Posted on Fri, Dec. 05, 2008

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Behind the scenes with Roy Wenzl

BY ROY WENZL

The Wichita Eagle

I first met the Funcheon family after I wrote about President Bush and Sen. Pat Roberts' visit to Wichita June 15, 2007, when Air Force One waited on the tarmac as the president conferred with the people inside.

In that story, I wrote that the Funcheons, a courteous and friendly family even when grieving, wanted to keep their conversation with the president private.

Two days later, Karen Funcheon called to say that she was moved by how I'd written the story. She asked that I come see her and Bob. I told her we wanted to know what they'd said to the president. Karen said she'd have to think about that.

They did not want to "blab" as they put it, about what they'd said, but it occurred to them that perhaps telling their son Alex's story might benefit other soldiers and their families by underscoring how they wanted the war to be meaningful, and not a waste like Vietnam.

I have a special interest in soldier stories because my grandfather was killed fighting the Germans in World War II. My mother was only 9 years old when the family got the telegram in 1944. I'd seen what a war death can do to a loved one, even decades later.

This story was painful to produce. Bob and Karen Funcheon cried several times as they described the life and death of their son. Gloria did not want to do it at all, and did so only because her mother pleaded with her. Sen. Roberts told me he cried when he first met the Funcheons, several months after their son died.

I interviewed the Funcheons, two of Alex Funcheon's fellow soldiers, and Roberts, who brought a world-view perspective to the story because he is a friend of the president and because he had served for many years as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

This is a war where many soldiers can stay in nearly constant touch with family and friends via cell phones and e-mail. Because of that, the Funcheons could connect me with Alex's platoon commander, Lt. Jon Bland, a 25-year-old officer from North Carolina, and Sgt. Gerardo Medrano, 29, the one survivor from the Humvee roadside bombing, who was recovering from his wounds at Fort Carson, Colo., where their unit was based before they deployed to Iraq.

The two soldiers were reluctant to talk at first. They did so because the Funcheons pleaded with them. They were further persuaded when I told them that I just wanted to tell what happened, in detail, so that readers might gain an understanding about what soldiers in Iraq have faced for many years now, everything from the heat to the fear of roadside bombs to the treachery of some of their Iraqi allies.

One of the attractions of the story is that the reader is right there: in the Humvee with Alex Funcheon and Gerardo Medrano, on foot patrol with Funcheon and Lt. Bland, and on Air Force One, first with Sen. Roberts and President Bush, then with the Funcheons and the president.

When I interviewed Medrano late last year, he described the Humvee blast literally from the inside. Though badly wounded, he said he never lost consciousness, and he was able to describe, in a voice halting with grief, what it was like as four men died by his side.

Later, I fact-checked with Bland, Medrano, and all three Funcheons. I did it because the story is incredibly, intrusivelyintimate, not only about what people did and said, but what they thought about four men dying one day in a war where the purpose and meaning will be talked about for decades to come.

Reach Roy Wenzl at 316-268-6219 or rwenzl@wichitaeagle.com.

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