STATESVILLE, N.C. – Row after row, more than 3,400 white crosses stand in a Statesville park this weekend, offering a silent salute to every American who has died in Iraq.

Near the front is one with the name Steven Sirko, a 20-year-old Army private who died in 2005, three months after arriving. He’s buried a few blocks away.

His mother, Summer Lipford of Statesville, organized the elaborate memorial. Called Arlington South, it’s modeled after similar tributes elsewhere.

With the help of friends, she spent two weeks building and painting the crosses. Friday, they pounded them into a grassy clearing near a creek in Mac Anderson Park near downtown. The crosses will stay through Monday.

For Lipford, 53, the memorial is a tribute to her son as well as other sons and daughters.

“These crosses are going to stand as if our soldiers were standing there,” she says. “I certainly don’t want another mother to walk my path.”

Sirko’s death, and the mystery surrounding it, have consumed the 53-year-old Indiana native. She has become a passionate critic of the war and has tried to pry answers about his death from the Pentagon.

She has met with five U.S. senators and spoken with the mother of Pat Tillman, an NFL star and Army Ranger whose death in Afghanistan sparked charges of an Army cover-up.

Gritty as her smoker’s voice, Lipford doesn’t give up easily. Salty and irreverent, she still wears the “Mother of a Soldier” dog tag her son gave her. Her voice cracks when she talks about him. Tears come with a stew of sorrow, frustration and anger.

“Your emotions,” she says, “start running into each other.”

Though she organized the memorial with friends from the liberal group MoveOn.org, Lipford insists it’s “got nothing to do with being for or against the war.”

Joe Davis, a Washington-based spokesman for the national Veterans of Foreign Wars, agrees. This week he criticized Democrat John Edwards for politicizing Memorial Day by calling for war protests. This, he says, is different.

“Some may accuse these people as trying to use the deaths for political purposes,” he says. “It’s hard to take issue with a display that is respectful and does honor to the service and sacrifice of those who died.”

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Everybody liked Steven Sirko.

Dark-haired and handsome, he played football and wrestled in high school in Catawba County. He was the youngest of four, a prankster with an impish sense of humor.

“He’s always laughing, always making people laugh,” says friend Mindi Saunders. “(There was) always a smile when he’s around.”

Sirko finished high school in Indiana, where his father lived after his parents’ divorce. He decided to forego college and enlist in the Army in January, 2003.

“He just wanted to save the world,” Saunders recalls.

Based at Fort Benning, Georgia, Sirko returned to Statesville most weekends. Once, on the occasion of a nephew’s birthday, he came home and dressed in a Spiderman costume for the party.

He trained as a medic and, in fall 2004, after a quick courtship, married a woman soldier he met on base. His mother saw him for the last time just before he was deployed in January, 2005.

“My husband said, “He’ll be fine.”‘ Lipford recalls.

“I said, “He won’t be back.”

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On April 17, 2005, Lipford watched a pair of officers walk up to her white bungalow. She rushed out the back.

“All I can remember,” she says, “is not wanting them to come in.”

They couldn’t tell her how her son died. Ten days after his funeral, an Army official told her he’d died of a self-inflicted narcotics overdose. That summer she asked for an autopsy. She says it found no trace of narcotics.

A year later, she says, the Army told her he’d accidentally injected himself with a nerve agent. She doesn’t buy it.

Army records made public say only that Sirko died of “non-combat-related injuries.” A Pentagon spokeswoman said no other information was immediately available.

Lipford has been to Washington several times to ask lawmakers for help. She’s sought comfort from other Gold Star moms, including Tillman.

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A few weeks ago, she heard a news bulletin announced from a TV in the next room. She ran in, stubbing her toe in the rush. The bulletin: The latest on Anna Nicole’s baby.

“All these soldiers are dying every day and there’s no news flash,” she says. “I never hear soldiers being talked about. People are so not touched by the war.”

She hopes this weekend, more will be.

Sometime Saturday, Lipford will do what she does every day: visit her son at Statesville’s Oakwood Cemetery.

Occasionally, she goes after midnight to make sure the candle she set on his grave is still lit.

Her son, she says, was always afraid of the dark.