Posted on 04/18/2004 9:46:56 AM PDT by Squantos
The cemetery in Dubois is on a hill, so it was possible to see the length of the procession following the horse-drawn carriage that took Marine Chance Phelps to his grave on Saturday. Pfc. Phelps was shot and killed west of Baghdad, Iraq, when the convoy he was protecting was ambushed on Good Friday. He was 19 and less than a year out of high school when he became the seventh member of the armed services with connections to Wyoming to have died in Iraq.
In his eulogy, Rear Admiral Richard Porterfield, Director of Naval Intelligence, said Phelps' "name will go down in the memory of the Corps as one of its great heroes." Tributes notwithstanding, Phelps' family and teenage friends wept and placed flags, flowers and effects like Copenhagen chewing tobacco on his coffin.
Phelps' father John Phelps hugged his daughter Kelley at the end of the ceremony. Chance Phelps' mother, Gretchen Mack, tapped the coffin lightly with her hand.
At the doors of Dubois High School, where the funeral and reception were held, Mack greeted well-wishers and told them "hug your babies."
Phelps graduated from high school in Palisade, Colo., but spent his childhood and many subsequent summers in Dubois. Many of the people at the funeral and in town had played baseball with him, or knew him as a child who played with their children. Phelps was patriotic and a supporter of President George W. Bush, said Mack, who lives in Riverton. His father served in Vietnam, and his sister works for Rear Admiral Porterfield in the Navy, so when he graduated the Marines was a natural choice. Phelps was untroubled by the chaos and danger in Iraq, where he was with the 3rd Battalion, 11th Marine Regiment of the First Marine Division. He had the courtesy, however, to cut the scary parts out when he wrote to his mother. He said that everything was fine except the heat and the mosquitoes.
He was more frank with his stepfather. "When he left Kuwait, he said the convoys were taking fire," Jeff Mack said. Phelps had always been a protector, said Andrea Schiffbauer, a friend of his stepsister's who grew up with Phelps. "He was my bully-guard," said Schiffbauer. When he was in third grade and Schiffbauer was in second grade at Ridgeview Elementary School in Craig, Colo., he bodyslammed another student who had been picking on the girls. At the service she sang "America the Beautiful" and "Amazing Grace." "When you're playing with a kid you're eight, nine, 10 years old, you don't think, 'One day I'm going to sing at his funeral,'" she said.
Others who made the trip from around Wyoming and the world shared the sense of incredulity at his death. Jeremy Adams, a Marine from Powell, met Phelps once at the Twenty-nine Palms Marine Center in California. They were in the same battalion but in different batteries. Marines from Wyoming had an instant connection, Adams said, and they talked about their respective towns. Adams, who is 25, met Phelps just out of basic training. Asked if Phelps seemed young, he shrugged and said, "They kind of always seems young."
For most of the afternoon, the clouds drizzled a mix of rain and snow. Clouds to the west seemed to promise worse weather, but people still lined Ramshorn, the main street, and waved flags as the procession rolled by. Many of the stores in town were closed. Dubois Drugstore had a sign in the window saying, "Chance Phelps you are loved and missed." Boy Scouts lined the switchbacks up the hill to the cemetery, many holding flags that were bigger than they were, some with fewer than 50 stars. Their faces showed all the solemnity they were capable of at the ages of 10, 11 and 12, only a few years younger than Phelps.
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