Published: December 2, 2004: Original Article
By DAVID BATES
Of the McMinnville News-Register

Early the Saturday morning after the election, Deborah Barquinero lay in the quiet of her bedroom, ruminating in her southeast McMinnville home about President George W. Bush and Iraq.

“I just woke up, and I said, ‘This is wrong. It’s wrong!’” she recalled.

Outside, the air was brisk, but the sun was starting to burn through the morning fog. From cardboard and plastic, she constructed a makeshift protest sign - “Stop the war!” - and called her younger sister, Paula Terry.

Was she up for an impromptu anti-war march downtown? Terry said she was.

The two sisters, bundled in coats and scarves, each bearing a sign, hit Third Street late that morning. The coffee shops were busy and shoppers were out.

They noticed a few lawn chairs set up along the curb, but the pedestrian traffic was still light enough that it did not occur to either of them that a parade was about to pass by - a Veterans Day parade.

The first inkling came from a passer-by, who admonished, “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

“We just looked at each other,” Barquinero said. “We still didn’t know what was going on. We were like, ‘Why should we be ashamed of ourselves?’”

A few minutes later, a man in a beret informed them in no uncertain terms, “This parade is for veterans.”

The women were out to express their opinion, not to ruin a parade. So the two daughters of Lt. Col. Charles Paul Moore Jr., a retired U.S. Army chaplain whose 1966 commission papers bear the seal of former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, strolled down to Adams and held their signs up there for motorists heading south.

With the move, veterans and their families turning out along Third Street to support the troops missed seeing the photograph Barquinero had attached to her sign - that of her 24-year-old son, U.S. Army Spc. Jeremiah Bruce Busby, a rifleman serving in Iraq with the 9th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Brigade’s 1st Battalion.

Two days later, manning the turret of a Bradley fighting vehicle, Busby joined 10,000 other American troops in storming the guerilla stronghold of Fallujah.

Called to action

Before the invasion, Busby had been pretty good about keeping in touch, by phone and e-mail. Military families get access to a government-run website, so Barquinero and her husband, George, were able to keep tabs on the battalion as well.

Busby said he had everything he needed - or could lug - in the way of equipment, including a 22-pound rifle, a 50-pound pack and a set of protective body armor. He said he felt adequately trained and fully prepared tactically as well.

Was he scared nonetheless? Of course he was. Who wouldn’t be?

Something big was about to happen, he told her. After it got under way, it would be difficult for him to get through.

So shortly before the assault dubbed “Operation Phantom Fury” was launched, the calls and e-mails ceased.

Barquinero began taking her sign and hitting the street, spending a few hours each morning walking alone by Linfield College, where Terry works as an accountant, then moving up and down Highway 99W.

Occasionally, she would get a friendly honk or a thumbs-up gesture from passers-by. But mostly, she would keep her gaze fixed on the sidewalk.

Speaking out like this, in public, was a new and difficult thing. Talking openly to strangers about her son, her family, the war, the president, was all very strange.

Barquinero suffers from an anxiety disorder, and finding just the right mix of medication has been tricky. Just going to the grocery store can be a challenge. Hearing about catastrophic events - like Sept. 11 or Columbine - hits her particularly hard.

On Sept. 11, she saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. She was so distraught, her boss let her go home for the day.

So she’s surprised that she’s able to open up to a reporter for this story. Terry, her more outgoing sister and a veteran of Gallery Theater productions, usually stands in as family spokesman. In one instance, the younger sibling recalls, she was the one charged with the awkward duty of sending paramedics away because Barquinero’s apparent heart attack was, in fact, a panic attack.

“This is an extremely big deal for her,” said Terry, who is a year younger. “But in all honesty, if I hadn’t been able to go with her that morning on the march, she was still going to do it. It speaks to how strongly she feels about the issue. She would have felt more uncomfortable if she weren’t speaking out.”

Before beginning the interview, Barquinero felt compelled to offer a warning. “My views are probably not very popular,” she said.

Once she got going, though, there was no stopping her.

In her view, President Bush is an arrogant liar. The war on terror is an exercise mounted on behalf of giant oil companies.

The American invasion and occupation of Iraq have served as nothing more than a recruitment tool for Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist network. The real terrorists, the ones who brought down the twin towers, are holed up in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, safely beyond American reach.

An ordinary life

Barquinero insists she’s not a radical. She doesn’t regard her views as radical by any stretch.

Unpopular, yes. But radical? No, she said, not radical.

The 83-year-old home where she and her husband reside rises in the heart of a working-class neighborhood lying east of the railroad tracks. It bears out her claims of mainstream respectability.

The small living room is lined with family photos. Disney videos fill a shelf beneath a small television set.

On the other side of the house, an entire room is filled with toys. Three 5-year-olds, the children of friends, play noisily there during the day.

An American flag dominates the front door. The narrow walkway to the street is lined by classic picket fencing.

But there, at the edge of the yard, she has a “Stop the war!” sign posted.

Most negative reactions she gets are from older people.

They don’t usually say anything, Barquinero said. They just shake their heads disapprovingly.

“Why?” she asked. “I don’t understand why anybody can be so blind.

“I’m proud to be an American. I love this country. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I’ve never done anything like this in my life.

“But I’ve never faced a situation where my son could die for nothing, for the oil companies, for money. It’s all about money.”

Barquinero and Terry grew up mostly in Corvallis. Their mother worked for the phone company.

Their father spent 30 years as an Army chaplain. After retiring from the service in 1989, he took a job counseling troubled youth.

Moore worked with kids not unlike his grandson, Jeremiah Bruce Busby.

Barquinero raised him and his sister, Holly, mostly in McMinnville. By her own admission, he seemed to be on a dead-end path before signing up for the Army in the fall of 2001.

Life-changing decisions

Busby signed up for the Army shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11. However, in his case, the timing was coincidental. He didn’t fit the mold of those politicized by the event.

She said her son’s climb out of his personal hell began with a fishing trip he didn’t take.

He was scheduled to accompany some companions on an Alaskan fishing adventure, but bailed out at the last minute. When their boat capsized, claiming the life of his best friend, he went off the deep end and tried to drink himself to death, Barquinero said.

“He spent a lot of years on his own in trouble,” she said. “He was really doing dangerous things. And he was really having trouble with life. Then, he was lucky enough to meet Tiffany.”

So why join the Army?

“He wanted to make a life (with her), but he didn’t have any skills and he hadn’t had any college,” Barquinero said. He felt the Army might give him one or the other or maybe even both.

And, she said, “I guess he thought it would be fun.”

Barquinero said her son described his girlfriend, Tiffany Ann Ludwig, as “the most wonderful woman in the world.”

She said, “He told us he was going to marry her.” And he did - in the Barquineros’ yard in the summer of 2003, with his grandfather doing the ceremony.

The wedding was thrown together on short notice. Busby learned he was about to ship out and wanted to make sure the love of his life, then just 19, would be taken care of.

When Barquinero wasn’t walking with her cardboard sign or tending to her child care work, she was glued to the TV set, usually watching CNN or MSNBC, trying to make some sense of what was happening in Fallujah. And, of course, trying to spot her son - as any mother would.

“I was just numb,” she said. “I would just sit and watch the news. And I would play solitaire on the computer for hours and hours and hours. And I would reach out ….”

Her voice cracked at the thought, stopping her in midsentence. Then she tried it again.

“And I would reach out and touch the TV screen,” she said.

Speaking out

Barquinero had already written members of Oregon’s congressional delegation. She’d also written to Bush.

On the Saturday of the Veterans Day Parade, five days after U.S. troops invaded Fallujah, she was moved to write the News-Register.

“Why don’t you cover more on the millions of people in this country who are against this futile war?” she pleaded. “My son is in Fallujah right now. I hate this war. I haven’t heard from him in two weeks.

“I am so angry about the waste of billions of dollars to kill people, when that money could do some real good in our country. So many programs and services are under-funded in our country, and in our own community. I am so frustrated and angry.”

Barquinero is proud of her son. He’s turned his life around. He’s healthy and strong now. He’s a good soldier.

But he, like her, is bewildered and somewhat disillusioned over the war in Iraq.

Busby joined the Army to make a better life for himself and his family. Now he’s manning a machine gun in the Middle East.

“He’s doing what he needs to do,” said Barquinero’s husband, George. “He’s proud to be there. But sometimes he doesn’t know who he’s fighting.”

“He’s very intelligent, and he has very deep, deep feelings,” Barquinero said. “I worry about when he comes from all of this, all of this horror. I worry about how he’s going to deal with it and rationalize it - the things they’ve done and the things he’s seen.

“I can’t imagine an army coming through McMinnville and just bombing the crap out of everything.”

As an analogy, McMinnville is, geographically speaking, pretty accurate.

Fallujah fills almost exactly the same acreage as McMinnville. The primary difference is population density. In a city three miles long and two miles wide, more than a quarter of a million Iraqis make their home.

Before Busby and some 10,000 troops pushed in Nov. 8, the U.S. military spent weeks bombing Fallujah.

The smaller bombs, the 500-pounders, left craters as large as the Barquineros’ house. Warplanes also dropped 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs before the ground troops were sent in and the street-fighting began.

The Pentagon reports 1,217 American soldiers have died since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In addition to the scores of Iraqi soldiers and insurgents who have also died, the civilian death toll is estimated at 14,500 to 16,662, according to the British-based nonprofit Iraq Body Count, which tracks and compiles specific, confirmed reports of Iraqi casualties.

Barquinero senses the war has not yet politicized her son, as it has her. But she wonders how he will make sense of it upon his return.

“I don’t think he sees the big picture yet,” she said. “He sees what is right in front of his eyes.”

So what did Busby think of having his photo - in uniform, no less - appearing on an anti-war poster displayed by his mother?

When Barquinero decided to make a protest sign, “I told him I was going to do it,” she said. “He asked me to put his picture on it. He wanted people to know he was there.”