It's ironic that at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning, August 28, in Cherry Hill, Central Park, while an exhibition of 971 pairs of combat boots were being assembled around the fountain, Dick Cheney - whose personal entanglement with Iraq, Halliburton, and its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) is questionable at best - was on his way to Madison Square Garden to check the podium for his acceptance speech this week.

The exhibit of combat boots was created by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization. AFSC's exhibit, Eyes Wide Open, is a glimpse of the human cost of war. The boots represent the number of U.S. military personnel killed to date in the Iraq war. The exhibit began touring in March 2004 with 504 pairs of boots. On Saturday morning there were 971. The exhibit will tour until March 2005, and with each viewing the number of boots displayed will undoubtedly rise.

Unlike a conventional gallery, this exhibition existed in a gallery surrounded by trees and lit by the sun. The boots are assembled on thin precision lines drawn inside a circle, with chalk. All lines point to the center. Boots are organized by state, and tagged with a soldier's name, age, rank, and home state. The state represented by the most boots is California, followed by Texas. Some have a soldier's photograph attached. If you know people who have been killed, it's easy to locate them. On Saturday morning, a woman knelt on the ground in front of a pair of boots and wept.

There are three sections to the circular exhibit. The wide, outer circle is filled with long lines of combat boots. The smallest circle closest to the fountain contains additional lines of boots. In the center, caught between the rows of combat boots, are hundreds of civilian shoes. Sneakers, sandals, a child's rain boots, baby shoes. Ladies' dress shoes, men's work shoes. One thousand pairs of civilian shoes representing a fraction of the estimated 16,000 Iraqis killed in the war to date. There is no count of the Iraqi death toll. Their deaths are not being documented.

Dick Cheney has a link to these boots, by association, through Halliburton and KBR. According to the Chicago Tribune, KBR, located in Houston, is hiring 350 people each week and shipping them to Iraq: "They journey by the hundreds each week to a cavernous warehouse tucked inside Houston's rusting industrial district: the unemployed, the underemployed, the blue-collar fathers struggling to make ends meet and the single mothers with preschoolers in tow."

Thirty thousand workers, enough to create a small city, have already been shipped there. "So acute is the need, and so frenetic is the hiring pace, that job applicants can show up for one of KBR's open-house job fairs on a Friday, begin training Monday, and fly to Iraq two weeks later. The company is hiring 350 fresh employees each week, with no end in sight."

Many of the people are desperate. The promise of $80,000 a year and a possible chance to dig their family from poverty, despite unbelievable working conditions, lure them to KBR:

"They will work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. They will sleep in tents, in 120-degree deserts, often with no air conditioning. They will risk being kidnapped, shot at, and blown up."

They are the American poor, the lower class. They will risk death, imprisonment, and land mines. For many it is their only hope. Conveniently, there are no jobs for them at home. Conveniently, that is, for Halliburton.

If you do the math, the war in Iraq began approximately 18 months ago, in March 2003. To date 971 military personnel have been killed, which averages out to nearly 54 per month. But since KBR is hiring 350 more people each week and sending them to Iraq, there's an unending supply to replace the empty boots. These people are expendable, throwaways, a segment of society trapped in a pen of unemployment and poverty. An unending supply, like fast food.

The exhibit in Central Park resembles a cemetery, a mass grave with 2,000 bodies. It could be a cruel mirage, an illusion, but tragically, it's not.

A few years ago I worked with David Copperfield, the magician. The field of shoes looked like a Copperfield trick...there'd be a flash of laser light, the sound of drum rolls, Copperfield would wave his hands, and people who'd disappeared in a puff of smoke just a few seconds earlier would magically reappear laughing and waving. Copperfield is a genius magician, but this is all he is, an illusionist. He can't create a human being. Maybe he uses identical twins instead? These deaths are permanent. No one is bringing them back.

Few people walked through the display, most lingered on the outside, speaking quietly or silently staring. Workers separated mounds of boots and moved them to appropriate sections. A pair on a bench to my left had a tag attached with the name "Martin." In another area, a woman called out to a co-worker, "I have an extra pair of boots, I have an extra pair," as if she held a life in her hand. There would undoubtedly, and unfortunately, be a name attached to the pair before the month was over, possibly within the hour.

A woman in running clothes jogged through the display. She moved her head to the beat of the music coming from her headphones, oblivious to the symbols of death at her feet. As she jogged by, and without addressing anyone in particular, she called out, "What's going on? Is this some kind of demo?"

Dick Cheney was in town that night. Police were surrounding and filling and overpowering the streets of New York. Helicopters were circling the city. They were in place to protect Dick Cheney's right to speak. But what happened to the rights of others: "the unemployed, the underemployed, the blue-collar fathers struggling to make ends meet and the single mothers with preschoolers in tow."? The people who once wore the black combat boots, the child who wore rain boots, the woman with sandals, the men who wore dress shoes, the children in slippers. What happened to their rights?

What happened to the rights of people who want to assemble on sidewalks and scream in voices pulled from thunder: "We don't want your war. We don't want your war!"? Why do they have to risk imprisonment? Why are they denied permits to say, "I don't like what you're doing! What you're doing is immoral, unjust, and a crime." What happened to The Bill of Rights?

When we are prevented from publicly questioning a government, when we speak at the risk of imprisonment, we have stepped over a thin chalk line and entered a state of fascism. Fascism is like an iceberg - the most dangerous part is hidden. And in Central Park the black boots grow beneath the fountain, row by row.

Author's note: (Since writing this essay five days ago, the number of U.S. military personnel killed in the Iraq war has risen from 971 to over 1,000.)

Magie Dominic is author of 'The Queen of Peace Room', nominated Book of the Year, Foreword Magazine; The Judy Grahn Award for best non-fiction; and for the CWSA Award. (Wilfrid Laurier University Press).

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