A Long Road Home

Nicholas Anderson spent most of his 19 years of life here, sharing a home with his mother.

He was a funny kid with “the goofiest smile ever,” a close friend recalls. He carried his sinewy, 6-foot-3-inch frame ramrod straight. He was a standout wrestler and a defensive lineman for his high school football team, the Bonanza Bengals. He loved Vegas; when he was half a world away in Iraq, he kept inviting his fellow Marines to come visit after the war.

But Nick Anderson also had a place in his heart for the California coast.

He spent summers in Ventura with his father. He worked on fishing boats. He developed a passion for scuba diving. He horsed around with his half brother, Jackson, 10 years his junior, his only sibling. There he met the woman who later became his fiancee.

Nick was a recruiter’s dream, a Sea Cadet at Bonanza High who loved the military structure and who told his parents how it compensated for his wandering attention span and all those middling grades he got in school. For years he talked about enlisting in the Marines. When he turned 18, he did.

There was one thing Lance Cpl. Anderson never discussed, but then what invincible young man ever talks about his own death? Who, at that age, dwells on the details of his burial?

Now, Nick is the subject of a heart-wrenching dispute, a clash of private pain and official policy in which seniority counts for all, and there is no solution worthy of Solomon. Nick died Nov. 12 in Iraq without a will, and his divorced parents deeply split on where to bury him.

Nick’s father wanted him in California; his mother, Nevada. Both want Nick’s body close by for comfort; both want to visit him often, to lay flowers on his grave.

The Marine Corps was forced to invoke its rule: The older parent gets final say.

His father is 58; his mother is 48. His father’s wishes prevailed.

Parental disputes over a child’s burial site are rare but not unheard of. The military says it doesn’t track the number of such conflicts. They are usually settled in private.

The Marines say they’ve done everything they can to be fair: Each parent has a Purple Heart, each has a personal condolence letter from President Bush and letters from an array of top military officials.

Dad has Nick’s dog tags; Mom, replicas.

But nearly three months after Nick’s burial at Ivy Lawn Cemetery in Ventura, after a funeral his mother attended and an interment she fled, she is still fighting the ruling.

“I just want to bring Nick home,” she said. Nick’s father said he’s already there.

“This is a mother’s nightmare on top of a mother’s nightmare,” said Nick’s mother, Eleanor Andrea Dachtler. “I lost Nick in life; now I’ve lost him in death.”

Dachtler gestured toward the lighted case that looms in her small living room, a shrine to Nick, full of his medals, the condolence letters, the dog tags, copies of his e-mails.

“How can that happen?” she said. “How can they take my son away twice?”

*

Dachtler will talk at length about her love and her grief for her son, her anger over the Marines’ decision. Nick’s father, Albert Anderson, has had much less to say publicly, though pain is no less evident in his voice.

“The Defense Department policy is very clear,” he said on the telephone from Ventura, his voice quiet but firm in rejecting a request for an interview. “And that’s all I have to say.”

To Dachtler and a growing band of her supporters, including a Las Vegas congresswoman, the military policy discriminates against women, who tend to be younger than the fathers of their children.

“This policy is just not right, and what happened to Eleanor is a travesty,” said Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley, whose son Sam graduated from Bonanza High School with Nick.

Berkley said she planned to introduce legislation to help rectify the problem, perhaps by requiring service members to name who they wish to make the funeral arrangements should they die.

Nick, like many people his age, even those who go into combat, left no will. On his military “personal readiness” checklist, he wrote “NA” next to the question of whether he had one. He left no letter of final instructions. His fiancee, Amanda Barnicoat, who is stationed with the Air Force in Japan, has told his friends that she and Nick never talked about death, only their life together. She doesn’t know where he wanted to be buried; she would have no legal say anyhow.

The senior ROTC instructor at Bonanza, where 150 of the 2,600 students are enrolled in the military program, said he never had the “what if” conversation with Nick.

“In his heart, I believe he would have wanted to be here,” said Kip Kowalski, who spent 25 years in the Army and retired as a sergeant major.

“Time with his Dad was fun time. It was summer -- it was vacation,” Kowalski said. “Sure, on occasion he’d complain about Mom being the strict one. She sweated over that boy. But Mom was just being Mom. She was turning out a great young man.”

In Tustin, four days before he shipped off to the Middle East in May 2004, Nick had a statement notarized giving power of attorney to his father to oversee his finances. One of the clauses authorized his father to “make any decision with respect to my health and care if I am unable to make such decisions.”

Military and civilian attorneys said that power of attorney ceases upon death and that the document was thus irrelevant to the policy that resulted in Nick’s body being delivered to his father.

It also didn’t matter that Nick had assigned his $12,500 military “death benefit” to his mother.

Nor that in the military’s notification record to be opened “in the case of death, missing status or serious injury,” he wrote down his mother’s home phone number, followed by that of his own cellphone.

Yet he made his father the primary beneficiary of his $250,000 life insurance policy, writing “100 percent” next to it; in the box below, for his contingent beneficiary, he listed his mother, also writing “100 percent” next to her name.

Legally, this means his father gets all the money. Whether that’s what Nick really wanted, or whether he thought he was dividing the amount in half, is impossible to say.

“I don’t care,” Dachtler said. “I really don’t. His father can have every penny. I just want Nick.”

Albert Anderson’s lawyer issued a statement on his behalf, saying it was “unfortunate” that the mother was going public with the quarrel. Any other comment by the father, the statement said, would “only amplify the distress on both sides.”

*

Nicholas Hale Anderson was born Feb. 3, 1985, in Mission Hills, Calif. His mother, who had been tending bar, had a difficult pregnancy. Complications from subsequent operations for cervical cancer would prevent her from having more children.

His father, a onetime motorcycle dealer, was working as a manager at a plant that manufactured garment racks.

After a troubled marriage that started three months before Nick’s birth and lasted barely a year, his mother gained primary custody of him in a joint-custody arrangement.

Dachtler moved with Nick to Laughlin, Nev., in 1988 and to Las Vegas a year later. For the last 15 years, she’s worked as a cocktail waitress at the Circus Circus casino.

In time, the elder Anderson moved to Ventura. For several years he operated a commercial fishing and dive boat called Liberty.

Both parents remarried.

Nick spent the school months in Las Vegas with his mother, several weeks in the summer with his father, and split the holidays between the parents. In Ventura, Nick took quickly and deeply to the sea. He doted on his half brother, Jackson, now 10, who last Halloween dressed up as a Marine in honor of Nick. He wore the same uniform for Nick’s funeral, three weeks later.

In summer 2003, after he graduated from Bonanza High, Nick took one of his two best friends, Robert Lichamer, to Ventura.

“We had a blast,” recalled Lichamer, 20. “We worked on a fishing boat, the Seabiscuit. It was beautiful. We hung out. We dove.

“Nick loved cars, he loved dirt bikes. He loved driving in the desert. He also loved being out on the ocean.”

Nick fell in love with Mandy Barnicoat, a Ventura woman a few months younger than he. They became engaged last year.

“Dancing underneath the stars,” Mandy wrote him, “or even jumping off a boat in the deep dark waters of the ocean, you’ve made me so much happier. With you I feel like I can do anything.

“I’ve fallen so much in love with you and [would] do anything and everything for you. I know that we are going to face many obstacles in the road ahead because of both our military choices, but I also know that our love is not one that will falter.”

After finishing boot camp in California, Nick flew home in December 2003. He was picked up by another best friend, Travis Harding, who had graduated a year earlier. Dachtler wanted to meet Nick’s plane, but she couldn’t; she was working.

Harding, 20, recalled a conversation he had with Nick that night.

“We didn’t talk about it for very long, but he was very serious about it,” Harding said. “He said, ‘If I die over there, I’ll be with my Mom. I want to be buried with my Mom.’ His Mom was everything to him.”

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On Nov. 13, 2004, Dachtler went to the post office to ship Christmas presents she knew would take weeks to reach Nick in Iraq. She sent along a “Lord of the Rings” video game, a tub of Snickers bars and a big tin of store-bought cookies. “I can’t bake worth a darn,” she said.

When she came home, she saw four or five uniformed Marines huddled in the driveway.

“I said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no,’ ” Dachtler recalled. “ ‘There’s only one reason you’re here.’ ”

The mother says she doesn’t remember anything the men said when they ushered her inside.

“I flipped out. I literally went crazy.” She asked them to come back the next day.

Three of the men came back. Nick was killed, they told her, when the driver of the Humvee he was riding in swerved to avoid an on-rushing car during a nighttime patrol 15 miles south of Baghdad. The Humvee overturned; Nick, who was manning the machine-gun turret, was thrown from the vehicle.

“I said to them, ‘OK. You can tell me now. When is my baby coming back home?’ ” Dachtler said. “They looked at each other, then they looked at me. And one of them said, ‘You haven’t spoken to his father. You haven’t spoken at all?’ ”

It didn’t occur to her that Nick wouldn’t come home to Las Vegas. Dachtler called Ventura. Nick’s father wouldn’t come to the phone, she said -- his wife’s sister said he was in too much shock and pain.

A day later, Dachtler said, after repeated phone calls, he finally came on the line. She asked him to let Nick be buried here.

She said he replied: “No. Nick loved the ocean. I don’t want to argue about this.” And that was that.

Dachtler said she still couldn’t believe it. Her husband, George Dachtler, complained to the Marines. They delayed the ruling one day to review the case. The decision was upheld, and Nick’s body was flown on a U.S. Airways flight to Los Angeles.

In the days before Nick’s burial in Ventura, his mother confesses, she alternated between having near-suicidal feelings and dreaming up a plot to get her son back.

“I thought up a whole plan, I really did,” Dachtler said, shaking her head with wonder. She wanted to involve her husband and Nick’s two best friends, Lichamer and Harding, who were going with her to the funeral.

“We were going to snatch his body from the funeral home, and run with it,” said Dachtler, who knew she would never follow through with the plan. “I had this whole plot running through my mind.”

The funeral was at Our Lady of the Assumption, a Roman Catholic church in Ventura. The interment ceremony was held afterward, but Dachtler left before the coffin was laid in the ground, screaming at her ex-husband: “How could you do this to me? How could you do this to me?”

According to Lichamer and Harding, Albert Anderson kept mumbling to the mother: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

There were memorial services in Las Vegas, one at Mountain View Church, another at Bonanza High.

One day Dachtler bumped into the Marine recruitment officer who had persuaded Nick to sign up.

She said the man told her: “I’ll bet you hate me. I’m very sorry.”

She said she replied: “No, I don’t hate you. Nick knew what he was doing. Nick wanted to serve.”

*

Dachtler knows the odds are against her getting Nick’s body moved, but she takes comfort in the many letters that she says help her case. Some are from Nick, including one he wrote in 2002 after an argument over his poor study habits.

“I only need three things from you,” he told his mother. “Love, support and trust. Without one of these three things from you I’m absolutely nothing.”

She produces several letters from Nick’s Marine buddies in Iraq, who wrote her after his death. Three noted how much he talked about Las Vegas, or how he loved to tell people he was actually from there, that there really are plenty of people from a place many consider rootless.

It is unknown whether Nick’s comrades, who are still serving in Iraq, also wrote to his father about Nick’s love for California. The father won’t say.

Dachtler says these days she alternates between fighting and grieving.

She spends one afternoon coaxing passersby at the grocery store or the post office to sign her plaintive petition to “change or amend this policy.” So far, she has about 1,600 signatures.

The next afternoon she spends locked inside her home, consumed by sadness as she stares at the shrine to her son, the most prominent feature in the living room of her small home a few miles west of the Strip.

She says she can hold it together most days to work her 6 p.m.-to-2 a.m. shift, though her co-workers at Circus Circus have turned a storage closet off the kitchen into a “crying room,” where she can go for a spell as other waitresses cover for her.

Some days she’s in a rage: “The Marine mother from Hell,” she describes herself. She went to the recruiting office not long ago and started screaming at the men inside; two police cars were called. She was escorted home; no charges were filed.

Some days the small things get to her. For some reason, she said, it angers her that she has only an inventory of the items in Nick’s wallet when he died. His father has the actual contents: his Nevada driver’s license, his Las Vegas library card, his card for a local branch of Blockbuster video, his prepaid Sprint telephone card. He had California items too: his scuba license, a dive shop’s business card.

One day, she can be upbeat and proud of the website she set up, with a lot of help from Nick’s friends: parentsforrights.com.

“I know that website’s not going to bring Nick back to me,” she said. “But you’d be surprised how much energy and work I’ve put into it. I don’t want any other parent to go through what I have.”

The next day, she can sink into despair. Thursday, Feb. 3, was such a day.

“George and I took a cake, put in 20 candles and lit them, and we took it out to the dining room table,” Dachtler said. “We just stood there, and sang Happy Birthday to Nick.”

She then broke down and cried.