Death in Iraq Leaves a Mother to Grieve, and to Rage

NORTH CASTLE, N.Y., Aug. 25 - When Yolanda B. Cuming envisions her son's funeral, she sees flags and generals and soldiers in regalia. She wants riflemen firing a salute. She hopes for a cortege with a police escort and a ceremony with full military honors commemorating the life of a proud soldier. This is her wish for her fallen son.

Pfc. Kevin A. Cuming, 22, was killed last Saturday while on patrol in Baghdad when a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into a Humvee he was driving. He was the second Westchester resident to die in Iraq since the start of the American-led invasion.

Mrs. Cuming said she expected to bury her son on Sept. 3 in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, following a two-day wake and a Roman Catholic funeral Mass. His body, transported from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, was to arrive in Westchester on Friday.

"I want the whole enchilada,'' she said in an interview earlier this week. She was seated on the deck of the family's modest two-story house in North White Plains set on a wooded hillside above a reservoir in this suburban town. "The full kit and caboodle," she added.

Mrs. Cuming smiled gamely, and her eyes, puffy from tears and no sleep, brightened momentarily. Her grief has become commingled with anger over a war she does not support, and she is full of indignation and blame for the president and the events that landed her son in Iraq.

"I don't think it's fair that so many mothers, fathers, siblings have to go through what I'm going through," she said. "Is it about oil? I don't know what this war is for. We don't want anyone else to die in this useless, stupid war."

Since Saturday, when two military men appeared on her doorstep with the worst possible news, she and her family had received a steady stream of visitors: relatives from around New York, and from Mexico, where Mrs. Cuming is from; neighbors; friends; the local fire chief; and the town supervisor. People brought food, flowers and cards, and ran errands for the family.

The well-wishers and mourners provided a distraction from the deepest pain, said Kevin's sister and only sibling, Christina, 20. "When everyone leaves at night, that's when it hits us," she said.

But at times it has been too much, and the family has posted notes on the door asking for privacy and has taken its telephone off the hook for stretches at a time.

Mrs. Cuming placed the son's e-mail messages and letters from Iraq on the glass-top patio table, and laid out dozens of photographs from his abbreviated life, mostly from his years in the military. In the photos, he is a good-looking young man with the dusky beauty of his mother, and he appears confident and happy - standing with his sister at her high school graduation, with his best friend from boot camp, dressed for war in the desert in Iraq.

He was an average student at Valhalla High School, a small public high school. "What comes to mind is, what a great kid," said the principal, Jerry G. Salese. "He wasn't the best student - he had a solid academic record - but what people remember was a very kind, gentle kid."

After graduation, he enrolled in SUNY-Oneonta but, his mother said, he was expelled because he missed too many classes and partied too hard. He entered Westchester Community College, where he took classes in culinary arts, but left after a year. Jobs in local restaurants and the delicatessen at the nearby Stop & Shop did not last long, either.

Mrs. Cuming picked up the phone and called a military recruiter - a fact that has filled her with guilt since the son's death. She and her husband, William A. Cuming, thought the military might give their son some discipline. Mr. Cuming served in the Vietnam War, where he won a Purple Heart; Mr. Cuming's father was in World War II.

Accepting his parents' plan, Kevin enlisted in the Army in April 2003 but never expected to go to war, his parents said. He signed up to be a cook and he was assigned to the First Calvary Division at Fort Hood, Tex. But last April he was deployed to Kuwait and discovered that all the cooking duties had been given to outside contractors. At first he was given the responsibility for monitoring the kitchen staff in his base camp.

In an early e-mail message from Kuwait before he was sent to Iraq, he described the scenery, his schedule, his tent, his weapons and equipment and finding himself at war.

"I am not too worried about going to Iraq," he wrote in a letter nine days after his arrival, "because the violence in the country has decreased, plus you are statistically more likely to get hit by lightning, hit the Lotto or get in a car crash than to be killed over here by direct fire.'' He spent his free time "playing Game Boy, watching DVD's and writing, he said, adding, "It's very boring!"

In Iraq, his responsibilities came to include the administration of the camp's motor pool. His phone calls and correspondence became less frequent. "I can't believe we are supposed to hand over the country back to the Iraqis in less than a month!" he wrote in an e-mail note on June 6. In a rare indication of the stress he was under, he added, "I try not to think about the attacks cause there is nothing you can do."

Mrs. Cuming, 51, who is a teacher's assistant at an elementary school in White Plains, shipped her son packages every few weeks: phone cards, chocolate-chip cookies, powdered lemonade, comic books, pictures of the family's home.

Mrs. Cuming said that her son never had a girlfriend and that she wanted him to experience that. In their phone calls, she would tell him of candidates she had spotted while walking through New York. But she avoided watching television news or reading the newspaper for fear of what she would learn. "I feared for my son's life always," she said.

She said she had never supported the war in Iraq.

"I am very against the war," she said sternly. "I don't think we should be there." It is one of the reasons she is opening her home to visitors and speaking out, she said. She plans to write a letter to President Bush.

Her son, however, never talked with his parents about the morality of the war or whether he supported it - "He was doing what a soldier was told to do," Mrs. Cuming said - and his letters home continued to reflect the resolve of a maturing young man determined to carry out his duties.

The family received the news of his death on Saturday morning. Mrs. Cuming was packing to go to Cancun, Mexico, when the doorbell rang and she spotted a car out front that she did not recognize. Then she saw the two military men at the door.

"All of a sudden I had the horrible feeling in my stomach," she recalled. "They said, 'Ma'am, we're from the United States Army.' I said, 'This is a mistake.' They said, 'No, ma'am, this is not a mistake.' "

"I cried and screamed, I cried and screamed," she continued, head down, as she absently fingered a photograph in front of her. "You feel anger, you feel hate, you feel sorrow, you feel numb. Every feeling goes through your head and heart."

Two other soldiers riding with Private Cuming were severely injured in the attack on his Humvee. At least one other Westchester resident has been killed in Iraq: Marine Cpl. Bernard G. Gooden, 22, of Mount Vernon, who died in April 2003 in an ambush on his tank battalion.

Private Cuming's death devastated a family that was already battling a chronic illness. Mr. Cuming, 61, a warehouse manager at a home for foster children in Dobbs Ferry, has lung cancer.

"I thought I was going to bury my husband first, but now I'm burying my son," Mrs. Cuming said, forcing back a wave of tears. Just as quickly, the muscles in her face relaxed again.

Mrs. Cuming led a reporter and photographer through the house and into the son's small bedroom. The walls were decorated with a poster of the cover from Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" on the wall and a picture of the World Trade Center towers.

She showed off his collection of shells and rocks, his uniform from cooking classes at Westchester Community College, his Lego collection, his mountain biking magazines, a calendar of scantily clad women that she had given him as a gift. She proudly displayed a drawing of Spider-Man that her son had done several years ago. Drawing, she said, was one of his passions.

As she spoke, her hands moved quickly across everything - his rocks, his clothes, his magazines and comic books. A wash of sadness came over her. "I'm tired," she said. "I have a lot to do." She had gift baskets to open, a funeral to organize and, she hoped, generals and soldiers to see.

Kirk Semple

© New York Times