Hundreds march for peace
BY DANA MASSING
March 19, 2007
For an hour Sunday, a 25-foot stretch of chain-link fence in Erie served as a memorial to the more than 3,200 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq.
Four metal posts held the fence in the snow-covered grass along East Sixth Street in front of the Pennsylvania National Guard Armory at Parade Street. The fence was put up Sunday morning for the event.
More than a thousand people walked past during Sunday’s March for Peace, organized by the Erie Peace Initiative to mark the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war. Dozens stopped to hang paper peace cranes or weave the stems of roses and carnations through the fence links.
Veteran Chris Gerhart was the first to turn the metal barrier into something more, placing a flower arrangement on an easel there.
The crowd behind him filled a line a block long and chanted, “What do we want? Peace. When do we want it? Now.”
Gerhart, of Erie, spent 14 months in Iraq with the 1st Cavalry and was one of the speakers at the rally in Perry Square before the march. He said the war was more about oil than weapons of mass destruction.
“Save the life of a soldier,” Gerhart told the crowd. “Fight to bring them home now.”
Erie resident Jennifer Bennett said it’s important to remember the U.S. troops in Iraq, who have sacrificed so much.
“I came to protest the war and let my voice be heard,” she said at the memorial. “It’s time to bring them home.”
Bennett was the last to add something to the fence: a red carnation. She said it initially bothered her that the memorial was only temporary. But then she decided that “it’s OK as long as it’s up here even briefly.”
In 12 minutes, the marchers were gone, the peace cranes beginning to fly away in the crisp March wind.
Erie Peace Initiative member Jim Wise and his wife, Sandy, captured the escaping paper birds and placed them in boxes.
“I can’t throw this away,” Jim Wise said as he gazed at the flags and the ribbons and handwritten notes with messages like “Bring them home.”
The couple waited 25 minutes, then began carefully slipping out flowers and placing them in a bucket, some destined for the Pennsylvania Soldiers’ & Sailors’ Home.
As the Wises dismantled the memorial, drums could be heard from four blocks away in Perry Square. The marchers had returned to the gazebo where they started.
Organizers had hoped to draw one marcher for each U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. Estimates from initiative members put the turnout at not quite one marcher for every three soldiers. Still, the group was pleased.
“Without a doubt, this is the largest peace demonstration in the history of Erie,” said Matthew Ochalek, an initiative member and one of the speakers.
“It takes a broad-based movement to stop war,” he said. “Our march … is only part of it.”
As the drumming died down and the crowd in the park thinned, the Wises and other volunteers took down the fence at the armory. Ochalek said the Army didn’t want the memorial left there.
But he said that photos had been taken and would be sent in a card to the armory to recognize the suffering of National Guard members and all the military.
And the mementos left at the fence would be saved, he said, although the Erie Peace Initiative hadn’t decided what to do with them yet.
“The tokens people left behind are very meaningful,” Ochalek said. “We would never throw them away.”