Town's loss can't bridge division on war

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. -- When Kyle Gilbert's body was returned home from Iraq, Brattleboro mourned its native son with a stunning funeral procession.

Thousands lined Main Street and crowded the town green on a summer evening last year to honor the fallen soldier, the first from Windham County and one of 13 so far from Vermont, which has one of the nation's highest rates of Iraq casualties. The outpouring, the town manager said, was like nothing he'd seen since the death of John F. Kennedy.

But in an evocative measure of the Iraq war's divisiveness, Brattleboro is now a town split over how to commemorate its war dead.

As Brattleboro prepares to dedicate a downtown bridge to Gilbert on this Veterans Day, the engraving of an accompanying stone memorial has exposed a philosophical and cultural rift in this town of 12,000 in southeastern Vermont, home to both hippie vestiges of 1960s communes and more conservative natives in the rural outlying areas. Veterans groups are dismayed by town officials' decision to jettison a reference to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Pentagon's name for the invasion, after a group of residents complained that the name endorsed the war in Iraq and President Bush's policies.

''It's not endorsing Bush; that was the mission," Frank Wetherby, 57, a Vietnam veteran who lives in nearby Vernon, said as he shopped for hunting gear at Sam's Outdoor Outfitters. ''Where do they get off? That's the sort of thing that turns this into 'them against us.' Support your troops; I don't care what your philosophy is."

Wetherby rues the compromise wording to be unveiled today at a dedication of the Kyle Charles Gilbert Memorial Bridge, which reads, ''Brattleboro remembers all the brave men and women who served our country or made the supreme sacrifice in Iraq."

''That's about as generic as you can get," Wetherby said.

Others in town, though, say the phrasing strikes a fair balance.

''It's diplomatic," said Ian Kiehle, 30, manager of a store that sells hemp clothing. ''It allows a person to interpret whether the supreme sacrifice was worth it."

How to appropriately memorialize the Iraq war dead is confronting more communities across the country. At Elgin Air Force Base in Florida, a granite monument remembers an Air Force technician killed in Iraq. At Fort Carson in Colorado, a black granite memorial honors 49 fallen members of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, bearing the inscription: ''Brave Rifles! Veterans! You have been baptized in fire and blood, and have come out steel."

There are no definitive counts of Iraq war memorials; most communities handle the matter without aid or oversight from outside government bodies or national veterans groups.

It is a painfully delicate matter, both for the families and communities, more so in places such as Brattleboro, which had some of Vermont's largest antiwar rallies at the outset of the conflict and was the site of a raid of Vermont Army National Guard recruiting offices last year by peace activists, many from Brattleboro.

For Gilbert's parents, the dispute over the memorial has been a source of consternation.

''I am the mother, and I think with my heart," Regina Gilbert, 41, a receptionist at a chiropractor's office in nearby Guilford, said in an interview this week. ''I just wanted my son's name on the bridge."

Kyle Gilbert, her only child, was 20 when he died. He was a top-ranked karate black-belt and a car aficionado who proudly drove a red 1969 Chevelle. He enlisted in the Army shortly after graduation from Brattleboro Union High School, following the example of his father, Robert, who served 20 years earlier.

Gilbert's unit, the 82d Airborne Division, was among the first to enter Iraq in March 2003. He died five months later, on Aug. 6. Even before official word came, his mother had pieced together the news from reading a brief item in USA Today about deaths in his unit.

''I turned to a co-worker and said, 'I don't feel so good about this,' and just then the phone rang," Regina Gilbert said.

The idea of naming the newly rebuilt bridge spanning Whetstone Brook for him surfaced in a column in the Brattleboro Reformer written by Judith Gorman, an opponent of the war. ''The president has been way too busy to do more than pay lip service to the casualties of his war or to personally honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice on his behalf," Gorman wrote. ''Let's do it for him."

Momentum built quickly, and the town assumed oversight of fund-raising and planning the $10,000 memorial.

Yet the process was difficult from the start. Opponents criticized etchings of an eagle and two American flags on the granite memorial as jingoistic.

They also objected to the inclusion of the phrase, ''Freedom is not free." That phrase was eliminated and replaced with Kyle Gilbert's last words to his mother, uttered in a truncated satellite telephone conversation on July 18: ''Just don't forget me."

But most objectionable to some residents was the inclusion of the name Operation Iraqi Freedom. Jerry Remillard, the town manager who backed the original version and grappled for weeks with the frayed nerves of residents disturbed by the phrase, defended the compromise language, saying, ''It will remind everyone about the cost of war, no matter what you think about it."

Still, the matter prompts heated reactions in town, across its economic and cultural spectrums.

''I oppose the war, and I wouldn't have wanted it referenced in any way on a bridge in Brattleboro," Kris McDermet, 57, an occupational therapist, said as she shopped at the spelt-stocked Brattleboro Food Coop. ''It would have amounted to dedicating the bridge to the war."

At C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc., Kim Saunders, 43, works as a receptionist, answering a phone that sits next to a photograph of her son, who also served in Iraq. He was fighting in Baghdad the day the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled.

''No matter how they word it, it bothers me," she said. ''He was a 20-year-old boy, and someone lost a son."

Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at schweitzer@globe.com.