Nicholas Roger's dad asks for meeting with Bush

Robert Rogers doesn't know what he'll say, but he wants five minutes to talk with the president.

The Deltona deputy fire chief whose son died in Iraq this week made the request to U.S. Rep. John Mica, R-Winter Park, who called to express his condolences.

"The person ultimately responsible needs to know Nicholas, needs to put a life to a number," Robert Rogers said Friday.

Mica's office said the congressman is passing the request on to the president, who has granted requests to meet with some parents of soldiers in the past. Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, of Vacaville, Calif., has gained national media attention for her unsuccessful attempts to meet with Bush and discuss the war in Iraq since her son Casey was killed there in 2004.

Rogers said his goal is simply to have the president know who his son was.

He spoke for the first time Friday about his son, killed Sunday while on combat patrol in Baghdad. Nicholas Rogers' unit was ambushed by indirect fire, small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, according to Army officials.

When two Army captains came to his door Sunday with the news of his son's death, they told Robert Rogers that the secretary of the Army expresses his condolences. Rogers said he thought, "He doesn't even know who my son is."

Rogers, who has been with Deltona Fire for 25 years, realizes that managers sometimes forget about the rank and file.

"I just want him [the president] to be able to put a face with a name," Rogers said.

He said he knows there are a lot of things about world politics he doesn't get, but Rogers doesn't understand why soldiers are patrolling dangerous areas on foot with all the technology available to them.

"What we're doing now is obviously not working. I just think we need to find a better solution to what is going on," he said of the current situation in Iraq.

Nicholas Rogers, 27, was the "kind of kid any dad would love to have."

And he became a dad that worshipped his daughter and was excited about his second one, due in February.

"If anything really changed his life, it was definitely Jocelyn," Robert Rogers said as he thumbed through photographs of his son and granddaughter -- pictures of her third birthday, making her first snowman at Fort Drum, N.Y., the two of them decorating a Christmas tree, a trip to Sea World.

All of them show Nicholas with a beaming smile. "Pictures are worth a thousand words," Robert Rogers said with tears in his eyes.

Rogers said he sees a lot of his son in his granddaughter, his "princess."

Rogers' body is coming home Monday to Orlando International Airport.

From the Orlando Sentinel

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