For the families of America's war dead, Memorial Day marks a hole in the heart, a light extinguished, a brave face remembered through tears. It couldn't be more personal, or more painful.
Yet, for these families there is also pride. A loved one's faithful service to country, even onto death, evokes something beyond respect, something closer to veneration. Tucked in a quiet corner or side room of these families' homes, one finds the reverentially displayed photos, the folded flag, the military medals and newspaper clippings; symbols and memorabilia of lives bravely lived and nobly sacrificed.
Somehow these artifacts of memory soften that terrible passage from vivid life to silent death. The beloved dead are gone, but never forgotten.
On Memorial Day especially, we are reminded of the price paid to safeguard a people and a nation. No one knows that better, or feels it more acutely, than the families of these honored dead.
On this Memorial Day weekend, more than 40 San Diego-area families will commemorate the loss of a loved one killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, casualties in a war on terror for which there is no end in sight.
Let three of these families and the young men they lost serve as emblematic of all such sacrifices, in this war and the prior conflicts we remember stretching back through the first Persian Gulf War, Panama, Lebanon, Grenada, Vietnam, Korea and World War II.
The Herrera family of Oceanside is virtually defined by a heritage of military service and valor. Marcos Herrera served in Vietnam during 1970-71 as a helicopter crew chief in a combat aviation brigade. Today he is a sergeant major in the Army Reserve. His military bearing remains intact, his hair, now with a trace of gray, is still trimmed regulation short.
Herrera's son, Marcus, is a non-commissioned officer in the Army's 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and a combat veteran of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
David Lee Herrera, a younger brother by four years, also served in the storied 101st Airborne, during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then in a second deployment that began in late 2005.
With evident pride, Marcos calls his son David “my hero.”
On Jan. 28, 2006, while serving as a sergeant and squad leader in D Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, David Lee Herrera was killed in action in Iraq. He was 26 years old.
David left a wife, Tonya, and two daughters, Emma, 3, and Gabriella, born just short of three months after her father died.
David's parents, Marcos and Madalena, are studies in stoic dignity as they sit at their kitchen table struggling with their emotions and talking, sometimes through tears, of their loss.
“He was always kind and gentle,” remembers Madalena.
“He never gave me a problem. He was always here for his mother, always considerate,” adds Marcos. Then, with a smile, Marcos recalls David as an outgoing kid and dapper dresser who boxed, played golf, wrestled and sang in the show choir during his years at Oceanside High School.
“He was a good boy, always with me, always helping other kids,” says his father.
He tried college briefly, then enlisted in the Army, following in the footsteps of the older brother he so admired. Before serving together in Iraq, their separate duty stations traced America's current military commitments and hot spots – Kosovo, Korea, Kuwait. David was decorated for his peacekeeping service in Kosovo, where, his father says, “he apprehended a lot of bad guys and did a lot of good things for children.”
Leaving last November with the 101st for a second tour in Iraq, David knew it was going to be bad, probably worse than the three-week campaign that routed Saddam Hussein's army in 2003. This time, units of the 101st would take over security duties in Baghdad, a city convulsed almost daily by terrorist bombings.
David and his unit would conduct security patrols in the city and sweep operations hunting for terrorists.
On the day he died, David's unit was twice dispatched on missions. David commanded an armored Humvee, sitting in the front passenger seat, reading the maps and talking on the radio. During the second mission, a follow-on patrol after an earlier search for terrorists, David's Humvee rolled over a huge bomb (an “improvised explosive device” in the military's official jargon) concealed under asphalt in the street.
Detonated electronically by a watching terrorist, the bomb wrecked David's Humvee. The blast, directed up through the vehicle's unarmored floor plates, wounded all four occupants. David's wounds – massive internal injuries and bleeding – were fatal.
The Bronze Star and Purple Heart that David was awarded posthumously now adorn a veritable shrine to his memory in the Herrera home. In the only photo his parents have from his time in Iraq, David stands straight in his desert cammies looking, as it were, through the camera and back to a world he would never see again.
“As a sergeant major, I understand,” says Marcos quietly. “As a father, I have a tough time. It hurts. I miss him.”
The Herreras are warriors. Death on the battlefield is a risk they all took, knowingly. The father volunteered for Vietnam. His sons enlisted in an all-volunteer military, embracing a proud tradition of service to a country they love.
Of the room where the Army service of all three Herreras is memorialized in photos, medals, maps and commendations, plus the folded flag given to the Herrera family at David's funeral, the father says simply:
“We keep it going. Our country is what it's all about.”
Aflagpole adorns the neatly manicured front lawn at the El Cajon home of Joseph Bertolino. Arrayed at the pole's base are small memorials in stone to Bertolino's deceased wife and mother. More recently, one more memorial in black granite was added: for Stephen A. Bertolino, staff sergeant, United States Army.
Sgt. Bertolino, Joseph's 40-year-old son, was killed in Iraq on Nov. 29, 2003.
From his photo etched in the black stone beneath the flagpole, Stephen smiles up at a viewer. A dark mustache and Army bush hat give him a rakish look. In death even as in life.
Stephen, too, came from a military tradition. His father is a Navy veteran of Korea and an Army veteran of Vietnam. At the ferocious Vietnam battle of the Ia Drang in November 1965, Joseph Bertolino was an Army sergeant in an artillery battalion. Under fire from North Vietnamese soldiers mounting a night attack, Joseph Bertolino crawled from howitzer to howitzer looking for more illumination rounds to help break up the enemy assault. Bullets hit the ground within inches of his head.
Joseph survived to serve another decade in the U.S. Army and to raise his son, Stephen, and five other children.
Stephen, nicknamed “Tony,” graduated from Granite Hills High School, converted to the Mormon faith of his high school sweetheart and later worked for the Postal Service. But Tony was drawn to the military.
“He wanted to follow in my footsteps,” says his father.
Tony did a three-year hitch in the Marine Corps, then switched to the Army. A model soldier with an impressive 6-foot-6 physique, Tony was selected for a three-year tour as an Army recruiter in Santee.
In 2002 he was transferred to Fort Carson, Colo., and assigned to the Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, a proud unit that traces its lineage back to frontier duty in the Old West. In April 2003, Tony and the 3rd Armored Cav went to Iraq.
By now, Tony was a trained aviation mechanic who worked on the 3rd Cav's many helicopters. But Iraq was a war zone and so Sgt. Bertolino had other duties, as well. He was a platoon sergeant assigned to escorting Army convoys that often came under attack from Iraqi insurgents.
On that fateful day, Nov. 29, 2003, Tony and his platoon were providing security for an Army convoy in Haditha, Iraq. As so often happens in that war, danger came from Iraqi insurgents wearing civilian clothes and driving a civilian vehicle. The car sped by the convoy and then turned across the road, blocking the convoy's path.
From inside the car, insurgents opened fire on the convoy with a heavy .50-caliber machine gun and also started throwing grenades. A burst from the insurgents' machine gun killed the driver in Tony's Humvee. To remain in the line of fire was certain death for everyone in the vehicle. Tony grabbed the wheel and started backing up to a safer, more defensible position.
Just then, two bullets from the heavy machine gun passed through the windshield and struck Sgt. Bertolino in the face, killing him instantly.
As Tony's father tells the story, his voice cracks.
“He saved the lives of a lieutenant and three or four other guys in the vehicle. He got a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart,” Joseph says, wiping away tears.
Tony and the high school sweetheart he married had four children. The oldest, Tony Jr. is 16, the youngest, Jason, is 7.
Tony was devoted to his family. A scrapbook his father keeps is filled with photos of Tony, infectious grin on his face, with his family; playing with the kids, kissing his wife, his long arms draped lovingly around them all.
Joseph describes his son as having a “heart of gold.” The father's voice cracks again and he pauses to regain his composure.
“He never met a stranger. He was always helping someone, always befriending someone. Buying presents for his kids. He was completely unselfish.
“He took care of his soldiers the same way. They loved him.”
At Fort Carson, Tony's name is inscribed on a memorial to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment's honored dead.
Across the small stone memorial to Sgt. Stephen A. Bertolino at the base of Joseph Bertolino's front-yard flagpole are the words:
“My son, my hero.”
Below that, this final thought:
“He gave his todays for our tomorrows.”
Fernando SuÁrez del Solar isn't the typical father of a Marine son killed in Iraq. Devastated and embittered by his only son's death in action a week after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, SuÁrez became an anti-war activist, even a protest-movement celebrity. A native of Mexico who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1995, SuÁrez now devotes full time to his personal crusade against the Iraq war.
A bumper sticker on the window of his mobile home in Escondido proclaims “Bush Lied.” Inside, the walls are covered with certificates of appreciation from anti-war groups he has addressed. After his son, Marine Lance Cpl. Jesus Alberto SuÁrez del Solar, was killed, he traveled to Iraq on a private peace mission delivering medical supplies to Iraqi hospitals.
His protests have been featured on the ABC News program “Nightline,” and on other television networks. Newspaper clippings in both English and Spanish on his anti-war protests fill notebooks he keeps in his living room.
He readily concedes that Saddam Hussein is a monster and that the Iraqi dictator's regime was an international menace. Still, he adamantly opposes the war that removed Saddam from power. Whether this is carefully considered geopolitics, moralism, or unresolved anger over his son's death while fighting for an adopted country remains an open question.
Lance Cpl. SuÁrez's ideals seem distinctly clearer.
By his father's description, Jesus enthusiastically joined the Marines after graduating from San Pasqual High School in 2001. Jesus' ultimate goal, says his father, was to become a Drug Enforcement Administration agent following his Marine Corps hitch.
After boot camp, Jesus was trained as a sniper at Camp Pendleton. “He was very happy; he was the top student in his sniper class,” recalls his father.
After completing his training, Jesus served stints in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Somalia and Hawaii.
On leave after returning to Pendleton in late 2002, Jesus married the girl he had dated through high school and who had given birth to his child.
In February 2003, Jesus' unit, Delta Company of the Marines' 1st Light Armored Vehicle Battalion, 1st Marine Division, was alerted for movement to Kuwait. With war looming, Jesus' worried father offered his son, a non-U.S. citizen, an out – a family move back to Tijuana, beyond the Marines' reach.
“My son told me, 'Father, you taught me to respect my word.' I signed the contract, I am a Marine. I will go, but I will come back,'” Fernando remembers Jesus saying.
“I was feeling very proud of him. He was a man, no more a boy, a real man, assuming his responsibilities. This for me was very beautiful,” says Fernando, tears welling up in his eyes.
In Kuwait, Jesus trained as a scout and medic. He wrote three letters to his family, reporting his affection for the Kuwatis he met, who told him of the horrors inflicted on Kuwait by Saddam's invasion and occupation in 1990-91.
On March 19, 2003, Jesus' LAV battalion crossed the Iraq border and went to war. Videotape shot by ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff and his crew, then embedded with the 1st LAV Battalion, on March 23 featured a confident, cheerful Jesus climbing a water tower with his long-range Marine sniper rifle.
“Are you worried about the Iraqis spotting you up here” asked Woodruff. “No,” says Jesus with a knowing smile. A camouflage bandana wrapped around his head, Jesus sighted in his rifle. The news video is now among his father's most cherished possessions.
Four days later at a spot in the desert a few score miles south of Baghdad, Lance Cpl. Jesus SuÁrez stepped on what may have been an unexploded bomblet dispensed from a U.S. cluster bomb dropped in an earlier airstrike. Jesus suffered massive injuries to his legs and torso. He died in a helicopter flying him back to emergency medical care.
At a Camp Pendleton ceremony on April 25, 2003, Jesus SuÁrez was posthumously awarded U.S. citizenship.
Recalling that day, his father weeps.
However ardent his opposition to the Iraq war, Fernando SuÁrez is more than forgiving toward the U.S. Marine Corps, where his son found a home.
“I love the Marine Corps,” Fernando says. “It was my son's family.”
David Lee Herrera, Stephen A. Bertolino, Jesus Alberto SuÁrez del Solar: Three more reasons to recall anew on Memorial Day 2006 what this nation owes to those who have given, in Abraham Lincoln's immortal phrase, the last full measure of devotion.
Caldwell is editor of the Insight section and can be reached via e-mail at
robert.caldwell@uniontrib.com.
