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thedrifter
05-01-06, 04:23 AM
Today is Monday, May 01, 2006
Originally published Monday, May 01, 2006
Updated Monday, May 01, 2006
Brothers to the end

A South Bay resident comes to terms with the death of his twin in Iraq. "There's never enough words," he says, "to describe someone's life, especially when it's cut so short."
By Doug Irving
Daily Breeze

The phone rang just as Michael Glimpse stretched out on his bed after a long day and flipped on the television.

Mike? It was his father, and Michael knew why he was calling from the way his voice broke. He didn't want to hear the rest. His twin brother, Marcus, was dead.

They had grown up as best friends, fishing on the weekends, racing their bikes. They watched out for each other even as they began finding their own paths in a Palos Verdes Peninsula high school.

Marcus had followed Michael into the military. He chose the Marines, and always said that showed he was tougher than his Army brother. Now he was gone, killed by a remote-controlled bomb on his second tour in Iraq.

"I'm still numb from it," Michael said as he sat in his bare San Pedro apartment. "I just ..." His voice trailed off.

"It's like half of you is gone," he said after a moment. "You know? Half of you is dead."

They were born as fraternal twins into a broken family in Plano, Texas, and spent their earliest years in and out of foster care. They had run "out of love" by the time their adoptive father, Guy Glimpse, took them in, he said, with little more than the shirts on their backs and a few stuffed animals.

But they were close. They spent long afternoons roughhousing, or competing to see who could jump a skateboard the highest. They named themselves the Blue Crystal Avengers and filmed a video about their crime-fighting exploits.

Michael was the oldest, born one minute before Marcus, and he was always the big brother. When a bully picked on Marcus in the fifth grade, it was Michael who knocked the boy down and made sure he would never bother his brother again.

The family moved to the Palos Verdes Peninsula in 1999, and the brothers enrolled as freshmen at Peninsula High School. By then, they were showing that, though they were twins, they were hardly identical.

Michael could make friends with anyone and wanted to spend every free moment outside. Marcus surrounded himself with only a few close friends, and could stay inside all day playing fantasy video games.

Michael enlisted in the Army the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks . He rushed through his senior year of high school in two months at an alternative school, then left for boot camp to become a paratrooper.


"Marcus was so proud of him," their father said. "He just beamed. There was no question of how much he loved him; there was never any question about that."

But with his big brother gone, Marcus seemed to lose his direction. He stopped going to class. He lost his job at a Blockbuster store because he was always late, even though he lived only a few blocks away.

His father told him to do something with his life. He chose the Marines -- in part to one-up his brother. "Marc felt that the only way he could do anything harder was to become a Marine," Guy Glimpse said.

His enlistment gave the brothers one more arena in which to compete. They quizzed each other on military details. They tried to sharp-shoot quarters with BB guns.

Marcus broke his shin bone during basic training but willed himself through the long runs anyway. A drill instructor saw him limping and ordered him to the infirmary, delaying his graduation, but only for a few weeks.

Michael was the first to leave for Iraq. He spent 10 months there, patrolling the streets, kicking in doors on raids. He lost a good friend in an explosion that tore apart the thick metal armor of a Humvee.

He saw "just the worst of what was going on there," his father said.

His brother shipped out several months later; the family gathered in a cemetery near San Diego to watch his ship head out to sea. The convoy went first to tsunami-battered Sri Lanka, then continued to the Persian Gulf.

Marcus spent only about a month in Iraq, patrolling an out-of-the-way region away from the worst of the fighting. Unlike his brother, he was able to sleep through the night without being jolted awake by the constant crash of mortars.

Michael returned to the United States last March; Marcus came home between tours in June. The twins had turned 21 while on duty in Iraq; now that both were back, their parents filled buses and limos with their friends and threw a huge party.

Marcus was sent back to Iraq in January. "You know what the funny thing is?" his brother kidded him before he left. "This is your second deployment, and I'll still have more time in country than you."

A few weeks ago, Michael sent his brother a bottle of Captain Morgan rum and a pouch with his old dog tags inside. He attached a note: "These kept me safe; I hope they keep you safe."


He curses now: "He wasn't wearing them."

Marcus was setting up a traffic checkpoint near Baghdad last month. He was putting up signs when a man standing nearby apparently detonated a bomb. The U.S. Department of Defense issued a short advisory a few days later: "Lance Cpl. Marcus S. Glimpse, 22 ... died April 12 as the result of an improvised explosive device."

Michael remembers the minute his father called to tell him his brother had died. It was 7:14 on a Thursday evening.

He flew to Pennsylvania, rented a car and drove alone to Dover Air Force Base to claim his brother's body. An officer at the base handed him the flag for Marcus' coffin, already folded into a tight triangle.

Marcus was buried at the cemetery near San Diego where his grandfather was buried, and where his family stood to see his ship off when he first left for Iraq. More than 600 people attended the funeral.

He is survived by his adoptive mother, Maryan , and two sisters, Megan and Mandy , in addition to his adoptive father and his twin brother.

Michael spent hours in the days after his brother's death trying to think of what to say at the funeral, but he couldn't find the words. "There's never enough words," he says now, "to describe someone's life, especially when it's cut so short."

When the time came, he stood and spoke what he felt, without notes. He described Marcus as a loyal friend and brother.

Ellie