More Candles at Vigil Illuminate Sobering Reality

Jeanne Brooks
jbrooks@greenvillenews.com
Columnist

On Oct. 3, a very warm Tuesday (the high reached 83), Ted Christian went down to City Hall in Greenville and filled out the paperwork for a special-event permit.

The application form was several pages. Christian applied to hold a candle lighting at 5:30 p.m. on Piazza Bergamo, Nov. 4, to mark U.S. military lives lost so far in the war in Iraq. He paid the $25 permit fee with cash.

It was that same Tuesday that Jonathan Rojas, 27, of Hammond, Ind., died in Baghdad and Daniel Isshak, 25, of Alta Loma, Calif., died in Tikrit.

In his basement, in 12 cardboard boxes, Christian has the tealight candles used last March at Piazza Bergamo to mark the third year of the war in Iraq. Each candle sits inside a 9-ounce plastic cup weighted by a couple of ounces of hardened mortar to keep it from tipping over.

On every cup is a strip of sticky-backed paper with information about a U.S. military fatality in Iraq. Name, age, date of death. There are more than 2,000 cups in Christian's basement.

He's one of the founders of the Greenville Antiwar Society. Through rain and cold, and season after season, members of the group have stood outside the federal courthouse on Washington Street on Wednesday evenings in protest against the war in Iraq.

The first candlelight vigil they held was at the courthouse. They lined the sidewalk with 2,000 lit candles to mark the number of U.S. military Iraq war deaths to that point.

Monday a week ago, Oct. 23, Christian went back to City Hall to check on the permit's progress. By then, the weather had turned cooler (high: 57) and over the 19 days since his last visit, 71 more U.S. troops had died. Another five were killed that day.

The pace of war since March made a grim calculation unavoidable for the candle lighting's organizers. By Nov. 4, the vigil would require an additional 500 candles and cups besides the ones in Christian's basement. On Tuesday last week, he bought 700 tealights and 680 cups.

The next day, an e-mail arrived saying the permit was approved. That was Oct. 25. There were five more deaths.

On Thursday and Friday, one death each. The permit arrived by e-mail Friday.

Christian and a few volunteers prepared the new cups with mortar Saturday.

And yesterday, Christian printed out the names since March -- 80 names per sheet, four across, 20 down. He cut the sheets in strips.

He and others will apply them to cups about an hour or so before the candle lighting Saturday. Some cups will have no names, as some are not yet released.

There will be no speakers on Saturday. But 2,819 or so candles to light, a silent and tender task. The count only for now.