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thedrifter
01-26-06, 07:30 AM
Sharing sorrow of war victims
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Gloucester County Times

A year ago today, I'd never heard the name Sean Kelly.

Lynn Kelly spoke to her son, a Marine serving in Iraq, on Monday, Jan. 24 -- at 7:50 in the morning. She wrote down every time he called. He didn't write much -- he said what he needed to say on the phone, telling his father, Alex, the grittier things he didn't want his mother to hear.

He said he was tired and joked with her that she'd never find Al Asad, where he was, on a map.

His birthday was coming up on Feb. 18 and he wanted chocolate-chip cookies. Lynn started baking Tuesday night.

Cpl. Sean Kelly was due to leave Iraq on Feb. 7.

On Wednesday, Jan. 26, Lynn Kelly woke up and learned that several Marines had been killed in a helicopter crash in western Iraq. The report said the Marines were from Camp Pendleton, Calif., though, and Sean was stationed in Hawaii.

She was out that day with her eldest son, Jason, but had told her neighbors to call her cell phone if a strange car stopped at her house.

"A mother knows," she said.

She and Alex were watching the afternoon news about the chopper crash when the doorbell rang. She could see two white Marine hats through the window in the door.

"If I don't answer the door, they can't tell me," she told herself. But they did tell her the worst news a mother can ever hear and the Kellys' world came crashing down around them.

I'm not sure why, but they let me in the house the following day. We sat and talked in the kitchen. Jason was there. Ryan, a Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C., was there. There was a big circle on the calendar around Feb. 7, the day Sean was supposed to leave Iraq. The rest of the media was camped outside, waiting.

The Kellys also invited me to be the only reporter to attend Sean's funeral a few days later. The funeral was held in the Pitman High School auditorium and the procession from there to the cemetery was nothing short of incredible. People poured out their hearts to the Kellys that day, and ever since. Through it all, Alex and Lynn have accepted the attention and have not withdrawn from the community that feels driven to honor them. They have accepted invitations to appear at all sorts of memorial ceremonies during the past year.

One ceremony they didn't anticipate was Jason's funeral, just about six months after Sean was killed.

In the past year, I have also gotten to know better some other people who share the same kind of inexorable sorrow experienced by the Kellys: Bill McGinnis, of Woodbury Heights, whose son, Brian, was killed in Iraq in March, 2003; Tom and Linda Ryan, of Gloucester City, whose son, Marc, was killed in Iraq in November 2004; and Bill and Pat Sutherland, of Westville, whose son, Steve, was killed in Iraq in November, 2005.

I have intruded on the private sorrow of all these people. Just because it's my job to do that doesn't mean it's easy, but in each case, these grieving parents graciously allowed me to tell the world about their children's lives and deaths.

I'd like it just fine if I never have to write that kind of story again.

Ellie