Posted 8:14 PM by Gene

Nadia and Robert McCaffrey, whose son Patrick was killed in Iraq in June 2004, said "Operation Iraqi Freedom" ended up on his government-supplied headstone in Oceanside, Calif., without family approval.

"I was a little taken aback," Robert McCaffrey said, describing his reaction when he first saw the operation name on Patrick's tombstone. "They certainly didn't ask my wife; they didn't ask me." He said Patrick's widow told him she had not been asked either.

"In one way, I feel it's taking advantage to a small degree," McCaffrey said. "Patrick did not want to be there, that is a definite fact."

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McCaffrey did not consult his father, with whom he discussed most important things in his life. "If he had asked me I would have advised him against it," Bob McCaffrey says. Nadia McCaffrey, who now operates a nonprofit grief counseling program and has become a leader in the Northern California antiwar movement, has been a lifelong pacifist and opposed her son's enlistment from the beginning. She says, though, that she was powerless to stop it. "He was like a lion in a cage," she recalls of her son's reaction to watching the terrorist attacks on television. "He just wanted to do something."

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Or maybe they DO KNOW -- AND DON'T CARE.