Common Folk Using Common Sense

Taken liberally from Final Salute by the Rocky Mountain News:

Somewhere in the Iraqi desert a homemade bomb exploded. Somewhere in the Iraqi desert, in the midst of the rubble, lay the body of a Marine from Colorado. And now the Marine was on a plane, an American Airlines 757, going home one last time.

According to the Department of Defense, Jim Cathey was killed in Al Karmah, Iraq, on Aug. 21. Members of his unit later told family members that Cathey was leading the search of an abandoned building when a booby-trapped door exploded. The explosion was so fierce it blew off an arm and leg of the Marine directly behind Cathey. That man, now in recovery, credits his lieutenant with saving his life.

When a young Marine in dress uniform had boarded the plane to Reno, the passengers smiled and nodded politely. None knew he had just come from the plane’s cargo hold, after watching his best friend’s casket loaded onboard.

At 24 years old, Sgt. Gavin Conley was only seven days younger than the man in the coffin. The two had met as 17-year-olds on another plane – the one to boot camp in California. They had slept in adjoining top bunks, the two youngest recruits in the barracks.

When the airline crew found out about Conley’s mission, they bumped him to first-class. He had never flown there before. Neither had Jim Cathey, and he never will again.

On the flight, the woman sitting next to him nodded toward his uniform and asked if he was coming or going. To the war, she meant. He fell back on the words the military had told him to say: “I’m escorting a fallen Marine home to his family from the situation in Iraq.”

“Never leave a Marine behind.”

When the plane landed in Nevada, the pilot asked the passengers to remain seated while Conley disembarked alone. Then the pilot told them why.

The passengers pressed their faces against the windows. Outside, a procession walked toward the plane. Passengers in window seats leaned back to give others a better view. One held a child up to watch.

From their seats in the plane, they saw a hearse and a Marine extending a white-gloved hand into a limousine, helping a pregnant woman out of the car.

On the tarmac, Katherine Cathey wrapped her arm around the major’s, steadying herself. Then her eyes locked on the cargo hold and the flag-draped casket.

Inside the plane, they couldn’t hear the screams.

Earlier a 40-year-old Marine major, Steve Beck, had received a phone call. “We have a casualty in your area,” the voice said. Steve Beck is a “casualty assistance calls officer.” It is his job to inform the family that a Marine has fallen in battle. It is his job to deliver the message no family wants to hear.

“The curtains pull away. They come to the door. And they know. They always know,” he said. “You can almost see the blood run out of their body and their heart hit the floor. It’s not the blood as much as their soul. Something sinks. I’ve never seen that except when someone dies. And I’ve seen a lot of death. They’re falling – either literally or figuratively – and you have to catch them. In this business, I can’t save his life. All I can do is catch the family while they’re falling.”

Two uniformed men had sat in a government SUV, several blocks from Katherine Cathey’s home in Brighton, and bowed their heads. Beck and Navy chaplain Jim Chapman closed their eyes in prayer as the chaplain asked for “words that will bring the family peace.”

When the knock came, Katherine Cathey was taking a nap. Her stepfather saw the Marines first and opened the door. “We’re here for Katherine,” Beck said quietly.

“Oh, no,” Vic Leonard said.

At first, Katherine’s mother thought it was someone trying to sell something. Then she saw her husband walking backward and the two men in uniform.

“Oh, no,” she said. “She’s pregnant!”

When her stepfather opened the door to her bedroom, Katherine could hear her mother crying. She thought something had happened to someone in her mother’s family. She had never heard her mother cry like that.

“What’s going on?” Katherine asked her stepfather.

“It’s not good,” he told her. “Come with me.”

Her own screams began as soon as she saw the uniforms. Katherine ran to the back of the living room and collapsed on the floor, holding her stomach, thinking of the man who would never see their baby. Finally she stood, but still couldn’t speak.

When Beck first knocked on 23-year-old Katherine Cathey’s door to notify her of her husband’s death, she glared at him, cursed him, and refused to speak to him for more than an hour. Over the next several days, he helped guide her through the grief. By the time they reached the tarmac, she wouldn’t let go.

On that tarmac in Reno, the white glove reached into the limousine, but Katherine Cathey couldn’t move.

“Katherine,” Beck said, “it’s time.”

“I’m not ready for this,” she said. “I’ll never be ready.”

Katherine looked at her mother, then at Beck, and took his hand. After climbing from the car, she steadied herself, her arm intertwined with Beck’s. Then she looked toward the plane. At the sight of the flag-draped casket, Katherine let loose a shrill, full-body wail that gave way to moans of distilled, contagious grief.

She screamed as the casket moved slowly down the conveyor belt. She screamed until she nearly collapsed, clutching Beck around the neck, her legs almost giving way.

At the base of the luggage ramp, the screams hit the pallbearers. When they lifted his casket, they struggled visibly with the weight, their eyes filling with tears as they shuffled to the white hearse.

After they placed the flag-draped coffin inside, Katherine fell onto one corner, pressing her face into the blue field of stars.

Beck put a hand on her back as she held the casket tight. By then, he was close enough to her to know that she wouldn’t let go. He kept his hand on her back until he found a solution.

“Would you like to ride with him?” he finally asked. She looked up, dazed, and replied with a sniffling nod. She took his hand again as he guided her to the front seat of the hearse, where the surprised funeral directors quickly moved papers to make room for her.

According to protocol – an extension of their sacred “never leave a Marine behind” mandate – a fallen Marine’s body must be guarded by another Marine whenever it is accessible by a member of the public.

At the visitation, Marines hear the families talk to the body. At the memorial services, they hear the eulogies. During the burials, they see the flag presented to the grieving mother or widow. Through it all, they try to hold ‘the stare’.

Before graduating from boot camp, every Marine masters the blank stare: the focused-but-distant look that glares down from recruiting posters, the one meant to strike fear in enemies, the one intended to convey more than two centuries of tradition.

Although the Marines are required to stand watch over a comrade’s body, once the casket is safely inside a locked mortuary or church, they usually leave at night and return when the mortuary reopens.

This time, however, the watch would not end. “Katherine and Caroline have both expressed concerns about Jim being left alone,” Beck told the Marine pallbearers. “So we won’t leave him alone.”

Beck showed the Marines the slow salute – the one they aren’t taught in basic training – three seconds up, hold for three seconds and three seconds down. “A salute to your fallen comrade should take time,” he said.

For Beck, that salute embodies more than the movement itself. Earlier in the day, someone had asked him about the arrival of “the body.” He held up his hand with a firm correction.

“‘The body’ has a name.” he said. “His name is Jim.”

The night before the burial of her husband, Katherine Cathey refused to leave the casket, asking to sleep next to him for the last time. The Marines made a bed for her, tucking in the sheets below the flag. Before she fell asleep, she opened her laptop computer and played songs that would have been played at a formal wedding they never held. She asked the Marines to continue standing watch. “I think that’s what he would have wanted,” she said.

Just past midnight, Staff Sgt. Andrew Price walked to the back of the room and, like a watchful parent, dimmed the lights further. Then he closed Katherine’s computer.

For the next hour he stood, barely illuminated by the light behind the altar, until another Marine approached from the shadows, paused before the makeshift bed and raised his hand in slow salute.

The next starts in slow motion. At a windswept cemetery near 2nd Lt. Jim Cathey’s favorite hunting grounds, the Marines moved as if underwater, a precision slowness, allowing everyone in the cemetery to study each move, each frame, holding it as long as possible until it’s gone.

Beck stood back and started the ritual again. “Present military honors,” he commanded.

“Ready. Aim. Fire.”
“Ready. Aim. Fire.”
“Ready. Aim. Fire.”

They knew the hard part was still to come: Taps.

The afternoon before, the pallbearers spent more than an hour with Beck as he instructed them on how to fold the flag. For such a seemingly simple task, there are hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Especially when you’re folding it for your friend’s pregnant wife – especially when you’re folding his flag for the last time.

The Marines took their time, stretching one fold after another, until the flag strained, a permanent triangle. A sergeant walked up and slipped the still-hot shells from the rifle salute into the folded flag.

Beck took the flag, cradling it with one hand on top, one hand below, and carried it to Katherine. He bent down on one knee, looking at his hands, at the flag, his eyes reddening. Before his tears could spill, his face snapped up and he looked her in the eyes.

“Katherine,” he said.

Then he said the words meant only for her – words that usually begin, “On behalf of a grateful nation …” – words he had composed. When he was done, he stepped back, into the blank stare.

For a group of Cathey’s friends, there was one more task. The Marines, many of whom had flown in from Okinawa the night before, walked up to the casket. One by one, they removed their white gloves and placed them on the smooth wood. Then they reached into a bag of sand the same dark gray shade as gunpowder.

A few years ago, while stationed in the infantry in Hawaii, Jim Cathey and his friends had taken a trip to Iwo Jima, where nearly 6,000 Marines had lost their lives almost 60 years before. They slept on the beach, thinking about all that had happened there. The day before they left, they each collected a bag of sand. Those bags of sand sat in their rooms for years. Girlfriends questioned them. Wives wondered what they would ever do with them.

One by one, the young Marines poured a handful of sand onto the gloves atop the casket, then stepped back.

Sgt. Gavin Conley, who had escorted his friend’s body to Reno, reached into the bag, made a fist and drizzled the grains onto the casket. And once again, he slowly brought his bare hand to his brow.

A final salute.

Spread The Word: