[This is a rerun from 2005 and worth remembering. Sadly, nothing has really
changed in Iraq in the nearly two years since Jim posted this article.
Except a whole lot more of young Americans have died. Let’s remember the
fallen and their families.]
Final Salute
by Jim Sheeler, Rocky Mountain News
Inside a limousine parked on the airport tarmac, Katherine Cathey looked out
at the clear night sky and felt a kick. “He’s moving,” she said. “Come feel
him. He’s moving.”
Her two best friends leaned forward on the soft leather seats and put their
hands on her stomach.
“I felt it,” one of them said. “I felt it.”
Outside, the whine of jet engines swelled.
“Oh, sweetie,” her friend said. “I think this is his plane.”
As the three young women peered through the tinted windows, Katherine
squeezed a set of dog tags stamped with the same name as her unborn son:
James J. Cathey.
“He wasn’t supposed to come home this way,” she said, tightening her grip on
the tags, which were linked by a necklace to her husband’s wedding ring.
The women looked through the back window. Then the 23-year-old placed her
hand on her pregnant belly.
“Everything that made me happy is on that plane,” she said.
They watched as airport workers rolled a conveyor belt to the rear of the
plane, followed by six solemn Marines.
Katherine turned from the window and closed her eyes.
“I don’t want it to be dark right now. I wish it was daytime,” she said. “I
wish it was daytime for the rest of my life. The night is just too hard.”
Suddenly, the car door opened. A white-gloved hand reached into the
limousine from outside – the same hand that had knocked on Katherine’s door
in Brighton five days earlier.
The man in the deep blue uniform knelt down to meet her eyes, speaking in a
soft, steady voice.
“Katherine,” said Maj. Steve Beck, “it’s time.”
The American Airlines 757 couldn’t have landed much farther from the war.
The plane arrived in Reno on a Friday evening, the beginning of the 2005
“Hot August Nights” festival – one of the city’s biggest – filled with
flashing lights, fireworks, carefree music and plenty of gambling.
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.
All Marines call each other brother. Conley and Jim Cathey could have been.
They finished each other’s sentences, had matching infantry tattoos etched
on their shoulders, and cracked on each other as if they had grown up
together – which, in some ways, they had.
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.
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.”
The woman quietly said she was sorry, Conley said.
Then she began to cry.
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.
~~
Dr Bob Griffin, www.grif.net
1 cross + 3 nails = 4 given