Signs stand sentinel for service members

The soldiers’ names were first nailed to Sullivan’s lampposts in 2004, not long after the town watched a seemingly swift victory in Afghanistan on TV and before the bloodshed in Iraq demanded more and more troops.

But as images of quick victories faded and the deployments kept coming, the service members’ parents stubbornly kept up the tradition. And the young people kept volunteering in Sullivan, population 4,400 -- a town that has done more than its share for the war effort.

More than 100 residents have served abroad. Dozens more are still deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, each honored with a white plastic sign on streetlight and telephone poles on Jackson and Hamilton Streets. Some names have hung more than once, while spouses and siblings are displayed two to a post.

The name Jake Shasteen is there. Derek Elder (again). Then comes Jeremy Barnes, Gerrick Smith, Michael Qualls, Brandon Parrish, Tessa Welty and more.

Last month, a new name joined the line: A.J. Woodworth, 21, a Marine reservist bound for Afghanistan who was a freshman at Sullivan High School when he watched the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on television.

“9/11 seems so far away to so many, but to us, it’s an everyday thing,” the Marine’s mother, Kathy Woodworth, 45, said as a power company worker drilled into a fresh wooden post.

One soldier from the area, Pvt. Cole Spencer, 21, of nearby Gays, Ill., has been killed in action -- in Iraq in 2007.

Parents say many from Sullivan have enlisted out of patriotism but also in search of opportunity and somewhat to transcend the isolation of this prairie town.

The effort to support the service members and their families at home is sustained by churches, a family support group at the local National Guard armory and an intense but informal military support network for which small towns like this are often known.

“We all kind of met at the post office, sending our kids stuff,” said Marsha Thompson, 53, whose son John Booker served one tour in Iraq before getting a military contract to work on Chinook helicopters in Afghanistan, where he is now. “We started talking.”

The result included holiday parties to send care packages and an ongoing coffee klatch. Moms in Sullivan ask each other about “your soldier -- do you know where you soldier is?” They rely on a phone tree at the first hint of concern.

Sullivan, the county seat of Moultrie County, is a place that evokes nostalgia, with a theater on the town square that once attracted well-known actors, inspirational messages on church signs and trim houses decorated with iris beds and hanging plants.

The National Guard armory for Headquarters Co. of the 634th Brigade Support Battalion sits at the edge of town, across a football field from Sullivan High School. The armory is quiet, its soldiers in Kabul. Beyond it, cornfields and single-lane county roads stretch for miles.

The 634th has an official Family Readiness Group to help spouses of deployed troops handle taxes and other paperwork. Often, that includes disputes with colleges abandoned by students who dropped course work to rush to Afghanistan, said Kelly Austin, 43, mother of a 22-year-old sergeant in Kabul for the 634th (who would be a senior this year at the University of Illinois) and a 20-year-old sailor on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.

Besides pictures of her children in Army green and Navy blue, the teacher’s bulletin board in the Sullivan Elementary School library includes the toddler-age children of other Guard soldiers serving in the 634th. She says she wants to remember all of them.

“There’s never a minute of forgetting,” Austin said.

Although the National Guard can help families tackle the formidable bureaucracy of the U.S. military, other couples with children at war provide the most moral support, these parents say.

“You’ve been there, done that,” said Mike Shasteen, 63, whose son Jake went to Iraq with the Guard. “You know what they’ve been through.”

It was the Shasteen family, along with Laura Elder, 61, who had the idea of hanging signs in town. Now the signs display their children’s names, along with Kelly Austin’s kids Stephenie and Harrison, who share a lamppost.

There are a few dozen from the Illinois National Guard alone, plus more in the Army, Navy, Reserves, Air Force and Marine Corps.

The signs will stand guard until the kids come home.

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jjanega@tribune.com