National Guard Spc. Patrick McCaffrey, 34 was killed in Iraq last week. His mother, Nadia McCaffrey, is challenging President Bush's rule that photos of her son's coffin cannot be displayed.

Her son's coffin arrived in Sacramento Sunday night. She allowed the media to take photos and encouraged the press to disseminate them.

"I don't care what [President Bush] wants," Nadia McCaffrey said of the administration's policy that bans on-base photographing of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan....Patrick "did not die for nothing," she said in a telephone interview. "The way he lived needs to be talked about. Patrick was not a fighter, he was a peacemaker."

Patrick, his mother said, had grown deeply disillusioned about the war. "He was really, really disappointed and hurt about the way Americans and Europeans were treated" in Iraq, McCaffrey said. When he called home, every two days, he also said he was ashamed by the allegations that American troops abused Iraqi prisoners. "He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there," McCaffrey told The Times in another interview, shortly after her son's death. "Even so, he wanted to be a good soldier."

Patrick was Mrs. McCaffrey's only son. RIP.