietnam War veteran Bruce Tonari of Gloucester County addressed a rally against the war in Iraq on Monday -- an hour and 15 minutes after his mother died. "I wanted to be here. I knew she was on her death bed," said Tonari, 57, after he told a 70-strong crowd in front of the Statehouse that, because of the war, "We have lost our moral authority."

The war, entering its fifth year Monday, inspired the rally by the Princeton-based Coalition for Peace Action, one of many protests held nationwide since Saturday.

Tonari, of Washington Township, said he planned to leave the rally and go directly to a Cherry Hill hospice to make funeral arrangements for his late mother, Betty, who was 80. "We are doing the right thing," Tonari said after he struggled on two canes to the podium. Tonari said he had been a Marine from 1968 to 1970, in Quang Tri in Vietnam, which then had been the provincial capital of the northern-most area of the old South Vietnam in what had been a north-south civil war.

And...

Many a gray head bobbed in the rally, but Whitehouse Station folksinger John Kasper laughed when reminded his acoustical guitar stood out as an obvious link to protests in the 1960s against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

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Link: http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070319/NEWS0301/70319033/1007/NEWS03

:cry:

He's a true hero, and its people like Bruce that make me realize there are great people in this nation. The real Americans are the ones who know real pain and real life, not the ones who have made billions off of the backs of everyone else and continue to take and steal from those who need it the most, like Bruce and his mom.

I get tired, frustrated, fatalistic, or disillusioned.

Makes me proud to know that there are Americans like that out there.

Truly inspirational.

:hi: