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thedrifter
10-17-04, 04:07 PM
United by grief, divided by war

Two families who lost sons in Iraq differ over rationale for conflict
By Alex Roth
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
October 17, 2004


LINCOLN, Neb. – Kyle Codner and Matthew Henderson didn't meet until four months before they died together, side by side in a country about as far away from this Midwestern state as a person can get. Their families, who have clashing opinions about the wisdom of the war in Iraq, have formed, in grief, a kinship.

Owen Henderson believes invading Iraq was the right thing to do, even though the war cost him his only son. A divorced veterinarian, he lives alone in a one-story house on the outskirts of this university town. His son, Matthew, 25, was a Camp Pendleton Marine. A T-shirt hanging above the bed in Matthew's old room reads, "Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body."

"We did the right thing by getting Saddam Hussein and his two sons out of there," Owen Henderson said recently.

"If we want to have the freedoms we have, we've got to get this terrorism under control."

In contrast, Wain and Dixie Codner can't fathom President Bush's war rationale and think their son's death was senseless. They live on a small farm in Wood River, a two-hour drive to the west, past 120 miles of cornfields, grazing livestock and a huge grain silo painted with the words "Jesus Is Risen."

Their only son, Kyle, 19, was so skinny that the Marines put him on double rations in boot camp, so boyish-looking that Iraqi translators nicknamed him "the baby." Wain Codner wonders if his son ever thought to himself, "What the hell did I get myself into?"

"Bush's reason for getting us into this war was based on lies," said Dixie Codner, 49.

The two families – who didn't meet until after their sons were killed in the same roadside explosion – reflect the emerging division about the war among families of U.S. troops killed there.

As of Friday, 153 Camp Pendleton Marines had been killed in Iraq, according to the Department of Defense, a death toll higher than that of any other military base in the United States. In recent weeks, the Union-Tribune has interviewed family members of 30 of those men, selected at random. Roughly two-thirds said they agreed with the decision to invade, even though a loved one had been killed as a result. The rest thought the war was a mistake or admitted to growing reservations.

Like Owen Henderson, many of the war's supporters remain convinced that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that he posed a threat to the United States and that the world is better off without him in power. Virtually all of them intend to vote for Bush.

Those who oppose the war worry that their loved ones died for nothing, given the failure to uncover any weapons of mass destruction. They think the situation in Iraq has become a bloody quagmire. Like Wain and Dixie Codner, they are proud of their sons but furious at Bush. Most intend to vote for John Kerry for president.

Of all those interviewed, none said his or her opinion about the wisdom of the invasion changed as a result of a loved one's death. In some cases, their opinions simply hardened.

In the case of the Codners and Henderson, however, their political differences haven't intruded on the relationship that emerged from their loss.



Nine days before he was killed, Kyle Codner wrote his mother an e-mail message that turned out to be morbidly prescient. "My job: We search for land mines and Improvised Explosive Devices. We either find them or they find us and go boom ... haha."

The lance corporal, a combat engineer, had been in Iraq about three months. It had been a whirlwind year for the teenager, who joined the Marines shortly after graduating from high school in 2003, finished boot camp that September, completed his advanced training in January and reported for duty at Camp Pendleton on Jan. 25. On the day he arrived, he was told he would be headed to Iraq within a month. He called his parents and told them he felt "overwhelmed."

Codner had joined the Marine Corps in part because he had no desire to raise cattle and harvest corn on the family's 200-acre farm.

He also felt something of a post-Sept. 11 patriotic calling. In a journal entry on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks – a journal his parents didn't discover until after his death – Codner expressed his admiration for the firefighters and police who died at the World Trade Center. He wished that he could be "half as brave," he wrote.

In his high school yearbook, which contained pictures of all 19 seniors, Codner was named most likely to "kick some terrorist butt." His mother wrote in an e-mail to him six days before his death, "I know I always say this, but stay safe."

Unlike Codner, Henderson was a fairly experienced Marine on his second tour in Iraq. The corporal was a squad leader who had nearly fulfilled his four-year military commitment and was making plans for civilian life. He and his wife, Jaimie, 24, an insurance underwriter, owned a house in Lincoln. He intended to enroll at the University of Nebraska and get a degree in construction management. He was hoping to return in time for the Nebraska Cornhuskers' first home football game Sept. 4.

Henderson and Codner met just before their platoon shipped out from Camp Pendleton in February. Henderson, who was Codner's squad leader, immediately realized that his fellow Nebraskan was very inexperienced. Henderson told his father about the brand-new Marine and vowed to take the younger fellow under his wing when they got to Iraq.

Owen Henderson thought about trying to find the Codners in the phone book so he could reassure them that his son was looking out for theirs. He never did get around to calling them. In retrospect, he said recently, "I'm almost glad I didn't get through."



In Iraq, roadside bombs – known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs – are terrifying weapons against which there are few defenses. Usually made by rigging live artillery shells with explosives, they can be planted pretty much anywhere: under a pile of trash, in a mound of dirt, even in the carcass of a dead animal. An IED is usually detonated via cell phone by someone standing in a crowd or hiding on a hillside, waiting for a passing convoy of U.S. troops.

An exploding IED can leave a gaping hole in the ground that can be used as a hiding place for yet another IED. And so it was that on May 26, Henderson's squad was assigned to fill craters along a road near the Iraqi town of Hit, about 80 miles northwest of Baghdad.

According to what Henderson's wife and father were told later by Marine Corps officials, Henderson, Codner and a third Marine were leading the squad down the road when they peered over the edge of a crater and saw an unexploded artillery shell. It had wires attached to it.

It is possible, perhaps likely, that Henderson, the most experienced member of the group, knew immediately that he was about to die. Nonetheless, the three were able to turn around and, in an instant, warn the half-dozen other members of their squadron to stay back.

And then the device blew up. It was a horribly powerful explosion, so violent that the military sealed their caskets. Henderson's widow doesn't even know if her husband was buried with his wedding ring.

The Codners and Henderson were notified of the deaths within hours, but the Marines had trouble locating the family of the third Marine, and his name wasn't made public for a week.

Henderson's wife had a feeling she knew who he might be.

There had been a 31-year-old corporal named Dominique Nicolas whom she had met at Camp Pendleton a few months before the unit left for Iraq. Nicolas promised he would make sure her husband came back safely.

Nicolas, as it turned out, took the vow seriously – so much so that it became something of a running joke between the two men. Nicolas would tag along with Henderson on combat missions, sit next to him at chow. In a letter to his wife, Henderson joked that he couldn't even go to the bathroom without Nicolas hovering nearby.

And so, when Jaimie Henderson learned about the deadly explosion, she imagined that the third Marine just had to be Nicolas. She was right.



On Memorial Day, five days after the blast, Owen Henderson drove out to the Codners' farm to offer his condolences in person. Dixie Codner welcomed him with a hug at the door.

The whole Codner family was at the house that day – parents, grandparents, Kyle's only sister and Kyle's fiancee, whom he had been dating on and off since junior high. They peppered Henderson with questions, eager to learn even the most painful details. They wondered whether someone in the chain of command might have messed up somehow. They wanted to know how the world's most powerful military couldn't protect its troops from a crude, homemade bomb.

Henderson, 55, an Army veteran, later recalled being struck by how little the Codners knew about the ways of the military. He answered their questions as best he could.

In subsequent weeks and months, the families kept in touch by phone and e-mail. One day, Henderson and a friend stopped by the Codners' farm on their way back from a trip to western Nebraska. Dixie Codner cooked up a meal of grilled chicken, sweet corn and green-bean casserole.

A few weeks later, Henderson called Dixie Codner just to chat. He found her in a particularly melancholy mood. A year ago that day, she and her husband had attended Kyle's boot-camp graduation in San Diego.

"Today is a bad day," she told Henderson. He tried his best to comfort her over the phone.

They found themselves becoming friends, compatriots in a unique brand of grief and misery. Henderson calls the Codners "wonderful people." Dixie Codner calls Henderson "probably the nicest man that I have ever met."

They rarely, if ever, talk about the politics of the war, although Henderson has a theory about why the Codners are so angry. Their son was so inexperienced that he "should never have been sent over there in that situation," Henderson said. The Codners' lack of familiarity with the workings of the military left them unprepared for the possibility that their son might be killed, he added.

"They are just not attuned to military ways and war and things like that," Henderson said.

The Codners say they simply can't understand why the United States needed to invade and occupy a country whose connection to the Sept. 11 terror attacks hasn't been established to this day.

They also are angry at the Marine Corps, which they feel seduced their son – "a child," Dixie Codner calls him – into signing up while he was still in high school. She said the recruiters gave Kyle the impression that the war would be over before he finished boot camp. She said she and her husband tried to talk him out of joining but eventually relented because he felt "we weren't supporting him."

continued...........

thedrifter
10-17-04, 04:10 PM
On a recent afternoon, the couple sat at their kitchen table, shuffling through pictures of their son in Iraq. One shows Kyle holding an M-60 machine gun and grinning at the camera, dozens of rounds of ammunition draped over his shoulders, "Rambo"-style. Kyle's father finds the picture hard to reconcile with the boy he knew. This was a kid who didn't even like to hunt.

"I look at that picture and it almost makes me sick," the 50-year-old farmer said.

Although the Codners, who are Democrats, direct their anger at Bush and the Marines, Henderson, a Republican, focuses his rage on a different source: the people responsible for blowing up his son. He refers to his son's killers as "cowards." He hopes Matt's buddies track them down and take them out.

Henderson and his wife – who, like the Codners, have a daughter in college – separated two years ago. Matt sided with his father in the split and didn't have much contact with his mother while he was in Iraq.

Becky Henderson, 55, a social worker who lives in Lincoln, said her son's death reinforced her belief that the war is a colossal mistake. She said her 82-year-old mother, Matt's grandmother, has registered to vote for the first time in her life, specifically so she can vote for Kerry.

Owen Henderson, however, sat in his kitchen one recent afternoon and listed all the reasons why Hussein needed to be eliminated. He likes to think he can separate his personal pain from his political judgments, and in his political judgment, Hussein was a terrorist threat, pure and simple.

Asked what he thought about the Codners' polar-opposite views of the war, he responded, "That's why both our sons died, so we can have our own ideas and voice our own opinions."

Besides, he said, when he gets together with the Codners, political issues are the last thing they want to talk about. Two months after Matt's and Kyle's deaths, the two families went out to dinner in Lincoln. The topics of Bush, Hussein and the wisdom of the invasion never came up.

Henderson, who stays in touch with Matt's platoon by e-mail, spent the evening giving Kyle's father and grandfather the latest news from the front and the latest details about the two Marines' deaths.

Matt's wife, who isn't sure invading Iraq was the right thing to do, remembers spending the entire dinner crying with Kyle's mother and fiancee. The three women talked about "how awful and hard this is," Jaimie Henderson recalled.



Dixie Codner describes the two families as members of "a club you don't really want to belong to."

On a September morning, she stood in Kyle's room on the second floor of the Codners' brick house, which is surrounded by cornfields. She leafed through a box of his personal effects shipped back from Iraq – his driver's license, his Social Security card, his Game Boy.

She started to cry as she pulled out a family Christmas picture that Kyle carried with him in Iraq, folded up in his pocket or helmet. She had given it to him before he left, having read somewhere that such a photo might come in handy because her son could show it to the Iraqis and say, "See, I'm just a regular person with a mom and dad."

At Owen Henderson's house, Matt's room in the basement remains almost as he left it before he joined the Marines. His Garth Brooks and Stone Cold Steve Austin posters are still taped to the wall. His high school letter jacket hangs in his closet. Asked how long he will leave his son's belongings in the basement room, Henderson considered the question for a moment and then said he had no idea.

Only a parent who has lost a child can fully understand the anguish of sifting through that child's music collection or clothing rack. For this and so many other reasons, Henderson and the Codners have gravitated toward each other, although Dixie Codner recalls telling Henderson the very first time she hugged him, "I wish we'd never met."


http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/memorial/images/041017medals.jpg

NELVIN CEPEDA / Union-Tribune
Jaimie Henderson toucheds the medals on her husband's uniform. They don't include the Purple Heart he was awarded posthumously.



Families of the fallen


Lance Cpl. Levi Angell
Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin
Lance Cpl. Jeremy Bohlman
Pvt. Noah Boye
Capt. Aaron Contreras
Cpl. Nicholas Dieruf
Pfc. Francisco Martinez Flores
Lance Cpl. Bryan Kelly
Cpl. Kevin Kolm
Sgt. Michael Lalush
Sgt. Jonathan Lambert
Capt. Andrew Lamont
Gunnery Sgt. Shawn Lane
Pfc. Christopher Mabry
Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Menusa
Lance Cpl. Jason Moore
Maj. Kevin Nave
Lance Cpl. DeShon Otey
1st Lt. Joshua Palmer
Lance Cpl. Rafael Reynosa
Lance Cpl. Jeremiah Savage
Cpl. Dustin Schrage
Cpl. Dustin Sides
Lance Cpl. John Sims Jr.
Staff Sgt. Trevor Spink
Sgt. Kirk Straseskie
Pfc. Brandon Sturdy
Lance Cpl. Jesus Suarez del Solar

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/memorial/images/041017codner-medals.jpg

NELVIN CEPEDA / Union-Tribune
Months after their Kyle's death, Wain and Dixie Codner must decide what to do with their son's Marine dress blue uniform, along with the many photos of their son taken while deployed to Iraq.

Photo Gallery

http://www.signonsandiego.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=041017fallen

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/memorial/20041017-9999-lz1n17grief.html


Ellie


Rest In Peace