shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies.
I wrote the verses down. I would repeat them again and again until they stuck.
“And there is one more piece to this picture, children,” my mother continued. “Most of these military deaths are being executed by I-E-Ds. ‘Improvised—explosive—devices.’ It means homemade bombs. Do you remember that this evil nation bombed this church with an IED ten years ago? Back then, people didn’t even know what an IED was. And now everyone knows! That, children, is the vengeance of God. It is the picture of that verse that talks about their violence coming back on their own heads. Can somebody look that up?” It only took me a few seconds to find it.
His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.
Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.
This last piece of the puzzle was not so compelling to me. Although I understood and believed the verses about God’s avenging of His people, my mother and grandfather seemed to vastly overstate the magnitude of the bomb incident each time it came up. I was nine years old when a few college students set off a pipe bomb in our driveway, blowing small holes in the fence and in our van. The blast was strong enough to shake off heavy wall hangings just over the bassinet of my new brother, Gabe, four days old and sleeping in my parents’ bedroom just over the driveway. It had been unnerving to be sure, and perhaps I’d just grown accustomed to glossing over such incidents—but to claim that this was the cause of the suffering of the entire United States military felt exaggerated and uncomfortably arrogant. I thought it was better to focus on the main cause—that protesting soldiers’ funerals was about America’s disobedience to God, showing the causal connection between the nation’s sins and its military deaths. I suspected others felt the same, because Mom and Gramps were the only ones I ever heard making the argument about the pipe bomb.
“I understand now,” I told my mother. “What time do we leave for Omaha on Saturday?”
* * *
The military pickets quickly took over our schedule. Within ten weeks of the first funeral, Westboro had dispatched nearly two dozen groups of protesters, everywhere from Caldwell, Idaho, to Marblehead, Massachusetts. Hundreds more would come in the years that followed. We gathered a team of aunts and cousins, designing an entire apparatus whereby we could keep abreast of the protest opportunities. Given the last-minute, fast-unfolding nature of the events—the bodies would need to be buried quickly—we would have to be prepared to act in an instant. We decided that one of my aunts would monitor the deaths announced on the Department of Defense website, and assign individual soldiers to church volunteers on a rotating basis. These volunteers would then search the media for information about the soldiers as well as their funeral announcements. As soon as they had the time and place of a funeral in hand, they would call my mother or me and we’d swiftly resolve the question: Would we be able to make the trip to picket this funeral?
The result depended almost entirely on logistics. Was the funeral occurring in a place we could reach by car in ten hours or less? If so, the answer was generally yes. Were the tickets to fly there prohibitively expensive? If so, the answer was usually no. Was the funeral yesterday? Clearly, this picket was not meant to be—but we would need to be more vigilant if we didn’t want these opportunities to elude us. If a given trip seemed possible, my mother would send a message to church members and ask who, if anyone, could go. Our decisions were based on the same constraints that govern the lives of every other red-blooded American: work and school obligations, the availability of vacation time, how much travel we had already scheduled ourselves for, and money. Other than parents for their minor children, we each paid our own way. (Although on one occasion, an older cousin of mine used his work bonus to distribute birthday gift certificates granting the recipient up to $200 toward a picketing plane ticket. Elation!) If at least three people could attend, my mother and I would immediately begin assembling the necessary elements for the trip: plane tickets,