An article that ran in our local paper called the New Times about my friend Carlos Arredondo.
The Vietnam war changed me as a child. This PNAC war has changed me as an adult. But, I still have my children....
Please read about my friends the Arredondo's. Thank you.
May peace be inside all of us!
Cindy
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/...
Carlos Arredondo did the unthinkable with gasoline, a Marine van, and a propane torch. Two years later, he still burns.
By Sam Eifling
Article Published Jul 13, 2006
Two summers ago in Hollywood, helicopter cameras broadcast a snapshot of hell: a van in flames, vomiting smoke into the sky like a burning oil well as paramedics nearby loaded a man into an ambulance. Naked but for his shorts, he was strapped to a stretcher, immobilized except for his arms -- they shivered, making the man look like a lunatic mime with an invisible squeezebox. That image was carried around the world, and it's why people in California, in Massachusetts, in Japan, in Costa Rica all remember the man who burned himself in Hollywood, Florida, even if they don't remember that the man was named Carlos Arredondo.
Print and broadcast media were all over him for a time -- the attention helped pump his wife's cell phone bill to around $5,000 in the aftermath of the accident -- but after Arredondo left South Florida to receive treatment in Boston, he practically disappeared from local media. He blew town without ever really answering the question of why a man, even one stricken with grief, would do what he did -- namely, damn near kill himself in a government van with five gallons of gasoline and a propane torch.
When a New Times reporter sought an answer to that question of why, part of the answer became apparent as Arredondo drove around the Boston suburb of Roslindale speaking about his son Alex. "The day he born, you know, like any other baby, he cry," says Carlos, a Costa Rican national whose English syntax often follows its own rules. "But it was laughing since then. There's no picture where he's not laughing." Five-foot-eleven and athletic, Alex talked about becoming an electrician until, at 17, he enlisted in the Marines, a move he barely discussed with his worried father.
"My son approached me and said, 'Dad, I'm a U.S. Marine. '" Carlos was stunned. "I said: 'Listen, son, I love you very much, I will support you, but you be very careful, because I don't want you to come back in a body bag.' He said, 'Dad, that's not going to happen. '"
Even as the young man shipped off to Iraq in 2003, he managed to find ways of delighting his family. Early in the war, Carlos and his second wife, Melida, pulled their truck to the side of the road in astonishment when they heard him interviewed from an Iraqi tobacco factory on public radio; he lay in wait for his mother and grandmother to astound them on a visit home in 2004; he summoned his mother, Victoria Foley, to a military annex in Maine during a brief stopover there.
Carlos could have used a good surprise on August 25, 2004, a hot day in a trying summer. His semi-estranged father, an absentee alcoholic who had been suffering liver problems, had died a couple of months earlier, his body found on a roadside in Costa Rica. For the second time in ten years, he and Melida had moved from Boston to Hollywood to be near her elderly mother and had maintained a home on Tyler Street, two miles west of I-95.
The stress of Alex's being gone for almost two years, with so little contact and so much carnage, was rubbing Carlos' heart raw. At the time, the 17-month-old war still seemed to be happening at a great distance, five months after four contractors were maimed and burned in Fallujah and shortly after news broke of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Flag-shrouded coffins were being brought home under cover of night and photographic blackout, as though grief ignored was grief contained. American forces seemed to be fighting bad news abroad so we wouldn't have to face it here, but Carlos clung to every bit of news from the war, good and bad. "I would talk to the ladies in my office," Melida says today. "They'd ask, 'How are you doing?' I'd be honest. I'd say, 'God forbid something happens to Alex. Carlos will just go off the deep end. He could end up hurting himself or other people or trying to kill himself. '"
But on that day -- Carlos' 44th birthday -- the father was sure he would hear from his son. So it was that Carlos was painting the white picket fence in the yard with a phone in his pocket, hoping for a call, when the green Chevy van arrived full of Marines.
Carlos' first thought was that Alex had topped himself: He had come to visit!
The van stopped, and three uniformed Marines from the Hialeah base came onto the lawn. Marine Sgt. Timothy Shipman, Gunnery Sgt. Syril Melvin, and Staff Sgt. Abraham Negron told him there in front of the house that they regretted to inform him that his first-born son, Alex, had been killed in Iraq.
Carlos was staggered. He ran to look for his mother, Luz Marina Redondo, the only other person at home. He tried calling a friend in Boston; she didn't pick up. Then he called Alex's mother in Maine and reached Carlos' only other son, the younger Brian. A van was in Bangor too. The Marines there didn't tell Brian; he knew when he saw them that Alex had died. "I said, 'Oh, my God, how ignorant I was,'" Carlos says. He called Melida and over a terrible connection implored her to come home from work.
By then, he was begging the Marines to leave, to end this nightmare, but they weren't going to leave him in such a state until his wife arrived. He went into his garage and brought out a five-pound hammer, walked toward the van and... threw the hammer to the ground. He ran to the backyard and dialed his son's recruiter, only to hear a voice on the other end say that the number had been changed. Nothing was making sense. Carlos went back into the garage.
Hit the article to read more please:
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/...
Memories of Alex
The heat was more than a weather front: The events that occurred on August 25, 2004, are important to clarify ("Matchhead," Sam Eifling, July 13). Close to 25 minutes passed between when the Marines arrived and the fire occurred. Carlos was told [of his son's death] in the front yard of our home on a humid, 95-degree day. Had a chaplain been on-site, I know that my Catholic-raised husband would have had a very different response.
The lives of all military families are full of worry while their loved ones are on deployment. Bad habits develop in the midst of this anxiety: too much news-watching, sleepless nights, extreme sadness at the reporting of the casualties of war. Having met so many other military and Gold Star families, we know such reactions are commonplace. Carlos' reaction at the news of Alex's death came on top of the boiling inside he felt from worry. The powerlessness was more than he could bear.
There is one other reason Carlos and I do the work we do: Alex wanted us to. One of his favorite songs was Three Doors Down's "Love Me When I'm Gone." He would often say "Don't forget me" or "Tell everyone I love them." Alex is out of the game. Carlos and I are not. A good Marine never lets his buddies stay behind. This father and step-ma will not stop until all of Alex's buddies are home at last. It's what Alex would have wanted.
If you are interested in donating to the Alexander Arredondo scholarship fund, please send a check to Blue Hills Regional and Technical High School (write "Arredondo scholarship" on the memo line). Our goal is to collect enough donations so this scholarship fund will continue long after we do.
Melida Arredondo
Roslindale, Massachusetts
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/...