A Father’s Public Grief, Private Healing

For families of the fallen in Iraq, the grief is usually private, the sorrow and tears poured out behind closed doors. But not for Carlos Luis Arredondo.

When three Marines arrived at his suburban home one afternoon last summer to inform him that his 20-year-old son, a lance corporal, had been killed in action, Arredondo went berserk with grief, anger and incomprehension. He grabbed a propane torch and a 5-gallon can of gasoline and set fire to the Marines’ van on the street, badly burning himself in the process.

Much of America watched the burning wreck live on cable television.

Nine months later, Arredondo, 44, is still healing, the singed flesh of his calves a ruddy brown. His doctors have recommended that he keep out of the sun for a year.

He has apologized to the Marines, is receiving grief counseling and will be moving this month to Massachusetts to be closer to his son’s grave and the boy’s younger brother. In November, a Boston intersection was renamed in the late serviceman’s honor -- he was born in the city and, before enlisting, had graduated from a Boston-area vocational school with an electrician’s degree.

“I miss him every day that goes by,” Arredondo said of his son. “I wake up, and I think of him. If he was alive, maybe he’d be thinking about being married and having some children.”

Marine Lance Cpl. Alexander Arredondo was shot in Najaf on Aug. 25. It was his father’s birthday, and the older Arredondo, a handyman and former bus driver, was building a white picket fence at the home in Florida that he’d moved into six weeks earlier. He was carrying his cellphone, expecting his son’s call.

Instead, the Marines pulled up in their van.

When his son was buried in a cemetery in Walpole, Mass., Arredondo was brought in an ambulance to attend.

The ache of Alexander’s death is still acute for three generations of his family.

“We have had two family tragedies -- what happened to Alex and what happened to my son,” said Luz Arredondo, 65, the boy’s grandmother.

It has taken its toll on her too. Her son said she had a nervous breakdown and was seeing a psychiatrist. Music makes her weep.

Alexander’s mother, who had earlier remarried and now lives in Bangor, Maine, is subject to bouts of brooding she calls “Alex’s days” when she wants to be alone and won’t answer the phone.

The other child she had with Arredondo, Brian, 18, was supposed to go live with his father, she said, but the turmoil caused by his brother’s death ended that plan.

These days, Arredondo seems embarrassed, as well as puzzled, by what he did the day the Marines pulled up in front of his home. He snapped, he said, when he couldn’t get though on the phone to a Marine sergeant he knew in an effort to get more news about his son.

At first, he said, he had thought the Marines had come to do recruiting. When they refused his request to leave, he clambered into their vehicle with the torch, gas can and a hammer. Standing on the street outside, he said, they did nothing to stop him.

“I was calling my son, ‘Alexander, Alexander,’ and saying, ‘This is not happening,’ ” he said. “I picked up the hammer and started smashing things inside the van. I was totally crazy in that moment.”

He sloshed gasoline around the interior, and it exploded, propelling him into the street. He suffered second-degree burns over 20% of his body. His mother, who had been trying to pull him from the van, tugged off his flaming socks

At hospitals in Hollywood, Miami and Boston, doctors worked to treat his burns, which extended from his right ear to his lower legs. In Massachusetts, he said, he was entitled to help from Medicaid. The Florida hospitals that admitted him sent him more than $53,000 in bills.

But his public display of a father’s agony over the death of a child in Iraq caught the attention and sympathy of others. More than 400 people, he said, sent cards and letters, often enclosing money to help him pay his medical expenses.

“It was overwhelming,” said Arredondo, who immigrated from Costa Rica to the U.S. in 1980.

When a New Jersey man mailed him a $1,000 check, Arredondo telephoned to thank him. The donor promptly sent another $1,000. Arredondo decided not to call again.

From California, two Latino boys, 7 and 10, who heard about Arredondo’s loss, gave up their weekly treat at McDonald’s and mailed $10.

“I wasn’t alone on this,” Arredondo said.

He was ready to sell his single-story house in this town between Miami and Fort Lauderdale to pay for his medical treatment, but between the gifts and adjustments the two Florida hospitals made in his bills, he said he wouldn’t have to do so and, instead, could rent out the house when he moved north.

To help him come to grips with his loss, the muscular, black-haired Arredondo has been seeing a grief counselor, sent weekly by the Veterans Administration, and meeting with members of other families who have had loved ones killed in Iraq.

At Christmastime, Arredondo visited a Marine Corps Reserve unit in suburban Miami to meet with the Marines who had come to his house and apologize for destroying their van.

From the Marines’ perspective, a spokesman said last week, the grieving father had nothing to apologize for.

“Losing a vehicle pales in comparison to losing a son,” said Bryan Driver, public affairs officer for the Marine Corps Casualty Assistance Office in Washington. “That is news that no one wants to hear.”

Arredondo said his grief counselor had advised him to put away his son’s belongings, so he filled four plastic tubs with letters and other personal effects.

Not all mementos have been stored away. A portrait of the late Lance Cpl. Arredondo in his high-collared dress uniform sits on a table in the living room, his dog tags draped over the picture frame.

His father has made photocopies of one of his son’s letters, written as he crossed the Pacific.

“Soon enough,” Alexander Arredondo wrote, “I will be in the desert, outside the city of [Baghdad], in full combat gear, ready to carry out my mission....

“I am not afraid of dying,” he told his parents. “I am more afraid of what will happen to all the ones that I love if something happens to me.”

Arredondo said that burying his son was “very hard, very hard, knowing that he had so much to look forward to.”

He said he prayed for all families who had lost a service member in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Keep writing, he urges parents whose children are serving.

“They want to read your letters,” he said. “They need to hear that we are very proud of them and that we love them.”