A Santa Rosa mom with a Marine son in Iraq called for an end to the war and a speedy return of the soldiers in an impassioned speech to an audience of more than 800 gathered at an anti-war rally Sunday.

Kathy Twers, a bookkeeper and mother of two, said she had never made a public speech before. But her love of her 21-year-old son, Jan Hulke, propelled words that left listeners at Santa Rosa's Juilliard Park cheering and clapping.

"It's a little scary for me," Twers said. "But when I feel nervous, I think of the bullets flying by my son every day. My son, who has to look at a person and decide if he's a terrorist and make a decision that he will have to live with for the rest of his life."

Hulke, a Marine corporal, is on his second tour of duty in Iraq and is patrolling the border with Syria, she said.

"If you believe in God, keep praying," Twers said. "But put a foot and a voice to those prayers and bring our troops home."

The rally at Juilliard Park climaxed a march that began in Roseland and was part of the annual Day in the Park sponsored by the Sonoma County Peace and Justice Center.

"I think we're at a critical point in Iraq. We need to get the troops out," said march organizer Barry Latham-Ponneck of Sebastopol. "It's a no-win situation. We're not making the world safer, we're making it more volatile."

Twers' plea came during a month in which both President Bush and Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry have said they will keep troops in Iraq until the country is stabilized, even past the June 30 handover of government to Iraqi leaders.

Neither Bush nor Kerry has voiced a clear-cut strategy for an exit from Iraq, but Twers said officeholders of both parties should do just that.

"The government needs to be accountable to us, and we need to be accountable to our troops," Twers said.

Many of those who watched and listened as she spoke had come to the peace rally for very personal reasons.

Fred Twers, Kathy Twers' husband, came because of the friends he lost in Vietnam. "I don't want to see it happen to another generation," said Fred Twers, who owns a telecommunications company.

Edmond Joseph, owner of a Glen Ellen landscaping business, sat on a blanket beside his wife and touched his 8-week-old baby's hand.

"I'm here for Ruby," Joseph said of his tiny daughter. "I want peace for her. And if it doesn't start with her parents, how will it get to her?"

His wife, Theresa Schulz, said she came because of her father, who was a 17-year-old sailor on the USS West Virginia in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked in 1941.

"Those images stayed with him all his life. The wounds from war run deep," said Schulz, holding her little daughter in her lap. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone."

Across the park, seated in a wheelchair, 90-year-old Ruth Hess wore a white straw hat and held a blue and white sign, "War is Not the Answer."

"I don't think war accomplishes anything," said Hess, who has watched the nation in battle from World War II to Iraq. "You have to learn to understand one another. Killing only creates sadness and anger."

Hess lives in Chicago but was visiting her daughter Barbara Tomin of Santa Rosa. "This is the way we wanted to share the day," Tomin said.

More than a dozen groups from around the North Coast participated in the march. It was the North Coast's largest anti-war demonstration since February 2003, when protestors turned out in force, both in Sonoma County and in San Francisco, a month before the war began.

On Sunday, people from the Healdsburg Peace Project stood with the Peace and Social Justice Group from Santa Rosa's Resurrection Parish.

The Women in Black, who gather on a Sebastopol street corner to show their grief for the dead on both sides of the war, were there.

So were Women in Pink, who carried pink banners and wore women's pink slips over their slacks and shorts.

The organization, part of a national network called Code Pink, was making a pun, but not a joke, said organizer Vicky Smith of Sebastopol.

"We want to give Bush a pink slip," she said. "We want to give Bush, Ashcroft and Cheney pink slips."

Copyright © 2004 The Press Democrat

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