The Pride and the Pain : News From Gulf Intensifies Loss for Gold Star Mothers and Wives

My boy’s death was not in vain.

James Stephenson, father of Pfc. Dion Stephenson, said those words. Thousands of other Americans, in other wars with other reasons, have said them as well.

They are salve for the soul. There is no cure for grief so deep.

We are waiting now, wondering how bad it is going to be. A ground war, we’ve heard time and again, is where casualties really mount. Soon the sight of flag-draped caskets may become familiar. It is an image that spreads pain. It makes people doubt.

The military, of course, knows this well. Many in the ranks have been trained in public relations damage control. They think of that other war, the one we lost, and they blame the press.

This time around, the military will not be talking about body counts. There will be no ceremony for arriving coffins at Dover. They think that was where things began to go wrong in Vietnam.

Not long after the start of Operation Desert Shield, a Marine Corps wife in Carlsbad hung a yellow ribbon on the mirror of her pickup truck. Her message was one of love and hope, to please come home soon. It was also a tip-off: woman home alone.

A man followed her after she had left her truck, then raped her at the point of a gun.

The military has cautioned families of other soldiers not to make the same mistake. Don’t wear your patriotism on your sleeve. Shelve the yellow ribbons. Avoid talking to the press. And if you must talk, do so among your own kind.

It wasn’t always so.

Hazel Smith is a gold star mother. Today, not too many people know what that means. Smith, 82, laments how things have changed. She remembers when showing one’s patriotism was unabashedly right.

She still flies the American flag, every day, morning until night, off the balcony of her apartment in Laguna Hills. But that’s just her, is what she says.

Hazel Smith has flown the flag ever since World War II, the conflagration that took her only child, 1st Lt. Pete Hunt, on Nov. 11, 1945.

Hunt was a pilot, flying a B-17 en route to Athens when it crashed in the mountains and all aboard died. Pete was movie-star handsome. He was 21 years old.

When her son was killed, a gold star went up on a front window of Hazel Smith’s home. She lived in Glendale back then.

There were gold stars everywhere during World War II, and everybody knew what they meant. More than 400,000 men and women sacrificed their lives in that war.

A gold star, in a window or on a banner unfurled near a front door, was a symbol of grief and a symbol of pride. Nobody ever gave a thought to tipping off the wrong kind.

“He enlisted,” Hazel Smith says of her son. “He was so proud, and he got everything that he wanted. He got to fly.”

That brings a slight smile to her face.

“A man in uniform was always respected,” adds Joseph Smith, Hazel’s husband. “And, I remember, people would actually get up and let you sit down.”

Tears cloud his eyes when he thinks of that. He was Navy himself. Today he is 84.

There is a formal organization of gold star mothers, a nonprofit service association of about 3,000 women throughout the United States, and another of gold star wives, with a membership count of 10,000.

Blue star mothers, too, have their group. They are the luckier ones. Their boys came home alive.

The women say that theirs are not organizations of self-pity, that they don’t get together to sob. They do volunteer work to support the military. It helps, in a small way, to ease their loss.

Membership, however, has fallen off. The women say they’ve had a tough time getting names and addresses from the Pentagon. Publicizing casualties is not something the military likes to do.

The deaths of members from World War II are also taking their toll. Women from the Vietnam era, many still bitter, aren’t taking their place.

“The Vietnam mothers got no support,” says Nora Golsh, a gold star mother in Glendale whose son, Sgt. Stephen Golsh, was killed in Vietnam. “It was an unsupported conflict. When my son left, they threw rocks at his bus.”

Watching the news, reading about other families’ grief, gold star mothers and wives revive the intensity of their loss.

Nora Golsh just answered a letter from a woman in Tustin whose fiance was killed in the Persian Gulf. She told her that helping others might take the edge off her pain.

“I look at Oceanside, Pendleton, all those mothers, you feel for them,” says Hazel Smith. “It just brings back memories. To this day, you never forget it. It’s there.”

A tear drops from her eye as she thinks about what she just said. Her gaze takes on a faraway cast.

She knew, she says, the moment that her son was killed. She felt something, around midnight, and said, “Oh, Pete,” out loud.

“I felt it,” she says. “I felt like a mother feels.”

Then Hazel Smith holds her hand to her heart.

It feels like yesterday.

My boy’s death was not in vain .