War’s Toll Came Home to Coulterville

On a winter day in 1991, a man in a U.S. Marine Corps uniform stopped at Coulterville’s general store. Without explaining his exact business, the stranger asked for directions to Ferry Road. As the Marine pulled away, the store clerk would say later, she just knew.

Ferry Road was where the Jenkins family lived.

Thom Jenkins would not be coming home from the war.

Lance Cpl. Thomas A. Jenkins was one of the first American ground soldiers killed in the Persian Gulf War. Time Magazine filled its Feb. 18 cover that year with his photograph: a handsome, young Marine in dress blues, rawboned face softened by boyish freckles, staring off the page with a look of proud intensity.

In the magazine piece, which carried the headline “War’s Real Cost,” and in other newspaper accounts, family and friends added flesh to the photograph. They described a fun-loving youngster who splashed through mud puddles in his old pickup truck, who spent weekends roughing it in the foothills and mountains of the Mother Lode country. “Indiana Jenkins,” his schoolmates called him.

“You couldn’t ask for a better kid,” a friend said. “He was a nice-looking kid, played a lot of basketball. And he gave the ultimate sacrifice. Tommy died doing his job.”

He was 21. A year or two later, with the quick war long over, it had become clear that Saddam Hussein and his regime were going to remain in power, despite their defeat. It also had been disclosed that Thom Jenkins had been one of many U.S. soldiers killed not by Iraqis, but by “friendly fire.”

Around this time I drove up to Coulterville to see what Jenkins’ people made of these developments. While there was some muttering around town about the “waste” of a young life, Thom Jenkins’ father was stoic and steadfast.

“If you are here to ask me if I am bitter, I am not,” Tom Jenkins, a Caltrans supervisor, told me straight away. “I am heartbroken. I lost my son. But I am not bitter. I refuse to remember my son that way.”

The war, the father said then, had been a “necessary evil,” and Tommy’s death a “terrible accident,” but his son had died performing his duty: “He saw himself as the champion of the American people.”

That was 10 years ago. Now, of course, more legions of young Americans are preparing to fight in Iraq -- an appropriate time, it seemed, to revisit Coulterville and the memory of Thom Jenkins.

A tiny town, Coulterville sprang to life in the Gold Rush and sits on the original stagecoach road into Yosemite. It has changed some, but not much in a decade. The historic Jeffery Hotel has closed, apparently for want of tourist traffic. Competing routes into the park have proven to be more popular, though not as picturesque.

The population on the city-limits sign is still listed at 115. But there are new signs at either end of town. They depict a red, white and blue outline of the United States and declare: “WE SUPPORT HOMELAND SECURITY. All suspicious persons and activities are immediately reported to our Law Enforcement Agency.”

In the county park, the names of 15 residents who served in the Persian Gulf War have been posted on wooden slats. The first name, and the only one with a cross branded beside it, belongs to Thom Jenkins.

They also have renamed the VFW hall after Jenkins. Early last Sunday afternoon, bartender Mildred Alford was holding down the post alone, watching the Green Bay-Tampa Bay game and taking the occasional discreet drag on a cigarette.

I asked this friendly woman what most of the clientele, when there was a clientele, thought about the prospects of fighting again in Iraq. Did they believe it was the right thing?

“Some of them do,” said Alford, 71, speaking through an artificial voice box, “and some of them don’t. And some just don’t want to get into it at all. They don’t want to talk about it. They are the ones who have been there and done all that stuff, and they know how hard it is.” As for herself, she was not ambivalent. “I think they should go get him, I do,” she said of Hussein. “If we don’t, he’s going to cause a lot more problems down the line.

“But,” she added, “I know it’s probably going to take a lot of lives....”

I had telephoned Tom Jenkins, the father, to see if he would be willing to talk. Polite but firm and as stoic as ever, he declined. He didn’t want to join the war debate, one way or another.

“We are not political people,” he said. “We wouldn’t have anything to add. I’d rather not talk about it at all.”

He paused, then added: “We do have a grandchild coming. We’re very excited about it. You can write that if you want to.”

There was one last stop. Thom Jenkins is buried in higher country, in a little cemetery about eight miles from town. Pines and oaks throw shade over the tombstones, many of which mark the remains of Coulterville pioneers.

It is a quiet place. Other than the occasional snort from an unseen horse, or the whining tires of a distant car, the only sound is that of dried leaves scraping against branches as they fall toward ground in a breeze.

The Jenkins family has been in Coulterville for many generations, and Thom Jenkins was buried on a slope alongside several of his kin. The closest grave to his is that of his mother, who died in an auto wreck five years after her son was killed. This is what’s chiseled on his tombstone:

Thomas Allen Jenkins

L CPL U.S. Marine Corp

Aug. 11, 1969.

Jan. 29, 1991.

Semper Fidelis.

Protect and Serve.

Along with a layer of leaves, the stone marker on this day was covered with several bouquets of paper roses, a plastic flag, two VWF emblems, a war medal, a little toy heart with wire arms and legs, a San Diego Chargers cap, once blue but now weathered brown and flecked with a light-green moss, and a handwritten note.

The note had been printed on a slip of adhesive memo paper, now bleached white:

After

All of these years you

Are still on my mind

Happy Birthday

Dad

And it seemed, this simple message, to say all there was to be said about war’s real cost.