In the Name of the Sons

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

On a cold night last October, two men stood shoulder to shoulder in front of a small crowd sitting silently in a sparsely furnished room in Flatlands, Brooklyn.

Marlowe Fletcher was the shorter of the two. He wore a leather jacket decorated with an eagle surrounded by the sentence “The nation which forgets its heroes will itself be forgotten.” A military cap covered his grey hair. The taller man, Oslen Hill, stood at Fletcher’s right. Hill’s dreadlocks hung over the collar of his black suit.

The two men barked a command as they saluted a coffin draped in the American flag. Then they looked at each other, and they hugged.

Fletcher and Hill did not know each other. The former was sixty years old, Jewish, divorced, and retired. He lived in Island Park, an 89 percent white village on New York’s Long Island. The latter was born on the island of Jamaica in 1963. In 2005 he left his home in Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up, and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, to work as an equipment repairman in a post office.

Fletcher was a strong supporter of President George W. Bush’s administration and of the United States’ military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hill had always felt inspired by the images of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X that hung on the wall at home. He had cheered Barack Obama’s election.

They were both veterans.

They both had experienced war.

Fletcher served in the United States Air Force in Vietnam. Hill enlisted at twenty-two and served as a paratrooper in the First Gulf War, in the 82nd Airborne Division.

They were both fathers.

They each had lost a son, fallen in war.

Army Private First Class Jacob Samuel Fletcher was born on November 25, 1974. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, he enlisted in the army. He was a member of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, based at Camp Ederle, in Italy. During the first week of the war, he parachuted into Baghdad, one of the first Americans to land in Iraq. On November 13, 2003, a roadside bomb destroyed the bus in which he was riding in the town of Samara, on the east bank of the Tigris River. He died twelve days shy of his twenty-ninth birthday.

Specialist Kevin Oslen Hill was born on June 14, 1986. In 2008, after his graduation from college, he announced to his family his decision to join the military. As a specialist of the 576th Engineer Company, based in Fort Carson, Colorado, he served in Iraq and then was deployed in Afghanistan. On October 4, 2009, Hill was on patrol at Contingency Outpost in Dehanna, near the southeastern Pakistan border, when his unit was attacked. Hill was shot in the head and killed. He was twenty-three.

On the night of October 16, 2009, in a cold room at the John J. McManus & Sons funeral home in Flatlands, family, friends, and fellow soldiers gathered for Kevin Hill’s funeral.

Marlowe Fletcher was there. Since Jacob’s death, he had attended the wakes, funerals, and memorial services of every fallen soldier from New York City and Long Island. “It’s our job to support the families,” he murmured. “It’s what we do.”

As Kevin’s life was celebrated, Fletcher stood toward the back of the room with a small group of other Gold Star fathers and mothers—parents who, like Marlowe Fletcher and Oslen Hill, have lost a son in war. At the end of the ceremony, servicemen and women paid their final respects at Kevin’s casket.

When it was Fletcher’s turn, he paused in front of the coffin. He turned to Oslen Hill, who sat bent over, his head between his knees. Fletcher reached for his hand and helped him to stand. Together, they gave their last tribute to Specialist Kevin Oslen Hill, as veterans do, as soldiers do.

Many veterans and many fathers have stood in front of many other coffins, feeling the same despair experienced by Marlowe Fletcher and Oslen Hill.

For a father to outlive a son is an unfair, almost unbearable burden. Yet, for a military father, the grief is compounded by additional emotions, some even harder to bear. Often, a son enlists to follow his father’s example. Morten G. Ender, director of the sociology program at the United States Military Academy at West Point, estimates that 10 to 15 percent of military personnel come from military families. “There is a long tradition of valuing military service,” Ender says. “A big value is placed in this legacy. You don’t want to be the first who breaks this long tradition.”

But today, a man’s role and his way to face emotions have been redefined. “There is a new generation of fathers that are now more involved with their sons,” says Ender. These parents, sometimes deprived of their past certainties, have to find their own, new paths to facing their loss.

For some such fathers there is, at least, the sense of pride in the sacrifices their sons have made, and the knowledge of their heirs’ heroism. For other fathers, however, there is just the profound pain that accompanies a sense of guilt—guilt for having laid down the footsteps in which their sons followed.

From the depths of grief, some military fathers pursue the path of patriotism. They crusade for the wars in which their sons served so that victory can redeem their sacrifice. Other fathers come to see war itself as senseless and dedicate themselves to saving other families from a similar fate.

In all cases, these middle-aged military men must somehow deal with their deep emotions. And that, unlike marching on the parade ground or fighting on a battlefield, is something they never trained to do.

Derek

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In the Name of the Sons