Their mother/daughter-in-law relationship had never been very close, and her initial reaction was annoyance. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything. Don’t worry.” Promising to call if she did hear something, she hung up, and immediately turned on the TV. “They said there were two helicopters down, and that was all they said.”
Theresa remembers being extremely frustrated. With an emphatic “Shit!” to no one in particular, she picked up the phone and called the 38th Rescue Squadron at Moody. “ ‘What’s going on? There’s a helicopter down. Is Jason okay?’ ”
“They said, ‘We haven’t heard anything about it; don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Fine, whatever.’ So I went to school and I came home, and then I was just glued to the TV. There was a helicopter down. They said there were seven people dead. And I thought, ‘There’s no way. There’s too many people. There’s a million people in the military and there’s hundreds of thousands of people out there. There’s no way.’
“But I was still worried, so I called up again and talked to Terry.” Maj. Terry Johnson was the Director of Operations of the 38th. “He said, ‘I haven’t heard anything, and no news is good news, Theresa. We haven’t heard anything. ’ ”
A bit later she went to the home of Stephanie and Craig Clark. Craig, another PJ in the unit, did a search for the story on the Internet, then tried to calm her fears by saying that PJs didn’t fly in Chinook helicopters. It didn’t work. She said, “You’re wrong, Craig. It’s a joint mission out there. They’re on any kind of helicopter.” Theresa returned home around eight o’clock. An hour and a half later, figuring that if something was wrong she would have heard, she went to bed feeling totally confident that Jason wasn’t involved.
At five-thirty the next morning, her alarm went off. She took a shower and began to get ready for school. The girls would sleep until seven o’clock. She did not turn on the television.
At about six-thirty, there was a knock on the door. “Jason had sent me an e-mail and it said he might be home sooner than we thought. And he’s come home before, unexpectedly. So when there was a knock on the door, at first I thought, ‘Oh, God, it’s one of those creepy neighbors.’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, he’s home.’ So I ran to the door.
“It was a bunch of people in uniform. And I thought, ‘He’s hurt; they’re going to take me to him.’ And I guess I was expecting them to say, ‘Get dressed. We’re leaving.’
“I think I knew the situation. There’s no other reason those people would be coming in at six o’clock in the morning. And when they came in, a part of me knew.”
General Folkerts followed protocol. “Are you Theresa Cunningham?”
Theresa, standing there in a robe, her dark hair still wet from the shower, didn’t respond. Major Savino looked at her, and then answered for her. “Yes.” And then they came in.
Somehow she found herself seated on the couch, with General Folkerts sitting on the coffee table facing her. “I regret—”
It was all she heard. Theresa doesn’t know what he said after that. She has no recollection of any of it. The room went into soft focus; sounds blended together into a background buzz. “I remember people, like voices in the background, kind of talking to each other and not to me. And I think somebody said, ‘Somebody’s coming over, Theresa,’ and then people just started coming over and over and over.”
The babies, ages four and two, woke up to the sounds of commotion in the living room. Theresa heard the girls, and went to them. “I sat with them and I just hugged them. I didn’t say . . . I was kind of . . . I still feel like I’m in shock. At the time I felt like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ and then I think I was hysterical because later I heard things that I did and they don’t sound normal. I don’t remember them, so I think I must have just been out in space somewhere.”
Half an hour after that knock on the door, Theresa pulled herself together enough to make three phone calls: to her parents in Southern California, to school, and to Jason’s parents in Gallup, New Mexico.
It was five in the morning when the phone rang in the home of Jackie and Red Cunningham. Jason’s mom was already awake. She’d found it difficult to sleep, even though Theresa had phoned the previous evening and said that no news was good news. But Red was still asleep, and the phone startled him. “I just jumped straight out of bed. I knew when I heard the phone ring. I knew what happened.”
Red dressed, and then drove his GMC pickup truck to the Conoco propane facility where he worked as a welder and crane operator. Rather than going inside, he asked the first person he saw to get his friend and coworker Greg Peterson to come out to the parking lot. Just the day before, Red had spoken to Greg about his fears for Jason. He’d told him that a helicopter like the one Jason was flying on had gone down, but they hadn’t heard anything.
“I came out there and he was leaning against his truck,” Peterson said. “I could tell he’d been cryin’. Red said, ‘Them bastards got him.’ I said, ‘What?’
“He said, ‘They got him. They killed him.’ We just hugged, stood there for five or ten minutes. He was crying. I just stayed there and held him for quite a while. That’s the only time I seen him cry the whole day. The rest of the day he was just quiet and reserved, which is not Red.”
On the drive home from the Conoco facility, as Red turned the corner onto their street, he saw three Air Force people at a neighbor’s house. He remembered Jason had always told them, “Don’t believe anything till they pull up there in that blue car.”
“But they were at the wrong house, so I still had that flicker of hope. And then, what seemed like an hour later, they got their addresses straightened out and they showed up at our house.”
All Red Cunningham remembers is that it was three people from Kirtland Air Force Base, home of the pararescue school, near Albuquerque, and that one of them was a woman and another was a chaplain. “They hand you a piece of paper, and it’s got this written out on it. I don’t remember—I was in shock at the time. I wanted to know what the hell happened.”
The piece of paper—not letterhead—didn’t provide any answers. It read:
5 March 2002
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence D. Cunningham,
On behalf of the Chief of Staff, United States Air Force, I regret to inform you of the untimely death of your son, Senior Airman Jason D. Cunningham. He died on 4 March 2002, as the result of injuries he received in combat. While further details are unavailable at this time, you will receive a letter from your son’s commander, which will provide additional circumstances. If the Air Force can further assist you, please contact the Air Force Personnel Center, Casualty Service Branch, at 1-800-433-0048. Again, on behalf of the Chief of Staff, please accept the Air Force’s deepest condolences.
Signed: MICHAEL C. MCMAHAN, Major General, USAF
DELIVERED BY:
KEVIN GARDNER, Major, USAF
Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico 87117
The words that echoed through Red Cunningham’s mind that morning were what his son had told him when his four years’ enlistment in the Navy was up. Jason had already passed the physical tests to become a Navy SEAL, but told his dad, “That’s just not what I really want to do. I want to save people.”
Red says, “Those were his exact words. ‘I want to save people.’ Not go out and search out, destroy, or capture or whatever. ‘I want to go out and save people.’ And he told me at that time, ‘I’d like to become a pararescueman someday.’ ”
Jason came home from the Navy, spent some time in Gallup, hunting elk with his dad in the nearby mountains where the PJs in school at Kirtland AFB actually trained. He was trying to come to some conclusions about his life, and once he did, he explained them to his father. “He decided to get in the Air Force, try to get in the PJ program. He had me pretty well educated into what they did and how dangerous their job could be.”
Red also knew that the attrition rate for wanna-be PJs was incredibly high, higher than SEALs, higher than Green Bere
ts. One time he asked Jason, “What if you don’t make it?”
“And he had no answer to that, because he was going to make it, one way or the other. He would go all-out; that’s just typical for him, through his whole life. ‘What if you don’t or if you can’t?’ doesn’t enter into the equation.”
And the credo, “That Others May Live”?
“He had a heart-to-heart with me to make sure I understood what that meant. He knew what that meant.”
That didn’t mean that there wasn’t an ache inside a father’s heart, knowing the path his son had chosen was a difficult and dangerous one. “You got to come to a point where there’s no more arguing about it, there’s no more trying to convince them. You just have to accept it, and then pat them on the back and tell ’em, ‘Do the best you can do.’ From that point on, I’ve got to deal with the ‘you might die’ part of it. I always emphasized, ‘just don’t take any unnecessary chances just to become a . . .’ ” Red Cunningham’s voice breaks. He never does say the word hero.
“I always told him, ‘You’re just like John Wayne in the twenty-first century. ’ That attitude. I was surprised he didn’t rip his shirt off and there’s a big S tattooed on his chest, the way his attitude was. He was going to do what he started to do, regardless. And that’s the way he was.”
The Air Force notification team wasn’t able to give the Cunninghams any information about what had happened or where. What Red remembers being told was, “You have two hours to notify anyone you want to tell, and then it will be released to the media.”
What’s that supposed to mean to a pipe welder living in Gallup, New Mexico, population twenty-one thousand, about 140 miles west of Albuquerque, a town that doesn’t even have its own broadcast television station? “It’ll be released to the media in two hours.” Yeah? So what?
“So what?” got answered in midafternoon, when there was a knock on the door of their modest one-story home. Greg Peterson, who had stopped by to see if there was any way he could help, answered the door. He recalls it was a woman who identified herself as a reporter for the Associated Press. She wanted to talk to Jason’s parents. Peterson asked her to wait, and went back to relay the request. At the time Red was on his way to the Albuquerque airport to pick up their elder son, Chris, who was coming in from Seattle. Jackie had no interest in talking, and that was what Peterson told the AP reporter. He remembers her saying, “Well, you know, all the press knows and they’re on the way.” He didn’t know. She elaborated: “Everybody from Albuquerque is comin’ this way. There’s people from Phoenix, and other areas from all over the state.”
Reiterating that Jason’s mom had no desire to talk at that time, Peterson sent the woman away. But when he got back into the house, he warned Jackie about what was to come, and said he was going to ask the Gallup police to send some men over to “be there and help control this mess when it came.” Peterson, who was a former Odessa, Texas, cop and spoke the language, didn’t have any trouble getting their help. He asked them to set up a perimeter that would keep the media from tramping through the Cunninghams’ front yard and banging on the door.
Meanwhile, fifteen hundred miles to east, in his home near Hurlburt Air Force Base, Florida, Maj. Don Tyler was in a reclining chair watching the news on television. He was recovering from surgery that had been performed the day before on the shoulder he’d mangled three weeks earlier in the crash of Ditka 03. Suddenly he called for his wife, Barbara, who came running back into the room to see what was wrong. What she saw were tears streaming down her husband’s face. “Something terrible has happened,” he said. Barbara had known about the American casualties when they were reported the day before, but the men hadn’t been identified. That was when Don told her that one of the dead was Jason Cunningham, and he thought Jason had been the PJ who had taken care of him after the crash.
Out west, it didn’t take long for the media horde to arrive. TV crews from the Albuquerque ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates set up near the house, as did the Fox station from Farmington, New Mexico. At its peak, Peterson counted eight or nine video cameras, four or five still photographers, and reporters from newspapers and radio stations in the surrounding area; roughly forty media people in front of the house.
What everyone wanted besides the photo op was a statement from Jason’s parents; interviewing neighbors who really didn’t know the family well wasn’t adding much to their stories. But what could Red Cunningham say that would be meaningful at that moment? How many ways can the father of a young man just killed in combat say, “I don’t have any details”? Should he be required to tell the world how he feels at that moment? Did they really need video of him being reduced to tears to make their viewers understand that the parents of a soldier killed defending his country are hurting?
Could an assignment editor ever contemplate being in the position Red and Jackie were in that afternoon? Would that contemplation lead to compassion, and a decision not to send a reporter out to ask, however politely, “How do you feel?” while divining that something journalistically important had been captured on videotape when tears poured from Red Cunningham’s eyes.
It’s not that the local news shouldn’t make a big deal about a homegrown airman killed in combat. They should. It’s their responsibility to headline it so that citizens are reminded in very real terms of the human consequences that go with a political decision to fight a war. But descending in a horde on his parents’ home within hours of their learning that their boy was dead is neither productive nor respectful. An informed assignment editor would know that the pararescue school is only minutes away, on the military side of the Albuquerque airport, at Kirtland Air Force Base. There were people there who knew Jason, who’d trained Jason, who could explain what a pararescueman does, and why a young man with a wife and two children might seek an assignment that requires him to live by the credo “That Others May Live.” Jason was the first PJ to die in combat since Vietnam. You’d think the instructors at the schoolhouse, or current PJ trainees might have something consequential to say about the nature of their commitment, about the impact of losing one of their own, about flag and country. Surely that would be more meaningful than reducing a father to tears on camera.
But the horde wanted the parents, and Red and Jackie decided that they’d try to write a statement that Red would read for the cameras. With the help of a woman that Jackie had once worked for at a local radio station, they wrote the statement. Peterson says that friends tried to make it clear that they didn’t have to do it, but the parents felt they owed it to Jason’s memory. So the media was told they could set up their microphones inside the picket fence bordering the front yard, set the cameras outside the fence so that they’d be a good twenty feet from Red when he came out, and wait. That made everyone happy except the Fox affiliate crew, who moaned that their newscast went on an hour before everyone else’s and they needed the statement to be made sooner. Peterson explained that they’d have to take no for an answer.
Sometime around nine o’clock, Red Cunningham came out of the house and read the family’s statement. Not surprisingly, he began to break down as he read. His friend Greg Peterson said that was the first time Red cried since they were together in the parking lot early in the morning. Peterson says that to their credit, the media people were respectful.
In addition to their having to deal with the media blocking the street in front of their house, the Cunninghams’ phone had been ringing off the hook all day long with calls from newspapers, radio stations, and other media from all over the country, all taking advantage of the fact that until that awful day, Red and Jackie never saw the need for an unlisted phone number. Peterson tried telling Jackie that she didn’t have to answer the phone and talk to everyone who called. That it could be done later. He even suggested unplugging the phone. But he says, “She was afraid not to answer because it might be someone in the family she needed to talk to. Then she’d get on the phone, and you know how they are, before you know it they’d have her
going, and she’s bawlin’ her eyes out, she’s an emotional wreck, and she has to sit down and talk to these people on the phone, and this had been going on all day and all night long.”
Around ten P.M., everyone who’d been in front of their house had packed up and gone—except for one car. In it was a field producer for CBS’s The Early Show. With her was an acquaintance of the Cunninghams, the local radio station executive who had been trying for hours to convince the parents to go to Albuquerque in the middle of the night in order to appear live on CBS with host Bryant Gumbel. Thus far she’d been unsuccessful, especially with Peterson and Chris and Lori, Jason’s brother and sister, lobbying their parents hard not to put themselves through that ordeal. Peterson had been especially clear, saying, “You guys do not need to be haulin’ across the country in the middle of the night.”
So a compromise was reached. The network was going to send a satellite truck from Albuquerque so the interview could be conducted live, inside the home. Shortly thereafter, the family was told that the New Mexico-based truck had been sent elsewhere. Instead, arrangements had been made to bring in another broadcast truck from Phoenix, 330 miles away, which could arrive in time to set up and do the interview between five and six in the morning.
But Peterson still wasn’t comfortable, especially when he saw the two women in the car, waiting, hours before the Phoenix truck was due to arrive. When he walked over to the car, they assured him that everything was fine, the truck was on its way, and he had nothing to worry about. Maybe it was that he still had some of his cop instinct in his blood, but he wasn’t convinced. He said, “You guys do not try again to talk them into going to Albuquerque. I don’t care how bad they think they need to talk on the TV, they do not need to do that now. They are going through so much hell, they do not need to go to Albuquerque tonight. They’re tired; they’re emotionally beat up. You guys just need to leave them alone until this truck comes; you’ll do the thing inside, hopefully short and sweet, and then move on.”
None Braver Page 38