Tom Sileo

by Brothers Forever

  Janet had called Annette a few hours earlier and insisted that she come over. Having just returned from a weekend on the Jersey Shore, Annette didn’t really feel like going anywhere, as she wanted to rest and relax at home. But because of the e-mail Janet had received from Iraq two days earlier, she knew her sister needed to be surrounded by as many familiar, caring faces as possible.

  Two days earlier, Janet had heard from Jill Kubicki, wife of Travis’s commanding MiTT team officer, Major Adam Kubicki.

  Janet,

  I know that as of the last message I received (today) that everyone on the team is fine. However, I think that they’ve had a bit more exposure to the real hardships of combat of late, and given the timing of it (mid-point of the deployment), now’s probably a good time for some support from their loved ones.

  Finally, I do know that there are good reasons for you to be proud of your son, that he is a fine and honorable man. I don’t know much of the details, but I do know that he has been important to setting the right sort of examples for the rest of the Marines and for the Iraqis with whom they are working.

  Best,

  Jill

  After receiving that e-mail, Janet had told Annette she had a horrible feeling about this deployment. It was different from the first one, and she could hear it in Travis’s voice every time they spoke. He didn’t share most details with his mother, but it was obvious that he was in the middle of the fight.

  As Janet handed six-month-old Maggie to her sister so she could finish making salads, Tom was preparing hot dogs and chicken on the deck for their visiting relatives. He was talking to another relative about Senator Biden’s Meet the Press appearance before heading out on the deck to fire up the grill.

  As sounds of life filled the Manion house, Gardner sat just outside their driveway. As on the day he had encouraged an emotional Travis to reconsider his decision to leave the academy, he was giving a pep talk to an extremely nervous Marine who happened to be a member of Travis’s graduating class at the Naval Academy. First Lieutenant Eric Cahill didn’t know Travis personally, but he had heard stories about his fellow Marine’s prowess, on both the battlefield and wrestling mat.

  “There’s no way to know exactly how this will go, son,” said Gardner, who had once had to tell a close friend’s wife that her husband was killed in Korea. “But remember how important it is that we do this the right way.”

  “Yes, sir,” First Lieutenant Cahill said.

  For the ninety-sixth time in the first twenty-nine days of April 2007, the military would inform an American family that their son or daughter had made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq. Though Cahill had the unique privilege of having a retired lieutenant colonel by his side, the burden of delivering this devastating news still fell squarely on his shoulders.

  With their cars parked on the street, the young Marine, in his green uniform, khaki shirt, and matching tie, walked toward the house with Tom’s close friend, who was still wearing the same navy blue blazer he had worn to church. Renee Gardner followed closely behind as they walked up the driveway, which went straight to the house’s “front” door, actually on the spacious home’s right side.

  Cahill and the Gardners weren’t sure the Manions were home until they heard voices coming from inside the house.

  Janet was at the kitchen sink when she heard the doorbell ring. Thinking it was two relatives who had gone across the street to pick up more food, she looked out the window and was pleasantly surprised to see Corky and Renee Gardner standing on her porch.

  “Oh look, Tom,” said Janet, drying her hands and starting to walk toward the front door. “Corky’s here!”

  That’s strange, Tom thought. He didn’t remember Janet telling him she had invited the Gardners over for dinner. In fact, he hadn’t talked to Corky in a couple of weeks.

  As Janet reached for the door’s brass knob, she saw part of the young Marine’s uniform through the window. Everyone in the house, including Annette, who was still holding baby Maggie, flinched as Janet let loose a piercing scream.

  After opening the door and seeing the looks on Corky and Renee’s faces, Janet slammed the heavy white door shut as her sister and other relatives sprinted toward the foyer. When Gardner gently reopened the door and attempted to come inside, Janet slammed it again, this time so hard that the hinges broke.

  As Travis’s mother collapsed on the floor in shock, with utter chaos overtaking the Manion home, Tom stood motionless as one of the most horrible scenes any husband and father could witness unfolded before his eyes. Though he hoped for a fleeting moment that his son was missing in action or wounded, the colonel was well aware of the Marine Corps’ notification procedure. Travis was almost certainly dead.

  Slapping both hands on the sides of his legs, Tom lowered his head and said the only words that came to mind.

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  Shrieks, along with the hysterical cries of a confused baby, filled the quiet neighborhood as the Manion home emptied into the front yard. Startled neighbors also began to come outside, including a Navy captain who lived next door. Annette, who was also screaming, helped her sister into the yard before realizing she had to get Ryan’s baby out of this nightmarish setting.

  As the Gardners tried to maintain their composure, Tom was the last person to walk out the door.

  Gardner had known Tom since 1994. He had never seen anything like the current expression on his face. Travis’s father wasn’t crying, but nearly all the color had vanished from his face.

  As Gardner’s eyes met those of his devastated friend, Tom, in a daze, looked straight through him before wandering out onto the lawn. First he hugged and kissed Janet, then he walked around with his hands on his head and both arms covering his face.

  “Why?” Travis’s father yelled to the treetops. “WHY?”

  As Annette took Maggie inside, where the baby’s great-grandmother was weeping in the living room, Janet stood bawling in the driveway in front of the garage. She pointed at her sister.

  “I knew it,” she said, clearly referencing Jill Kubicki’s e-mail. “I knew it, I knew it. . . .”

  Tom, who was aimlessly circling the front yard, approached his old friend.

  “Dead?” he asked, to which Gardner nodded with his eyes closed. After shaking his head in disbelief, Tom had started walking away, when his friend put his arm around him.

  “Tom, I know this is the worst possible news,” he said. “But I have this Marine over here who must give you the official notification. Let’s just compose ourselves for a minute and let him do his job so he can get back to base. Can you please do that for me, Tom?”

  When Tom looked over at Cahill, who was probably twenty-five or twenty-six, he saw his own son. Having served in the Marine Corps for a quarter century, he knew how tough this young man’s assignment was. No matter how painful, Tom had to take a deep breath and let the Marine do his duty.

  He stood quietly as Gardner motioned the visibly shaken Marine over to face the fallen hero’s father.

  “Okay, Eric, you can begin,” Gardner said.

  “Colonel Manion, sir, the Commandant of the Marine Corps has entrusted me to express his deep regret that your son, First Lieutenant Travis Manion, was killed in action in Al Anbar province, Iraq, on April 29, 2007, while conducting combat operations,” Cahill said. “The Commandant extends his deepest sympathy to you and your family in your loss.”

  It was official. Travis was gone.

  “Thank you for telling me,” Tom said. “Can you tell me anything more about what happened?”

  “I’m very sorry, sir, but this is all the information I have at this time,” the Marine said.

  “Okay,” Tom said, putting his right hand on Cahill’s right shoulder as tears began to flow. “Thank you.”

  As the young Marine walked back to his car, Gardner turned around and called his name.

  “Lieutenant Cahill,” he said. “You did a fine job.”

  Moved by the retired li
eutenant colonel’s words, Cahill promptly saluted him. After walking back to his car, getting inside, and putting on his seat belt, the young Marine put his elbows on the steering wheel and lowered his head into his hands.

  When Annette got inside the house with Maggie, she smelled something burning. It was the hot dogs and chicken Tom had been cooking on the deck when the doorbell rang. With the sliding glass door wide open, smoke was pouring in from the deck. Annette handed Maggie to her sister-in-law, Maria, and turned off the smoldering grill. Nobody knew that earlier that day, Travis had enjoyed a final barbeque with his fellow Marines. Though they knew Travis was dead, the family still had no idea what had happened.

  Travis’s sister Ryan was just about to leave her prospective store when her cell phone rang. The caller ID said it was from her parents’ house, so it was probably just her mom asking when she would be over for dinner.

  “Hello,” Ryan said in an upbeat, confident tone.

  The inarticulate screaming of someone who sounded like her mother filled her left ear. Ryan, as anyone would, began to panic.

  “Mom? MOM? What’s wrong?” she said as her stomach shriveled into knots.

  Ryan heard shrieks and sounds of people sobbing.

  “Mom, you have to calm down and tell me what’s wrong,” Ryan said. “Is it Maggie?”

  All she heard was more screaming.

  “Mom, did something happen to Maggie?” Ryan repeated.

  Suddenly the line was quiet.

  “You need to come home,” the voice said.

  “Did you call an ambulance?” she said.

  “Yes,” the voice said before Ryan could even finish her question.

  In complete shock, Ryan hung up the phone and asked her friend to rush her over to her parents’ house. The drive was the most tense, frenetic five minutes of the twenty-seven-year-old mother’s life, as she asked herself what could have possibly happened to her baby daughter.

  Did she fall? Did she stop breathing? Did Dave, her husband, who was working about an hour away over in West Chester, Pennsylvania, already know?

  As the car pulled up to the mailbox at the end of the long driveway, Tom and Gardner stood alone on the front lawn, with all the guests waiting inside near the broken front door. Ryan flung open the passenger’s side door and started running toward her dad.

  Where is Maggie? Where is the ambulance? What are Corky and Renee Gardner doing here?

  As a totally confused, panicked young mother demanded to know what in God’s name was going on, Tom met her near the end of the driveway and wrapped his arms around his little girl.

  “Travis was killed,” her father said in a solemn monotone.

  It was Aunt Annette, not Janet, who had made that frenzied phone call to Ryan. She could now hear Maggie crying inside and knew her baby was okay. But Travis was dead, and just like her mom a few minutes before, Ryan fell to the ground, picturing his face.

  “It’s not fair,” Ryan screamed in agony while lying in the driveway. “It’s not fair!”

  Ryan’s husband, Dave, who nearly got in an accident after receiving the news while driving, had already made about half of the hour-long drive to Doylestown when he pulled over onto the shoulder of Interstate 276. He was sick to his stomach as he pictured Travis, his brother-in-law and very close friend, returning home from Iraq in a flag-draped casket. Dave had already lost a brother to bone cancer at a young age, and losing Travis felt like the same nightmare all over again.

  As he wiped sweat from his forehead and got back onto the road, Dave thought about that night with Travis at the Eagles game in December, just before Travis left for his second deployment. When he had joked with Trav about coming up with a way to avoid another deployment to Iraq, his brother-in-law had suddenly grown serious and uttered those five words Dave had never forgotten: “If not me, then who. . . .”

  Travis’s death was a punishing, inconceivable blow, but Dave realized his brother-in-law had backed up his words.

  As he pulled up to his in-laws’ home, like his wife and her parents, Dave still had no idea what had happened in Iraq.

  The front lawn was now empty, although several neighbors were still outside talking about the tragedy that had just struck their town. Because of a sniper in Fallujah, Iraq, the peace of Sunday in this quiet Pennsylvania community had been shattered.

  When Dave hurried inside, he found his wife sitting on a living room chair, shaking, staring blankly in front of her. Janet was on the couch to Ryan’s left, with loved ones on each side and her devastated mother also close by.

  Travis’s mom was sobbing as she held a glass of whiskey in her right hand. She hadn’t taken a sip, as she knew she’d throw it up. Instead, with her eyes wide open, she prayed in silence.

  God, please wrap your arms around my baby boy. Please don’t let him suffer. Please welcome him into your arms.

  For a moment Janet was calm, until baby Travis’s face once again flashed through her mind. Each time she saw that enduring image, the agonizing spasms of pain would resume.

  After hugging his wife and telling his mother-in-law he was deeply sorry, Dave walked into the kitchen, where he saw through the window his father-in-law on the porch. The smoke from the burning chicken and hot dogs was starting to dissipate, and Tom was standing near the grill, blankly staring into the tall trees behind the house as Gardner tried to console him. Without saying a word, Dave, tears streaming down his face, walked up to Tom and gave him a big bear hug.

  As word spread and the night drew in, the house quickly began to fill with relatives, neighbors, and friends, almost overwhelming the family as they wandered through the house in shock. When Dave went downstairs to feed his daughter a warm bottle and whisper soothing, reassuring words in her ear, Tom, suddenly in full military mode, summoned his wife and daughter to the master bedroom, which wasn’t far from the living room on the middle level of the house.

  “Look, I’m not sure how we’re going to get through this nightmare, but the one thing I know is we need to stick together,” Tom said. “From this point forward, we need to be there for each other, no matter what.”

  Janet and Ryan didn’t say anything, but they didn’t have to. America’s newest Gold Star family, now three instead of four, embraced in a hug that each of them would always remember.

  Across the country, in Coronado, California, Brendan Looney was moving into Building 602 of the BUD/S compound, where he would soon start initial courses that would eventually lead to the grueling first phase of training to become a Navy SEAL.

  After mostly quiet deployments to Korea and Iraq, Brendan was determined to become a SEAL, despite facing the most physically demanding training known to man. Moving into the barracks was the first step in an odyssey that would last more than a year, starting with the upcoming twenty-four-week BUD/S training regimen and culminating with another seven-month SEAL Qualification Training (SQT) program.

  Brendan and his new roommate, fellow Naval Academy graduate Rob Sarver, whom he had known for nine years, were almost finished moving in their personal items when Rob’s phone rang. On the other line was a good friend and fellow midshipman, Kacey Kemmerer.

  “Rob, is Brendan with you?” Kemmerer said. “I just tried to call him.”

  “Oh, sorry man, I think Brendan left his phone out in his car,” Rob said. “What’s up?”

  “Shit, man, I really don’t know how to say this,” Kemmerer said. “It’s Manion. . . .”

  The reception was terrible in the barracks, and the phone cut out before Kemmerer could finish his sentence.

  With a suddenly bleak look on his face, Sarver looked at Brendan, who instantly knew something was wrong.

  “It’s Trav,” Sarver said to Brendan, who immediately sat down on his bed. “Something happened.”

  After Sarver helped Brendan stand up, nothing else was said as Brendan walked to the parking lot to call Kemmerer back and find out if his friend was alive. While heading outside to get his cell phone, Brendan’s leg
s began to wobble, so much that the ocean breeze from the nearby beach, where SEAL candidates endure BUD/S training, nearly knocked him over. Brendan then realized he probably wasn’t going to make it to his car.

  “You call him,” Brendan said so quietly that Sarver could barely hear him over the waves crashing outside the Coronado base’s fortified perimeter.

  With Brendan standing a few feet away, Sarver dialed Kemmerer’s number to get the news.

  “Hey,” he said. “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure on the details,” Kemmerer said. “But Travis was killed earlier today in Fallujah. Please tell Brendan I’m sorry.”

  Brendan knew Travis was gone before Sarver hung up the phone. Tears welled up in the SEAL candidate’s eyes as Sarver gently delivered the shocking news.

  “Trav didn’t make it,” he said. “He passed away.”

  In nearly a decade of friendship, Sarver had never seen anywhere near this level of emotion from Brendan, who clasped his hands behind his neck and wandered dazedly into the parking lot. He was breathing so heavily that even as he got farther and farther away, Sarver could still hear him huffing and puffing over the usual coastal noise.

  As Brendan walked back toward his friend, his eyes engulfed with tears, Sarver handed him his cell phone so he could call his two brothers, Steve and Billy, who also knew Travis well from their days at the Naval Academy. When they heard the stunning news they were devastated, as were their parents and sisters.

  Next it was time to call Amy, who had spent countless days and nights hanging out with Travis during the Annapolis years. Amy, who was still living on the East Coast, wasn’t just linked to Travis through Brendan. She was his friend as well.

  While Brendan dialed Amy’s number, great memories from Annapolis and other fun times he had had with Travis filled his mind. In the instant that Amy’s phone rang, Brendan panicked.