Roy Wood, 17: Driven to make Dad proud
By Steve Hendrix, The Washington Post
Sgt. Roy A. Wood, shown in an undated photo, was a member of the 20th Special Forces Group, Florida Army National Guard. He died in a vehicle accident on Jan. 9, 2004, in Afghanistan.
Family photo
Roy Wood rushed into the theater tucking in a shirt that was already pretty well tucked. Even on one of the few days when students at Georgia Military College were allowed to show up in something other than a starched white shirt, striped blue pants and cadet's epaulets, the 17-year-old with the ramrod posture constantly checked his neatness.
Roy's dad would have loved this prep school within the 135-year-old military college in Milledgeville, Georgia: the dress code, the "Duty, Honor, Country" banners surrounding the parade ground, the discipline that led students to snap to attention and salute a passing hearse. Roy Sr. was a Special Forces lifer, who resigned his commission and left his job as an emergency room doctor to ship out to Kabul with a National Guard combat unit as a medical sergeant.
Roy Jr. is pretty sure his dad would love this theater thing, too, although it would be more of a surprise.
"He loved music, I know that," Roy said as the director called for first positions. "He told great stories. But I don't think he was ever a performer. Honestly, I'm not sure where this comes from."
Wherever it came from, it came big. In ninth grade, he was recruited for the ensemble of "Thoroughly Modern Millie." By 11th grade, he won a state acting competition as the lead in "Chicago." The yes- sir-no-sir overachiever who made honor societies from math to Spanish became the guy who busts out the raucous "Ice Ice Baby" routine at football halftime shows. He loved the applause.
Now it was time to take up a broom and rehearse "Little Shop of Horrors." He was playing Seymour, the lead.
It took years for Roy to figure what was driving him to master one challenge after another, to play four sports, post a perfect GPA, hurl himself around the obstacle course. Then, in 10th grade, he wrote an essay about the morning when he was 6 and two Army officers knocked on the door. He recalled the look on his mother's face before they even opened their mouths to describe the convoy accident that had killed his 47-year-old father on January 9, 2004. He reached back to his dad's parting words to him: "While I'm gone, you're going to have to be the man of the house."
He came to see extracurricular overkill as a bid for the approval of the father who left him in charge. That Green Beret who was so determined to deploy on operational missions that he took — and passed — an endurance course test that felled soldiers half his age.
"I just want to make my dad proud," Roy said.
He'd arrived at campus that morning in the dawn gray, in time for the morning flag ceremony and the inspection of ninth-graders he carried out as a cadet second lieutenant. He hurried over the brick path where he and his younger sister, Caroline, 14, had written their father's name during a September 11 commemoration of the fallen.
"My dad is my hero," Roy wrote in the college admissions essay he sent to Harvard, Yale, Duke, Stanford and Princeton.
Yet he wasn't on his father's path. Medical careers have become too unpredictable. His mother beseeched him to stay out of the military. "She says she couldn't bear it if the same thing happened to me," Roy explained.
And as much as he loves musical theater, he's too practical to try to make a living from it. "I want to give my children a comfortable life," he said. He was thinking of engineering, dentistry. Maybe law.
But for now, singing and dancing fed both artistic and competitive drives. With the state competition a week away, the cast settled in for a fifth hour of rehearsal. Roy would have a couple of hours of homework after that. He smiled at the prospect, confident that the dad who left him in charge would admire his ambition, respect his choices and let him sing.
Leah Andrews, 19: Finding new ways to mourn
By Steve Hendrix, The Washington Post
Leah Andrews, 19, is shown wearing her father's aviators in her dorm room at Gardener Webb University in Boiling Springs, N.C., on Oct. 10. Her father, Air Force Master Sgt. Evander Andrews, died in a construction accident building on an air strip in Qatar in 2001.
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post
Leah Andrews hit "play" on her phone as she sat on the floor of her North Carolina dorm room. She would let herself watch one video. Not like her first Oct. 10 away from home, when she binged for hours on YouTube homecoming scenes: All those men in olive drab, just back from war, popping up in classrooms and at soccer practice; all those daughters screaming, throwing arms around their fathers, tears of elation.
For Leah, just tears.
This time, the 19-year-old pledged, no videos of other dads. Just a few seconds of the dad who would never get that kind of homecoming. She'd found an old VHS tape of her parents and recorded a few seconds by pointing her phone at the TV screen. Now, the shaky images cast a faint blue glow on Leah's coppery hair, her gray eyes. The tiny couple on the screen sliced a wedding cake. The groom's laugh filled the dorm room.
"I think this was the happiest day of their lives," Leah said.
Her own memories are hazy. Her dad's legs sticking out from under his truck when she went outside to play. He once pretended to be devastated that they had eaten all the Cap'n Crunch. He called her "Silly Goose."
He was quiet. Her mom says she is the same quiet.
If the wedding was his best day, she doesn't know much about his worst, except the date: Oct. 10, 2001. Rushing to finish an airfield in Qatar in the opening days of the war, Air Force Master Sgt. Evander Andrews, 36, became its first military casualty when he was crushed by a forklift.
Thirteen years later, Leah can still see her mother collapsed and sobbing on the bed. She remembers swearing to her 6-year-old self that she would never do anything to make her mom cry again. So now, the sophomore at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, N.C., turned off the video and gathered her books for class. At home, there were traditions. Her sisters, Courtney, now 17, and Mackenzie, now 15, would slip on their father's dog tags. Her mom would email teachers to warn that the girls might be emotional.
But Leah was on her own, finding new ways to grieve on the day they always set aside for grieving. She looked for one of the aging flannel shirts that had long ago stopped smelling like her dad, but they were all at home. She took the Air Force-issue Randolph Aviator sunglasses displayed above an encased triangle-folded flag. They were too big for her narrow face, so she hooked them onto her collar — something he carried to carry her through the day.
A classmate coming out of the library stopped. "Hey Leah," she said. "I saw your Facebook posting. How are you?"
"I'm okay."
Sometimes the expressions of sympathy were annoying, especially the I-know-how-you-feel ones. "Not if you have a dad at home, you don't," Leah would think.
But sometimes, they helped. Her friends knew just to be there, knew that Oct. 11 would bring back their exuberant, photography-loving friend who was excited to become an interpreter for the deaf.
"Tell me if you want to talk," Erica Wright said, getting up in the dining hall to hug her friend. "Hang in there," her boyfriend texted when Leah got weepy in her morning sign language class. She apologized to the teacher. "That's okay," he signed, thumping his shirt with his thumb.
Before putting her bag down in religion and culture, she told another professor she was having a hard time concentrating, and why. He looked at her. "I can empathize," he said. "Dec. 12th is my day." She felt like hugging him.
Midday, sitting in the campus Chick-fil-A, she sent her mom, Judy, their first communication of Oct. 10, 2014. "Made a 100 on my religion and culture exam," Leah texted.
"Way to go Idaho!" Judy answered.
Her mom was coming to pick her up later, after she finished classes and her shift at an American Eagle store.
At 10 p.m., Judy pulled up outside the mall, ready to drive her oldest child home for a weekend visit. "Hi, Mama," Leah said, leaning over to give her a long hug.
Washington Post correspondent Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
Drew Pope, 24: Sorrow, despair, then purpose
By Steve Hendrix, The Washington Post
Drew Pope was 11 on Oct. 17, 2002, the day his mother told him his dad, Navy Ensign Jerry "Buck" Pope had been killed. That night, through some Internet quirk, he got an email from his father. "I'm proud of you," it said.
Family photo
An email arrived in Drew Pope's inbox one morning last fall that he was afraid to open.
"YOUR MIDTERM GRADES HAVE BEEN POSTED," read the subject line.
Never had a message like this brought good news. Never had he made much progress in previous attempts at school, at adulthood, at getting past the pain of burying his father and the years of depression that followed.
Drew was making another run at a degree. At 24, he was barely a freshman at Chippewa Valley Technical College in Eau Claire, Wis. Anything would be better than the F's and incompletes that ended his first try at college. Anything was progress over the bleakness that marked middle and high school.
Walking had been his only solace back then, logging miles to nowhere, insulated from the deadness by the metal bands screaming into his headphones. "When I walked, I could think," Drew said. "I was alone, but I wasn't."
The despair would return at home, or in class — anywhere he was supposed to connect with others, but couldn't. He needed "angry music." That's what spoke to the sadness that had slowly overwhelmed him since Oct. 17, 2002. He was 11 on the day he got home from school and his mother told him his dad, Ensign Jerry "Buck" Pope, had been killed. That night, through some Internet quirk, he got an email from his father. "I'm proud of you," it said.
Pope, a 15-year Navy SEAL, had always been away a lot. Drew got used to the homecomings — once his dad had returned with a mustache that made him look completely different — and to the constant moves: Virginia, Texas, North Carolina, California, Virginia again. But Pope was still a "supersized influence" on his oldest son. They studied martial arts together. As Pope trained for marathons, Drew rode his mountain bike alongside.
Besides, the deployments were supposed to be over. His father, a physician assistant, had landed a stable posting at Quantico in northern Virginia. Pope could make it home to dinner with Drew and his mother, Andrea, and the younger kids, Jack, now 13, and Leah, now 20. Then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Within months, his dad was heading overseas. By the fall of 2002, he had been killed in a truck crash in Yemen.
Drew didn't think losing his dad explained everything about the deep pit he had slowly tumbled into. He is an anxious person by nature, he said. But he wouldn't have fallen as far if his dad had been alive to "explain things."
They moved to Minnesota to be near his mom's family, and he began seventh grade as a stranger. He started talking back to his mother. He stopped trying in class. Sadness became depression. At the very worst of it, he found relief in cutting himself.
"I was in a pretty dark place," he said.
To break bad patterns, his mom sent Drew to a Utah boarding school to finish high school. He started college at 17 and quickly foundered. It looked to those who loved him that he was lost for years, working at telemarketing jobs and Wal-Mart and spending hours on the computer.
But Drew said he has been learning, mostly about himself: "I was trying to figure out what was depression and what was Drew."
Things got brighter. He learned to be comfortable being an introvert, which has put him more at ease with family and friends. He's patient and likes problem solving, and he can imagine a career in network management. With encouragement from his mother and advice from the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, he sorted out his survivor benefits and re-enrolled.
He cooked part time at a Pizza Hut when he wasn't in class. He felt like he was doing fine. He hoped so. He opened the email from school.
Network Diagraming: A. Network Infrastructure: A. Network Concepts: A. Cisco Certification: A. Ethics: A. Twelve credits in all, a 4.0 grade-point average.
For the first time in years, Drew Pope was connecting.
Chad and Noah Griffith: Brothers in arms
By John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post
Maj. Sam Griffith, of Virginia Beach, died Dec. 14, 2011, while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was 36 and was with the 4th Air-Naval Gunfire Liaison Company, Marine Forces Reserve, based in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Family photo
The guns were strewn across the playroom floor, a Nerf arsenal prepped for mayhem. The children at Noah Griffith's birthday party — eager to begin the battle for backyard supremacy — picked through 17 weapons.
One of Noah's friends reached for a worn toy revolver, its blue and yellow paint chipping on the edges. His brother and frequent adversary, Chad, 10, stopped her.
"She needs a gun," said Noah, a day from turning 9. But that gun, Chad told him, belonged to Dad. He snatched it away. The boys gave her a different weapon, and soon nearly a dozen heavily armed prepubescents ventured into a cold Virginia Beach afternoon.
From his fortification of lawn chairs, towels and a Superman umbrella, Noah announced the rules. No destroying bases. Get shot five times, and you're out.
With that, he held up his hand and counted down.
"Three, two, one — Nerrrrrrf!"
Noah sprinted toward his brother's stronghold, shielded by a collapsible mini soccer goal. Chad had hidden the revolver beneath a wheelbarrow behind him. On another day, he might have let someone else use it. But on this one — when his brother's birthday party was being held on the third anniversary of their dad's death — Chad couldn't bear it.
He had begged his father, Marine Maj. Sam Griffith, not to deploy to Afghanistan.
"I do not want you to go to war," Chad wrote in jagged print letters. "If you die I will cry for a long time."
The family learned that a Taliban sniper had killed him on Dec. 14, 2011, one day before Noah's sixth birthday. The distraught kindergartner asked his grandfather to help him remove every photo of Griffith from their walls. Chad, then 7, simply refused to believe it.
Six months after the funeral, the brothers watched other children leap into their fathers' arms at a homecoming for Griffith's comrades. Chad turned to his mom, Casey, and asked, "Did he get off the bus? "
Almost three years later, the birthday combatants paused mid-battle to debate a winner. It was hard to tell. Foam orange darts littered the grass.
"You guys are all dead," Noah decided. "We killed you."
Gun drawn, Chad appeared from behind the shed. "I'm not dead yet, punks," he shouted. At that moment, perhaps the only thing that could precipitate a cease-fire arrived at the front door: pizza.
Chad took his slice to the living-room couch, away from the other kids. He resented that his brother got more attention on birthdays than he did. "People always overcompensate with Noah," Casey explained. Both boys said they got along better when their dad was alive. When each evening he would hug them and read "You Will Go to the Moon" and then hug them once more.
"We go half and half," Noah said before the party. "We're friends ... "
"And then we're enemies," Chad interjected.
Noah, plagued by night terrors after his dad's death, refused to sleep alone, so the brothers shared a room. That annoyed Chad. He would tell Noah to grow up.
The day before the party, they fought over who would lay a wreath on Griffith's grave at Arlington National Cemetery. Chad, at one point, wouldn't walk away from the headstone.
"When I leave the grave," he said, "I feel like I leave my dad all over again."
That evening, Noah had another night terror.
Casey, her life as a single mom further complicated by a newborn daughter, understood that her boys had to mourn in their own ways.
After the pizza, she brought out a mint-chocolate-chip ice-cream cake. Chad said he didn't want any. As Noah opened gifts, his older brother slumped onto the kitchen floor.
Noah always got more presents, he told his mom a bit later. That wasn't fair. He went to the playroom and shut the door. This was about more than a birthday, Casey knew. Chad was entitled to these moments. He loved his brother. He'd come back out.
Chad soon emerged, lugging a trash can packed with the Nerf guns. Noah and the others gathered around, making their selections. Chad reached down to the bottom and pulled out his dad's revolver.
Grinning, Noah counted down.
"Three, two, one."
Lauren Gibbons, 15: A grief camp veteran
By Steve Hendrix, The Washington Post
Lauren Gibbons, now 15, was 3 when Chief Warrant Officer Thomas J. Gibbons' helicopter went down near Bagram air base in Afghanistan in 2003. Her sister Emily was an infant.
Family photo
Lauren Gibbons already knew some of the girls at this sunny horse paddock in Virginia. She'd met Angelina at a previous Gold Star Teen Adventures camp in Florida. She'd hung out with Shaina at a Snowball Express camp in Texas. Gibbons may be new to horses, but she is an old hand at grief camps.
A couple of times a year since her dad was killed in 2003, Lauren, 15, has come to gatherings like this, meet-ups of kids who have lost parents in military service: A Soldier's Child, Project Gratitude, T.A.P.S. At each event, she spends time with others who know the sadness, the anger — even the embarrassment — that comes with well- meant expressions of sympathy.
"Sometimes it just made me feel different," Lauren said. "Whenever there was a father- daughter dance or breakfast, I would have to find a neighbor or an uncle to go with me."
She was 3 when Chief Warrant Officer Thomas J. Gibbons' helicopter went down near Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Her sister Emily was an infant.
Lauren's memories of her dad are built from the stories of others. "He was very protective of his family," she offered. "He didn't like other people to hold me that much. He wanted to do the holding. That's what my mom says."
She keeps photos of him hanging by her bed in Clarksville, Tenn. Her favorite: Dad helping toddler Lauren stuff a Build-A-Bear. He taped a message on the bear's recorder: "Lauren, I love you." Then his audible kiss.
"It stopped working a few years ago," she said.
There was no need to explain the loss of a recording — or a father — to the girls in this pasture along the Blue Ridge. They have all lived it, the eight daughters between 8 and 17 who now surrounded two retired racehorses named Clayton and Gabriel. They petted and patted. Lauren seemed mesmerized by Clayton's bottomless brown eyes. Even though she'd been horse-crazy since she was 4, she'd never ridden.
"That's what I like about GSTA," she said. "You do stuff."
Gold Star Teen Adventures is a hard-core sub-genre in the universe of grief camps. Some offer special access to amusement parks, concerts and sporting events. Some feature hours of circle time with counselors. Gold Star, founded by a Green Beret who lost a leg in Iraq, is open exclusively to the children of Special Forces operatives who were killed in the line of duty. They don't coddle; they push.
"At the last of one these, I ate a worm," said one teen. "We ate roadkill. We cleaned a raccoon."
There was no bug eating at the Boulder Crest Retreat in Bluemont, Va. But the girls did get intimate with a little horse poop.
"It's grass going in, and grass coming out, that's all it is," said Suzi Landolphi, the horse handler, who gave each girl a chance to experience a semi-dried ball of manure as more pastoral than putrid.
"Not happening," said one, stepping back. But Lauren sniffed with a not-so-sure-about-this expression. She tilted her head and shrugged.
"I think my dad would be proud of me," she said. Proud of the tall blond teenager she's become, of the 10th grade soccer and lacrosse player. But maybe especially proud of the kid not afraid to get dirty, the girl who gained her open-water scuba certification last year at a Gold Star camp in Key Largo, Fla.
More than a decade after her dad's death, Lauren has grown out of the stress balls, the bears with a father's photo for a face, the group sessions on loss. "Sometimes all the talking can be a little overwhelming."
But if she needs the camps less, she enjoys them more for the friends she sees there, the cohort of the left behind. The horse weekend, which included late-night dancing in the cabins and a long trail ride, connected her to her father just by making her happy.
"You begin to feel like you don't have to think about it so much," she said, "that I can miss my dad and still go on to live my life."
Matthew Greene, 25: Taps for a warrior father
By Ian Shapira, The Washington Post
First Lt. Matthew Greene, a West Point graduate now stationed at Fort Hood in Texas, visits the grave of his father, Army Maj. Gen. Harold Greene, at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia on Nov. 28. Greene was killed in a shooting at what was then known as the Afghan National Defense University near Kabul, Afghanistan. .
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post
First Lt. Matthew Greene stood before the open casket that held the body of his warrior father, the man who'd long been Matt's inspiration. Major Gen. Harold Greene, 55, was laid out at a Virginia funeral home in a full Army service uniform: a dark blue jacket and navy blue pants with two gold stripes denoting his status as a general.
Matt wanted to gaze at his father one last time before the man everyone called "Harry" was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The two-star general had just become the highest-ranking U.S. service member killed in a combat zone since the Vietnam War, shot Aug. 5 by an Afghan soldier at a local military academy.
Matt, 26, a West Point graduate who followed his father into the military, was in disbelief.
"I thought I was ready for it that day," he said later. "But when I saw the hearse, it was a painful reminder of what we were there to do."
Matt grew up surrounded by soldiers, with two parents who met in the Army and were pursuing accomplished military careers. His mom, Susan Myers, is a retired Army colonel who taught leadership and management at the U.S. Army War College. His dad rose to become the deputy commanding general of the Combined Security Transition Command- Afghanistan.
Like so many military kids, Matt and his sister, Amelia, now 22, moved around, living in Southern California, Missouri, Pennsylvania. For Matt, Little League helped ease the transition to a new place. His dad often coached his teams.
Baseball was a bond between them. When they went to professional games, Greene always had his son keep a scorecard. "He'd always ask me, 'What would you do as the manager now?' " Matt recalled. "He'd take something we were just watching and make it a thinking problem."
Matt, who's now based at Fort Hood in Texas, said his dad never pressured him to join the Army. But Matt always admired the way soldiers carried themselves and worked as a team. He loved listening to his father talk about his job: deciding what tanks, rifles, computers and other equipment were needed for war and how to marshal them.
It was Matt's father who comforted him when West Point rejected him. It was his father who celebrated when he got into the elite military academy on his second try. It was his father who told him how proud he was when Matt made it through his grueling plebe year and again when Matt earned a computer science degree in 2012. It was his father who presided over his son's promotion from second lieutenant to first lieutenant in 2013, less than a year before his death.
"He said, 'This is a charge from the Army and from the people of the United States saying you have shown the diligence and performance required of a leader,'" Matt said, " 'and now we're going to ask more of you, and we're going to expect more from you.' "
The Greenes wouldn't reunite at a military ceremony again until the day of the general's funeral at Fort Myer and his burial at Arlington. Among the mourners: then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff. Matt could barely talk to them or anyone else.
On a sunny August afternoon, the boyish lieutenant stood in front of a pack of mourners at Arlington, watching as a riderless horse with boots backward in the stirrups led a solemn procession past rows of gleaming white headstones. Matt saluted as his father's casket was removed from the horse-drawn caisson. Then the Greenes made their way to Section 60, where the general would be interred next to hundreds of rank-and-file soldiers who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Flags were folded and presented to the family. A cannon salute shook the air. Then a bugler sounded taps as Matt fought back tears, squeezing his mother's hand to maintain his composure.
He didn't notice the huge crowd behind him or the clutch of photographers snapping photos. He just stared at the closed casket, and, before he turned to walk away, he knelt down and placed his hand and a rose on top.
David and Camryn Trent, 11 and 6: Daddy's birthday
By Michael S. Rosenwald, The Washington Post
The uniform of Nelson Trent, who was killed in Afghanistan by an enemy bomb in December of 2012, leaving behind two children, David, 11, and Camryn, 6.
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post
On the spring day Sgt. 1st Class Nelson Trent would have turned 39, his widow woke up, thought about her children and decided, "We should do something to celebrate."
With the helium machine she normally uses for birthday parties, April Trent blew up balloons at her home 20 minutes from Myrtle Beach, S.C. She got two small pieces of cardboard — one for her 11-year-old son David, the other for her 6-year-old daughter Camryn. On one side she wrote, "Happy birthday Daddy." On the other: "SFC Nelson Trent. KIA Kandahar Afghanistan."
David wandered by and asked, "What are we doing?"
He was a skinny, freckled 9-year-old when his dad was killed by an enemy bomb shortly before Christmas in 2012. David still missed their hunting trips and afternoons fishing. He still talked about the time they killed a rattlesnake together with a big rock.
At first, April told him she was preparing a surprise, but when Camryn came into the room and spotted the balloons, it was time to spill the details. "We're gonna celebrate Daddy's birthday," she told them.
April knew she could have been the one to die in Afghanistan. She was there, too, serving a few hundred miles away. They were an Army couple — he from Texas, she from South Carolina — who met in training and fell in love early one morning during formation. She flew back to the United States with his body. Her mother, taking care of the kids, had delivered the devastating news. Camryn climbed into her arms, crying. David put up his fists and declared, "I want revenge."
The days had been getting easier, though not by much. Camryn, now in first grade, sometime puts on one of Daddy's old shirts or hugs her teddy bear with his picture as its face. "Daddy Bear," she calls it.
David, boisterous and bubbly before his father's death, has grown quieter, more prone to anger. With his door closed, the fifth-grader plays a lot of video games, though April has hidden his dad's shooting games. Minecraft has become an obsession.
The children have new lives. They moved from Austin, Texas, to a five-bedroom house in Loris, S.C., where their father's Army boots, hat and camouflage are packed in trunks in the attic.
April, 33, is still in the National Guard. She has a boyfriend and a baby on the way — due April 8, 2015, three days after what would have been Trent's 40th birthday.
David is now old enough to realize that all wasn't well between his parents. "We were going to get a divorce when we got back," April said. "Our marriage was rough."
But April 5, 2014, was Trent's birthday. "I can't let the kids forget him," April said. "I can't not honor him and keep his memory live. He gave his life not only for his country, but his family."
David and Camryn were full of cheers for the birthday plan, calling it "so awesome."
That afternoon, they headed out to the front yard. High up on a shiny pole, a U.S. flag was blowing in the wind. David, wearing a tie-dye shirt, and Camryn, in a colorful shirt that said "Love," held orange balloons with the cards attached. SFC Nelson Trent. KIA Kandahar Afghanistan.
"Happy birthday to you," they sang. "Happy birthday to Daddy, happy birthday to you."
"Ok, let 'em go," their mother said.
Up, up, up into the cloudy blue sky, the balloons sailed away.
David watched silently.
Camryn jumped up and down, shouting, "Bye bye baloonies!"
Sidney Pompa, 17: A mother's cheers
By John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post
Sidney Pompa is shown with her mother, Staff Sgt. Aracely Gonzalez O'Malley, 31, of Brawley, Calif., who died Oct. 22, 2010, in Hamburg, Germany. She suffered a brain aneurysm while deployed in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan.
Family photo
Sidney Pompa stood at the front of the V formation, her head down and her feet spread shoulder-width apart. She wore a gold ribbon in her hair, and on her matching cheerleading uniform was the name of her Hawaii high school, Leilehua. Behind the Las Vegas stage, where she and six teammates waited in silence for the most important 73 seconds of their young careers, a towering wall of lights illustrated the stakes: "NATIONALS."
"Aloha!" she shouted, whipping her head back to signal the start of their performance.
Sidney, 17, didn't always want to cheer. She started at age 8 because her mom, Aracely Gonzalez-O'Malley, insisted on it. Serving in the Army, Gonzalez-O'Malley frequently had to move her family. Cheerleading had helped her make friends growing up, and she thought it would do the same for her daughter. So, Sidney cheered.
Then came Oct. 21, 2010, four months into her mother's deployment to Afghanistan, where she was serving alongside Sidney's stepfather. The teen was visiting her paternal grandparents in California when her dad called.
"I have to tell you something," he said. "It's about your mom."
Gonzalez-O'Malley, a staff sergeant, had died of a brain aneurysm at 31. Sidney was 13, and her brother, Riley, was 10. Her mom had given birth to a third child, Sean, just nine months earlier.
Cheerleading suddenly meant something different to Sidney. It was an unexpected gift that held within its wrapping hundreds of memories. She began to wear on her uniform a Gold Star pin given to her by the Army. It reminded Sidney of how proud her mother was of her commitment. She rubbed its face with her thumb so often that the metal lost its shine.
Gonzalez-O'Malley had coached Sidney that first season years earlier, teaching her just the right rhythm to "Who rocks the house? The Bulldogs rock the house." They shared hours in front of living room TVs — daughter on the floor in a split and mother on the couch above, pressing down on Sidney's shoulders to improve her flexibility. And then there was that final email from Gonzalez-O'Malley, sent three weeks before her artery ruptured. She had just learned the results of Sidney's middle-school tryout.
"YAY Sidney, you made the cheer squad," she wrote. "I am so proud of you!!!!!!!"
Sidney understood her mother wouldn't be there on the day of her graduation or the morning of her wedding, as she had so long imagined. But cheerleading always conjured her presence. Each time Sidney practiced or performed, she could hear Gonzalez-O'Malley's voice: Arms stiff. Don't bend your wrists. Enthusiasm. Yell from your diaphragm. Loud but not squeaky loud. Keep smiling.
In Las Vegas, Sidney and her teammates woke at 5 the morning of the competition. They had qualified for the JAMZ cheerleading national championships and traveled 2,800 miles to compete. Using a makeup brush her mother had bought her three months before deploying, Sidney carefully detailed each girl's face.
Minutes before the performance, she saw her mom's sister, who had come from Arizona to watch. They hugged. "I know Mom's watching, too," Sidney said. Soon after, she took the stage and yelled "Aloha!" and whipped her head back.
Her arms remained stiff on the back handspring. Her shouts resounded. She kept smiling.
The team came off the stage, and Sidney walked to her backpack. She opened the front zipper, searching for bags of candy she had made for her teammates. Then she saw the Gold Star pin. Sidney picked it up and, not long before learning they had won first place, rubbed her thumb over its face.
Calvin Davis, 6: Fading fragments of a father
By John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post
Calvin Davis, pictured during a fishing trip with his father Jonathan Davis. Jonathan Davis died from a bomb explosion in Afghanistan in 2013.
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post
From his booster seat, Calvin Davis peered out the window of his mom's gray Chevrolet Silverado as it clattered down a gravel road in rural Arizona. The setting sun bled over a sprawling landscape of sage brush and three-story amber boulders.
"I can see the white fences," announced Calvin, who is 6 and missing a front tooth. "There's the graveyard." He turned to his mother, Helena. "I see Daddy's flags."
One was American, ripped in half by the wind. The other was scarlet and displayed the words "UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS." The pole was planted next to the grave of Calvin's father, Staff Sgt. Jonathan Davis, killed by a bomb in Afghanistan on Feb. 22, 2013. Calvin was 4 at the time and adored his dad, who stood 6 feet 3 inches and had such powerful arms that he could toss his only child all the way across the pool.
As months passed, the boy remembered him only in fragments, many of which he was unsure were real. He sometimes imagined that his father taught him to ride a bike or shoot a pellet gun. "Right, Mommy?" he asked. No, she said. A grief counselor had warned her that because of Calvin's age, even his most vivid memories were likely to fade or vanish.
Helena, 35, refused to accept that. So, twice a year, she and her son drove 600 miles from Southern California to Davis's grave in Kayenta, Ariz., a remote patch of the Navajo Nation. This was where Davis raised sheep with his family and starred on the high school basketball team and fell in love with Helena. Here, too, was where he dreamed of serving as a Marine.
Calvin hopped down from the truck. He found coins that others had left to honor his dad and set them atop the headstone. He dug his sneaker into the dried brown clay and dragged it in a circle around the base of the burial mound. He tossed a rock, then kicked it. He pointed out a towering set of boulders in the distance that he was sure looked like a man's butt.
As they left, Calvin glanced at his mom.
"Do you miss Daddy?" he asked.
"Very much."
"Are you crying?"
"Yes."
"I knew you were crying. You cry a lot when we go to Daddy's grave."
She stroked his hair. "You know it's OK to cry, right?"
He changed the subject.
Calvin didn't talk much about sadness, in part because he was too young to fully understand what he'd lost. Instead, he talked of the early morning fishing trips with his father. The coffee they shared from a thermos, and the worms his dad always put on the hooks because Calvin felt bad about sticking them. He used to lie on his father's chest and tug on his ears. He used to ride on his father's shoulders and feel so tall. Together, they sneaked bites of Helena's homemade cheesecake. "I would eat the last piece," he crowed.
He remembered all of this, just as he remembered that the clouds were gray on the day his father's flag- draped casket rolled off the plane at Dover Air Force Base. Just as he remembered that the house where they stayed had blue Jell-O and his favorite green Gatorade. Just as he remembered why his father left and did not come back: "Because of war."
What he didn't remember was that his dad nicknamed him "Calvinator." He didn't remember the last hug or kiss or goodbye. He also didn't remember the day the three men came to his house and one of them said, "We regret to inform you ... ."
And that was why Helena brought him back to Kayenta.
On this trip, they visited his father's grave twice, the second time with his maternal grandparents. His grandfather replaced the torn flag as Calvin picked up a metal rake longer than he was. Quietly, he walked in circles, towing the metal prongs. His mother handed him a miniature Christmas tree. He took it to the gravestone and set it down next to a handprint he made when the concrete base was poured. Calvin crouched on his knees and placed his right hand where it had been that day. His fingers were longer, his palm wider. He had grown.
For a moment, the original impression disappeared.
Washington Post staff writer Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
Andrew Gutierrez, 17: A gift he can't have
By Petula Dvorak, The Washington Post
Army Staff Sgt. David Gutierrez, a former nightclub bouncer and amateur football player, joined the military for the money and kept reenlisting as his family grew. He died on Christmas Day 2009. Here, Gurierrez and sons Gabriel, Jeremiah and Andrew Gutierrez and his wife, Patty, at Christmas in happier times.
Family photo
Andrew Gutierrez steeled himself for Christmas as soon as the stores started blaring carols in November.
Those holiday songs, the piney smell of fresh-cut Christmas trees, the gingerbread giddiness of other kids making lists of stuff they covet — they're always hard for Andrew to take. The 17-year-old wants one gift more than any other: "I want my dad back. I just want my dad."
He and his younger brothers, Jeremiah, 11, and Gabriel, 9, want Christmas back, too — a day forever marred by the two soldiers who knocked at their door in Seattle on the morning of Dec. 25, 2009.
Their mom, Patty Gutierrez, was cooking Christmas breakfast, waiting for her husband's Skype call from Afghanistan so he could see the boys open their presents. But Army Staff Sgt. David Gutierrez, 35, had been hit by a rooftop-explosive device in Howz-e Madad on Christmas Eve and died the next day.
Before that Christmas morning, the Gutierrez brothers loved the season, just as their dad did. He was a big, beefy man — a nightclub bouncer and amateur football player who joined the military for the money and kept reenlisting as his family grew. But at Christmas, he was more kid than warrior, obsessed with getting the perfect tree.
"He wanted one that was big. And full," Andrew said. "It took forever to find the right one. One time, it was so big, it wouldn't fit on the car, and we had to carry it home."
Once the tree was up, the decorating ritual began. Dad's Oakland Raiders ornaments. The giant, billowy angel tree-topper. The little American flags.
"He put up a step-stool so I could reach the top," Andrew remembered.
After Gutierrez's death, the family moved from Seattle to his home town of Gilroy, Calif., where Andrew is a slight high school senior, with head-to-toe black clothes and long floppy bangs. His bedroom is filled with piles of notebooks, sketches, drawings and graphic design projects that feature dragons, flames, monsters from an alternate universe. He hopes to go to an art school in San Francisco next year.
Christmas, now, is an artificial tree. The family can't stomach the smell of a fresh-cut evergreen.
They assembled the fake version right next to Gutierrez's medals. His Purple Heart reflected the tree's white lights. They put up the Oakland Raiders ornaments. And, as they've done in previous years, they took a Christmas picture. One year it was with Gutierrez's boots, another year with his dog tags. This year it was the family holding a picture of him.
They continued trying to create Christmas traditions that are their own, without forgetting the things their dad loved. Those special chocolate cookies that Patty invented when she forgot an ingredient. Watching Gutierrez's favorite movie, "Elf."
But they still weren't able to make it to Dec. 25. On the 23rd, they opened their presents. On Christmas Day, they woke up, had a quiet breakfast and went to Gavilan Hills Memorial Park with a rainbow bouquet of flowers.
They spent most of the day at the grave, surrounding the shiny, black marker. Gabriel brought his new metal detector. When he found a bottle cap in a grassy field near his dad's grave, he thought it was a sign.
"Dad used to collect bottle caps!" Gabriel exclaimed.
Andrew used to collect them, too, but stopped after Gutierrez died.
After the cemetery, they went home and set the table for dinner. Patty's boyfriend, Joe, was coming over, with one of his daughters and the guy she's dating.
Patty, 41, made chicken coated in crushed Ritz crackers, green bean casserole, linguine, macaroni and cheese and crescent rolls. They had cakes, cookies and hot cocoa. There was laughter, conversation. Almost normal, but not quite.
Waking up the next morning, done with the Christmas, "is a relief to be honest," Patty said. "Five years later, and it's still a nice feeling to be done with it."
For her and her sons, it will never be a day filled with pure joy. "The boys and I," Patty said, "we just have to think, 'What would David do?'"
Andrew was certain he knew. "Dad," he said, "would want us to be happy."
Tiffany McKay-Mortimer, 34: Relearning everything
By Ian Shapira, The Washington Post
Tiffany McKay-Mortimer, seen with her two children Jocelyn, 10, and Jonathtan, 6, followed in her father's footsteps by joining the Army. Her father, Joseph McKay, a member of the New York Army National Guard, was killed in 2008 when a roadside bomb and rocket-propelled grenade hit his convoy south of Kabul.
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post
First, the neurosurgeon removed a portion of Tiffany McKay-Mortimer's skull. Then he drilled away a small piece of bone behind her left eye to expose a potentially lethal aneurysm. Finally, he used a titanium clip to separate the aneurysm from her artery, depriving the dangerous bulge of any more blood.
The surgery at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta in January 2011 took just a few hours. Tiffany's recovery from it has taken years.
The Army staff sergeant, who once escorted military vehicles around Iraq, couldn't drive. She needed to relearn how to speak. She didn't know how to stand up or sit down. She had to be bathed and fed. She couldn't brush her own teeth. She had double vision.
Through months of brutal physical therapy at Fort Benning, Ga., Tiffany longed for her father, who inspired her to join the military. But Army Sgt. 1st Class Joseph McKay, a member of the New York Army National Guard, had been killed June 26, 2008, when a roadside bomb and rocket-propelled grenade hit his convoy south of Kabul. He was just days away from his 52nd birthday.
"He would have fed me. Pushed me to make me walk or sit up longer," said Tiffany, 34, a statuesque mother of two with long hair and strong arms. "My recovery time would have probably been half the time. He would have never left my side."
McKay had always been there for his daughter, taking the oldest of his three children to armory balls and watching boxing matches — his favorite sport — with her in their living room.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he'd pulled bodies out of the rubble of the twin towers and guarded Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station.
Tiffany followed him into the military in 2002, enlisting in the Army. By 2005, father and daughter were both in Iraq. After mortars rained down on Tiffany's small compound near Baghdad International Airport, McKay arrived to comfort and bolster her.
When there were no other soldiers around, she cried, but her father told her to stop. "He just said: 'You can't be scared. You can't be out here and afraid.'"
She needed that toughness five years later, when she learned the results of a brain scan at a military base in South Korea. She'd been searching for the cause of chronic headaches she'd been having for almost a year after a Humvee accident. The scan showed the aneurysm.
Her neurosurgeon didn't think it was the source of the headaches, but it still needed to be fixed. Left untreated, the aneurysm could fill with too much blood and rupture, potentially disabling or killing her. But the surgery also carried risks — stroke or even death.
She and her children flew back to the United States. She was worried during the long flight that the high altitude would put too much pressure on her brain. As for the surgery, she said, "I was prepared to die."
Tiffany is divorced and has full custody of her kids. It fell to her mother and grandmother to take turns looking after her and Jocelyn, now 10, and Jonathan, now 6.
So much of Tiffany's rehabilitation involved managing her pain levels with nerve blockers, Botox and Vicodin. Her mother bought dark curtains for her bedroom because sunlight triggered piercing headaches, and she massaged Tiffany's forehead and feet at night.
"But sometimes," she said, "you just want your dad when your head is killing you, and you want to lay in his lap, and you want him to massage your head."
Tiffany, who was medically discharged from the Army in 2013 and now lives outside Atlanta, has made huge progress.
She is starting to use an elliptical machine. She is relearning how to drive a car, though the farthest she's gone is to her kids' bus stop a few minutes from her home.
"Right now, I am trying to do things on my own," she said. Her father would want that for her.
Jordan Phaneuf, 17: A stranger's tribute
By Ian Shapira, The Washington Post
Jordan Phaneuf, 17, used kind words she remembers at the wake of her father Jospeh Phaneuf, who died when a roadside bomb killed him in Afghanistan in 2006, when writing the essay for a college application.
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post
From the start, Jordan Phaneuf knew exactly where she wanted to go to college: Becker, a small, historic campus in Worcester, Mass.
Jordan, who wants to be an animal doctor, loved the school's highly touted pre-veterinary program. She also liked that Becker is just an hour's drive from her family, which was rocked when a roadside bomb killed her father, Army Staff Sgt. Joseph Phaneuf II, on Dec. 15, 2006, in Afghanistan.
Jordan was 9 at the time. She remembered the early morning knock at the door, the dogs barking, her sister yelling, "What's going on?"
She is 17 now, a willowy senior, with long hair colored deep red and a soft spot for strays. She looks after a cat named Chase that she and her family found in the woods near their house in rural Eastford, Conn.
Becker might have been a reach a few years ago, when Jordan got mostly C's her freshman year at Woodstock Academy. But now Jordan was getting mostly A's and B's in honors Italian, advanced English and advanced anatomy. Her GPA had improved to a 2.6. She plays guard on the varsity basketball team — not a starter, but she likes to shoot three-pointers from the baseline corners of the court. She also volunteers with a nonprofit that helps feed poor families.
The last thing Jordan needed for the Becker application was her essay. She knew it would somehow be about her dad, who once surprised her at a basketball game by walking in after he'd been away at a training camp for two months. She dashed off the court to hug him, and the game was halted.
She still keeps his photo above her bed, another emblazoned on a candle on her dresser, and a third photo plastered on her Twitter page of him clad in his camouflage kissing her as a child. Her college essay, she felt, had to touch on his death.
But how?
Jordan thought about his wake, eight years ago on Dec. 26. There was a receiving line at the funeral home, which was decorated with poinsettias. There was a man she didn't know who knelt down in front of her as she stood with her older brother Ryan, now 23, and older sister, Danielle, now 19.
Sitting at her desk in her tan-walled bedroom, she began tapping out her memories on her Surface tablet: the mourners walking by, telling her she was too young to lose her father, how sorry they were. Their faces were a blur. Then the man bent down, wearing a suit and tie.
"While holding my hand, he looks at me and tells me how great of a man my father was, how he is such a hero for giving his life," Jordan wrote. "He tells me how my father didn't just do this for my family, but what my father did was also for him and everyone else in this country."
More than anything after her father's death — meeting President George W. Bush or reading a letter from another soldier who was with her dad in his final moment — Jordan remembers this man.
She slapped on a title: "The Man Who Changed My Life." Her English teacher liked the essay, but thought the title was too cliched. So Jordan came up with a better one: "The Stranger."
Jordan's mother, Michele Phaneuf, didn't know who Jordan was describing and wasn't aware that he'd made such an impression until she read the essay. Jordan longed to thank him, writing that "he was the one who made me realize that my father's death was not just a tragedy, but it turned him into a hero."
After she submitted the application to Becker, Jordan called home nearly every day, asking her mother or soon-to-be stepfather whether anything had arrived in the mail. One day in late November, her mother's fiance reported there was a package from Becker. Jordan was at a friend's house.
"Could you read it?" she asked, putting the phone on speaker.
"Congratulations!" he read. "I am delighted to offer you admission to the Bachelors of Science in Veterinary Science with a Pre-Veterinary Concentration program for the Fall 2015 semester."
Jordan was in.
Avery and Alaya Alexander, 9: Fatherless from the start
By Ian Shapira, The Washington Post
Marissa Alexander, pregnant with twins, attends her husband's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery in 2005. She and LeRoy Alexander met as students at C.D. Hylton High School in Dale City, Va., where he played on the football team.
Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post
The labor pains stretched on for 15 hours before the Alexander twins finally arrived on a muggy North Carolina morning.
First came Avery, 4 pounds and 15 ounces, at 9:11 a.m. on Sept. 28, 2005. Then his sister, Alaya, 5 pounds, 1 ounce, at 9:48 a.m.
At Fort Bragg's Womack Army Medical Center, their exhausted mother, Marissa Alexander, greeted her newborns with a mixture of exhilaration and sorrow. In their small faces, she already saw the features of the person absent from the delivery room: their father.
Staff Sgt. LeRoy Alexander had been killed three months earlier by a roadside bomb near his base in eastern Afghanistan. The 27-year-old Green Beret was just a few weeks shy of coming home so he could be present for the birth of their longed-for twins, who were conceived with the help of fertility treatments.
Instead of Alexander himself, there was a photo of the 200-pound demolition specialist, taken just days before his death. He was with his comrades, wearing sunglasses and a brown T-shirt that barely contained his muscular body.
In the hospital room, Avery gazed at his mother with large brown eyes that made her think he was the "spitting image of his daddy."
"LeRoy, are you in there?" Marissa wondered.
Nine years later, the twins were eating cookie-flavored Blizzards at a Dairy Queen near Fort Lee, a military base south of Richmond, Va., where their mom is an Army logistics officer. They had just come from a soccer game, so they were wearing matching gray-and-black jerseys, their skinny legs protected by shin guards.
The third-graders do almost everything together. Though they have separate bedrooms, they routinely sleep in the same bed. They share an iPad and are addicted to Minecraft and Animal Jam.
Alaya is the more exuberant of the two, her face often animated by a big smile. She loves to draw with pencils and markers.
"I want to be an artist," she declared.
Avery imagined himself working alongside her. "I want to be an employee — Alaya's employee," he said.
That made sense to her. "Actually, at home, I am always the boss of him," she said.
They've known since they were 3 or 4 years old that their dad is in heaven and that he died fighting "bad guys." But at age 5, Avery pressed for more specifics, and his mother explained: "Daddy's vehicle got blown up."
She's told them stories about how the two of them met as students at C.D. Hylton High School in Northern Virginia. How their dad was a wide receiver on the football team, the class clown, a dancer with great rhythm.
The twins keep photos of Alexander in their bedrooms, though he's missed every milestone they've shared: Their first steps, first words, first day of kindergarten, first trip to Disneyland.
Avery said he misses his dad when he gets bullied at school. Alaya misses him when she sees her friends getting picked up at the recreation center by their fathers.
Though their mom is dating again, their father's absence makes them different from many of their classmates.
On Alexander's birthday, the twins usually brought a balloon to their dad's headstone at Arlington National Cemetery and released it into the air, with a note telling him that they love him.
At their ninth birthday party in September at Fort Lee's welcome center, the twins decided to do the release honoring their father in the parking lot. Instead of attaching a note, they picked out a balloon printed with a "9" to mark the number of years since their birth — and the number of years since their father's death.
Keely Quinlan, 18: Embracing a painful reminder
By John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post
On Feb. 18, 2007, Chief Warrant Officer John Quinlan, 36, had been piloting a helicopter in southern Afghanistan when it crashed, killing him and seven others. Quinlan, flying with no visibility through a storm, lost an engine but kept the Chinook nearly upright as it fell, saving the lives of 14 people. His daughter Keely, now 18t, keeps this memento, which has a helicopter pendant.
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post
Keely Quinlan picked at an apple fritter as a gray-haired Army colonel methodically debriefed the freshman about her first semester at American University.
How had she done on her finals, John Evans wanted to know. Well so far, she told him. When would she head home to Tennessee for winter break? Soon, the 18-year-old replied.
And what grades did she expect to make this year? "No less than a B-minus" in any class, said Keely, prompting a thumbs-up from her lunch companion across the table.
They were the sort of questions Keely's father might have asked her, had he been there. Except he wasn't.
Eight years ago, on a cold, clear-sky Sunday morning in Clarksville, Tenn., the bell rang at Keely's front door. She opened it and found two strangers in uniform. One was a chaplain. The other was John Evans.
Keely, who was 10, stared at their shiny shoes. Then she screamed.
"I knew," Keely said.
Evans had come because he was the commander of her father's battalion. On Feb. 18, 2007, Chief Warrant OfficerJohn Quinlan, 36, had been piloting a Chinook helicopter in southern Afghanistan when it crashed, killing him and seven others among the 22 on board.
To Keely, he was "Dad," unless she really wanted something. Then, "Daddy." She and her younger sisters — Madeline, now 16, and Erin, now 11 — knew him as the biggest kid in the family. Quinlan was the first on the trampoline he set up for the girls one Christmas, doing goofy toe touches high in the air. Mustachioed and 6 feet 4, he once showed up to a Halloween party at Keely's Catholic elementary school dressed as a grandmother in curlers and pantyhose. "I was mortified," she said.
They last spoke on Valentine's Day, the week before he died. He had just shaved his extravagant auburn mustache for an official photo, and was scheduled to come home before month's end.
"Can you put your mustache back on?" she pleaded.
"It doesn't work that fast," Quinlan explained, then promised he would try.
"I love you," she told him.
"I love you, too," he responded. "See you soon."
The moment at the door haunted Evans. At the funeral, Quinlan's wife, Julie, asked him to avoid Keely because he was wearing the same uniform from the day of the notification. Evans, now 48, feared she would never want anything to do with him.
"I'm that reminder," he said, "of the worst day of her life."
He thought about Keely often and occasionally saw her at an annual Fort Campbell remembrance. Then, when she was 13, Evans took a chance. Already friends with her mom on Facebook, he sent Keely a friend request. Evans wept when she accepted.
They began to exchange messages, and he checked on her each year in mid-February. "You are an amazing young woman," he wrote in 2012, "your Dad would be so proud of you."
Last spring, both realized they would be moving to Washington. Keely to study journalism at American, and Evans to work as a fellow at the Brookings Institution. He took her to lunch at the Army and Navy Club. He and his wife invited her to have dinner at their home in Northern Virginia. She ate pot pie and watched the Army officer talk to his two daughters, 6 and 7; he reminded Keely of her own dad.
Evans is, in a way he never could have envisioned, an indispensable thread between Keely and her father. "This is a guy who got to see my dad," she said.
At their December lunch, Evans reminisced about Quinlan's booming laugh and wry sense of humor. About his command of helicopters. "A far better pilot than I was," he said.
On the day of the crash, Quinlan, flying with no visibility through an unexpected winter storm, lost an engine but kept the Chinook nearly upright as it plummeted to earth, saving the lives of 14 people. As Evans spoke, Keely chewed her thumb and stared intently at him through her dark-rimmed glasses, capturing every word.
Two hours after they arrived, Evans checked his watch. He had to return to work, he said, but they'd get together again after she returned from her break.
She hugged him, smiled and said: "Always good to see you."
Washington Post staff writer Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
