Not in our name.

Despite the TV networks' best efforts to funnel the grief and pain of September 11 into the flask of war, not everyone who lost a loved one cooperated with this effort.

Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez's son Greg was one of the victims of the World Trade Center attack. They wrote a letter to President Bush that said, "Your response to this attack does not make us feel better about our son's death. It makes us feel worse. It makes us feel that our government is using our son's memory as a justification to cause suffering for other sons and parents in other lands."

Judy Keane's husband, Richard, was also killed in the World Trade Center attack. According to The Washington Post, "she helped organize a prayer vigil near her home." More than 5,000 people attended, the paper reported. The assault "was in retaliation for something else, and that was the retaliation for something else," she told the Post. "Are we going to continue this in perpetuity? We have to say at some point, OK, let's find another way."

Robin Theurkauf lost her husband in the attack on the World Trade Center. She now has to raise their three boys by herself. "While this attack was intended to provoke, responding in kind will only escalate the violence," she wrote in The Friend, the Quaker weekly.

Abe Zelmanowitz was the man Bush praised for staying at the side of his quadriplegic friend when the World Trade Center was hit. Zelmanowitz's nephew Matthew Lasar said he does not want "bloody vengeance." He told the Institute for Public Accuracy, "What I see coming are actions and policies that will cost many more innocent lives, and breed more terrorism, not less. I do not feel my uncle's compassionate, heroic sacrifice will be honored."

Derrill Bodley and Deborah Borza lost their daughter Deora, twenty, who was on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. At a memorial service at Santa Clara University, where Deora was a student, her parents said she would have wanted them to forgive the hijackers, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Borza read from one of her daughter's journals: "People ask whom, what, when, where, how, why. I ask peace."

"We must not retaliate in kind as if our cause allows us to," Bodley said.

Amber Amundson lost her husband, Craig Scott Amundson, when Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. He was twenty-eight and the father of their two children.

"I have heard angry rhetoric by some Americans, including many of our nation's leaders, who advise a heavy dose of revenge and punishment," she wrote in a Chicago Tribune column on September 25. "To those leaders, I would like to make clear that my family and I take no comfort in your words of rage. If you choose to respond to this incomprehensible brutality by perpetuating violence against other innocent human beings, you may not do so in the name of justice for my husband. Your words and imminent acts of revenge only amplify our family's suffering, deny us the dignity of remembering our loved one in a way that would have made him proud, and mock his vision of America as a peacemaker in the world."

Her husband was a Pentagon employee. "Craig believed that by working from within the military system he could help to maintain military focus on peacekeeping and strategic planning--to prevent violence and war," she wrote. She added: "For the last two years, Craig drove to his job at the Pentagon with a `visualize world peace' bumper sticker on his car."

Bobby Marsh lost his partner, Margaret Mattic, in the attack on the World Trade Center. "She called me immediately after the plane crash," Marsh told me. "She said she was trapped and was waiting for instructions." That was the last he heard from her.

"Margaret was someone who was fairly apolitical," he says. "Her view was we need peace, and whatever brought peace, that is what she wanted." In a letter to his daughter, Sophia, age nine, Marsh wrote: "The U.S.'s war on terrorism won't bring Margaret back."

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.