Posted on 11/20/2004 6:38:46 AM PST by mondoman
Tale of two tombstones
Fort Logan caretakers carefully prepare twin grave markers for Marines killed in Iraq war
By Jim Sheeler, Rocky Mountain News November 20, 2004
Sgt. Andrew Alonzo made his way among the flowing fields studded with gray marble markers, until he reached the workshop where they keep the headstones with no names.
Two stone slabs lay in the morning sunlight, still cold to the touch.
"All I know is that they're for two Marines, both killed on Veterans Day," said the cemetery caretaker, as he smoothed his bare hands over one headstone, then the other. "One was from Colorado, one from Wyoming. Killed on the same day, in the same area."
In a few days, the Marines would be buried within a few yards of each other inside Fort Logan National Cemetery, the first time since the Vietnam War that the cemetery would hold two funerals on the same day for men killed in action.
Five days before the burials, Alonzo picked out two slabs of marble, each one cut to the same specifications: four feet long, weighing roughly 240 pounds. The markers come from a cardboard box marked "blanks," reserved specifically for soldiers killed in action.
The cemetery just received a new shipment.
"They look the same, but they're very different," Alonzo, 42, said of the two marble slabs - one from Georgia, the other from Mississippi. "You can see the differences in color, you can see it in the marble. If you know where to look, you can see the differences."
Usually, Fort Logan receives the headstones already emblazoned with the name of the dead; they are ordered direct from the quarry and are usually set in place a month or two after the funeral. For soldiers and Marines killed in action, however, cemetery workers like to set the headstones on the same day. To ensure that's done on time, the stones must be smoothed, cleaned and prepared on site.
The process begins with a blank slate.
Inside the cemetery workshop, Alonzo slid a long steel file across one of the headstones, filling the room with white powdery smoke and the grinding rhythm of metal on marble.
"I wonder what they were like," Alonzo said, staring at the headstones. "Sometimes, you try to visualize them. Sometimes, you can."
More than a year ago, Alonzo lost one of his own comrades in Iraq, as they both served in the dangerous Sunni Triangle. At times, he still struggles mightily with the loss. Within the past several months, he's found solace among the familiar terrain of Fort Logan, alongside the headstones he set himself, to honor the people he never knew.
Monday morning, he began his journey to mark the lives of two more.
"When the headstones are blank, there's something missing. Just something missing," Alonzo said. "It's like the names are just floating out there, waiting.
"They're waiting for the stone."
Called from the cemetery
Alonzo measures his time in Iraq by thousands of new white marble markers on the hill, set atop the graves of veterans that fought in the wars before his.
"When I left for Iraq, none of these were here," he said, pointing to the graves - an average of 15 a day - dug while he served as a member of the Colorado-based 244th Engineer Battalion of the Army Reserve.
"Now we have two more coming," he said, nodding up toward the area where the new arrivals would be buried, near the seven men killed in Iraq and Afghanistan already buried at Fort Logan. More than 50 other Marines and soldiers with Colorado ties are buried in other local and national cemeteries throughout the United States.
"They'll receive the same honor as every veteran here - everyone here is treated equally," Alonzo said. "Still, in a way, they're special. They gave the ultimate sacrifice."
Nearly all the groundskeepers at Fort Logan are veterans. Alonzo joined the Marines after graduating from high school in Lamar, and spent the next "13 years, one month and two weeks" as a Marine. Caught in the force reductions and base closures of the 1990s, he took early retirement, then worked as an orderly at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital.
He started digging graves at Fort Logan six years ago and worked his way to a supervisory position. He was called up to go to Iraq in March of 2003.
He got the call while working at the cemetery.
"Talk about your heart sinking," he said. "I just had to say, 'Tell the guys goodbye for me. I have things to do.' "
As he roamed the headstones in his electric golf cart, he spotted something nobody else could see - a broken line among a line of headstones.
"These stones," he said. "Look at them."
After more than 20 years in the military, he's specially tuned to cracks in uniformity. In his closet at home, all his shirts face the same way; they're in order from long to short. He can tell if someone's moved something in his house, if it's not dead center on the table. Inside his toolbox, every implement has its place.
"And I'm the same way with headstones," he said. "If I see something out of place I'll make 'em pull it out and do it again."
Though he had served overseas in noncombat zones before, Alonzo admits changing a lot since coming home from Iraq, as he struggled to cope with the things he saw there.
"I have to take sleeping pills, but my body keeps fighting them so they have to increase the dosage," he said. "Now the dreams are getting further apart."
Since returning, he doesn't trust people the way he used to, he said. He jumps at the rifle salutes that slice through the cemetery periodically during the day, and still drops his head when Taps drifts through the field.
Other things have changed, too. He always sits with his back to the wall in restaurants. When driving, he scans the road for debris, still programmed to look for improvised explosive devices in Iraq. He doesn't think he's as social as he once was. And now he cries during war movies.
"I never used to cry like that," he said.
Before he was sent to Iraq, he never used to miss the news on the war. Now he tries to avoid it.
Inevitably, it meets him in his cemetery.
Life work among the dead
On the morning the headstones were scheduled to get their names, a graying Vietnam vet entered the workshop and peered inside. Ever since Alonzo had asked the lanky 58-year-old to haul the blank stones into the shop the day before, Walter Huling couldn't stop thinking of them.
"I want to see them put the names on," Huling said, as he waited for the engraver to arrive. "When they're blank like this - you never know. You think, 'It could be my name on there.' "
In Vietnam, Huling survived two helicopter crashes and earned a Bronze Star for making it through a two-day firefight where half his company was killed. He's been in a line where he watched as the men on either side of him were shot, but he survived.
"It do make you remember," he said, patting one of the blank stones. "Just a strange feeling."
Drafted at 19, shortly after graduating from Manual High School, he soon found himself in the middle of a scene that still gives him nightmares.
"The first thing I did in Vietnam was police the bodies of dead Marines, to put them in the body bags," Huling said. "I was 19. Like to scare a young man to death. It was a sight you never forget."
"But it also taught me an appreciation for life. That it could be me laying there."
He looked out at the headstones.
"It's life and death every day out here. When you work out here, you take advantage of life as life is."
After returning from Vietnam to Colorado, Huling worked at a steel factory, then drove a garbage truck in Denver before coming to Fort Logan eight years ago.
Like many of the veterans - many who have worked more than 25 years here - he says it's the last job he'll ever have, and he plans to be buried here, too.
"I think this job is my true calling. I just hate that I haven't been here longer. Everybody got something they have to do in their life, and I think this is mine. I just wish I could have put all those years in here."
Back at the headstones, the engraver arrived from a local funeral company and laid out the templates with the names of the two Marines. Huling and Alonzo read them aloud, in capital letters.
"KYLE W. BURNS"
"THEODORE SAMUEL HOLDER II"
They calculated the ages in their heads, which they've learned to do instantly, and Huling pounded his chest.
"This is emotional," he said. "One of them is the same age as my son."
Together, the two men wonder aloud if the dead Marines knew each other, if they were killed in the same battle. As the engraver sandblasted the names -into the marble, Alonzo looked up.
"With the names there, you start to get a clearer picture of them," he said.
"The names aren't floating around in the air anymore."
The Vietnam veteran nodded.
"Let it be written," he said. "Once it's written in stone, that's it.
"Let it be written in stone."
'I had the urge to kill'
In the section of the cemetery reserved for soldiers and Marines recently killed in action, a front-end loader bit -into the ground. In the place that's usually one of the most peaceful in the city, the earth rumbled.
As the caretakers dug the first grave, then started on the second, Alonzo thought back to the funerals he attended in Iraq, saluting the empty helmet and combat boots of a fallen friend, listening to the final roll call.
"You know, I took one of the last pictures of Sgt. Lawton," he said, thinking back to his comrade, a 41-year-old staff sergeant from Hayden, who died in an ambush on Aug. 29, 2003.
"It was the day before he was killed. He was sitting under a tree, wearing those big sunglasses of his, reading his Bible."
Alonzo looked down. In the next grave over, the grass was still taking hold above the last Marine buried here, less than a month ago. When Alonzo first got back from Iraq, all of this emotion might have set him off.
"When I first got back, I had the urge to kill somebody," he said quietly. "I was so unhappy with what happened to Sgt. Lawton, but I didn't get to see anybody pay for it. I wanted to kill someone, I wanted to see someone pay."
After arriving in Lamar - where the whole community worried about him, and where his family had a bench dedicated to his unit in Iraq - Alonzo wouldn't leave the house for more than 30 minutes a day. Instead, he holed up, alone, thinking about Iraq, wondering how everyone else could go on living their lives while the war raged.
"You think, 'Why am I still alive? Why am I so lucky? Why wasn't I on that convoy?' It's always, 'What if? What if? What if?' " he said.
"In Iraq, you would be going down the highway and you just see an Iraqi body, burned up, just out there. People didn't stop to investigate. It was just another body. Another casualty of war."
Once he was home, the images wouldn't leave.
"I did consider suicide," he said. "The closest I had was having the pills out on the counter, ready to take them. But I would always stop myself. I'd stand there, debating whether it was worth it."
At the urging of his family, he requested psychological help from Veterans Affairs, which began to help him relax.
Then he realized he could also escape to the place he knew best, alongside the people who've been there, and the ones who didn't make it.
"Being back at work is the most relaxing thing. I always look forward to coming to work. It's peaceful here, quiet, and I'm doing something that's close to my heart."
As the day grew on, the sun lowered, painting the graves the color of thunderclouds. As the shadows lengthened across the ground, Alonzo smiled.
"This is my comfort zone," he said.
When the war returns these days, Alonzo remembers the face of Sgt. Lawton, but also remembers the faces of children they helped building schools. He still sees the dead people in the streets, but also remembers a vivid image of a child dancing, all alone, on the side of the highway.
Later, as his crew prepared the grave sites, Alonzo headed back to check on the headstones.
"You can't tell people what it's like over there. You can describe it, but you can't feel it," he said.
"I like to think we did some good over there."
Seeing it through to end
On the morning of the funerals, the Marines arrived early, in formal dress blues. Andrew Alonzo and his caretaking crew arrived even earlier, their names stitched in cursive above their pockets.
Within minutes, their shoes were dusted with the dirt of new graves.
As the body of Lance Cpl. Kyle Burns arrived, it was accompanied by a Marine who had never left the flag-draped casket from the moment it arrived in the United States.
A few hundred yards away, Sgt. Alonzo pulled up with Kyle Burns' headstone, saddled with a similar mission.
"I won't leave the stones, now," he said.
Inside the special section where the most recent KIAs are buried, Alonzo stopped at a hole next to two other Marines killed in Iraq, including Thomas Slocum, the first Coloradan killed in the war.
"It means a lot, the Marines. Even though I'm in the Army Reserves, I still consider myself a Marine," he said. "Once a Marine, always a Marine."
A pledge to the fallen
After the rifle salutes sounded at the funeral shelter nearby, a lieutenant colonel walked up to the mother of Kyle Burns and answered some of the questions everyone had asked all week.
Yes, it turned out, the two men knew each other, he said. They died in the same battle, trying to save the life of an injured Marine whose vehicle had come under fire. Both were killed while manning a machine gun, trying to clear the way. They died within minutes of each other, only a few hundred yards apart.
"Nobody wants to go if they're 20 years old," said Lt. Col. William Costantini, of the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. "But if you're a Marine, the way you want to go is facing your enemy. I have to look up to them."
As the mourners slowly filed away, the parents of Kyle Burns remained, waiting to attend the service of a stranger.
Soon, more limousines arrived, and another flag-draped casket. Another rifle salute, and another folded flag.
As the parents of Staff Sgt. Holder left the shelter, the parents of Kyle Burns stopped the grieving couple, and introduced themselves through tears.
"I'm sorry," one mother said, as they embraced.
"I'm sorry," said the other, through more sobs.
As the Marines packed up, Kyle Burns' parents also turned from the shelter, but instead of heading back to the car, they walked to their son's grave.
As they arrived, Andrew Alonzo stood where they couldn't see him, giving them plenty of space with the stone he set only minutes before.
At the grave site, the family traced the name of their son with their fingers, then looked over at the open grave, only a few yards away.
"They fought with each other," Robert Burns said. "They had each other's back."
The family walked off, arm in arm, still in tears, Alonzo moved forward, preparing to set the next headstone.
"As I watched (his mother), there were a lot of things going through my mind, but one thing especially," he said.
"I wanted to tell her, 'You don't have to worry.
"We'll take care of him now.' "
I could not read this story without shedding a tear.
"Once a Marine, always a Marine"
"But if you're a Marine, the way you want to go is facing your enemy. I have to look up to them."
"We'll take care of him now"
God Bless those that take care of those that gave last full mesure of devotion.
"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we
should thank God that such men lived." -- George Patton.
Thank you so much for posting this. More tears and prayers for these remarkable men and for their families.
'But if you're a Marine, the way you want to go is facing your enemy. I have to look up to them.'"
Ditto!
I mourn their short lives - so much missed and so much given. Thank God for these magnificent men and women who put their lives on the line for this nation - the legacy they leave demands appreciation for the lives we are able to live - in this greatest of all nations.
What a beautiful tribute to the fallen who now rest in so many of our National Cemeteries--and those who are their guardians. Like Arlington--and Eagle Point where my husband is buried--these cemeteries are hallowed ground. Though much of it may be watered with tears, the grass that grows seems rich with grace and dignity, as are the men described in this story. God Bless them!
With God's will..one day we can thank them all in person....
I was OK until I got to the part about Kyle Burns'parents
waiting for the service of the other Marine, having just buried their own son.
What extraordinary people!
From then on, the screen kept getting very blurry.
I agree with you. If I had been the author of that quote I might have substituted "of secondary importance" or something similar for "wrong and foolish". I've never been gifted with eloquence. G.S.P never expressed a halfway opinion.
BTTT for an awesome article.
I agree! A major BTTT....
bttt
Thank You for posting this article. My prayers offered for the families.
Thank you.
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