Vigil marks 2,000th Iraq death

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Gabrielle Banks
October 27, 2005

At 8 a.m. on Aug. 14, 2004, Diane Davis Santoriello and Neil Santoriello Sr. got the visit that every soldier's family dreads.

"I heard the knock and I looked out and saw our pastor and I knew immediately," Mr. Santoriello, of Penn Hills, recalled yesterday before the start of a candlelight vigil in Oakland commemorating the 2000th death of a U.S. soldier in Iraq.

The Army major standing beside the pastor on the Santoriellos' doorstep that day tried to read the notice in his hand announcing that their son, Army 1st Lt. Neil Santoriello Jr., of the 1st Infantry Division, had been killed the day before when a roadside bomb exploded near his tank outside Khaldiya, Iraq.

But Mr. Santoriello said he couldn't bear to hear his 24-year-old son's name.

"We did not see our son for a year," while he was on a tour of duty, "and then we got him back in a box," he said. He was the 930th U.S. soldier killed in action.

In the year since Neil Jr.'s death, his mother, who said she never attended political rallies before, has become a familiar face at antiwar rallies in the region. After a year of mourning for his "hero," his father said he has also joined the antiwar movement on his son's behalf.

Last night, they led a quiet procession of more than 100 protesters, bundled up in black clothing and shielding lit candles from the wind, from the Friends Meeting House in Shadyside to a rally outside the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh in Oakland.

In response to the grim milestone, American Friends Service Committee helped organize nearly 600 antiwar events yesterday in 49 states and Canada.

Organizers read the names of 103 Pennsylvanians who had been killed, soldiers from places like Apollo, Union City, Confluence, Indiana and the East End.

As the Raging Grannies sang "Soon and very soon, we are gonna change this world," Edith Bell, an 81-year-old Highland Park woman who survived Auschwitz, said she was "infuriated" about this war.

"We were all bamboozled and our rights were taken away slowly" during the Holocaust, and that is beginning to happen here, said Ms. Bell, a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

As darkness settled in, members of the Pittsburgh Organizing Group began a drum circle, some beating on buckets. Police officers kept their distance from the protesters. There were no arrests.

Neil Santoriello Jr., who debated for Penn Hills High School, once told his parents that he wanted to be president or the secretary of defense. His parents believe if he were alive he would be proud of their activism on behalf of fallen soldiers.

The Santoriellos have befriended a number of other Gold Star parents like themselves who have lost children in Iraq, including Cindy Sheehan, the California woman who staged a much-publicized antiwar protest this summer outside President Bush's Texas ranch.

When Ms. Santoriello visited Arlington National Cemetery recently she noticed several headstones for soldiers who had been killed on the same day as sons of parents she had recently met.

"I know more death dates now than I do birth dates," she said.