Crawford, Texas – Larry Mattlage is tired of all the commotion at the anti-war camp across the road from his ranch house. He wants all the cars out of his ditch and the war protesters, the pro-war demonstrators and the media to leave.
So he’s closed the iron gate to his small spread outside of town and posted “Sorry, We’re Closed” and “Help Wanted” signs. And on Sunday morning, as Cindy Sheehan and a small gathering of other anti-war supporters prepared for a worship service, he stood in his goat pasture and fired a shotgun into the air.
“I’m getting ready for dove season,” he said when reporters pressed him. “I’m practicing.”
His message, though, was unmistakable as he talked on.
“These neighbors out here are upset,” he said. “I don’t want nobody getting hurt. I just want them to pack the … tents and go where they came from.”
Within minutes of his shotgun blast, sheriff’s deputies and Secret Service agents, who protect President Bush at his nearby ranch, rushed in. And McLennan County Sheriff Larry Lynch said he counseled Mattlage to exercise some restraint.
“He’s on his own property,” Lynch said. But he warned that Mattlage can’t just “shoot across the road.”
The situation began Aug. 6 when Sheehan pitched camp at the fork in the road about 3 miles south of the president’s Prairie Chapel Ranch and vowed to stay until Bush, who’s spending most of the month in Texas, meets with her to talk about the war in Iraq.
Her son, Army Spec. Casey Sheehan, was killed in the war last year, and she and other families met with the president a couple of months later at Fort Lewis, Wash. Now, she’s seeking a new meeting, she says, to confront him on what she sees as an unjust war.
“It is disruptive,” Sheehan acknowledged after Mattlage’s complaints about the camp. “But George Bush is the one who caused the disruption, not us.”
The White House had no comment Sunday, referring inquiries to local law enforcement authorities.
“Look,” said Mattlage, who has a longstanding deal with NBC News for a view from his spread of the president’s ranch, “when they first came out here, I was sympathetic to their cause. They, as American citizens, have a right to march and to protest.”
But “they’re just like company,” he said.
“If you had had your brother- in-law in your house for five days, wouldn’t it start stinking after a while?”
