Jorge Medina, father of soldier killed in Iraq, speaks to the WSWS

“Thousands of soldiers are dying and they don’t care”

By Jeff Riedel
8 March 2005

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Jorge Medina is one of the thousands of parents who have paid the almost unthinkable price of losing a child in the illegal US war and occupation of Iraq. On November 14, 2003, Army Specialist Irving Medina, 22, was killed in Baghdad when his convoy drove over an improvised explosive device.

Irving’s identical twin brother Ivan had just returned from an 11-month deployment with the Army in Iraq, and their sister Jenny, a sergeant in the Army Reserves, was stationed in Florida when the news of Irving’s death came

Jorge and Ivan Medina have since become outspoken opponents of the war, joining in marches and protests and making appearances at schools and on television to indict the Bush administration for dragging the country into war based on lies. Last September, Jorge took his protest to floor of the Republican National Convention in New York.

The Medinas learned of Irving’s death late in the afternoon on the same day he was killed. Jorge was working on the upstairs apartment of their modest two-story house in Middletown, New York, pulling nails out of the wall with a hammer, when his wife Ana went down to answer the door. Hearing his wife crying and screaming his name, he ran down the stairs to see a uniformed Army officer and a chaplain. Ana, collapsed on the stairs, was shaking and screaming in Spanish, “Tell them to go away, I don’t want to see them here.”

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