Knee Deep in the Hooah!

He came off of a military jet at Dover Airfield in the 1950s. He had a family. He had a wife, an unborn daughter, a mother, a sister and other siblings. His name was Earl.

My uncle died October 31st, 1955 in Germany. He did not die in battle. He did not die with a gun in his hand. Regardless, he died suddenly and with little warning. He also died thousands of miles away from his pregnant wife, his loving mother and his adoring sister.

We are still unsure exactly what he died from. He was my mother’s oldest brother. The first born of a family of 16 children. He died at the age of 21.

We had always believed that he died of a brain hemorrhage. That was what his medical records said. It was the official report. His daughter, who grew up to become a nurse, uncovered some documentation that has since led her to believe he died of complication from a very fast growing and deadly brain tumor. She feels pretty confident in her findings.

I don’t talk about my uncle Earl very much because it has always been a known open wound in our family. The only stories I know of him were the few my mother has shared about his wit and his ways of getting her into trouble when they were kids together. I also know that he once fell from his bicycle and suffered a fairly traumatic brain injury — it rendered him with amnesia for quite a while. I think this is why they assumed it was an aneurysm or a dislodged blood clot in his brain that killed him. Now we believe it was something else all together.

My mother told me two things about Earl’s death that have always stuck out to me. My mother got the call about her brother’s untimely death while at work. Ironically enough she was a telephone operator in thier small town at the time. She said that when she heard that his body had arrived at their home airport, she crossed her arms and laid her head down. She felt sick and like she was going to pass out. It took her sometime to compose herself again.

The second story I always remember through secondary memories, is that of my grandmother the day they buried Earl. My mother recalled vividly for me when they gave Pfc. “S” his military gun salute (I think this was the traditional 3 volley, 7 service member salute – 21 shots). Her mother’s (my grandmother’s) body shook with dread with each fire taken. My mother said she watched as these invisible bullets piereced her mother’s soul that day.

When I asked my mother last week to tell me more about Earl she relived the same memories she always had. The only thing she added to her story, in light of recent news, was “Thank God I didn’t have to worry that there would be hordes of reporters to take pictures of my brother’s casket. I couldn’t have handled that.”

Amen, mom. I hope and pray that no sister, wife, mother, brother, husband or father ever has to worry about that.

My mother was joining me in making her phone calls to the Pentagon and writing letters too. Please do the same. My uncle Earl’s casket would have just been another photograph to a reporter, but to the family who loved him it would have been more. Contained within that flag draped coffin was a man they dreamed of hugging again. He had a young wife who dreamed of him meeting their unborn child. Inside that coffin laid the first son and first child of a very large family. He walked down an unpaved and untrod path with my grandparents.

No one had the right to steal his memory for their own story and their own angle. That story belongs to us – his family.

You can join my Facebook cause “No Media at Dover” here. You can find contact information to our officials HERE. Please write, call, advocate and do what you need to do. This is not something that we should be burdened with.