Talk about race Quietly, under the media radar, some folks are tackling Boston's touchiest topic By Christine MacDonald, Globe Correspondent  |  June 19, 2005 As a black child riding a school bus from Roxbury to East Boston in the 1970s, recalls Michael James, he was frightened by stone-throwing whites protesting forced school desegregation. As one of the few white children growing up in the Bromley-Heath public housing project, says Paul MacEachern, he often got into fights with other white boys, who picked on him for hanging around with African-Americans. As a member of one of the first Latino families to move into the Fields Corner section of Dorchester, says Fernando Bossa, he was spit on as a boy, called names, chased by kids with bats, and told repeatedly that he should go back to where he came from. ''It's an ugly thing the way people could judge you by the color of your skin and really treat you like dirt," Bossa says. Today minorities make up the majority of residents in a city that has gone, according to the US Census, from predominantly white to multiracial and multicultural in recent decades. While this diversity is sometimes touted as one of Boston's strengths, many residents and community leaders lament that people from different races, economic brackets, and lifestyles often share the same city blocks without acknowledging one another's existence. So James, Bossa, MacEachern, and a few hundred others have set out to build bridges between different groups and make Boston a more neighborly place for all of its residents. As participants in City-Wide Dialogues on Boston's Ethnic & Racial Diversity, they aim to have frank conversations about the often painful, even unspeakable topic of race. Since the project's launch in late 2003, about 450 people have taken part. The goal: to attack the city's stubborn standoffishness, ease tensions, and build civic trust one neighborhood at a time. Their ground plan: funding from several private foundations (including The Boston Globe Foundation), and backing from Mayor Thomas M. Menino and other state and local government agencies and officials. ''A lot of people were on pins and needles," said James of the first session of a Roxbury dialogues group he facilitated. ''But at the end of the day, I think we realized that we had things in common -- the struggle for survival in this city." The project, which so far has attracted scant media attention, has served as a sort of civic think tank and social network builder. ''We have to overcome our differences," said Sharon Knight, a 53-year-old African-American welfare case manager who lives in Dorchester. ''We all have misconceptions of different groups. We need to stop judging people so much." Knight said she decided to participate in the project to help set the record straight. ''Not all African-American men are drug dealers and gang members," she said. ''The average African-American wants his children to grow up and go to college." For Dorchester resident Adam Gibbons, 40, a social studies teacher at the Lydon Pilot School in West Roxbury, ''the program allowed me to go deeper and to explore how to talk about my own experience as a white male," he said. ''One thing I've learned in the last 10 years or so is the ease of being a white male in a white-male-dominated society." Since early last year, organizers have conducted 28 dialogues in more than a dozen neighborhoods and plan more, according to Jeff Stone, City-wide Dialogues co-chairman. ''Originally the goal was to get 1,000 people to participate. We didn't have long-term plans," Stone said. ''Now we've written grants and plan to continue" running dialogues in Boston neighborhoods, along with multi-neighborhood dialogues launched for the first time this spring. Next year, Stone added, the organization may add groups that bring together urban and suburban residents to build relationships that could lead to better regional cooperation, he said. ''We are creating the space," he said, ''so people can finally have these conversations, but in a respectful way, neighborhood by neighborhood." Each group meets four or five times for about two hours each. To assure that everyone has a say and no one dominates the conversation, the exchanges are led by facilitators trained in a dialogue model developed by the organization's steering committee. Creating cross-cultural relationships is a particularly difficult task, notes Jamaica Plain resident Wendy Loveland, 41, a white marketing executive who joined the initiative hoping to strike up neighborly relationships beyond the block where she lives with her partner, Margaret Williams. The two were married last year. ''In Jamaica Plain there are white neighborhoods and Latino neighborhoods. . . . It's not integrated because of the price of housing. So people don't socialize," says Loveland. ''We don't know how to bridge the gap between people from one side of Centre Street to the other side of Centre Street." Longtime Villa Victoria residents Jewel Cash and her 15-year-old daughter, also Jewel, say the same is true in the South End. Gay and straight people, residents of housing projects and those who are affluent -- all share the same turf but rarely interact, they said. ''Only on Halloween does everyone sit out on their stoops and talk to each other. It's beautiful," said the elder Cash. The rest of the year, she continued, ''perhaps those who have don't like to be approached by those who don't have." ''Race and class go hand in hand like brother and sister," added her daughter, a sophomore at Boston Latin Academy. After the first meeting, facilitators take participants through a group exercise to get them thinking about how one's race can dictate opportunities and privileges. Have they ever been followed around a retail store by a security guard? Been evicted from a childhood home because their parents couldn't make the rent? Did they attend public or private schools? ''I think some people might have felt guilty about doing well," said Melida Arredondo, 39, of the exercise in which people had to reflect on how race often dictates opportunities. The Roslindale resident of Costa Rican descent said the exercise angered her by highlighting her disadvantage as a minority. ''I've been taught the American way that I can get ahead, and it's really not the case," she said. ''There are still a lot of barriers." The discussions varied from neighborhood to neighborhood, depending on the changes underway in each place and the experiences participants brought with them. ''A lot of people were really skeptical," said Michael James, 39, who as a child faced whites who threw stones at his school bus and now, as a diversity consultant, led a Roxbury group's discussions. ''They thought there was a hidden agenda. It took a long time to get past that and to a level of comfort. ''It did not happen until we got into the adversarial issues," he continued. ''People were saying things that were politically incorrect. That's when things opened up." One man in the group brought a Pulitzer Prize-winning news photograph from 1976. It showed a white youth thrusting the pointy end of a flag pole toward a black man during a busing protest that turned violent outside City Hall. (The victim, not so incidentally, was Ted Landsmark, who in 2003 would be named chairman of a task force that recommended changes to the school assigning process so more students would have a shot at attending high quality schools in their neighborhood.) ''Everybody in the room -- no matter their race -- was appalled," James recalled. ''It accelerated the conversation. It was like: 'We do have something in common. We don't want this to ever happen again.' People started sharing." In contrast, a predominantly white South Boston group of longtime and newer residents of the neighborhood, which played a central role in the busing crisis, didn't discuss busing except in passing, according to Rebecca Cheezum, a white former South Boston resident, who presided over the group. ''Since there wasn't much representation of people of color, class issues were a big topic. They talked a lot about the escalating cost of living being brought on by the high cost of real estate in South Boston," she said. ''Some people there recognized that although they were white, they hadn't had all the opportunities other whites had." And there were generational differences, too. Roslindale's Arredondo said she was struck that her stepson Brian, 16 when he participated, was less concerned about racism than were older members of the group. For the Cashes too, mother and daughter had different perspectives, they said. ''I'm coming from a different generation that hasn't gone through that hatred," said the younger Cash, who was born in 1989 and has experienced the busing crisis only through books and movies. Racism does seep into student life, Cash said. But students in the Boston Public Schools, where nearly nine in every 10 are persons of color, may be better prepared than their parents to confront and engage issues of racism, she said. For example, Cash said she recently confronted a South Boston classmate who made a comment about African-Americans that she found racist. The boy later apologized to her and the class. More common than racial confrontations, she said, are cross-cultural friendships. ''Socially, I don't think race plays that big a role. If you are black you will have at least one Asian and one white friend," she said. ''I see Asian people who are more ghetto than me. Then, you have some black kids who are very preppy." All the participants interviewed were enthusiastic about the dialogues and said they developed genuine friendships, even with participants with whom they had clashed. But they nearly all agreed that the four- to six-week initiatives only began what must be an ongoing effort. Bossa, who as a Latino child in Dorchester experienced racism firsthand and is today a community activist and host of a bilingual television show on the Boston Neighborhood Network, said his group lost momentum after the formal dialogues sessions ended. Several groups also dwindled despite efforts to keep meeting, participants said. Others, like the Roslindale group joined by Antonia Chronis and her husband, Bill Jennings, continued meeting for months after the formal sessions ended. This month they joined with other dialogues alumni to form a Rozzie-wide group open to anyone who had completed the initial program. They held their first meeting two weeks ago and plan monthly gatherings. For Chronis, 44, a Greek-American, and Jennings, 45, an African-American, the dialogues helped them get to know more neighbors and raise awareness about racism. ''It's been easier for Bill and I to talk about the experiences we've had as an interracial couple," said Chronis, who added that she is now more likely to speak up when she hears racist comments. In Dorchester, similar neighborhood-wide events have emerged from several dialogues completed in the last two years. Besides the conversations on race, members have gathered for pot luck dinners and to attend plays, parties, and other social events. One group formed a book club. Others have formed e-mail networks that share news and spread word about neighborhood events and issues. ''People worked at being honest," said Gibbons, of Dorchester. ''We got to a level where people were able to laugh about things, though certainly we didn't go deep enough." Christine MacDonald can be e-mailed at cmacdonald@globe.com.

washingtonpost.com

A Father Transformed by Anguish
Scars Define the Man Who Burned Himself After Son's Death in Iraq

By David Finkel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 16, 2005; Page A01

BOSTON -- Another day of trying to recover.

Once again, Carlos Arredondo, whose reaction to the death of his son became one of the iconic images of the Iraq war, is reading the last e-mail he received from him. "I'm in najaf," the e-mail from Marine Lance Cpl. Alexander Scott Arredondo begins, and those three words are enough to make a 44-year-old father once again feel as though he is on fire.

Every bit of Arredondo's skin is coated with antibiotic cream. His left palm has glass in it from when three Marines informed him that Alex was dead and he began smashing the windows of their van. His lower legs, which received the worst of the burns from when he splashed gasoline in the van and ignited it, are stained the color of cranberries. His hair, cut off in the hospital, is only now starting to grow back. His fingernails, ruined when he used his hands to claw holes in Alex's grave for flowers, are all gone.

"do me a favor and check the news online. save pictures articles and videos if you can. i'll stay in contact until i move. let everyone know i love them," the e-mail from Alex goes on, and Arredondo continues to read it, oblivious to everything else, including his wife, Melida, who is in another room urgently typing a letter.

"Our family is in need," she writes on her computer.

"Medical costs are now over $50,000."

"We are inviting you to a very special" event, she continues, a fundraiser, and keeps writing until the phone rings and Arredondo comes in to see who's calling.

Maybe it's the psychologist. Maybe it's the grief counselor. Maybe it's the marriage counselor. Maybe it's his mother, who had a breakdown after pulling off his burning socks when he was on fire. Maybe it's Victoria, his first wife and Alex's mother, who called him a bastard when she heard what he had done. Maybe it's his son Brian, who is so confused by what Arredondo did that he has stopped all contact with his father.

"Hello," Melida says into the phone, and when Arredondo realizes it's not anyone he knows, he returns to a room where the walls are covered with photocopies of Alex's portrait, the windowsill is covered with the medications he needs to get through a day, and the bed is covered with copies of Alex's letters, including the first one he sent as he headed overseas.

"I am not afraid of dying," it says. "I am more afraid of what will happen to all the ones that I love if something happens to me."

"Oh, Alex. Oh, my goodness," Arredondo says as he picks that one up to read.

The worst of Arredondo's injuries were on his legs, to which he applies antibiotic cream. Twenty-six percent of his body was burned.                                                                

Photo Credit: David Finkel -- The Washington Post                       

 

Defying Explanation

Even now, so many months later, no longer unconscious in a hospital burn unit, no longer restrained to his hospital bed as a precaution against suicide, no longer gasping as his skin is pulled off with tweezers, no longer encased in bandages, forgiven by the Marines, Arredondo says he does not know why he did what he did.

Was he trying to kill himself? Maybe, he says. Was he trying to bring attention to his son's death, the 968th of the war? Maybe it was that. Was it an act of protest against a war he doesn't like? Maybe. Was it out of anguish, or perhaps guilt, over being a less-than-perfect father? Maybe. Was it, as Melida says one afternoon when Arredondo has gone to Alex's grave, "poor impulse control"? Maybe it was that, too, he says when he returns, hands dirty, eyes shiny, retreating again to the room of portraits and e-mails.

He says he understands the meaning of grief now; less clear to him is the meaning of recovery.

"How am I going to feel better?" he says. "I have no idea."

It is a question not only for Arredondo, but for all of the survivors of the 1,300 U.S. troops killed so far in the Iraq war, the relatives who in those first moments scream and weep and slam the door and collapse. "The beginning of the war" is how Maj. Scott Mack, whose platoon members delivered the news to Arredondo, describes it.

And then come all the moments after, when "emotions become behaviors," says Tom Hannon, who counsels veterans and their families in Boston. The "profoundly depressed" mother of a Vietnam War veteran who has visited her son's grave every day for more than 30 years. The father of a Vietnam veteran who insisted that the name of his dead son never be mentioned again. "What's your responsibility?" Hannon says he asks parents. "Is it to flounder and fail, or is it conduct yourself in a way that honors your boy or girl? It's the difference between being a victim and a healthy survivor."

"Here are five criteria for recovery," says Robert Weiss, a senior fellow at the University of Massachusetts's Gerontology Institute in Boston and an expert on bereavement. "You regain internal comfort, which means you are not assailed by painful thoughts. Second, you regain the ability to experience gratification. Third, you have energy for daily life. Fourth, you find your social roles have meaning; you're not just going through the motions. And fifth, you can treat the future as if it has meaning. You can plan. You may even hope."

That's what recovery is, Weiss says, a person's return to his previous level of functioning, but reaching such a point takes "longer than anybody thinks" and only increases in difficulty when recovery is from the death of a child. "If you ask people who have had kids who died, they'll tell you that you don't get over it, you get used to it," he says. "There is a kind of persistent ache. There is a sense of having failed the kid somehow. There's just a complicated set of feelings of helplessness, self-blame and sometimes rage."

Where, then, is Arredondo in this, whose son is dead, whose other son won't talk to him, whose ex-wife is furious at him, whose wife is begging for money for him, and who spends most of his day in a room he has converted into a shrine? How far has he come? How far does he have to go?

"I really love my son," he says, at the cemetery one day, stamping his foot three times on Alex's grave.

He visits the grave every other day. He has decorated it with roses, carnations, Alex's pictures, Alex's letters, a temporary headstone that he made from two discarded pieces of wood and 13 American flags.

"If he were to come right now, he would kiss me on the mouth, he would kiss me on the cheeks, he would kiss me on the mouth again," Arredondo says. "That's how we said hello."

He stamps his foot again, hard enough for the ground to vibrate.

"Hello," he calls.

The Day His Life Changed

He was, until Aug. 25 of last year, a healthy, normal man. He worked. He played soccer. He loved, rather than obsessed.

Alex was his firstborn, and the photos that Arredondo is constantly looking at show how close they were, at least in the first years of Alex's life. There they are at home, asleep next to each other, in a part of Boston called Jamaica Plain. There they are at Boston's swan boats. There they are in New York, on a playground near the World Trade Center. There they are in Costa Rica, visiting where Carlos was born.

He sneaked into the United States when he was 19. He married Victoria in 1983. In 1984 they had Alex, in 1987 they had Brian, and then came a divorce punctuated by accusations and a long-running custody battle, which still defines their relationship, even as they grieve. During Alex's teenage years, Arredondo was living in Florida with Melida, prohibited by court order from direct contact. He returned to Boston in 2000, resumed contact with his sons, moved back to Florida early last year to start a construction business, and, on Aug. 25, his birthday, just after lunch, was in the front yard of the house he and Melida bought, waiting for Alex to call, when here came the Marine van.

"We're looking for the family of Alexander Arredondo," he remembers one of the Marines saying. "I am the family," he said, and then "it was like my heart went all the way to the ground."

From the time of notification to the time of the fire took, he imagines, 20 minutes. He remembers running into the back yard, sitting in the grass, phoning Melida, phoning Brian, standing up, sitting back down and standing up again. He remembers going into the front yard and asking the Marines to leave. He remembers picking up a hammer. He remembers picking up a gasoline can and a propane torch. He remembers a Marine saying, "Sir, don't do that," and then he was in the van, first smashing windows, then splashing gasoline, and then igniting the torch, perhaps accidentally, perhaps intentionally, perhaps suicidally, perhaps, perhaps. "I just feel this explosion," he says, describing what happened next. "It threw me out of the van, and immediately I feel the flames all over me. I feel the sensation of burning. The sensation I was on fire.

"I remember that they grabbed me and held me down while I was screaming, and my mother was trying to take off my shirt, and I keep telling my mother, 'My feet are burning.'

"I remember somebody else grabbing me by the back of my pants and picking me up, and they were dragging me, my feet were dragging, and then the person was on top of me, and he was holding me down on the ground.

"I remember suddenly Melida was there, and she said, 'Carlos, can you see?' And I kept saying, 'Oh, Alex,' and Melida, she said, 'Don't fight it, don't fight it anymore, don't fight it, don't fight it.'

"And then, when I started getting a little more tranquil, because Melida was there, I think I passed out."

The bill for the hospital with the burn unit was $43,710.46. The bill for the ambulance was $487.50. The bill for an initial psychological evaluation was $250. The bill for another hospital, whose emergency room he was taken to initially, was $9,952, the latest reminder of which has shown up in the day's mail. Melida, a nursing home administrator who has been out of work since Aug. 25, puts it in a stack of letters, including one from a hospital informing them that a lien has been placed on their house.

"Carlos," she says, "are we going to see Alex?"

"Yes," he says.

In the bedroom, he coats himself with antibiotic cream and sunblock, and grabs a handful of Alex's letters to pass out to whomever he sees. In the living room, Melida says, not joking, exhausted, "I need to know -- is this normal behavior?"

They get in the car and drive past the church that donated furniture and rent money to them when they came back to Boston for the funeral and then decided to stay on for a while to be closer to Brian, who is living with Victoria in Bangor, Maine.

They turn onto the road they were driving along the day that Arredondo's mother, in the back seat, soon after the funeral, suddenly began kicking and screaming, and broke down in front of their eyes.

"I've never seen my mother like that," Arredondo says.

They drive past the funeral home where Alex's wake was held, go past the restaurant where the fundraiser will take place and follow the same zigzagging route to the cemetery they followed on the day of the funeral.

"He was so naive, you know?" Arredondo says. He looks at one of the photos he has brought with him, a close-up of a young man who lived until he was 20 years and 20 days old, who had a girlfriend named Sheila, who liked to sing, who enlisted 25 days before 9/11 and was one of the first Marines into Baghdad. "He was a nice person," Arredondo says, reducing 20 years and 20 days to a sorrowful compliment, and describes the last time he saw him, in his casket. "They allowed me off the stretcher and I saw the back of his head. He had a big opening," he says, and how many times since has he wondered about the exact cause of that?

Later, back home, while Melida works on arrangements for the fundraiser, Arredondo receives a call from a friend of Alex who mentions that he recently spoke with Brian.

"You talked to him?" Arredondo says. "I haven't heard from him. In a month. He was quiet? He was taking it hard? Why do you say that? He sounded very sad?"

Next, he writes a letter.

"Brian, please call me," he writes. "Come to visit. Please. I miss you. I love you very much. Call me. Your dad, Carlos L. Arredondo."

Next he calls Victoria.

"This is Carlos," he says. "I would like to talk to you, please. And I need to talk to Brian, please. I would like to talk to all of you, please."

He hangs up. "They didn't pick up," he says. His hands are shaking. The doctors have told him to take deep breaths when this happens. He takes deep breaths. "What am I supposed to do?" he says. "I've already lost one son. Now I will lose another?"

A Mother's 20 Minutes

"So how's it going?" Victoria remembers Alex saying when he telephoned her from Najaf, 15 hours before he died. "I laughed and said, 'Okay,' and then I said, 'So how are you doing, honey? Are you eating?' " And soon after that, a Marine van was pulling up in front of her house.

A little yellow house on a busy road in Bangor -- that's where Victoria Foley is living now to be away from her ex-husband and Boston, and that's where the van arrived about the same time another van was arriving at Arredondo's house in Florida. The Marines had timed it perfectly except for one thing: Only Brian, 17, was home. The Marines wouldn't tell him why they were there, but of course he knew, and then his father was on the phone saying, "Brian, the Marines are here," and then Victoria was in the front yard and Brian was saying to her, "I'm sorry, Mom, I'm sorry, Mom," and now her recovery is underway, too.

A mother's recovery: "Ah geez," she keeps saying. She has a quiet, sad voice, sad eyes, sad posture, sad everything, and knows it, which doesn't change a thing. "I have days when I feel someone has put a thousand weights on me," she says. "I have days when I don't even want to think because it takes too much effort. I call them Alex days."

Her ex-husband has his wounds; she has hers. Her ex-husband has his images of Alex; she has hers:

Alex is 6, and Carlos is gone, and she, Alex and Brian spend night after night sleeping with one another on the couch.

Alex is 10 and has an announcement. "Mom, I'm no longer a little boy," he says. "And his teeth were still little," is what Victoria remembers about that.

Alex is 17 and is asking Victoria to sign his enlistment papers so he can join the Marines. "This is what he wanted," she says. "Why would I not allow it when it's such a good and noble thing?"

Alex is 19 and about to leave for his second tour in Iraq and is trying to explain to her what to do if he dies, "and I said, 'I can't. I can't do that,' and I went to the sink and did the dishes."

Alex is 20 years and 20 days old, and Carlos is on the phone telling her that if she hadn't signed the papers, Alex would still be alive.

She sits in the chair where she sat when the Marines told her that Alex was dead, in the chair she sometimes just sits in, looking around. There's Alex's picture. "What a handsome guy, huh?" she says.

There's the phone, with an answering machine filled with a father's messages, all of which Brian listened to. "He said, 'I know I should call, but . . .' So I took him off the hook. I said, 'Your father's not very healthy right now. Maybe it's better not to talk to him.' And he said okay, and you could see him lighten up."

There's the TV, the reason for so much of Brian's confusion.

"Turn on the TV!" Melida said into the cell phone that day, speaking loudly to Brian because of a hovering news helicopter from which pictures were going live across the country.

And so Brian, in Maine, turned on the TV.

"That's my father!" he said. "That's my father!"

"He saw his father shaking, on the stretcher," Victoria says. "He thought he was going to lose both of them that day. I can't imagine what he was feeling. I don't even know what I was feeling, except: What are you doing!

"The first thing I said was, 'Oh, my God.' And the second thing I said was, 'You bastard.' "

Her ex-husband's reaction -- everyone knows his 20 minutes. He is the man who set himself on fire.

Victoria's reaction -- no one knows it. This is what it was:

"I stood up. I sat down. I stood up. I sat down. I kept doing that. I probably did that for 10 minutes. For 20 minutes. I have no idea. I don't know what I was trying to do. I guess I was trying to feel okay."

Recovery, Maybe

The list for the benefit is up to 500 people, including City Council members and neighborhood friends. There will be a computer with a looping slide show of photos of Alex as a baby, as a boy, as a young man, as a Marine, as a baby. The suggested donation will be $20, to go to a fund for medical bills or toward a scholarship fund named for Alex. The deejay will play subdued music, and there will be 1,000 copies of one of Alex's letters, which, the night before the benefit, Arredondo is folding into envelopes.

"Nine hundred sixty to go," he says after he has been at it for a while.

The next morning, he is up at 5:30, and while Melida sleeps, he looks at some of the sympathy cards he has received. One person wrote a message of condolence on a napkin and enclosed $25; another sent $7 that she said she was going to spend at McDonald's; another sent $1,000. All totaled, the contributions have come to about $8,000, which Arredondo has mixed feelings about accepting, just as he has mixed feelings about the benefit itself. "It doesn't feel right," he says.

Eight thousand dollars, however, is not $50,000, and so by sundown he is in a coat and tie and loosely tied sneakers and long pants that sandpaper his skin as he moves among the people who, for whatever reason, have shown up to see the man who set himself on fire.

There are not 1,000 people in attendance, only a hundred or so. They are generous, though, and have donated nearly $5,000 by the time Arredondo thanks them for coming and says to them, "I have people ask me, 'What happened in Florida?' I cannot really tell you what happened."

He also says, "There's a lot of families out there, they're thinking their kids are going to be safe, and the truth of the matter is everybody's at risk."

There is applause, there are nods, there are some tears; and then it's over and Arredondo is in the car, going by the funeral home where he stopped in the other night for no reason and ended up praying over the body of a stranger; and then he is home, sleeping separately from Melida because they are afraid that if they are together she will touch his leg; and then it is morning, and the phone is ringing, and he is answering it, and he is momentarily unable to speak.

"Victoria?" he says.

Much later, after he and Victoria have talked for two hours, and he has asked about Brian, and Victoria has said that the day will come when he will call, Arredondo will say that for the first time since Alex's death he felt something lifting in him. But for now, he talks without anger, without bitterness, with his eyes shut, to the mother of his dead son.

"Do you know I have two pictures of Alex in the casket?" he says at one point. "They're helping me. To accept what happened."

"They're helping?" she says.

"Yes," he says.

Later:

"How did you handle it?" he asks.

"How did I handle it?" she says.

"Yes," he says.

"I cried a lot," she says.

Later:

"I think I was angry at a lot of things," he says. "I was angry that I don't have my boy anymore. But I wasn't saying it was your fault. I understand it was his choice."

Later:

"I think it's beautiful where he is," he says.

"It's a very nice spot," she says.

And finally:

"Well, thank you for calling me."

He puts the phone down. He is sitting at the table with Melida's computer on it, upon which the slide show of Alex's photos is playing. Alex in the casket. Alex the Marine. Alex riding a bicycle. Alex asleep in the embrace of his father. Alex on the day he was born.

"How about a trip?" Melida says after a while.

"Yeah," Arredondo says. "That would be nice."

At the cemetery, there are several inches of fresh snow. The grave, soft in August, is hard now, and this time when Arredondo stamps his foot -- hello Alex, hello Alex, hello Alex -- the snow flies into the air. Up it goes, onto the reddened skin of his legs, an unexpected explosion of cold, and maybe that's why the man who set himself on fire is suddenly shivering and wondering: Is this how it feels to feel better?

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

 

Friends help family cope with loss of Marine son in Iraq By Jack Encarnacao, Globe Correspondent  |  November 12, 2004 If he were alive today, Lance Corporal Alexander Arredondo would probably be fighting alongside fellow Marines in Fallujah, the war-torn Iraqi city where Arredondo's marine unit is battling insurgents for control. "He would want to be with his buddies," said Melida Arredondo, of Roxbury, the wife of Alexander's father. "He really believed in the cause of helping the Iraqi people. Nowadays, it's really amazing to be see such idealism and altruism." Corporal Arredondo, 20, was killed Aug. 25 in Najaf, Iraq, by hostile gunfire on his second tour of duty. Friends from the Boston neighborhoods where Arredondo and his family lived and worked gathered at the Milky Way Lounge in Jamaica Plain last night for a quiet and intimate Veterans Day memorial. City Councilor John Tobin commemorated the upcoming dedication of Arredondo Memorial Square along South Street in Jamaica Plain, where Arredondo spent his early years. "It's a way to memorialize someone who made the ultimate sacrifice, and it's done in a place where they played ball with their friends. It's a lasting tribute," Tobin said. Funds were collected to support the family and for a memorial scholarship to be offered to students at Blue Hills Regional Technical High School in Canton, which Arrendondo attended. After graduating in 2002, he joined the military. "This event is somewhat of a blessing because it's a distraction from the pain," Melida Arredondo said. The Arredondos' pain has ebbed and flowed since the late August afternoon when the family, living in Hollywood, Fla., where Melida Arredondo's ailing mother was being treated, learned that Alexander had been shot in the head during combat. When Carlos Arredondo learned of his son's death, he grabbed a can of gasoline and a propane torch and lit himself on fire in a military van parked in front of his house, suffering burns on over one-quarter of his body. Last night, Carlos Arredondo, a native of Costa Rica, displayed a scrapbook of news clippings from his home country and Boston documenting his son's death. A slide show documenting Alexander's life in Boston and the South Shore was screened. As the American death toll continues to rise in Iraq, the Arredondo family attempts to reconcile uneasiness with the war with pride in their fallen son. "We are conflicted, my husband especially," Melida Arredondo said. "You've never met anyone as patriotic as my husband. He wants to support this country, but he just lost a child. It's a very difficult place to be."

A father's unbearable pain By Ralph Ranalli and Amie Parnes, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent  |  August 27, 2004 Melida Arredondo fell in love with her husband-to-be the moment she saw him with his two sons. Carlos Arredondo's devotion to them was unwavering, she said, throughout their marriage and life together in Boston, and it continued unabated after Alex, the eldest son, joined the Marine Corps. Alex Arredondo had always wanted to be a Marine, family and friends said, even while the 20-year-old Norwood native attended Blue Hills Regional Technical School in Canton. He fulfilled his dream when he joined the Corps in 2002 and had already served one tour of duty in Iraq before shipping out again early this summer. His family preserved on videotape the last time they saw him, in January when the couple dropped off their 20-year-old Marine at Logan International Airport for a trip back to his base at Camp Pendleton, Calif. Melida Arredondo said she remembers "looking at those big green eyes and praying" that her stepson would be safe. But the couple's worst fears were realized when a van full of Marines in dress uniforms pulled up in front of their house in Hollywood, Fla., on Wednesday, where they moved last spring to care for Melida Arredondo's ailing mother. She said her husband knew instantly they were bearing news that would crack the foundations of his world: Lance Corporal Alexander Arredondo had been killed in action. Then, in what may become one of the enduring images of grief in the homeland over American lives lost in Iraq, Carlos Arredondo broke into the Marines' van and set it and himself ablaze with a can of gasoline and a propane torch. "He knew what they were going to say" before they told him, his wife said yesterday. "He had a very close bond with his son, and he did not take the news very well. He was in pain, so much pain. He just heard that his son had died and he lost it. "He didn't feel like he had enough time with his kid," she said. "Alex was too young. He was so young." Melida Arredondo blinked back tears as she spoke of her stepson yesterday outside Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Inside, her husband was in serious condition in a burn unit, suffering from severe burns over 26 percent of his body. In Massachusetts yesterday, friends and teachers remembered the young Marine from his childhood in the suburbs south of Boston, calling him warm, idealistic, and 100 percent committed to serving in the military. "The world's going to be a lot colder place without him," said Jerry Sass, a veteran teacher in the electrical program at Blue Hills Regional who taught Arredondo, a 2002 graduate. Sass described Arredondo as a rugged-looking but sensitive young man who showed an above-average aptitude for electrical work. Arredondo was not involved in school sports or other extracurricular activities, Sass said, but studied martial arts outside school, a passion shared by Sass that the two often discussed. Sass said he was surprised when Arredondo informed him, in 2002, that he had enlisted in the Marines, because the teenager was so quiet and laid-back. "To be honest with you, he was the type of kid I wouldn't think would join the Marines," Sass said. "But I guess his grandfather was in the Marines, and he wanted to follow in his grandfather's footsteps." "He would have made a great husband and a great father," he said. "He was just a great person." Arredondo visited Sass at the school three times after graduating, first after completing boot camp, then after returning from his first tour of duty in Iraq, and then last fall, prior to being redeployed to Iraq, Sass said. During the second visit, Arredondo spent a couple of hours with Sass and a few other teachers in the electrical program discussing his experience in Iraq, including how he helped train Iraq's new police force. "He wasn't scared at all," Sass said. "He felt he was trained well and was prepared for it. . . . I think he really believed in what he was doing." Officials at the Canton school yesterday posted a tribute to Arredondo on the school's website and shared photographs of him with the news media, including a picture of the then-18-year-old sporting a new buzz cut and smiling back at the camera as he stepped up into a bus bound for the Marine Corps training base at Parris Island, S.C. "Look at the kid getting on that bus," Blue Hills Superintendent-Director Kenneth M. Rocke said. "That's not a kid having second thoughts." In fact, during his senior year, Arredondo received the school's First Lieutenant Michael P. Quinn Award, an accolade given to an outstanding student who plans to enter the Marine Corps, Rocke said. The school is now planning a memorial service to further honor his service, he said. Sass said that Arredondo's mother, Victoria Foley, called him yesterday to thank him for mentoring Arredondo, the teacher said. "I told her he was a great kid, and it was a pleasure having a student like that," said Sass, who has three teenaged sons. Foley could not be reached at her home in Bangor yesterday, but she told the Patriot Ledger of Quincy that her son wanted to be a Marine beginning at age 16. Foley and Carlos Arredondo were divorced in the late 1980s, friends said. Carlos Arredondo's condition was upgraded yesterday from critical to serious, and his trauma surgeon, Dr. Louis Pazano, said that he was "doing very well." "He is alert, oriented, and responding," Pazano said. Friends and acquaintances described Carlos Arredondo, a native of Costa Rica, as a friendly man intensely proud of his heritage. Edward Grimes, the director of the Uphams Corner Health Center where both Melida Arredondo and Alex's brother both worked, said the family was sometimes stressed by Carlos Arredondo's difficulty finding steady work as a truck driver and in construction. With her stepson dead and her husband hospitalized, Melida Arredondo was clear yesterday where she placed the blame for her family's tragedy. "The war needs to end," she said. "They're sending these kids over there, and they're dying." Jonathan Saltzman of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Parnes reported from Hollywood, Fla.