In a Tiny Town, an Old Story

It has been a while since Thom Jenkins was brought back from the Persian Gulf and buried in the Sierra foothills. The young Marine was among the first to fall, and so in death he became, for a time, famous. His lean face filled the cover of Time magazine. “War’s Real Cost,” the headline said. At the funeral, the chaplain spoke of a “beacon of liberty” and made a promise: “Thomas Allen Jenkins, your sacrifice will not be forgotten.”

Things were so different then, remember?

That was a time of yellow ribbons and televised battle briefings. Most Americans seemed downright excited about fighting a righteous war, one to redeem Vietnam. President Bush was golden. Now, 18 months later, Bush is not so golden, and his short little war has become fodder for scandal: Who knew what when of Saddam Hussein’s true intentions? Why did we let him off the hook? Now the talk is not of liberty’s beacon, but of money squandered on Kuwaiti palaces and Americans killed by friendly fire--Americans like Thom Jenkins, a victim, it turns out, of an errant U.S. missile.

I was curious how this devaluation of the Gulf experience was playing here. Jenkins’ people had been so stoic in their loss, so patriotic in their concern for other youngsters the community sent to the war. On Thursday, I met his father at the Caltrans shop where he is foreman. We went to lunch. Even before the burgers arrived, Tom Jenkins anticipated my central question.

“If you are here to ask me if I am bitter,” the father said, his dark eyes unblinking, “I am not. I am heartbroken. I lost my son. But I am not bitter. I refuse to remember my son that way.”

Coulterville is a tiny town, a rustic relic of the Gold Rush. The Jenkins family settled here several generations ago. Everyone knew Thom and what had happened to him, and on my visit I quickly picked up whispered echoes of the country’s second-guessing.

“It was kind of a waste, what happened to that boy,” one man told me.

Tom Jenkins tries to avoid such talk. In his telling, his son’s death was an “unfortunate accident,” the war a “necessary evil.” History will judge whether it was “worth it.”

This peace was not reached without difficulty. The hard times came when the attention died down, when Jenkins, his wife and their daughter found themselves alone with stacks of condolence letters from strangers and nothing more. Jenkins was not deaf to the questions about the conflict, the rumors about how his son died. He combed the official reports, paid visits to his son’s surviving comrades. He came to understand precisely what happened, and then, accepting, put it all away.

“I can’t say everything about that war was good,” he said. “It wasn’t. It was just something that I had to accept.” Jenkins recalled how his father, disabled in World War II, had remained bitter about his wounds. He refused to do the same over his son. “That bitterness is a deep, deep hole, and I would not allow it. It’s a fatal life. I accept that.”

Throughout lunch, he kept steering the conversation back to his boy. That was what he wanted to talk about, not politics, not the national mood, just his son. “I called him Tommy,” he said, smiling. “I wish you could have got to know him.” He described everything about the boy, from his interests and character, to his height and weight. He spoke of the book his son started, of the ranch they were going to run together, and of the pride the young Marine felt serving in the Gulf.

“He saw himself as the champion of the American people,” he said.

In a way, Tom Jenkins could have been any parent bragging about a child who had moved away, except that, in his case, the child will never return--one more thing for the father to accept.

I visited the grave site before I left. It’s at a pioneers cemetery, up in higher country where the oaks give way to sugar pines. Half a dozen little U.S. flags adorn the tombstone. The yellow ribbons and silk and plastic flowers have begun to lose their color and a wreath of pine needles has turned brown.

It was shady at the grave, and quiet, and it seemed a good place to think. What I thought about was how fired up we’d all been at the start of that war, about politicians who need to save face, and fathers who need to save memories. The more I thought, the more it all seemed so hopelessly cliched, obvious and useless.

Such an old story.