He was killed on Aug. 16, 2006-shot by a sniper near Fallujah as he went to rescue a wounded Marine, Lance Corporal Glover, who also died that day. Their funerals both took place in New York City within the same week.
I often wish that every American could attend at least one funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. They are one of only a few occasions when military and civilian rituals can come together as one. They are the proud and largely unknown moments of American history. Since 9/11, they’ve taken place more than 4,000 times.
The first Marine I recognized as I arrived at Capt. McKenna’s funeral was the first sergeant in charge of my rifle company when we deployed to Iraq in 2003. He returned there in 2005 and was wounded twice, first by a roadside bomb then in a mortar attack. Despite his injuries it was clear he was in charge.
Senior Marines coordinated the funeral detail with unparalleled intensity. Now was not the time to have something go wrong. Again and again they walked the rows of Marines lining the church steps, making sure they knew when to salute and when to stand at attention, and ensuring that each man’s uniform was worn properly.
A silence fell outside the Immaculate Heart of Mary church, as the Marines were suddenly called to attention in anticipation of the approaching hearse. Bagpipes sounded like distant chirping from blocks away. The parents and family arrived. Some had composed themselves and walked tall and stoic past the assembled and into the church. Others held handkerchiefs to their faces, clutching each others’ shoulders for support, shuffling up the stairs as if they couldn’t see what was before them.
The officers, who for years led us with barely a flicker of personal emotion, appeared worn and somber. Capt. McKenna was one of their own. Some bowed their heads as their eyes turned red.
I don’t know why, but I can’t remember much of the funeral mass. I guess my mind was drifting too much. It seemed in the course of several minutes my thoughts ranged from the absolute pride of being a Marine and being associated with such men to the darkest guilt of not being there with them when Capt. McKenna and Lcpl. Glover died.
As I stood at the back of the church as the mass ended, I saw my old company commander walking down the aisle. He was the officer who’d led my company in Iraq. We caught each others’ eyes. His right hand held the arm of his wife; my right hand held a funeral program moist and buckling from sweat. We awkwardly grasped each others’ left hands and shook. No words were exchanged, and it seemed we were both startled to see each other. It was years ago that we’d served together, when the war was still new and thought to end soon. That was such a long time ago, and innocence had been lost over and over again since.
I remembered the first time I met him, in the tranquil summer of 2001, during an easy two-week training mission to Ukraine. I remembered him holding our rifle company together during the frustrating year of 2002, when we were mobilized in response to 9/11 and kept stateside. I remembered him standing atop a Humvee in 2003, commanding us as we faced down our first group of Iraqi protesters lobbing bricks at our lines. I remembered seeing him at the Marine Corps birthday ball in 2004 and learning he’d be going back to Iraq soon. His battalion would lose 48 Marines on that deployment.
Now in Brooklyn, in 2006, we still weren’t able to leave it all behind us.
A few days later the funeral for Lcpl. Glover was held in Rockaway Beach, Queens, a quiet middle-class neighborhood on the south shore of Long Island. I put on my good suit and got ready to meet the war face to face once again.
In the church parking lot we former Marines gathered together and fell back into the old ways, as if we’d been sitting on our HQ’s roof watching the sun set over the Euphrates River. We rehashed old war stories, we bummed cigarettes, we busted chops, we told familiar jokes.
This little reunion of ours felt good. Really good. This was one of the few times we’d been together since coming home from Iraq three years earlier. Suddenly we didn’t have to explain ourselves to anyone who wasn’t a Marine.
Lcpl. Glover’s funeral drew an assortment of his closest friends and complete strangers. Seeing his flag-draped casket, carried with meticulous movements by Marines, is one of the saddest and proudest moments I’ve ever witnessed.
At the cemetery I saw members of Glover’s old machine-gun squad from before he deployed. They’d lost all the sarcasm and the sh-t-eating grins I remembered from the last time I saw them, a year earlier. Their eyes were red. They stood close to each other. They didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. They just stared, looking at nothing in particular.
The service had, unfortunately, become familiar. I braced myself for the playing of taps by the bugle and the folding of the flag before Lcpl. Glover’s parents. I watched people around me flinch as the rifle salutes cracked and faded over the quiet cemetery. Once the ceremony was over, there wasn’t much we could do. We said our goodbyes, to Glover and to each other, and went back to being civilians again.
Later that day three of us ate at a restaurant near the Brooklyn Bridge and reminisced about old times. If anything good had come out of our experiences from the preceding days, it was to remind us how much we still needed to rely on each other-even though we no longer carried our rifles.
I wished those Marines still in Iraq had been present to see Capt. McKenna and Lcpl. Glover celebrated and laid to rest. But of course they couldn’t be. It would be another two months before they left Fallujah to come home.
Often it feels surreal that those Marines I once knew in the mundane moments of everyday military life were suddenly lifted to the highest possible place in American lore, and will forever be remembered as “the fallen.”
I don’t even know what I’ll do when someday I have to face their names on a wall.
