Memorial Tribute for SGT. Joel A. House
by Deanna A. House
written between June 23, 2007 and January 21, 2008
Last night as I was standing in the dooryard before bedtime grieving the terrible loss I feel since learning that my son had fallen in battle on June 23, a silent figure crept across the lawn to the impromptu roadside memorial that now decorates our front yard. Quietly I watched the man kneel for minutes at the bench. I snuck back into the house to share with Joel’s family what I was watching, and we went out to greet him. “I’m sorry for interrupting your family time,” the man cried. “I have a son in Iraq, and I was just praying to your son to ask God to bring my son home safely. I feel so selfish.” We hugged him, reassuring him that we understood. I have prayed that this is some mistake and that it was somebody else in that explosion only to feel guilt pains that if that were true, it would be one of your mothers facing this grief instead. I could never pray that prayer. Earlier that day, we learned that Joel’s body had returned to American soil. His duty to his country had been served. He had paid the ultimate sacrifice. Now he only owes an eternity of duty to his God and Savior. Joel’s sacrifice was now helping this tearful man face the constant fear that plagues a soldier’s father’s heart as one begs the Heavenly Father that He will never call his family to hear the dreaded words, “We regret to inform you that your son has been killed in the line of duty.”
Joel’s sister and I had visited Joel in Fort Hood, Texas one weekend in October before he deployed to his second tour of duty. “Come home in one piece, Joel,” I had told him. “You don’t have to be a hero.” But I knew Joel’s character was that he could do nothing less if the moment called him to it. He didn’t want to go back to Iraq, but when faced with the choice between serving at a less dangerous desk job or riding around the desert in a HumVee with a .50 caliber machine gun as he had been trained during his first tour of duty two years earlier, he chose the more dangerous path because he was efficient at his job and somebody had to do it.
“A desk job sounds good to me,” I pleaded.
“That’s boring,” Joel had replied in his typical mastery of understatement.
This week as mourners from our community and state flood our family with their condolences, we have dug out the photo albums to share the reminders of who my son was and who he was becoming while serving in the U.S. Army. Joel, who always struggled in school and who hated reading and math, graduated from Lee Academy in 2003 and enlisted in the Army. He wanted to grow as a man first before ultimately enrolling in college where he hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps hunting and fishing in a career that would lead him back to his beloved Maine woods and lakes as a game warden or a Maine guide. Joel, who had accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior as a boy, was also searching for his life mission to his God. Words came hard to Joel, and he once asked me how he could share his faith with those military brothers who were still searching for theirs:
“There are many languages, Joel” I assured him. “Your talk talks and your walk talks, but your walk talks louder than your talk talks.”
As we watched our boy metamorphose into a man through boot camp, getting stationed at his first post, deploying to his first tour of duty, and then his second, we knew that we were witnessing a young man who was daily walking more confidently down the uncertain path into which Jesus was leading him. The photos narrate a story of the boy whose favorite clothes were always made of camouflage and who grew up with the notion of guns and battles depicted through shows like Tour of Duty and video games like James Bond. They were easier to understand than the chapters of MacBeth his English teacher had assigned him. He spent more time mastering the game pad than the pen and eraser. Naturally athletic, he played team sports like soccer, basketball, and baseball, but didn’t always allow the demands of practice to encroach on his time spent with Mother Nature, hunting, canoeing, and kayaking.
Maine’s outdoor sports taught him to understand Mother Nature’s exacting discipline. Her rules for survival were unbending, and a man who did not respect them was a fool. Equipped with her lessons, he went off to boot camp and A School, returning home with awards for Physical Fitness. The boy who hated pens and calculators could clean, load, and shoot a semi-automatic with deadly precision.
His tank instructor, Sgt. Richard O’Donnel shared with us the time Joel unloaded the fire extinguisher inside the tank. “He really got his ass chewed out on that one,” he laughed. “He didn’t panic, though. He waited before pulling the hatch as he had been instructed.” By the time he had finished training, he could maneuver an Abrams tank around a dime and send its terrible thunder into a target miles away. His self-doubt had begun to shed, and quiet confidence stared back into the camera’s lens.
We were so proud of him in his crisp, green uniform as our family picked him up once from the Bangor International Airport, but he still blushed, not knowing how to accept praise, when strangers shook his hand in gratitude for service to our nation.
Developing maturity notwithstanding, youthful mishaps reminded us that he was still just 18 years old. One time, when we picked him up from BIA, he stopped off I-95 on the way home to take a leak and lost his uniform hat. I couldn’t understand why he just wouldn’t get another when he returned to his post. But he was distraught. His father and he spent hours riding up and down the 30 mile stretch of highway that week on the shoulder at 5 miles an hour searching for it. Eventually, he had to call his cousin Jeremy, also stationed at Ft. Hood, to overnight him a new one. A soldier was expected to stand in full uniform irregardless of what fashion mishap Mom was willing to overlook.
The photo I love the most of Joel is the one taken on Iraqi’s first election day towards the end of his first tour of duty. A MacArthurian swank gleams back into the camera’s eye as he stands in front of a supply truck with stogy hanging from his mouth. “I was with Joel that day,” remembered Maj. John Morning, from his first tour. “We got called to a suicide bombing detail that was pretty gruesome later that day.” Images of democracy’s hope juxtaposed against bomb-mangled bodies strewn across the pavement taught Joel the truth behind the great general’s promise, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past, a world found upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance and justice.
Joel thought his part was finished. He could come home. The Army had different plans for him and ordered him to return again a year later. There were no simplistic visions of guns and battles sparking a boyhood war fantasy this time. He knew what war meant. He knew what he was facing, and he didn’t relish the return.
Secretly, Joel was always afraid of dying. During a high school athletic physical, I remember him turning white as a sheet and passing out in the hospital hallway when the doctor told us he had a heart murmur. He didn’t know what a heart murmur was, and he thought it was fatal.
Before deploying, he got to come home during bear hunting season and spent the time with his brother Luke and his dad. The year earlier, he had shot a respectable-size bruin and hoped to continue his luck.
His sister Joy and I went to Fort Hood to visit him and stayed with his cousin’s wife. We made the most of every moment together. The photos tell the story of the inner turmoil stalking the warrior. He had learned to push down the fear that compelled him to flee. As his mother, I was helpless to teach him how to go forward, but I could see that from you, his band of brothers, he had learned what he must do. We lost ourselves in small diversions to chase away the demons that laid siege to our uncertain futures. I now play daily the short videos I took of the afternoon Joel and Joy played guitar and sang and dreamed of reaching fame and glory.
Joel was a classic rocker who in high school had found a voice through Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Jimmy Hendrix, and other great guitarists. I scream inside that I will never see those skillful hands drifting dexterously across the fret. I cherish the videos where we managed to get not only a rare smile but even a few lines of lyrics out of his voice. The pounding cadences and prophetic poetry of the Vietnam Era music haunts me still. I understand now a truth about war and the warrior that my son was able to give expression to through an ancient language forged with the physics of the creation of the universe.
But God is good even amidst tragedy. In March, Joel returned home for 2 weeks R and R after surviving a suicide bomb attack on the Iraqi police barracks in Taji where he bunked when out in the field. Reality dug in deeper to our family’s consciousness this time when he shared, “I thought I was going to die.” In the photos during this time, I see our close-knit family celebrating his safety, yet the pain Joel suffered belies his gentle upside-down smile. He mourned the loss of close friends who fell during that attack while sharing the nightmarish photos of destruction that took their lives. Joel did not share with me what had transpired. The story, like the IED scattered corpses, came to me in bits and pieces through others’ retellings. His innocence lost, he protected and honored me by sheltering me from his horror, naively believing that a woman my age had never lost her own.
The photographs have changed this week. Instead of coaxing a smile from my reluctant hero, family and friends are following a casket. We held each other tightly as we received his body home from Dover, Delaware at BIA. His cousin Sgt. Carey brought the body home with military honors, following a list of 45 ceremonial duties that need be performed before he could turn to his own wife and my sister, his mother, for a hug. The Maine State Police and Penobscot County Sheriffs escorted our procession down I-95, creating a 2 mile traffic stop behind us. The fire departments of Lee, Lincoln, and neighboring communities met us in Lincoln and we entered town on Saturday morning with 100’s of well-wishers, mourners, veterans, and flag carriers lining the streets. Upon reaching Clay Funeral Home, we waited nervously to hear the counsel of our undertaker about the advisability of viewing Joel’s corpse. “There’s only soft tissue missing from lower extremities,” it was pronounced. I didn’t care. I just wanted to touch him one more time, to see his face. Touching his forehead startled me back into reality. It was cold and covered with make up. “This isn’t Joel anymore than those photos,” I woke up. Nevertheless, I rubbed his hair, his face, his ears, his eyes, his chest. I touched his arms and glove-covered hands desperately trying to capture in my mind’s eye the last image I would ever have of my hero son.
The Honor Guard from a base in New York stood a silent vigil—2 by 2—at the funeral home’s doors that weekend. “I don’t want you to stand at his casket watching his corpse all weekend,” I explained to the Lt. “Stand out by the doors near the street where two roads fork.” I wanted every passerby on Main St. to know what my son did, and did for them.” On Monday for the visiting hours, the Honor Guard brought his coffin to the fundamentalist Baptist church where his father had been assistant Pastor when Joel was an infant. It was in this church that his father and I had learned a bitter lesson about how leaders can manipulate noble ideals for self-gain and glory. It took us years to separate the frailty of human motivation from the rightness of our most cherished Christian and American values. Coming full circle, God had allowed us to return 20 years later to this spiritual sanctuary that we had once invested our lives into in an unrealized dream of providing a church home for our children.
The church was too small to host a hero’s funeral. The next day, the Honor Guard returned with Joel’s casket to his high school gymnasium where a thousand people came to say good-bye to their hometown friend and neighbor. Among those attending were Maine’s Governor, Maine’s full Congressional delegation, our state level representatives, many military dignitaries, the Governor of the Passamaquoddy tribe and his Lt. Governor, a young man who had spent 2 years of high school living with our family in the high school’s dormitory when Joel was in Head Start. But of all the visitors, I think the most special for me were the 4 soldiers from Ft. Hood who had known Joel from his first tour or through training. Steve Burke, Brad Mitchell, Peter Cooper, and Richard O’Donnel had come to say good-bye to a brother. The pain in their eyes was the same pain I had captured in photos when Joel was with us in March. It was the pain of loss that overwhelms the stoicism of the soldier’s training.
With the funeral over, Joel’s coffin was borne a half mile away to his final resting place at Woodlawn Cemetery. There was a 21 gun salute, taps, the folding and the presenting of the flag to me. When it was over, I stood there not knowing what I supposed to do. It was my first interment and nobody had told me what the custom was. All I could think was how badly I wanted to touch Joel again, to see his face, to put him back in his place in the family photos. I walked to the coffin and touched it, knowing it was all I would have. “Good-bye, Baby, I love you so much” and with every force I could find within, I turned my back and walked into the empty days ahead for which the fallen soldier’s mother must learn to live.
This week President Bush is meeting in our state with Russia’s President Putin. They are talking about the world, politics, and the great ideals and rights of humanity: freedom, liberty, justice, peace, prosperity. I understand that the world has changed since the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the cessation of the Cold War. We live in a world not always staked out by nationalist boundaries. The new world into which we are immerging is a global world connected by the Internet. The enemies to democracy and human rights don’t limit themselves to political boundaries. Like a cancer, they quietly grow cells in Paris, Madrid, Rome, Moscow, New York, anywhere that promotes the sanctity of human life over the zealotry of the misguided. Joel was friends with people from many of these places even though they were far away from Lee, Maine. He saw Al-Queda suicide bombings in many of these cities played out on TV like the rest of us and feared for the safety of those whom he loved.
Joel will never be the president of a world super power. Joel will never debate policy on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet Joel did have a political vision. He tried to live his life somewhere between “We hold these truths to be self evident” and “For God so loved the world He gave His only son.” If one man lives his life to the best of his ability to promote the betterment of the human condition, it can make a difference. Joel’s was a soldier rather than a statesman. His walk walked him into giving his life for his country. Joel could take all the noble ideals and words of all the politicians and, in his classic mastery of understatement, boil them down into one worthy word—family. Me, his dad, his brother, his sister, his grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, neighbors, class mates, team mates, church family, exchange student friends, Army buddies, dads of Army buddies, nobody meant more to Joel than his “family”. He didn’t know how to tell us what we meant to him, but his walk for us walked him right over a deeply placed improvised explosive device while trying to route out Al- Queda terrorists who had been seen in the region.
Joel’s Iraq Memorial service was held before I could finish writing. My grand scheme had been to go through the week, chasing the coffin with the camera, and then to send you this report. I wanted you to know how much Joel’s sacrifice meant to our Maine community and that he was buried a hero, an honor that unfortunately not all soldiers receive. Our country’s politicians and military honored Joel’s sacrifice as the weeks progressed. We received condolence letters from the President, many cabinet members, generals, and military leaders. A flag which had flown over the U.S. Capitol at half mast in Joel’s honor was presented to us. An artist from Utah is painting a portrait of Joel. The groups from whom you’ve received letters and care packages have not forgotten us: they’ve sewn us an afghan and a quilt stitched from heartfelt wish that there was more that could be done. His things returned from both Fort Hood and Iraq in good condition and we treasure it. Joel’s body lies at the edge of the woods now; his tombstone seals the promise that he is forever home.
The summer passed and your lives needed to focus on your safe return to your families. I decided to wait until you were safely returned home upon American soil to share this memorial with you. Selfish of me, I guess, since I know that I’m opening up a pain that you’ve had to long since numb for your own survival. It’s a mourning mother’s selfish demand that now that you are home safely, you do not forget her son. I also want you to know how much you meant to Joel and, for that, how much you mean to me and my husband.
Our community and our nation have not forgotten Joel. This week the USA Today plans to have a photo of him and his father on the front pages of their newspaper. In a bitter, ironic twist, our little village of 845 people did so well at burying its hero, that God decided to call another hero, Sgt. Blair Emery (24), (whose young wife Chu lives in Fort Hood with her family,) to his final orders. Lee has become one of three Maine towns, the other two our largest cities, to lose more than one soldier.
“I got a teaching job at the American School Foundation in Monterrey, Mexico, Joel, and will drive up to Fort Hood in the winter to be there for you when you return,” were the last words he heard from me when he called home on June 21st, two days before he died. I have recently received word that you are each coming back individually with other units. I want come to Fort Hood, but I don’t know which of you I will see. I’ve been coping by pretending that Joel is still in Iraq, and I believed that seeing his brothers return without him would help me move through my own survival anesthesia into the more somber reality that he won’t be returning. And I also need to see you to know that although Joel died so far from home, the American ideals of freedom and liberty for which he gave his life continue to live.
Please forward this memorial to those who knew Joel, to those who did not know him.. The photos slowly begin to be uploaded to my MYSPACE page at http://www.myspace.com/deannahouse, if any wish to view them. I am grateful that you have made it home safely. I pray that you can transition back into your families and your futures well. You have fought for their futures, and I pray that now you can enter peacefully into the promise of your own.
Joel had been saving money for his return to buy a motor boat for our family’s cabin on Silver Lake where he spent his summers and dreamed of spending the rest of his life. My husband and I have purchased THE JOEL HOUSE MEMORIAL DOCK for the lake front to be commemorated on July 4, 2008. It would be an honor for our family if you could share this celebration. “Camp” is our family’s symbol of “family” and you, Joel’s band of brothers, are now a part of our family–forever.
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