The Mother's Day Project

Ann Landre has organized a unique tribute to our troops. Hundreds of crafty girls around the nation are stitching the name of one woman lost in Iraq. The names will be sewn together into totes, which are designed to raise awareness in the general public as they are carried around town.

She says it best:

The [...] purpose of The Mother’s Day Project is to draw attention to the human cost of the Iraq War. While the parameters of the Project focus on women who have lost their lives serving as part of the Coalition forces in Iraq, it is not meant to exclude recognition for others who have lost their lives due to this war. Male soldiers, men, boys, girls, infants and Iraqi women have died in the thousands. They are all worthy and deserving of our attention. They were all part of the universal “us.”

This war, more than any other in my lifetime, has been removed from the collective psyche of our day-to-day lives. What we see, what we know and subsequently, what we feel is tightly controlled. [...] The Mother’s Day Project, in making the losses of war personal, changes forever the sense of disengagement.

She played dirty pool and sent me a woman sharing my name. That really made me cry.

Chief Warrant Officer (CW5) Sharon T. Swartworth, 43, of Virginia was the regimental warrant officer for the Judge Advocate General Office, based at Headquarters Department of the Army, Pentagon. She was on a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that was shot down Nov. 7, 2003, in Tikrit, Iraq.