Keith Epstein

Children of the Fallen

Tampa Tribune/Media General – May 30, 2005

By Keith Epstein

BATTLE GROUND, Wash. — All three of them have dreams. Sometimes their father appears in uniform. He has a few hours before he must get back to his plane at MacDill, or wherever he goes.

War — or heaven — waits.

Occasionally, Becky and Johnny imagine he has been living in a nearby town all along. Not dead — just leading a different life with a new identity in, say, Hillsboro, Ore.

Doug has cinematic nightmares. His father, glowing in the moonlight, unexpectedly materializes beside his bed and shakes him from slumber.

“Want a piggyback ride?”

As if Dad has to ask. Giddily, they gambol around the room and into the hall of their old house at 3916 Wisconsin Ave., near Dale Mabry Highway. But when Doug hops off and turns, his father is gone.

Instead, a shadowy, faceless figure advances menacingly.

“The theme is always the same,” Doug said. “It’s like he’s on leave from being dead and he’s come for a visit. He only has a few hours and then disappears. He’s always his age, no matter how old I get.”

Becky, Johnny and Doug are not children, and their father did not die in a recent war. A hero, he was shot down in 1965, among the first Bay area casualties in Vietnam.

Becky, 46, is a nurse who volunteers for the toughest, terminal cases. She lives in this Portland, Ore., suburb with her restaurateur husband and two children, in a cozy home dwarfed by giant cedars. Photos of father and family fill the walls.

Johnny, a 50-year-old artist and graphic designer, has his father’s Silver Star. A slew of letters to old squadron mates, Information Act requests to the military and a box of documents have not stilled the questions in his mind.

Doug, the eldest, waits tables at a Portland steakhouse. He buys books on Vietnam but never finishes them. At 51, he criticizes himself for not following ambitions — except for a marathon run. In 1991, he ran his first, dedicated to his dad.

At the finish line, Doug collapsed, sobbing with joy. “I wanted him to be there, and maybe he was.”

The Musgrove children realize Vietnam is history, and that Memorial Day is meant for remembering the sacrifices of the dead, not the wounds of the children left behind.

Yet four decades and a continent removed from their childhood in Tampa, a gung-ho Air Force captain named John David Musgrove — forever 37, forever with that playful glint in his eye, forever missing — still haunts them, exerting an inexorable force on their lives.

“I was driving home from work the other day and I saw a man holding a little girl’s hand as they crossed the street. I had to take my glasses off and wipe my eyes,” Becky said. “I couldn’t stop thinking: that lucky girl. She has what I didn’t have.”

For the Musgrove children at middle age, Memorial Day is every day. It stings, warms, reassures. It raises questions, speaks to them at intersections and influences their relationships. It terrifies — and gives strength. Sometimes, the worst is when they hear about another serviceman with children who dies in Iraq.

Said Johnny: “Every death has repercussions that are felt for decades by other people.”

Dedicated To Family

Seven times, as part of his prewar duties with MacDill Air Force Base’s tactical air command, Capt. Musgrove chased Gemini spacecraft 10 miles into the air to take photographs. He had still loftier ambitions, of being an astronaut, perhaps, or an Episcopal priest. But by all accounts, he was as dedicated to his family as to his career in the wild blue. Like many fighter jocks with God on their side, the F-4C Phantom pilot with the strong, compact physique may simply have imagined himself indestructible.

From the tense jungles of Southeast Asia, he wrote to his family almost every day. He wrote despite the constant clamor of gunfire, artillery, air-dropped flares and airstrikes. It was, he said, “something you can adjust to.”

Not hearing from his relatives — that was harder. He corresponded with the fervor of a family man. “Damn near out of candle so this will have to be short,” he wrote his brother Wayne in a letter that ran for several pages. “Believe me, there’s no other reason. I could write all night.”

Becky Musgrove Irby, barely 7 when her dad died, figures she has fewer than a dozen memories of him. In one, she and her father try to make a birthday cake for her mother — a disaster triggering bouts of laughter. In others, he wheels her around the yard in his wheelbarrow or pushes her mother in a rope swing while singing “King of the Road.”

He took them fishing off Gandy Bridge, and when President Kennedy died, her father picked her up from school. It was the only time she saw her parents cry.

The News Hit Hard

Some fathers might simply teach sons to play baseball. Musgrove coached Johnny and Doug’s Little League team. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, he built them a baseball field.

He cleared the vacant lot behind the house for a diamond. While he was in Vietnam, the neighborhood boys, also sons of military men, would have a place to play. He plopped home plate in the back yard.

That’s where Doug was that October afternoon 40 years ago — a ball in his glove, ready to throw and make an out. All heads suddenly turned toward the street. A station wagon Doug described as “that horrible Army brown” pulled up. Two uniformed officers strode to the front door.

“I just knew,” Doug recalled. “Nobody had to say anything.” Without a word, the game broke up. Players scattered. Becky was summoned from a playmate’s house.

The children gathered in their parents’ bedroom with their mother and John Mangrum, the priest from their church, St. Mary’s Episcopal. Johnny remembers a few details: background TV noise of a World Series game between the Dodgers and Twins. The smell of burgers, dinner waiting. The priest saying, “and in that great battle your daddy died.”

At 11, Doug was the man of the family now. His mother tried not to cry. He tried not to cry, too. Becky went back across the street to play with her friend. The boys never played in Little League again.

Ritual And Pageantry

A whirlwind of time-honored ritual and impressive ceremony followed. They were in the mayor’s office. They were on the evening news. In 1965, casualties in Vietnam were a novelty.

Barely two years since Kennedy’s assassination, the family watched as their father’s flag-draped coffin arrived on the same hallowed ground. Six white horses led the cortege.

“When you get the medals and there’s a 21-gun salute at Arlington National Cemetery, and then you see all the monuments in Washington, it’s incredibly powerful,” Doug said. “You’re living what you’ve seen on TV. I was really into the pageantry of it.”

When a classmate’s dad died in a car crash, he felt fortunate. “No pomp and circumstance for him. No flag-draped coffin. No … higher purpose.” Eventually, Doug discovered that he hadn’t felt or understood much at all.

Details Of Death

For Becky, the military, newspaper articles and family correspondence provided enough detail: Her father had been killed in action Oct. 4, 34 miles northwest of Qui Nhon, while pinpointing hostile targets for ground troops. Venturing into hostile territory by helicopter without armed escort, he came under attack. The chopper faltered and fell.

Although adept on 20 aircraft types, Musgrove had never been fond of helicopters. He complained to his brother that, lacking range or lift, a chopper was “a machine absolutely without use on a modern battlefield.” The letter arrived days after his death.

Family Adrift

“Capt. John D. Musgrove Receives Two Air Force Medals Posthumously,” proclaimed the MacDill Herald on Feb. 18, 1966. The front-page photo still transfixes them.

In it, Johnny is smiling oddly. Doug seems almost too determined to be curiously attentive. Little Becky, in the gingham dress bought for the occasion, seems lost as Brig. Gen. Frank J. Collins presents the Purple Heart and Silver Star.

“Look at me. I’m biting on my cheeks, sucking them in so I don’t cry. I’m trying to be the brave little girl,” she said. “We were all trying to be brave.”

Johnny sees it now, too. “It’s just heartbreaking. She’s trying to be a little soldier and hang together.”

A sergeant read the account of battle in a manner Johnny recalled as staccato and theatrical. Their father had “distinguished himself by gallantry.”

“It was bizarre. Those medals, well, as a kid, you couldn’t help but think they’re the coolest thing,” Johnny said. “But our whole center of gravity was gone. It sucked the energy out of our family. We were adrift.”

Life After Dad

Their mother tried to keep them grounded in the church. She got a job and enlisted a Big Brother for the boys to take them bowling and camping.

Their mother moved them to a bigger house, different schools, and, she thought, a fresh start. Despite entreaties by her husband’s relatives in Oregon to move west, they stayed in Tampa. Nancy Musgrove didn’t want anyone pitying the children, calling attention to their loss.

Attempting to move on and give her children stability and direction, she remarried, a widower she knew at St. Mary’s. They have been together 32 years, more than twice as long as the 13 years with her first husband.

She sighs when thinking of John Musgrove. “Nobody replaces your first love,” she said.

Yet at 76, and despite all she tried to do for Becky and the boys in Tampa, Nancy Schmid has regrets. “In retrospect, I feel I didn’t handle it very well,” she said. “I couldn’t bring myself to talk to them about it very much. My goal at the time was just to go on having a life.

“I thought they were doing OK. We just kind of went on with the lives we had left and tried to be happy.”

She paused.

“Losing their dad has affected them so profoundly,” she said.

Today’s Children

Despite widespread acceptance of counseling and improvements in services for military families, feelings often stay buried.

When President Bush, at the White House on April 4, posthumously awarded an Iraq war hero from Tampa the Medal of Honor, Sgt. Paul Ray Smith’s stoic German-born wife, Birgit, spoke patriotically of his sacrifice. But when Bush put his arm around Paul Smith’s son, David, the boy remained taciturn.

He no longer receives counseling and rarely brings up his father. He withdraws to his room, where sometimes he lies on his bed or plays on the floor with green plastic soldiers, a toy tank and GI Joes.

“He goes in there, shuts the door and talks to his father,” his mother said. “He plays Army soldier and plays with Paul. For him, his father’s still around. They play war.”

That’s in his room.

“You cannot sit back forever and cry,” his mother said. “He’s a little man. They don’t cry in front of people.” She added: “He’s doing fine. It’s time for us to move on.”

“Holes In Their Hearts’

When Becky read about 11-year-old David, unresponsive even to the president, tears flowed. It seemed like her all over again, holding everything back.

“How many fatherless and motherless kids are we creating?” she asked. “How many people with holes in their hearts and lives?”

The answer: many.

In recent wars, children of the fallen — once called “war orphans” — number in the thousands. At least 1,095 children have lost a parent to the war in Iraq, according to an analysis of casualty data through April by Scripps Howard News Service. The Pentagon does not keep such data.

Nearly half the 1,578 men and women in uniform who have died were married or engaged, 492 had children, and 40 had a spouse who was pregnant.

Because of World War II, 183,000 children grew up without fathers. In Vietnam, some 20,000 lost fathers.

One was Tony Cordero, founder of a survivors group, Sons and Daughters in Touch. Although scholarships, counseling and other support are better now than during the Vietnam era, Cordero said “there is a need for more and better counseling, not just for a few months after the death but for an extended period.”

“We don’t pay a lot of attention to the children,” said Karen Spears Zacharias, Oregon-based author of “Hero Mama,” a book about her father who died in Vietnam and the mother who raised her.

Last year, the Department of Veterans Affairs added grief counseling to the package of benefits. Families also can get help from a private assistance program for children.

“The old notion used to be to get the child to disengage from the dead parent and move on,” said J. William Worden, a clinical psychologist and co-director of a Harvard University child bereavement study. Instead, families should create rituals, remember anniversary dates and “keep the person with them in life.”

Always A Presence

Stripped of their father’s strength, the Musgrove children favored strong spouses. John Musgrove, although dead for 40 years, is “very active in our lives,” Becky’s husband, Steve Irby, said. “He is a big part of our conversations.”

During rocky times in the relationship, his loss helps her persevere. “I think because of what happened, I’m more grateful for what we have. We really cherish each other,” she said.

All have imagined their father’s homecoming. Becky fantasized for years “that he was going to come back, he was just missing or had been a prisoner of war.”

“I thought maybe he’d show up at my graduation or my wedding, and then my daughter’s graduation. You have this wish in your heart that it didn’t happen. That he’s still out there.”

Doug and Johnny turned to therapists in the 1980s: Dad and death figured heavily.

“Turned out I’d never grieved,” Doug said. “I had to go back and try to feel what I was trying not to feel when I was 11.”

Becky pays Vietnam little mind and tries not to follow developments in Iraq.

“I’ve made it a point not to delve too deeply. … Good war or bad war, it doesn’t matter. It was a war and he’s gone. I don’t have my daddy. What difference does it make how he died?”

If Becky dodges details, Johnny is on an insatiable quest for them.

“We never saw the body. I’ve never been sure what happened. Did he die in a crash? Did he burn up? Was he shot?”

Losing his father “gave me a sense of apprehension about life, a fear about uncertainty.”

“Anything can happen at any moment,” he said.

Whenever his school principal walked into the classroom, his immediate thought was: Has something happened to my mother, too? Risk of failure prevented him from trying painting earlier in life.

“I had the sense the world really can be rocked at any moment. It really damaged my core self-confidence.”

Not long ago, Johnny tracked down his father’s old squadron mates. He asked them to share their memories of him. Most responses seemed idealized.

“I want reality,” he said. “What was his day-to-day reality? Would he have been a peacenik after the war, or harder core? Would we have had a massive power struggle?”

The Connection

John Musgrove’s brother Wayne is their closest connection. He remembers, listens and answers their questions. Why was Dad taken? What was he like? What would he think of them now? He tells them it’s all right to be sad. When Becky married, it wasn’t her stepfather but Wayne who gave her away.

For Father’s Day seven years ago, Becky wrote a poem, “Dad for Always.”

“Some folks called him a hero,” she wrote. “I didn’t have him long enough.”

“Though Dad couldn’t stay to see me grown, there was another here — whose love has always guided my heart and soul — a little bit of Dad for Always.”

Uncle Wayne.

When he spoke of her poem, Wayne, 74, choked with emotion. “Not all of what’s come out of this is sad,” he said. “The trauma has never left, and it never will. But we did everything we could to make a life for them. They’re 50 and these guys still come up and kiss me. This whole thing has really brought the rest of us closer.”

(CHART) AREA OBSERVANCES

Tampa Bay area residents today will remember those who served in the nation’s military, especially those who lost their lives in that service. Also honored will be those now engaged in protecting the country’s interests. Here are some of the Memorial Day events planned:

Hillsborough County

TAMPA: Veterans for Peace, Chapter 119, is sponsoring a Memorial Day candlelight vigil from 7-9 p.m. at Bayshore and Bay to Bay boulevards. The vigil is an open-air silent observance in honor of those who died while defending the nation, and to strive for peace. Participants are asked to dress in black or wear a black armband, and to bring matches or a lighter and a candle. They also may bring an appropriate sign or the U.S. flag.

Attendees may park and meet at the park on the southwest corner of the intersection, or park elsewhere. Caution is urged when crossing these busy streets to the sidewalk along the seawall where the vigil will take place.

PLANT CITY: The Memorial Day service formerly held downtown in McCall Park has a new location this year, says James Williamson, adjutant of American Legion Post 26 of Plant City. This year’s service will be at 11 a.m. at American Legion Post, 2207 W. Baker St. The post is across from Tomlin Middle School.

SUN CITY CENTER: American Legion Post 246 will host a ceremony at 10 a.m. in the Kings Point clubhouse auditorium. Guest speaker is retired Rear Adm. Joseph H. Miller. For more information, call Paul Wheat, post commander, at (813) 634-7777.

RUSKIN MEMORIAL PARK: VFW Post 6287 of Ruskin will place flags at the park at 11 a.m. and hold a noon ceremony at the post, 5120 U.S. 41. For more information, call (813) 645-2935.

RUSKIN: The South Hillsborough Elks Lodge will hold a picnic from 4 to 6 p.m. for lodge members and their guests. Cost is $5. The post is at 1630 U.S. 41, Ruskin. For more information, call (813) 645-2089.

LOWRY PARK ZOO: The zoo, at 1101 W. Sligh Ave., will have free admission for all active-duty reserves, National Guardsmen and veterans with valid U.S. military ID. (Offer not valid for spouses or dependents.) The zoo is open 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Pinellas County

BAY PINES: Army Brigadier Gen. Mark T. Kimmitt, deputy commander for plans and policies at U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, will speak at this year’s Memorial Day observance at the Bay Pines VA Medical Center.

The ceremony, in association with the Pinellas County Veterans Liaison Council, begins at 9 a.m. All veterans, family members and the public are invited to attend.

Kimmitt previously was deputy director for operations and chief military spokesman for the multinational forces in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He will be substituting for the event’s longtime guest speaker, U.S. Rep. Bill Young, R-Indian Rocks Beach, who canceled because of congressional business.

PINELLAS PARK: Representatives of all U.S. military branches will attend a service at 10:30 a.m. at Freedom Lake Park, 9990 46th St. N. Members of the Korean War Veterans Association, Suncoast Chapter 14, will unveil the Victory Tree plaque near the park’s Korean War Veterans Memorial.

LARGO: Johnnie Clark, a Marine veteran who received the Silver Star for valor, will be keynote speaker during a 7 p.m. gathering at the Largo Central Park Military Court of Honor, 101 Central Park Drive.

LARGO: An 11:30 a.m. parade and noon service are planned at Serenity Gardens Memorial Park, 13401 Indian Rocks Road, Largo. Call (727) 595-2914.

Pasco County

HUDSON: The Suncoast Veterans Affiliated Council will hold its Memorial Day service at 11 a.m. at Grace Memorial Gardens, 17007 U.S. 19, Hudson.

after an address by guest speaker “Wig” Wigmore, the Gold Star Mothers will place a wreath at the monument, accompanied by bagpipe music by Jim McDonald of American Legion Post 343.

After the program, refreshments will be served at the Aripeka Elks Lodge, 9135 Denton Ave., Hudson.

For information, contact Chairman Paul Clamp at (727) 845-3886.

Copyright © 2005, The Tampa Tribune and may not be republished without permission. E-mail library@tampatrib.com

GRAPHIC: PHOTO 7 CHART
U.S. Air Force photo (2) U.S. Air Force Capt. John David Musgrove remains forever 37 in the hearts and minds of his children. Right, Becky, Doug and Johnny put on brave faces as their mother, Nancy, accepts her husband’s posthumous Silver Star. Photo by Tim Labarge Becky Musgrove Irby sought out her father’s name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington Park in Portland, Ore. Tribune photo by MICHAEL SPOONEYBARGER Doug, left, and Johnny Musgrove still struggle with the loss of their father 40 years ago. U.S. Air Force Capt. John David Musgrove was killed in Vietnam. Family photo Before the Vietnam War, Capt. Musgrove was stationed at MacDill Air Force Base. John, Nancy, and their children, Becky, Johnny and Doug, lived at 3916 Wisconsin Ave., near Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa. Tribune photo by KEITH EPSTEIN Forty years after their father was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, the effects of his early death linger in the lives of his children. Knight-Ridder/Tribune When 11-year-old David Smith of Tampa received his late father’s Medal of Honor in a ceremony last month, the boy was nonresponsive, even as President Bush put his arm around him. The story struck a chord with Becky Musgrove Irby, who understood David’s emotional withdrawal. His father, Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, was killed in Iraq.