In the Name of the Son

When Nick Berg was beheaded in Iraq, America was outraged. So was his father, but not how you would expect

It caught us off guard, when the news of Nick Berg’s murder broke early last May — his father proclaiming that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were the villains. What? Attacking his government instead of his son’s killers? His venom didn’t seem to be springing from the horror of Nick’s murder, but from rage at a warmongering government. You might excuse it, or ignore it, as raw grief, unspeakable grief: Michael Berg collapsing in his front yard when he got the news from a reporter that Nick’s beheading was posted on the Internet. You couldn’t imagine. But the grieving man was blunt: “George Bush’s ineffective leadership is a weapon of mass destruction.” And then, once he got started, he popped up at demonstrations all over the world: Washington, later London, Paris, South Korea, hammering away at our President, denouncing the war.

The stakes were high, and not only because of the coming election; the abuses of Abu Ghraib had just raised the specter of ugly America. Congress was holding hearings questioning the Pentagon’s approved interrogation techniques: “A bag over your head for 72 hours — is that humane?” Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed demanded of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Not humane, Wolfowitz averred. This as his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, made a seven-hour PR pit stop at Abu Ghraib. It was a world-stage question: Was Abu Ghraib a few undertrained, bad-form prison guards, or had something much worse in our conduct of the war on terrorism been exposed? Nick’s beheading, the first in a series, was a grotesque — but helpful — reminder of what we were dealing with here. Maybe we weren’t off the hook for Abu Ghraib, but at least attention might be diverted to them in a very big way.

Yet here was Michael Berg having none of it — and trying to take the meaning of his son’s death in a very different direction.

In the May 12th issue of the Daily News a friend had given him to peruse friendly remembrances of Nick, there was also a Signe Wilkinson cartoon of a card game between Uncle Sam and a Masked Terrorist, who holds up Nick’s head as a playing chip and says, “I see you and I raise you.” Michael couldn’t allow that. Just as he couldn’t allow Nick’s screams to be played on late-night cable, or George Bush using his son’s murder as a smug reminder of who “the real evildoers” were. Not that Michael could actually stop anything. But he had to respond to Nick being used as a pro-war pawn.

Never mind that his son’s view of the war had been diametrically opposed to Michael’s; Nick was pro-Bush, a gung-ho kid, a Marine wannabe who went to Iraq to make a buck and help in the rebuilding. Spread freedom, spread capitalism. But the war didn’t divide father and son. Michael and Nick were close; they had long since agreed to disagree about politics and war, especially this one. And Nick would never know the tragedy of Nick — that was Michael’s to deal with. One moment a hostage, making, it seemed, a ransom tape, then … Michael had to face that, and decide what it meant. Which wasn’t difficult: He’d been actively opposed to war going back to Vietnam. He’d protested the first Gulf War every Saturday morning in downtown West Chester, for months. But he had to push much harder now. And he suddenly had the public forum to do it.