E-Mail This Article to a Friend PRICE OF WAR A father’s grief BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI

Just as the Iraqi governing council signed the country’s new interim constitution earlier this week, Fernando Suarez del Solar, the father of a US Marine who died while fighting in Iraq, arrived in Massachusetts as part of a national speaking tour to protest the US occupation. On the evening of March 8, only hours after President Bush hailed the creation of the Iraqi constitution as a "historic milestone," Suarez summed up his thoughts on the administration’s Iraq policy in two words: "Bush lies."

Suarez has good reason to doubt the Bushies on this issue, as he explained while addressing 70 or so Boston residents gathered at Dorchester’s Adams Street Public Library to attend a forum titled "Iraq, Occupation or Liberation — Who Pays the Price?", sponsored by Dorchester People for Peace, Veterans for Peace, and Military Families Speak Out. A slight, mustachioed Mexican immigrant wearing a MONEY FOR SCHOOLS NOT WAR button and his son’s military dog tags, the Spanish-speaking Suarez delivered his remarks through an interpreter. He told the crowd — many of whom also sported peace-sign stickers and WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER buttons — that he lost his 20-year-old son, Jesus, just seven days after the start of the US invasion of Iraq. When three military officers showed up at Suarez’s San Diego home on March 27, 2003, they told him that Jesus had died from gunshot wounds to the head from "enemy fire."

"I had no reason to doubt that," Suarez said. But then, he got a phone call from a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, who told him the newspaper’s Iraq correspondent had heard something different. Suarez found out that Jesus had actually stepped on a US cluster bomb and bled to death in the Iraqi desert near Diwaniya. "When I asked the Marines," he recalled, "I was told that the information was confidential and under investigation."

Last December, Suarez and several military families traveled to Iraq with Global Exchange, the San Francisco peace-advocacy organization. The trip enabled him to pay his respects at his son’s grave, where he "collected earth" as a memento. But he also saw what he called "another face to this war." He described the time he spoke with fellow soldiers of a 19-year-old military man from Illinois, who had committed suicide. The man’s colleagues told Suarez that the soldier killed himself after he mistakenly shot an Iraqi boy playing with a soccer ball. "These soldiers had suffered severe shock," Suarez said, "yet they were ordered to keep a lid on it."

Suarez, who had back-to-back speaking engagements in Boston, Cambridge, Lawrence, and Holyoke through Thursday, ended his talk by offering some advice to his largely progressive audience: things can change, so long as Bush is voted out of office.

Suarez will speak at his last Bay State engagement on Thursday, March 11, at 7 p.m., at the St. Rose Church, 601 Broadway, in Chelsea. For information, contact Chelsea Uniting Against War at (617) 889-2841.