Posted on 07/17/2004 8:02:00 PM PDT by neverdem
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Master Sgt. Thomas R. Thigpen was 52 when he fell dead of a heart attack during a touch-football game in Kuwait on March 16 — a casualty that does not quite fit the standard template of wartime tragedy: the fresh-faced 18-year-old cut down with the promise of a full life ahead.
He was not the oldest to die since the invasion of Iraq. That would be Staff Sgt. William D. Chaney, 59, who operated the machine gun in the door of his unit's Black Hawk helicopters — the same job he performed in Vietnam — and died after surgery for an intestinal problem. Sgt. Floyd G. Knighten Jr., 55, serving in Kuwait in the same unit as his 21-year-old son, died of heat stroke while driving a Humvee without air-conditioning across the scorching Iraqi desert.
In all, 10 soldiers age 50 or older have died in the Iraq war, some of medical ailments that might have excluded them from earlier conflicts, others under fire in the heat of battle. That is a small percentage of the nearly 900 American service members who have died since the Iraq war began, but it is 10 times the percentage of men in that age group who died in Vietnam. It is nearly as many as those of that age who died in the entire Korean War.
And those 10 deaths, if no sadder than those of the young soldiers who never left their teens, have created a far different, and perhaps surprising, landscape of grief. It is a scene not of spring, but of harvest: a total of 11 grandchildren left behind, 21 decades of marriage, years of service to communities, mortgages nearly paid off, and long careers that were already pointed toward retirement.
"I told him, `Daddy, you're too old to be going over there like that,' " said Liza Knighten, 57, who met her husband, whom she called Daddy, 34 years ago near her home in the Philippines while he was in the Navy. "He told me, `I'm not too old to fight for our country.' "
The war deaths of middle-aged soldiers are a consequence of a specific moment in American history. With a shrinking roll of full-time soldiers and no draft to replenish it, the nation's armed forces have had to reach deeper into the Reserves and the National Guard, where men in their 50's typically train and serve alongside soldiers in their teens. About 5,570 of the 275,000 American troops in or about to leave for Iraq and Afghanistan are 50 and older, nearly all of them members of the Guard and Reserves.
The deaths raise questions about why older men, many of them veterans and some in obviously questionable health, are deployed to a war zone. Seven of the 10 died of heart attacks or other "nonhostile'' causes, as the Pentagon classifies them, while three were killed in combat.
Though the Army and other service branches have mandatory retirement regulations that can kick in anywhere from age 55 to 62, depending on a soldier's length of service and other circumstances, there are no age limits on the battlefield. "If you're a soldier, you're expected to be able to do your job and to go where you're needed," said Lt. Col. Gerard Healy, an Army spokesman. "Where you're needed is most likely to be in a combat zone.''
All members of the armed forces must pass periodic physical fitness tests - meeting standards in push-ups, sit-ups and a two-mile run - and military regulations require physical examinations on base at least once a year for members of the Reserves and the Guard. But medical assessments can be subjective: A condition like high blood pressure that would bar a new recruit from enlistment is allowable in an experienced soldier if it can be controlled through medication.
Most of the older soldiers understood the potential sacrifice they were being asked to make, because many of them had faced it before, in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf war of 1991. And if they or their families had doubts - "Let's sit this one out," one veteran's wife urged him - those misgivings were most often squelched with a nod to duty, country and an almost fatherly sense of responsibility to the younger soldiers they had taught.
Sergeant Thigpen, a National Guardsman from Augusta, was to become eligible for voluntary retirement in June 2003, but that February, his unit was called up to serve in Iraq, pushing his retirement date back at least a year. When his wife of 25 years, Theresa, visited him at a training camp in Indiana before he left, "he broke down and cried," she said.
"He said, 'I don't want to, but I know I have to go.' He told me he had 19-year-olds, who he trained, crying on his shoulder, and there was no way he could let them go by themselves."
In Shape, They Thought
His scheduled return was more than a month away, but Mrs. Thigpen, 50, had already packed their suitcases for a Caribbean cruise when, in March, word came of her husband's death. Now, their modest one-story house on the outskirts of Augusta is quiet, its solemnity enforced by a glass display case just inside the front door that confronts every visitor with medals and pictures and memories.
The boys of Augusta miss the man with the gray push-broom mustache who took a generation of Cub Scouts on camping trips. Church groups mourn the seasoned hiker who guided them along the Appalachian Trail. Madison and Morgan Thigpen, ages 4 and 6, still come down from Atlanta to swim in his pool, but their grandfather is not there to applaud their dives.
Family photos of some soldiers in their 50's who died in Iraq show that they were predictably soft around the middle. Not Sergeant Thigpen, a former marine who ran several times a week and, defying the gray mustache that betrayed his age, finished the Army's two-mile run in 17 minutes. He often joked about being in better shape than anyone in the family, including his 31-year-old daughter and 24-year-old son.
In the Middle East, he was stationed at Camp Doha, Kuwait, while many of the soldiers he had trained in computer and communications systems worked at Baghdad International Airport. Mrs. Thigpen said her husband, dismayed at being separated from them, volunteered for a half-dozen trips on a supply convoy to Baghdad.
Most days, before she went to bed and just as he was rising, the couple would chat by instant messaging on the Internet. Rarely did he complain about life in the desert, but occasionally frustration surfaced, as when she urged him to take a short leave to visit his ailing mother in Georgia.
"If I leave here, I'm going AWOL, I'm not coming back," he wrote. But he came home at Thanksgiving, and went back, dutifully.
He seemed able to handle the rigors of a war zone, Mrs. Thigpen said, but over the years there had been warning signs among the high fitness scores. Three times - in 1994, 2001 and last October, while in Kuwait - Sergeant Thigpen had gone to doctors or the hospital with chest pains.
A stress test after the second incident convinced his private doctor that his heart was fine, she said. But after he collapsed during the touch football game, an autopsy revealed that two arteries were partly blocked.
In their daily chats, Mrs. Thigpen, an assistant manager at the Georgia Department of Motor Vehicles who was also active in the women's ministry at Augusta's HIS Community Church, talked about wanting to take up the ministry full time. The couple were contemplating ways to pay for her return to college. Now, because of her husband's death, the Army will pay.
"It just shows,'' she said, "you'd better watch what you pray for.''
'The Last Time I Go Away'
Outfitting a 59-year-old National Guardsman for war requires some unusual skills, like persuading a doctor and an insurance company to approve and supply 18 months' worth of anticholesterol and blood pressure medication.
Staff Sgt. William D. Chaney arranged all that. But if he had any reservations about whether his health or age should keep him from going overseas, they evaporated when he and his wife of 32 years, Carol, sat down for a family meeting with their 26-year-old son, Chris.
Chris asked one question: "Dad, do you want to go?"
"He said, 'Yes, it's what I trained to do,' " Mrs. Chaney, 58, recalled in an interview at her office at the Chicago Botanic Garden, where she is director of human resources.
When her husband's unit was called up, Mrs. Chaney was recovering from surgery and treatment for cancer, but she did not ask him to stay. She knew he had a deep need to go, a desire nurtured over 30 years. "Bill said he wanted to finish what he didn't finish in Vietnam," she said. "He said, 'This will be the last time I go away to war.' "
Drafted into the Army in 1967, he served for two years before coming home to a nation where opposition to the Vietnam War - and sometimes to the soldiers who fought there - had not yet reached its crest. Seeking to put his Army training as an air traffic controller to use, he was told it did not qualify him for a job in commercial aviation, his wife said. So he went to work in a warehouse. He once sought out other veterans at a V.F.W. post near his home in Schaumburg, Ill., a Chicago suburb, but felt less than welcome.
Where the military was concerned, "he was kind of bitter about everything," Mrs. Chaney said.
Not until 1986, when a huge "welcome home" parade for Vietnam veterans in Chicago attracted more than a half-million people, including Sergeant Chaney, was he able to begin putting those feelings aside. He began talking regularly with veterans he had met there. Three years later, he joined the Illinois National Guard.
Sergeant Chaney went back to what he knew best: repairing helicopters and teaching younger soldiers to do the same. He also served as a helicopter crew chief, sitting behind the pilot and co-pilot, manning the machine gun that juts out the helicopter door - the same job he had in Vietnam.
This Mother's Day, May 9, Mrs. Chaney was surprised to receive her husband's call from a military hospital in Germany. He had been evacuated from the combat zone because of severe abdominal pain and had undergone surgery to remove part of his small intestine. They spoke a couple of times that week, as his condition improved. But when she called on May 18, he was dead, apparently of a blood clot in his lungs. Military officials had not yet contacted her, she said, and that has been a source of continued anguish during the two months since.
While the sergeant was in Iraq, his unit's Internet connection rarely worked. So Sergeant Chaney resorted to an old standard of soldiers: handwritten letters. He described Saddam Hussein's palaces and the generals who were ferried about in his helicopter. But he expressed little fear, Mrs. Chaney said.
"He told me he was more afraid when he was in Vietnam," she said. Comparing resistance fighters in Iraq with the Vietcong, he told her: "I've dealt with professionals. These guys are amateurs."
Going With Him
When the commander from the Louisiana National Guard armory knocked on Liza Knighten's door one evening last August, his message was simple and somber.
"He said 'Floyd died,' " Mrs. Knighten recalled. "I said 'No.' Then I said, 'Which one? Because I've got two.' "
It was her husband, Sgt. Floyd G. Knighten Jr., a 55-year-old mechanic with the Guard's 1087th Transportation Company, who had died of heat stroke during a convoy across the Iraqi desert.
Her 21-year-old son, Specialist Floyd Knighten III, who was serving in the same National Guard unit in Iraq, was safe. But that, she said, eased the pain only so much.
Sergeant Knighten, a barrel-chested Vietnam veteran with the stomach bulge of a middle-aged man, did not have the physique of a combat-ready soldier.
"He's got a belly on him, but who doesn't these days?'' asked Specialist Knighten. "He was a strong guy, with a lot of upper-body strength. That helped him as a mechanic.''
Floyd Knighten III was just 8 when his father came home in 1991 after serving in the gulf war. "I told him then that when he goes back to war, I'm going to go with him.''
Father and son shared a truck on two missions across the Iraqi desert.
"We mostly talked about wanting to go home,'' Specialist Knighten said. "He was thinking about retiring, and he'd talk about the fishing trips he wanted to take. But it was awesome just being there together, especially being at war. I did feel like I was at home because I had my Dad there.''
Needed at Home, and in Iraq
It took nearly a week for the soldiers of the Third Battalion, 15th Infantry, Third Infantry Division to locate the body of Sgt. First Class John W. Marshall, 50, who was blown from the turret of his armored vehicle as his unit fought its way into Baghdad in April 2003. But then Sergeant Marshall never made things easy for himself, or anyone else.
"I'll get rid of them in a heartbeat'' was his half-joking prescription for dealing with incompetent or inattentive subordinates, said Denise Marshall, his wife for 16 years. Apparently he did just that on the run into Baghdad, taking the place of another soldier who had been manning the turret. His actions earned him the Silver Star.
A career soldier, Sergeant Marshall enlisted in the Army at 18 and worked his way up the ranks, serving in South Korea and Germany. Early on, he took a five-year leave for treatment of Hodgkin's lymphoma, but resumed his career. He was eligible to retire in 2002, but as the prospect of war in Iraq loomed, he decided to re-enlist.
He had plenty of reasons not to go. His son Richard, 16, was suffering from night terrors that had developed during the past few years, while Sergeant Marshall had been stationed in Kentucky and was rarely home in Hinesville, Ga. His wife had developed a disorder that left her temporarily blinded in one eye and required surgery.
"I told him, 'Let's sit this one out,' " Mrs. Marshall said. Her physician had written a letter to her husband's commanders asking his deployment to be deferred at least 30 days so he could help at home. "He read it,'' she said. "He didn't like it.'' The letter sat on his desk while Sergeant Marshall prepared to go overseas.
"His response was: 'I trained these guys, Denise. I really need to be there.' I knew if he didn't go, somewhere down the line, maybe in five years or so, he would look at me and say, 'I should have been there.' ''
Now home alone with their three children in Hinesville, the military town near Savannah that borders Fort Stewart, Mrs. Marshall says she feels isolated. Few men from Sergeant Marshall's unit have visited, she says, and none have reached out to offer help with her boys, Richard and Kevin, 15. Though their house bubbles with the laughter of a daughter, Jennifer, 13, and the shouts of pre-kindergartners at the day care center that Mrs. Marshall runs at home, the air of vitality can be misleading.
Recently, Richard asked his mother about his father's attachment to his unit, and to the Army, she recalled: "Did Dad love them more than he did us?'' "No," she had answered. "But he felt obligated to do everything he could to get them back safe and sound. He just didn't come back with them.''
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Theresa Thigpen's husband, Master Sgt. Thomas R. Thigpen, was 52. "I know I have to go," he told her.
May God bless and give victory to the United States Armed Forces. Say a prayer for the families of those who return badly wounded or don't return.
God bless this good father; he never left his boys!
The Honorable life of an American Soldier.
Though many of the comments in the article were designed to be ANTI-military - they did not attain that goal.
I'm 50 years old. I felt it necessary to resign my reserve officer's commission (USAR) in 1993 because I had developed a medical condition that I knew made me no longer a deployable asset to the army reserve. There has not a day passed since then that I haven't wished to be "back in the saddle." Especially so after 9-11. I mourn for the families of these men, but I can't help but feel a little envy of the men themselves - along with great admiration. I know that is a strange emotion, but I feel guilty that I am not there. It troubles me that I can't be there to help those those young folks. I understand the paternalistic feelings of these great men.
I thank God for these men, and I pray for His comfort to their families. I wished I could personally give them all a hug and say thank you for your father's, grandfather's service. They did the right thing.
Friends, any time you see a soldier/sailer,airman, marine, etc, regardless of their rank or age. You stop and shake their hadn and praise them for being in uniform. That is the best way I know to honor the dead like these.
God bless this good father; he never left his boys! This bears repeating; superb comment.
The life of a soldier touches more than the battlefield. They are the best among us.
Sargeant Marshall was my best friends' brother...He is sorely missed. He loved his job and his soldiers.
Thank you, Alia. :-)
...reminds me of something in an exchange between me and that younger buddy of mine. I joked that he was so hairless way back when we went through initial, that he'll probably live to be 125.
He said, "Hey, don't wish that on me, old man."
;-)
Your post brings me to another point I thought of making earlier: Healthcare. Medical science, and all that. Given the advances in medicine, all humans (not killing themselves this way or that) are living longer. Much longer, and more healthy than WWII vets. I know the cut-off for active duty used to be 45 I seem to recall.. So, I do not quite understand the "alarm" of older men, in this article.
.. and one more: Don't we have highschool and college male athletes dying while playing sports -- from heart attacks and such? Young males in their prime of health -- just simply dropping?
You feel guilty because these are your brothers, and you wish you were there to watch their backs.
Thank you, sir, for serving.
Sorry for your loss.
Thank you!
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