It’s a location I know well. I used to walk through this spot most mornings on the way to high school at C.B. West, when the school was known for being a football powerhouse. Across the street is my mother’s real-estate office. Catty-corner is La Maison cheese shop, where I often stop for a bite. Down the block is Kenny’s News Agency, where we used to line up for Spectrum concert tickets. Still visible in the distance is where Bert’s Bicycle Shop once sold my parents my banana-seat bike. Two blocks away is the County Theater. I remember the night in the 1970s when Kevin Benstead “streaked” after the Bad News Bears let out. Main Street merchants. High-school hijinks. That’s the normal stuff of Doylestown. Not what I witnessed on Friday night.
Ladder 79 of the Doylestown fire company raised an American flag above a crowd of a few hundred. And as the clock (a gift from the Rotary Club marking Doylestown’s founding in 1838) was about to strike 8, someone called for a moment of silence.
In front of the crowd was a fit, immaculately groomed man wearing a blue Oxford shirt. He was on the verge of tears. His wife, in black, was already over that line. Equally distraught were their daughter and son-in-law. No one could blame them, or understand their loss.
They were Colonel Thomas Manion, Janet Manion, Ryan Borek, and David Borek—the family of Travis Manion.
The night was to be First Friday in Doylestown, a monthly ritual for dining out and shopping. But the evening had been recast as a vigil for Marine first lieutenant Travis Manion, who died in Iraq on April 29.
But by the time it began, its purpose had changed yet again. Now it wasn’t to honor just Manion but also another man from town as well, Army first lieutenant Colby Umbrell, who died May 3. Neither fit the ID of who’s fighting in Iraq.
They were 26, scholars, athletes, warriors, patriots, and from Doylestown. Young men who could’ve done anything with their lives. Now there were two condolence books to sign, and, silently, the crowd did so. As we waited, a young woman named Christy Jefferson sang “Amazing Grace.”
Major Adam Kubicki is the commanding officer of Military Transition Team 20. He was Travis Manion’s commanding officer and was at his side when he died. He wrote a letter to the family, which they shared with me.
Major Kubicki wrote:
Know that Travis meant a great deal to all of us in his unit. He was an incredible officer, a true warrior, and an example and inspiration to us all. He was also an honorable man, willing to pursue the right path no matter the difficulty. His enthusiasm and abilities were apparent to everyone, including the Iraqis with whom we live and serve.
Meanwhile, an Associated Press story ran in this newspaper on May 1 under the headline “April’s Toll: 104 Troops.”
It’s the sort of story I would have read in passing. I doubt I would’ve paused when I got to the paragraph that said, “A Marine died in combat Sunday in Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold west of the capital, the military said.”
But the Marine who died in Anbar was Travis Manion. And when another story is written giving the final count for May, there will be one more Doylestonian in those ranks, Lieutenant Umbrell.
It’s difficult to localize a war fought around the globe when daily stories describe a death toll pushed upward by often-faceless, nameless soldiers killed in combat.
But things have changed. Never again will I read a headline on war dead and see only words. The war has now come home.
AFTERWORD
Five years later, tragedy revisited the Manions when Travis’s mother, Janet, passed away from lung cancer, but by then, she’d ensured the legacy of her son by establishing the Travis Manion Foundation (TMF), which continues to thrive. As described on the foundation’s website, travismanion.org, “Travis’ legacy lives on in the words he spoke before leaving for his final deployment, ‘If Not Me, Then Who . . . [?]’ Guided by this mantra, veterans continue their service, develop strong relationships with their communities, and thrive in their post-military lives. As a result, communities prosper and the character of our nation’s heroes live[s] on in the next generation.”
In 2014, Travis’s father, Tom, teamed up with the journalist Tom Sileo to write the book Brothers Forever, which tells the story of Travis and his Naval Academy roommate and best friend, Lieutenant Brendan Looney, who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. Together, theirs is a sad and amazing story, and one that I have also written about. The two men are buried beside each other at Arlington National Cemetery. Brendan Looney’s widow, Amy, opened what was then the second of TMF’s four offices in San Diego shortly after his death in 2010. And on Memorial Day in 2011, President Barack Obama visited the graves of Lieutenants Manion and Looney and told their story during his address at the Arlington National Cemetery:
The friendship between 1st Lieutenant Travis Manion and Lieutenant Brendan Looney reflects the meaning of Memorial Day. Brotherhood. Sacrifice. Love of country. And it is my fervent prayer that we may honor the memory of the fallen by living out those ideals every day of our lives, in the military and beyond.
UNEXPECTED MEMORIAL DAY LESSON
FROM DECORATED MARINE
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, May 27, 2007
I THOUGHT I HAD a great idea for a Memorial Day Weekend column. I believe that the men currently fighting in Iraq are an unheralded bunch no less deserving of our thanks and praise than those of the so-called greatest generation who fought World War II.
My plan was to contact some of the highest profiles of that generation and see whether they agreed. I had in mind men like Bob Dole, who, as a member of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, tried to rescue one of his platoon’s radio men while fighting in the hills of Italy and almost paid with his life; or “Wild Bill” Guarnere of Easy Company, a D-Day hero immortalized by the historian Stephen Ambrose in his book Band of Brothers.
I hoped they’d share a few stories, praise fellow soldiers, and offer a word of remembrance.
That was the plan. Except I never got past the first interview.
I started and ended with Jack Lucas. Lucas became known to me when I visited the USS Iwo Jima last October while she sailed in the Persian Gulf. I was a military tourist, and on landing aboard ship by helicopter, I found myself on what’s called the Jack Lucas Airfield. Naturally I inquired: Who is/ was Jack Lucas? Well, shame on me for not knowing his story.
Jack Lucas remains the youngest recipient of the Medal of Honor since the Civil War. Today he is 79. But he was recognized for his conduct at age 17. Lucas finagled his way into the Marines when he was just 14 by forging his mother’s signature on the consent papers. Six days after his 17th birthday, he threw himself on top of two grenades to save three fellow Marines. He was one of 22 Marines to receive the Medal of Honor for service at Iwo Jima.
“I was fortunate that one was a dud. The other tore me up pretty bad but I survived it, and so did the three men who were with me, and they enjoyed a full life,” he told me this past week. When the war ended, and his body had healed, Lucas kept a promise made to his mother upon enlistment: He returned to high school (ninth grade), now sporting a Medal of Honor and driving an Oldsmobile convertible!
All of which is column-worthy in itself. But things got even more interesting when I said to him: “You know, Mr. Lucas, we think of you as a member of the greatest generation, and as I become more familiar with the gentlemen who have given their lives in the war in Iraq, I believe that they, too, are a great generation.”
As expected, Jack Lucas agreed with me. But then he offered a 10-minute discourse on Iraq, which was not what I expected from this larger-than-life Marine.
He began by reminding me that, in the Second World War, 400,000 young men lost their lives and an additional 900,000 were wounded. He thought that was a horrible price to pay, but necessary because we’d been attacked. Vietnam and Korea, by contrast, were wars that were “really not necessary” but were “brought upon us by politicians who thought we needed to go to war. We were not attacked.”
Each life given for America is
most valuable, and most precious, and I do not want to put that down. But for comparison, consider the viciousness of World War II: We lost 5,320 men in the first two days of combat at Iwo Jima. And in just 36 days, 6,820 men killed at Iwo Jima and 19,000 wounded. Just 36 days.
In Iraq, we are going on five years, and lost 3,300 men and 25,000 wounded. So you see the difference in the violence of the war.
On Iraq, Jack Lucas was just getting started.
He recognized that Saddam Hussein was a dictator, albeit not one who attacked us, and who possessed no weapons of mass destruction.
We have gone in and caused our young men to lose their lives.
Our men are very precious, and we don’t need to be losing lives for something we should not be in, in the first place: Iraq.
Lucas bristled at the notion that Iran may be a future point of conflict and argued that if we’d kept Saddam Hussein in power, he’d be dealing with Iran, and we wouldn’t have to.
He told me about a trip he’d taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he saw young men with no arms and legs: “It makes me sick.” He deemed it “heartbreaking” and “unnecessary.”
“We should have gone into Afghanistan with sufficient troops, and got bin Laden, and wiped out al-Qaeda, and crushed the Taliban,” he said, before finally pausing to catch his breath. When he did so, I remembered the initial purpose of my call.
“Mr. Lucas,” I said. “Do you agree that the service of these men is no less noble than your own?”
“You got that exactly right,” he said with authority.
And I do not want to equate it otherwise. Everyone who serves this great nation, in peacetime as well as wartime, are our most noble young people, and we do cherish them, and want to look out for our young men.
And when we want to get them out of harm’s way, people want to call us “liberal” or “pantywaist,” and I ain’t never been no pantywaist, but I want my boys out of Iraq.
Lucas’s message for Memorial Day?
Just remember all of the young people who lost their lives in this great country, everybody, and bow your heads, and think about them, and inscribe their names on your hearts.
All the while Lucas spoke, I was thinking of a friend who told me that wars are fought by people who are infinitely wiser and braver than the people who start them.
AFTERWORD
Jack Lucas died of leukemia in 2008 at age 80. His obituary in the New York Times says:
Big for his age and eager to serve, he forged his mother’s signature on an enlistment waiver that would have allowed him to join the Marines at 17 rather than the usual 18. But in fact he was by then only 14, though the military did not learn of that until censors discovered it through a letter he had written to his 15-year-old girlfriend.
I didn’t know that part about the girlfriend or I surely would have written it in my column. But I’m glad I did describe the image of Lucas returning to the ninth grade wearing a Medal of Honor and driving an Oldsmobile convertible. The obituary also pointed out that in the 1960s, Lucas rejoined the military and became an Army paratrooper to conquer his fear of heights. Apparently, on a training jump, both of Lucas’s parachutes failed but he survived, thanks to his stocky build and a last-second roll as he hit the ground.
My friend Mark O’Connor, the proprietor of the Irish Pub in Philadelphia, raises money for a group called Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation. Every year he hosts Medal of Honor recipients for a raucous and worthy fund-raiser. I’ve met and interviewed several of them at these events, including Barney Barnum, Tom Norris, John Cavaiani, Sal Giunta, Brian Thacker, and Mike Thornton. In my interviews, I of course referenced their heroism and intrepidity and often read from their official award citations. To a man, they never want to discuss their own accomplishment but always stand ready to describe another, more “worthy” recipient.
THE WORLD
ACCORDING TO BRUNO
Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, July 5, 2007
HE REMAINS the Living Legend.
The distinctive voice of Bruno Sammartino, a native of Abruzzo, Italy, sounded just fine when I caught up with him this week at his home outside Pittsburgh, recovering from back surgery.
“I had two [operations] before this one, and I came back strong. I will be back in training within a matter of a few weeks, and I’ll be good as new, I hope,” he said. He sounded like he has plenty of fight left in him, particularly when the subject is the current state of his old profession.
I finally got disgusted and walked away because it seems like nobody cares. People keep dying, keep dying, keep dying. But nobody cares.
Like many across the country, and in this area in particular, I grew up watching the man tangling on Saturday mornings with the baddest the World Wide Wrestling Federation had to offer. He had no equal.
Sammartino’s career spanned four decades. He was the longest-reigning champion in WWWF history. He headlined at Madison Square Garden on 211 cards, and 187 were sellouts!
I wondered what Sammartino was thinking as he watched the Chris Benoit tragedy play out. Investigators in Atlanta believe Benoit strangled his wife, Nancy, and their 7-year-old son, Daniel (who suffered from fragile X syndrome, an inherited mental disability).
Their bodies were discovered with Bibles beside them, which authorities believe Benoit put there before hanging himself with a weight-machine pulley. The Canadian Crippler was just 40.
Sammartino told me that steroids have ravaged the sport he loves. Citing data from Irvin Muchnick’s book Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal, Sammartino said there have been about 90 premature deaths in professional wrestling over the last generation. He added:
And it blows my mind that there are all these investigations in baseball, football, and what have you where there have been no reported deaths, and yet when it comes to wrestling, it just goes on like it doesn’t matter, it’s not important, it doesn’t exist.
I asked the man I still admire about the steroid culture in his era. He said that he first heard of steroids while training at a gym in the early- to mid-1960s when he was impressed by a bodybuilder. When he asked about the guy’s regimen, Bruno was told he was using steroids. Sammartino had no idea what that meant.
“I was 275 pounds at the time, and I got there by training my guts out,” Bruno said. By the 1980s, things had changed. Sammartino said the mindset of today’s wrestlers has been tragically refocused: “The mentality of any wrestler today is that to make it, you have to be juiced up. Now, who’s discouraging of that?”
He was quick to point at the ringleader overseeing wrestling’s devolution. He says Vince McMahon deserves “great blame” for failing to discourage the steroid culture rampant in his business.
Sammartino believes McMahon doesn’t explicitly encourage steroid use but protects its destructive culture by keeping the sport’s drug testing inhouse. And he remembers when McMahon admitted to using steroids himself during a 1994 trial:
If the head of the organization is known to be a steroid user like that, can anyone believe the inside drug testing that the organization does? I find it extremely difficult for anybody to take that seriously.
There used to be more to pro wrestling than the size of the competitors. It was all about Chief Jay Strongbow’s determination, Victor Rivera’s athleticism, and George “the Animal” Steele’s . . . animalism. I loved it, but when the latest incarnation comes on the TV and I’m with my sons (who are at the age when I first got hooked), I change the channel.
Sammartino understands it. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Because today there’s so much vulgarity, profanity, nudity. That puzzles me more than anything else.” He also worries about kids emulating the steroid use they see rewarded.
Today, young kids are very knowledgeable, and they hear about so-and-so and how strong they got and how they can improve by using these chemicals. And they’re not thinking of the serious dangers that go along with that.
&nbs
p; Anybody who knew Bruno Sammartino, they would know better than to ever suggest that I should ever take anything, or anything like that.
A living legend, indeed. Pro wrestling has long been a ghost of its former self. I hope the sport will soon take the ultimate good guy’s concerns to heart.
AFTERWORD
Not long after I wrote this column, a sponsor of my radio program—a cigar store in Philadelphia—invited Sammartino to come to town for an appearance. I was thrilled to be his escort for the day at a time when I was still practicing law with the legendary James E. Beasley. The firm is located in the ornate and aptly named Beasley Building at 12th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia. The building was constructed in 1894 by the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania and served as its headquarters for many years. The headquarters fell on hard times before Beasley bought the building in 1986 and painstakingly restored it. The building was—and remains—a showpiece. The afternoon of Bruno’s appearance, I took him to my normally staid law office, thinking it would be the ideal spot for him to spend some down time before the event. But from the moment he entered, he was immediately recognized by lawyers and support staff, all of whom were eager to share stories of his influence on their upbringing. Word spread through the five floors that there was a celebrity in the building, but not everyone understood who it was. Finally, on a microphone normally reserved for fire drills, our receptionist announced that “the living legend Bruno Sammartino” was in the house. A line quickly formed outside my office for photos and autographs. In 10 years of practicing law at a firm that saw many noteworthy clients come through its doors, I don’t recall any other moment that so energized the office.
AN IMMIGRANT’S DREAM
STILL MEANS SOMETHING
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, July 15, 2007
THE DAUGHTER of the shoemaker to King Nicholas Petrovich of Montenegro is on her deathbed. She is 101 years old. She is my grandmother.
Word of Victoria Grovich’s (nee Ivanisevich) imminent passing came to me last week on the same day I reviewed the latest Pew Global Attitudes Project Survey. The study noted the continued decline of the United States’ image throughout the world. The same day, the president’s approval rating in one poll plummeted to 29 percent, while Congress’s rating is lower still.
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right Page 16