thedrifter
12-19-07, 07:54 AM
Remembering Colby
By MIKE SIELSKI
The Intelligencer
keep from falling apart.
Anything can be a trigger, Mark and Nancy Umbrell said. Anything can make you lose it. So although some memorabilia is easily visible in the room — Colby’s diploma from Johns Hopkins University and a photograph of his headstone — it’s as if his parents understand how much they can take.
If Nancy didn’t touch the two corkboards covered with photos of Colby, if she left them on the floor near the bed, maybe she wouldn’t start flipping through them and start thinking about Colby and cry.
If they hung his dress blues in the closet, and if the closet doors stayed shut, then they wouldn’t have to remember that part of Colby’s death that cuts them so deeply.
Nancy hoped Colby could be buried in his uniform, but according to the Army, the IED that killed Colby caused such a severe head injury that it rendered his body “not viewable.” That meant his casket would remain closed at the funeral service at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Doylestown and at his burial in Arlington National Cemetery.
“That hurt — not only that he was dead, but that we couldn’t see him,” Mark said. “Those are the kinds of things you don’t want to think about.”
At the foot of Colby’s bed, folded into a rectangle, is a “quilt of valor,” a blanket with a broad American flag sewn on it. It was a gift from the Bucks County Veterans of Foreign Wars.
When she first got the quilt, Nancy draped it over the bed. But after a while, she couldn’t stand to walk past the room. So she drew another sanity-saving conclusion: If she folded up the quilt, the bed wouldn’t look like Colby’s casket, draped in the flag.
-
Mark and Nancy keep busy. They try to live as they would have if Colby were off at college or stationed in Alaska — somewhere, anywhere, safe. Mark, who owns and operates Middle Bucks Mechanical Inc., a heating and air-conditioning company, drives his pickup truck from job to job. Nancy takes art classes at Bucks County Community College. Yet each anticipates the smallest thing that might bring Colby to mind, that might ignite the stabbing in their gut.
“The first class was …” Nancy said. “… But there was one girl in there who knew, and she’d been to Colby’s viewing. And I called her before I went and said, ‘I’m going to see you there, and I want to come up and hug you, but that will make me cry. So I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to try to get through the class.’ She understood. At the end, she just looked at me and said, ‘You did it.’ ”
On certain days, Nancy makes it a point to shop at a supermarket miles from their Doylestown Township home, just so there’s less chance she’ll see a familiar face, less chance someone will stop her, place a hand on her shoulder and say, “I’m so sorry ...”
It seems there’s always someone saying those words — friends, family, neighbors, people they’ve never met before.
“With me at work, I have a customer base,” Mark said. “Some I see once a month. Some I see once a week. Some I see once a year. So it’s pretty much every day that I run into someone who says, ‘I’m very sorry about your son.’ And I just say, ‘I appreciate that.’ That’s how I’ve dealt with it.”
Over the last six months, they’ve been invited to a series of ceremonial events, public acknowledgments of their son’s sacrifice that stir in them equal parts pride and grief.
A groundbreaking at Doylestown’s Veterans Park for a war memorial. The unveiling at the Bucks County Courthouse courtyard of 16 commemorative flags, one for each Bucks County soldier killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. A state House resolution by a local legislator. The Bucks County All-Star Football Classic, where everyone observed a moment of silence for Colby. A half-time tribute during a football game at Wyoming Seminary, a college prep school Colby attended after high school. They’ve been to all of them, but there is that inner emotional conflict.
“Everything that’s happy is sad,” said Colby’s sister, Casey.
Mostly, they go because they want people to remember what he did and why. Even on the afternoon of May 4, the day after Colby died, when television camera crews and newspaper reporters started lining up outside their house and Nancy didn’t think she could summon the strength to speak to them, Mark told her, “Listen, honey. This might be the one time you’re going to get his story told. If you say no, they’re not coming back.”
What’s harder for parents whose son has died during a war: The private moments of heartache, when Nancy breaks down and Mark is there to hold her, or the public moments, when they have to try to smile after strangers call Colby a hero?
“There are days when it would be easier if you just didn’t wake up,” Nancy said as tears well in her eyes. “We’re not suicidal or anything, but it is hard, especially when … you miss them. ... It’s the forever thing. It’s hard. But I think it could be worse. We talk about that a lot.”
Mark gently rests his hand on the back of her neck.
“There are people who lose kids to car accidents or suicides, or a 3-year-old drowns in a swimming pool,” he said. “Can you imagine being a parent and having guilt? We have no guilt. Colby died doing what he wanted to do, and that’s almost a good thing.”
-
They arrive promptly at 6 p.m. every Tuesday, as few as eight and as many as 20, lining the intersection of Main and State streets in Doylestown, standing in the cold to send their message, carrying candles and signs.
“VIGIL FOR PEACE”
“FIND HUMAN MEANS, NOT WAR”
“WE STILL SAY NO TO WAR IN IRAQ”
Many of the vigils’ participants, though not all, are Quakers. Their pacifism is rooted in their religion and values, their presence woven into the tapestry of Doylestown’s history. (The adoptive mother of the town’s most famous son, author James Michener, was a Quaker.)
“We say peace is the way,” said Doylestown resident Ken Johnson, a professor at Penn State-Abington and a vigil leader.
“There are no excuses for war,” Johnson continued, turning his focus to the weapons-of-mass-destruction justification for the Iraq war. “And people’s lives have been given away for something that turned out to be not true.”
The vigils began in October 2001, just after the United States retaliated against the Taliban for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They’ve been a fixture in the community ever since.
From the campaign against the Point Pleasant pump in the early 1980s, when Abbie Hoffman led protests against the diversion of water from the Delaware River, to these tranquil anti-war demonstrations, Bucks County has a tradition of social activism. And Doylestown is that tradition’s axis.
That activism is flavored, however, by a small-town sensibility of togetherness.
Colby died a mere four days after another Doylestown native — 26-year-old Marine 1st Lt. Travis Manion — was killed by a sniper’s bullet in Al Anbar province. The one-two punch of their deaths seemed to strengthen the community’s social kinship and de-emphasize differences.
Twenty-five thousand people showed up for the town’s Memorial Day parade this year, and still, Johnson and other war opponents marched in the parade to some cheers. One vigil regular, Edwin Nagel, attended the Manion and Umbrell funerals out of respect for their service.
“I think it would keep a sociologist busy for a long time,” said Colby’s high school track coach Paul Wilson, a Bucks resident for more than 30 years. “It’s a sophisticated community. You’ve got a lot of smart people here, and those smart people are very articulate in their views, whether they’re for or opposed (to) the war.
“We support these soldiers, these kids, because if there’s one lesson that came to us from Vietnam, it was that you may not agree with the war, but darn it, don’t go slamming people’s children,” Wilson said. “These are their kids. Doylestown, as a community, supports its children and men, its soldiers. Doylestown has learned that lesson very well.”
For their part, Mark and Nancy have remained steadfast in their support of the Iraq war. Their political views haven’t changed, even after losing their son, and they resent the suggestion that Colby lost his life needlessly.
“I had a couple of people say to me, before he passed away, ‘How could you let your son go over there?’ ” Nancy said. “And that made me so mad. Not to say there weren’t mistakes made — I don’t think anybody can argue that — but we believed that we should be doing it.”
More importantly for them, Colby believed that. Enlisting was his decision, his calling, and for all their anguish, all the moments when they miss him most, they hold onto the hope that someone, perhaps a person they’ve never met, draws something positive from their son’s life and death.
Someone, for instance, like Cynthia Magnuson.
Magnuson graduated with Colby from Central Bucks High School East in 1999. She and Colby hadn’t kept in touch and she hasn’t had any contact with his parents. Yet when Magnuson started reading Colby’s obituaries, his true-believer streak struck her.
This was the same classmate who sat in front of her in advance placement statistics class their senior year, the crew-cut football player who always made her giggle with his goofy jokes? She remembered Colby Umbrell, and she realized how little she really knew about him.
Magnuson had been working as a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., since June 2005. But she had spent the first half of this year weighing the opportunity to accept an advisory position in the American embassy in Iraq ... until she learned how Colby died and why he had served.
“It meant so much to read about Colby,” Magnuson, 26, said by telephone from Baghdad. “He felt like he was doing something important. Nobody from our generation says something like that. We’re very cynical, self-absorbed. It was the last push I needed to make the decision to come over here.”
Cynthia Magnuson’s detail in Iraq is scheduled to end in March. Her story is now a chapter in Colby’s.
“We realize,” Mark said, “he’s not going to be forgotten.”
-
The Central Bucks East auditorium was nearly full the morning of Nov. 9 for the school’s annual Veterans Day ceremony, the audience of 1,000 students, teachers, soldiers and parents still and reverent. Mark and Nancy sat among them, listening to the school band perform Samuel Hazo’s “Each Time You Tell Their Story.”
When the final note, the light gong of a bell, faded and the polite applause stopped, two Marines stood up to demonstrate a flag-folding ceremony. This is the symbolic ritual that transforms an American flag into a tight, blue, triangular field of stars. For the demonstration, the Marines used the flag that flew at half-staff over Delaware Company’s base in Musayyib on May 3, the day Colby died. The Umbrells have donated it to East.
This was no small donation.
The Musayyib flag was Mark and Nancy’s single tangible connection to the events surrounding Colby’s death, the one remembrance of his last day alive that they could touch.
“I do believe his soul’s gone, and that’s what gets us through, that he’s in a better place,” Nancy said, “but I don’t feel like I’m visiting Colby when I go to Arlington. I’m honoring him.”
After the ceremony, Mark and Nancy mingled for a short while, talking with Larry Greene, who just this month stepped down as East’s football coach.
Since the school district opened a third high school in 2004, the rivalry between the CB East and CB West football teams hasn’t carried the same gravity it did when Mark and Colby played. CB South went 11-1 this past season. Once Pennsylvania’s premier program, West hasn’t had a winning season in three years. And now, East must find Greene’s successor.
When Colby was playing, Mark headed a successful push to build a new weight room at East. Soon, Greene said, Colby’s picture will hang in that weight room.
Later, Mark and Nancy sipped coffee from plastic foam cups in a faculty lounge before heading home. In a rotunda down the hall from the lounge, East students and staff members had erected a tribute to graduates who have served in the military. There was a glass case displaying newspaper articles about Colby. The Musayyib base flag would soon rest there, too.
On the wall above the case, there was a photo collage and, bracketing the collage, two mahogany plaques. On the plaques were 129 gold plates, the name and graduation year of an East soldier engraved on each.
Of the 38 classes that have graduated from Central Bucks High School East since 1969, only one alumnus is known to have been killed in action. His was the only gold plate bordered in black. Left plaque, second row from the left, 12 plates down.
COLBY UMBRELL
’99 — ARMY
December 19, 2007 7:35 AM
Ellie
By MIKE SIELSKI
The Intelligencer
keep from falling apart.
Anything can be a trigger, Mark and Nancy Umbrell said. Anything can make you lose it. So although some memorabilia is easily visible in the room — Colby’s diploma from Johns Hopkins University and a photograph of his headstone — it’s as if his parents understand how much they can take.
If Nancy didn’t touch the two corkboards covered with photos of Colby, if she left them on the floor near the bed, maybe she wouldn’t start flipping through them and start thinking about Colby and cry.
If they hung his dress blues in the closet, and if the closet doors stayed shut, then they wouldn’t have to remember that part of Colby’s death that cuts them so deeply.
Nancy hoped Colby could be buried in his uniform, but according to the Army, the IED that killed Colby caused such a severe head injury that it rendered his body “not viewable.” That meant his casket would remain closed at the funeral service at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Doylestown and at his burial in Arlington National Cemetery.
“That hurt — not only that he was dead, but that we couldn’t see him,” Mark said. “Those are the kinds of things you don’t want to think about.”
At the foot of Colby’s bed, folded into a rectangle, is a “quilt of valor,” a blanket with a broad American flag sewn on it. It was a gift from the Bucks County Veterans of Foreign Wars.
When she first got the quilt, Nancy draped it over the bed. But after a while, she couldn’t stand to walk past the room. So she drew another sanity-saving conclusion: If she folded up the quilt, the bed wouldn’t look like Colby’s casket, draped in the flag.
-
Mark and Nancy keep busy. They try to live as they would have if Colby were off at college or stationed in Alaska — somewhere, anywhere, safe. Mark, who owns and operates Middle Bucks Mechanical Inc., a heating and air-conditioning company, drives his pickup truck from job to job. Nancy takes art classes at Bucks County Community College. Yet each anticipates the smallest thing that might bring Colby to mind, that might ignite the stabbing in their gut.
“The first class was …” Nancy said. “… But there was one girl in there who knew, and she’d been to Colby’s viewing. And I called her before I went and said, ‘I’m going to see you there, and I want to come up and hug you, but that will make me cry. So I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to try to get through the class.’ She understood. At the end, she just looked at me and said, ‘You did it.’ ”
On certain days, Nancy makes it a point to shop at a supermarket miles from their Doylestown Township home, just so there’s less chance she’ll see a familiar face, less chance someone will stop her, place a hand on her shoulder and say, “I’m so sorry ...”
It seems there’s always someone saying those words — friends, family, neighbors, people they’ve never met before.
“With me at work, I have a customer base,” Mark said. “Some I see once a month. Some I see once a week. Some I see once a year. So it’s pretty much every day that I run into someone who says, ‘I’m very sorry about your son.’ And I just say, ‘I appreciate that.’ That’s how I’ve dealt with it.”
Over the last six months, they’ve been invited to a series of ceremonial events, public acknowledgments of their son’s sacrifice that stir in them equal parts pride and grief.
A groundbreaking at Doylestown’s Veterans Park for a war memorial. The unveiling at the Bucks County Courthouse courtyard of 16 commemorative flags, one for each Bucks County soldier killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. A state House resolution by a local legislator. The Bucks County All-Star Football Classic, where everyone observed a moment of silence for Colby. A half-time tribute during a football game at Wyoming Seminary, a college prep school Colby attended after high school. They’ve been to all of them, but there is that inner emotional conflict.
“Everything that’s happy is sad,” said Colby’s sister, Casey.
Mostly, they go because they want people to remember what he did and why. Even on the afternoon of May 4, the day after Colby died, when television camera crews and newspaper reporters started lining up outside their house and Nancy didn’t think she could summon the strength to speak to them, Mark told her, “Listen, honey. This might be the one time you’re going to get his story told. If you say no, they’re not coming back.”
What’s harder for parents whose son has died during a war: The private moments of heartache, when Nancy breaks down and Mark is there to hold her, or the public moments, when they have to try to smile after strangers call Colby a hero?
“There are days when it would be easier if you just didn’t wake up,” Nancy said as tears well in her eyes. “We’re not suicidal or anything, but it is hard, especially when … you miss them. ... It’s the forever thing. It’s hard. But I think it could be worse. We talk about that a lot.”
Mark gently rests his hand on the back of her neck.
“There are people who lose kids to car accidents or suicides, or a 3-year-old drowns in a swimming pool,” he said. “Can you imagine being a parent and having guilt? We have no guilt. Colby died doing what he wanted to do, and that’s almost a good thing.”
-
They arrive promptly at 6 p.m. every Tuesday, as few as eight and as many as 20, lining the intersection of Main and State streets in Doylestown, standing in the cold to send their message, carrying candles and signs.
“VIGIL FOR PEACE”
“FIND HUMAN MEANS, NOT WAR”
“WE STILL SAY NO TO WAR IN IRAQ”
Many of the vigils’ participants, though not all, are Quakers. Their pacifism is rooted in their religion and values, their presence woven into the tapestry of Doylestown’s history. (The adoptive mother of the town’s most famous son, author James Michener, was a Quaker.)
“We say peace is the way,” said Doylestown resident Ken Johnson, a professor at Penn State-Abington and a vigil leader.
“There are no excuses for war,” Johnson continued, turning his focus to the weapons-of-mass-destruction justification for the Iraq war. “And people’s lives have been given away for something that turned out to be not true.”
The vigils began in October 2001, just after the United States retaliated against the Taliban for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They’ve been a fixture in the community ever since.
From the campaign against the Point Pleasant pump in the early 1980s, when Abbie Hoffman led protests against the diversion of water from the Delaware River, to these tranquil anti-war demonstrations, Bucks County has a tradition of social activism. And Doylestown is that tradition’s axis.
That activism is flavored, however, by a small-town sensibility of togetherness.
Colby died a mere four days after another Doylestown native — 26-year-old Marine 1st Lt. Travis Manion — was killed by a sniper’s bullet in Al Anbar province. The one-two punch of their deaths seemed to strengthen the community’s social kinship and de-emphasize differences.
Twenty-five thousand people showed up for the town’s Memorial Day parade this year, and still, Johnson and other war opponents marched in the parade to some cheers. One vigil regular, Edwin Nagel, attended the Manion and Umbrell funerals out of respect for their service.
“I think it would keep a sociologist busy for a long time,” said Colby’s high school track coach Paul Wilson, a Bucks resident for more than 30 years. “It’s a sophisticated community. You’ve got a lot of smart people here, and those smart people are very articulate in their views, whether they’re for or opposed (to) the war.
“We support these soldiers, these kids, because if there’s one lesson that came to us from Vietnam, it was that you may not agree with the war, but darn it, don’t go slamming people’s children,” Wilson said. “These are their kids. Doylestown, as a community, supports its children and men, its soldiers. Doylestown has learned that lesson very well.”
For their part, Mark and Nancy have remained steadfast in their support of the Iraq war. Their political views haven’t changed, even after losing their son, and they resent the suggestion that Colby lost his life needlessly.
“I had a couple of people say to me, before he passed away, ‘How could you let your son go over there?’ ” Nancy said. “And that made me so mad. Not to say there weren’t mistakes made — I don’t think anybody can argue that — but we believed that we should be doing it.”
More importantly for them, Colby believed that. Enlisting was his decision, his calling, and for all their anguish, all the moments when they miss him most, they hold onto the hope that someone, perhaps a person they’ve never met, draws something positive from their son’s life and death.
Someone, for instance, like Cynthia Magnuson.
Magnuson graduated with Colby from Central Bucks High School East in 1999. She and Colby hadn’t kept in touch and she hasn’t had any contact with his parents. Yet when Magnuson started reading Colby’s obituaries, his true-believer streak struck her.
This was the same classmate who sat in front of her in advance placement statistics class their senior year, the crew-cut football player who always made her giggle with his goofy jokes? She remembered Colby Umbrell, and she realized how little she really knew about him.
Magnuson had been working as a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., since June 2005. But she had spent the first half of this year weighing the opportunity to accept an advisory position in the American embassy in Iraq ... until she learned how Colby died and why he had served.
“It meant so much to read about Colby,” Magnuson, 26, said by telephone from Baghdad. “He felt like he was doing something important. Nobody from our generation says something like that. We’re very cynical, self-absorbed. It was the last push I needed to make the decision to come over here.”
Cynthia Magnuson’s detail in Iraq is scheduled to end in March. Her story is now a chapter in Colby’s.
“We realize,” Mark said, “he’s not going to be forgotten.”
-
The Central Bucks East auditorium was nearly full the morning of Nov. 9 for the school’s annual Veterans Day ceremony, the audience of 1,000 students, teachers, soldiers and parents still and reverent. Mark and Nancy sat among them, listening to the school band perform Samuel Hazo’s “Each Time You Tell Their Story.”
When the final note, the light gong of a bell, faded and the polite applause stopped, two Marines stood up to demonstrate a flag-folding ceremony. This is the symbolic ritual that transforms an American flag into a tight, blue, triangular field of stars. For the demonstration, the Marines used the flag that flew at half-staff over Delaware Company’s base in Musayyib on May 3, the day Colby died. The Umbrells have donated it to East.
This was no small donation.
The Musayyib flag was Mark and Nancy’s single tangible connection to the events surrounding Colby’s death, the one remembrance of his last day alive that they could touch.
“I do believe his soul’s gone, and that’s what gets us through, that he’s in a better place,” Nancy said, “but I don’t feel like I’m visiting Colby when I go to Arlington. I’m honoring him.”
After the ceremony, Mark and Nancy mingled for a short while, talking with Larry Greene, who just this month stepped down as East’s football coach.
Since the school district opened a third high school in 2004, the rivalry between the CB East and CB West football teams hasn’t carried the same gravity it did when Mark and Colby played. CB South went 11-1 this past season. Once Pennsylvania’s premier program, West hasn’t had a winning season in three years. And now, East must find Greene’s successor.
When Colby was playing, Mark headed a successful push to build a new weight room at East. Soon, Greene said, Colby’s picture will hang in that weight room.
Later, Mark and Nancy sipped coffee from plastic foam cups in a faculty lounge before heading home. In a rotunda down the hall from the lounge, East students and staff members had erected a tribute to graduates who have served in the military. There was a glass case displaying newspaper articles about Colby. The Musayyib base flag would soon rest there, too.
On the wall above the case, there was a photo collage and, bracketing the collage, two mahogany plaques. On the plaques were 129 gold plates, the name and graduation year of an East soldier engraved on each.
Of the 38 classes that have graduated from Central Bucks High School East since 1969, only one alumnus is known to have been killed in action. His was the only gold plate bordered in black. Left plaque, second row from the left, 12 plates down.
COLBY UMBRELL
’99 — ARMY
December 19, 2007 7:35 AM
Ellie