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Kyle Gilbert, her only child, was 20 when he died. He was a top-ranked karate black-belt and a car aficionado who proudly drove a red 1969 Chevelle. He enlisted in the Army shortly after graduation from Brattleboro Union High School, following the example of his father, Robert, who served 20 years earlier.Gilbert's unit, the 82d Airborne Division, was among the first to enter Iraq in March 2003. He died five months later, on Aug. 6. Even before official word came, his mother had pieced together the news from reading a brief item in USA Today about deaths in his unit.
''I turned to a co-worker and said, 'I don't feel so good about this,' and just then the phone rang," Regina Gilbert said.
The idea of naming the newly rebuilt bridge spanning Whetstone Brook for him surfaced in a column in the Brattleboro Reformer written by Judith Gorman, an opponent of the war. ''The president has been way too busy to do more than pay lip service to the casualties of his war or to personally honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice on his behalf," Gorman wrote. ''Let's do it for him."
Momentum built quickly, and the town assumed oversight of fund-raising and planning the $10,000 memorial.
Yet the process was difficult from the start. Opponents criticized etchings of an eagle and two American flags on the granite memorial as jingoistic.
They also objected to the inclusion of the phrase, ''Freedom is not free." That phrase was eliminated and replaced with Kyle Gilbert's last words to his mother, uttered in a truncated satellite telephone conversation on July 18: ''Just don't forget me."
But most objectionable to some residents was the inclusion of the name Operation Iraqi Freedom.
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As Brattleboro prepares to dedicate a downtown bridge to Gilbert on this Veterans Day, the engraving of an accompanying stone memorial has exposed a philosophical and cultural rift in this town of 12,000 in southeastern Vermont, home to both hippie vestiges of 1960s communes and more conservative natives in the rural outlying areas. Veterans groups are dismayed by town officials' decision to jettison a reference to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Pentagon's name for the invasion, after a group of residents complained that the name endorsed the war in Iraq and President Bush's policies.
''It's not endorsing Bush; that was the mission," Frank Wetherby, 57, a Vietnam veteran who lives in nearby Vernon, said as he shopped for hunting gear at Sam's Outdoor Outfitters. ''Where do they get off? That's the sort of thing that turns this into 'them against us.' Support your troops; I don't care what your philosophy is."
<...>
For Gilbert's parents, the dispute over the memorial has been a source of consternation.
''I am the mother, and I think with my heart," Regina Gilbert, 41, a receptionist at a chiropractor's office in nearby Guilford, said in an interview this week. ''I just wanted my son's name on the bridge."
