Notifying Officers Dread ‘The Call’

When he got the call he had been dreading, Marine Maj. Daniel Hooker thought: I can’t mess this up.

He put on his dress blues, hung in his office in anticipation of such a mission, with a sense that he was donning religious vestments. He shut the door and tore a page from the manual he had been given, the one that spelled out the speech he was supposed to use.

Hooker began reciting the words. “The commandant of the Marine Corps has entrusted me.... “ But he couldn’t get through them.

He called the chaplain in, and the two practiced his lines.

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Like everything else in the military, bad news is delivered by the book: Wear a dress uniform. Drive a government vehicle. Do not go alone. Do use the word “dead.”

The task of notifying family members that a loved one has been killed, injured or is missing in action falls not to social workers trained in the delicate dance of dealing with grief, but to the troops themselves.

They get a few hours of training and a handbook that spells out the regimen. In the end, they must draw on their inner resources to perform what may be, outside of combat, the most difficult job in the military.

“To look at somebody and say, ‘I have this terrible news for you’ -- it’s heartbreaking,” said Capt. Gary Dallmann, a Navy chaplain at Camp Pendleton who has accompanied casualty notification personnel 18 times in his 22 years of service. “I can vividly remember every [case].”

The notification procedure has come a long way from the days -- through the Korean War -- when a telegram arrived coldly at a family’s door.

Today, Pentagon lore tells of troops taking planes, boats and dog sleds to reach relatives in Alaska. Sometimes they track down kin on vacation.

The Pentagon sets the ground rules for how the news is delivered, but the different branches of service have policies too. The Air Force prefers that commanders at the rank of major and above knock on the door; helping survivors apply for benefits is then left to civilian workers.

The Army, Navy and Marine Corps spread the duty more broadly. At Camp Pendleton, 25 Marines have been put on standby in recent weeks, a mix of senior enlisted men and women and officers; 200 more Marines are ready, if needed.

Across the services, there are dos and don’ts: Do keep any description of the circumstances brief and accurate. Do be prepared for a wide range of reactions. Do not be defensive if next of kin blames the military. Air Force Col. Gene Quintanilla, commander of the ROTC at Michigan State University, has done seven notifications: cases of traffic fatalities, aircraft accidents and two suicides, all during peacetime.

“It doesn’t get any easier. You still dread doing it,” he said. “I’m gunshy at this point. Every time the phone rings at home, I just cringe because of the war in Iraq.”

Quintanilla has his own emotional handbook for that moment the door opens. He thinks of the death of his grandparents, or of the hole his father’s death left in his life. A death in the family isn’t the kind of thing one understands without experiencing it firsthand, he said.

And to Quintanilla, the Air Force is family.

On the drive to someone’s home, Quintanilla makes sure he has everyone’s name straight and reviews details of the death one more time. The rehearsal helps him get through the grim task. On the way back, he and his partner talk about how things went, and that helps him through the rest of the day.

The experiences of Quintanilla and others shape the advice the military gives for these missions. So do follow-up conversations that people such as Tom Perry, who oversees casualty matters for the Air Force Personnel Center in Texas, have with next of kin.

Much of what Perry has learned involves what not to do: Don’t say, “I know how you feel,” or “You’ll get over it.” Such pat condolences ring hollow and can appear to minimize a family’s loss. “We tell them not to over-talk,” Perry said.

More advice: Don’t reach out and hug someone; that could be interpreted as an unwanted expression of intimacy. Don’t bring your pregnant wife along to offer support to a grieving widow, as one officer once did. That widow, Perry said, was left to think of the children she would never have.

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Hooker and the chaplain drove for five hours Thursday in a snowstorm from Albany, N.Y., to South Burlington, Vt., to the home of Mindy Evnin, the mother of Cpl. Mark A. Evnin, a 21-year-old Marine sniper who had been shot to death in a firefight in Iraq.

Along the way, Hooker practiced his lines and talked to the chaplain about God, life, death and what he had to do. A first sergeant rode in a car behind them.

Mindy Evnin wasn’t home. Hooker gave a neighbor his cell phone number so she could let him know when Evnin returned.

“This was like a gut check to me,” the 39-year-old said. “It was like being on an obstacle course when you have to let go of one thing and grab another and you know that if you can’t, you will fall 30 feet and you will be injured.”

The three Marines drove to a restaurant. Before the food arrived, Hooker’s phone rang.

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Chaplains are a notification officer’s preferred partner. They support not only the family, but also the bearers of the bad news.

“I’ve had [officers] say to me, ‘Chaplain, will you tell them?’ ” said Dallmann. He reminds them that notification is their job, a moment when they become the embodiment of the armed forces. “I tell them, ‘You can do it.’ ”

Through the years, Dallmann has seen a range of reaction -- from stunned silence to fury. There was the woman who answered the door, saw who was there, and promptly shut it, unable to face what she instantly knew.

It took Dallmann 45 minutes to talk her into opening the door.

It’s not uncommon for a casualty assistance officer to be assaulted. There was the teenage girl who pummeled Dallmann with her fists and screamed, “You killed my brother!” until family members could pull her away.

More commonly, however, a bond forms between families and those who tell them that a son, daughter or spouse has died. Notification officers routinely receive birthday and Christmas cards from the families.

The Pentagon’s goal is for notification to take place within 24 hours. The preferred time is dawn, when there’s a good chance someone is home.

A manual used by the Marine Corps offers these pieces of advice: A floral arrangement can be sent and charged to the government -- if it costs no more than $81. The banner on the flowers must read, “United States Marine Corps.” Do not promise anything more than you are certain the government will provide. Try not to say “no” to family members’ requests.

“The definition of success is if you are able to make the notification in a dignified manner,” said Maj. Peter Davis, who is in charge of the Marine Corps’ casualty assistance office at Camp Pendleton. “This is the final act when Marines take care of Marines.”

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Mindy Evnin, in her nightgown, had settled in front of a frozen dinner and an episode of “Friends” when the knock came.

She opened the door.

Hooker stood straight and stiff. But his hands trembled.

“Just tell me, is he dead, is he wounded or is he captured?” Evnin said.

Hooker asked whether he could come in. He asked if he could sit down. Then he delivered his speech.

The only words Evnin can recall now are “he died.”

“He’s a very lovely man,” Evnin said of Hooker. “He teared up when he told me. I told him, ‘I’m sure this must be horrible for you.’ And he said this is the first time he had done this.”

Ten minutes later, the Marines left. They went back to the restaurant, hoisted a beer in the name of Mark Evnin and ate steaks. Hooker went to a hotel and, drained, fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

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Times staff writer Hugo Martin contributed to this report.