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The real-life underpinnings of the story are in place. On March 16, an Israeli bulldozer killed 23-year-old Rachel Corrie in Rafah, Gaza, as she protested the army's demolition of a Palestinian home. The Israelis say Corrie was caught in churning debris and wasn't actually crushed by the vehicle, but some eyewitnesses report that the driver deliberately plowed into her. Corrie has since become an American martyr for those opposed to Israel's occupation of Palestine.
And at first glance, her parents don't seem the type to raise such a fiery activist. Her father, Craig Corrie, spent his professional life as a reinsurance actuary. He still wears argyle socks. Cindy Corrie played flute in local ensembles and devoted herself to raising her three children. She is a fan of the baroque period.
So while the clichéd script could be written from here, a talk with the couple reveals much more than two political neophytes finding their way through a suddenly complicated world.
Last month, Craig and Cindy Corrie came to Central Connecticut, appearing on local public access talk show The Other Side and speaking at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at UConn. Listen to Craig talk about his views on the insane logic of war -- molded as a combat engineer in Vietnam -- and his daughter's choice to insert herself into a war zone on the side of the vulnerable becomes more clear.
"I remember a morning we had some Vietnamese helping us fill sandbags, so there'd be probably teenagers and some older people, mostly women," Corrie says. "And it came to be lunch time, so I took them up to our chow line, and then an officer came by and he told me they were really too dirty to be in the lunch line.
"Now they weren't any dirtier than I was, but OK. Then I went back to try to get them C-rations, which you can get in a box for lunch. And he wouldn't allow that, because he said, 'Well they'll just take them to the Viet Cong. So what I ended up doing was just going through [the chow line with the Vietnamese workers] -- I think there were about seven of them, and I got somebody else to help me -- and so in two or three trips apiece, we could just go through and just get lunch."
He continues: "But, you know, that logic. The first part of it is just racist. But the second part, there may be some truth to it -- I don't know where they would take that food. I didn't really care. It seemed to be important for them to know that I wanted to feed them."
As they raised their children in Olympia, Washington, Cindy Corrie became involved in community activism, designing an alternative education program within a local public school. Both speak of their enjoyment working with other people, Craig on insurance deals, and Cindy making music.
Now, as the couple travels around the world -- speaking out against the Israeli occupation and their daughter's killing -- the personal qualities and local causes they championed are simply magnified on a larger stage.
"I think we've always been very political in a sense," Cindy says. "We've been interested, even if we haven't been activists. We've always spent a lot of time thinking about issues."
Still, the Corries are grieving parents, so the question in their lives now revolves around how to balance their public activism with some kind of normalcy.
"In some ways we've had no choice" but to get involved publicly, Cindy says. "I guess we could have just retreated somewhere, and there are times when I've wanted to do that, but I know that would not have felt right. We haven't done that, because to do that would feel so much worse. If there's a gift in our situation, it's that there are these outlets for what we're feeling."
But carving out a regular life could be all but impossible for the couple.
"I'm going to a concert on Saturday night with two of my friends, and it's the first time I've done something like that since Rachel was killed, Cindy says. "And I hope I can lose myself there a little bit, but I know that for us -- and for people that love us -- initially there's some awkwardness because things aren't the same. So you just can't go back to how they were on March 15, much as we might like to," she says, her voice choking up.
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