Mother of fallen soldier speaks out Mother of fallen soldier speaks out (March 11, 2005)

'I'm not going to be quiet anymore'

By Jon Wiener

When Karen Meredith found out last May that her only son had been killed in Iraq, she screamed. Six months later, as she gazed at the 57,000 names etched in stone at the Vietnam Memorial, visions of her son's name on a new wall raced through her brain, and she wanted to scream again.

She didn't, not about a war that she never liked, not about her inability to get a photo of her son's coffin, and not about the fake signature on the letter she got from the Department of Defense. But the following day, while she clutched a flag and stood over the grave of Lt. Ken Ballard at Arlington National Cemetery, she made a decision: "I'm not going to be quiet anymore."

Meredith first came forward at a Mountain View Voices for Peace vigil last December. Ever since, she has become more and more vocal in her opposition to the war that claimed the life of her son and more than 1,500 other U.S. soldiers.

As the second anniversary of the war approaches, Meredith will be sharing her story - and that of the fallen tank commander she raised from infancy as a single mother - with anti-war gatherings from Los Altos to Washington, D.C. "If I speak from my heart, maybe it will touch other people's hearts and show them that it's not just another number," she said.

An Army brat, Meredith grew up as one of eight siblings and attended 13 different schools. A teenager at the height of the Vietnam War, she kept it to herself that her father was a colonel.

"It wasn't real popular to be an army family in the '70's," she recalled. "During Vietnam, if your kid was in the service, you didn't tell anybody."

These days, she is proud to talk about her family's military connection - Ballard, a 1995 graduate of Mountain View High School, followed in the footsteps of three generations of servicemen before him. The 27-year-old was scheduled to come home last April, but the day after turning in their weapons the soldiers in his unit soon learned they would be among the first to have their tours extended. At the entrance to her home, a clay goose still wears the camouflage she adorned it with in anticipation of a triumphant return that never was.

Meredith had been a regular guest caller on a KGO radio talk show while Ballard was stationed abroad. But it was only at a December peace rally that she turned into an activist.

Meredith said she hadn't planned on talking, and nobody had asked her to do so. But she decided that the 90 people quietly huddled in front of City Hall deserved to hear what she had to say - the country's debt to the troops means keeping them out of wars they don't need to fight. Seven other families in Santa Clara County have lost a member in the Iraq war, and Meredith wanted everyone to know what it is like to feel the way that she does. Mike Zelinski, a Voices for Peace member, remembers a hushed silence falling over the crowd outside City Hall. Afterwards, a group of people overcome with emotion gathered around her.

Meredith still breaks into tears sometimes when she talks about her son, but she says doing so is part of her responsibility to show people what the cost of war is. Everywhere she goes, she wears pins in honor of the troops and a button where she keeps track of the number of how many have been killed, inviting people to ask her what it all means.

"When I'm able to talk about him it's a good day - a better day," she said. "All of us parents just don't want our kids to be forgotten." Inside her Dale Avenue apartment, pictures and other mementos pay tribute to a fallen hero. Above her left ankle is a tattoo of a gold star - a symbol that families hung in their windows during World War II when a loved one had been killed overseas.

"No one wants to be a gold-star family," said Meredith, now a member of Gold Star Families for Peace, her eyes welling with tears. "We're sadly getting new members every day."
E-mail Jon Wiener at jwiener@mv-voice.com

E-mail a friend a link to this story.