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Posted on Mon, Dec. 08, 2008

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FOR ALEX: SECOND OF SEVEN PARTS

Family and friends grieve for Alex

BY ROY WENZL

The Wichita Eagle

"Don't worry ill be
coming home before you know it."

- Alex Funcheon, e-mailing his parents, five days before he was killed in action

Five days after Alex died, a tornado nearly two miles wide blew the western Kansas town of Greensburg to splinters. A dozen died. Dozens injured.

Four days after that, the Funcheons buried Alex in a cemetery north of Wichita.

"Yesterday, my brother was put into the ground," his little sister Gloria wrote in her diary. "People got out of their cars to watch. Police saluted. Strangers cried. In the limo no one spoke so I looked out the window. Looked into the faces of strangers looking at me."

The day after the funeral, President Bush appeared in Greensburg, kissing homeless mothers on the cheek, hugging children, chatting up little old ladies beside basements gaping at blue sky. The Funcheons watched this on the news.

Air Force One had landed in Wichita so Bush could fly in a helicopter to Greensburg. Bob growled at the TV: "He should have called us."

Gloria rolled her eyes. Did her father feel entitled?

Gloria was 18, just graduating, a stalwart on East

High School's champion debate team. She had an inclination for blunt talk. In the 10 days since Alex died, her parents' grief had begun to irritate her. Her father, usually even-tempered, had become short-fused. The idea that the busy president somehow "owed" them a visit irritated her, though she didn't like Bush.

She thought Bush had killed her brother and everybody else in his Humvee. She'd joined the debate team four years before, in part because the Alex she adored then had been on his school debate team. Alex had gone on to become a dope-head dropout, but she became a student with a future, good grades and high skill. Debate either sharpens ideas or exposes weaknesses in logic. She found plenty to expose about Iraq, U.S. foreign policy, and George W. Bush's leadership. Her parents supported Bush and the war. And the war killed Alex.

One hundred Americans were killed in April 2007, the worst month so far. Bush's Republican allies were deserting him in Congress.

And now that Alex was dead, her father was angry, and sarcastic about politics, and her mother retreated to the bathroom every day and turned on the fan thinking no one could hear her sobbing.

Alex had been a jerk to them; Bob had been so worried about Alex's petty crimes that he had taken Karen to consult a lawyer about what their liabilities might be if Alex became a criminal.

Gloria despised what he'd become. Karen still defended him, blamed the drugs, and remembered the good boy Alex had been. One day, she said, her little boy brought home a dead frog flattened by cars, and cried at how it suffered. But then Alex smoked pot morning, noon and night, including before he dropped out of Heights High School.

Karen was sure he had come out of the drug fog in the Army. From Iraq he had sent pleading e-mails: Send German CDs; he was studying German. Send guitar lessons; he was learning guitar.

In late December, she learned, he'd been given a horrible task. A roadside bomb exploded beside a Humvee, killing soldiers. Officers ordered him to climb into the wrecked cab with the blood and body parts and strip the Humvee of anything useful to the enemy. He'd done that, and then, days later, after Karen's father died, Alex e-mailed from Iraq: "u still grieving your dads death? You want to talk about it?"

That was the real Alex, she said. Her boy becoming the man he was meant to be.

She wanted to stop breathing. She wanted to die.

But Gloria --"Glo," as her Dad called her -- was trying to ride this out. She visited friends. She sat in long silences, the pale skin of her face framed by strawberry blonde hair, her look composed.

She cried for her brother, but she also told mourners the truth -- she loved him, he was a screw-up. While she studied, while she earned a spot as an International Baccalaureate student at East High School, Alex got drunk, got laid, got high, treated his parents with contempt, and treated her cruelly, bullying her in grade school, ignoring or taunting her in high school.

He'd joined the Army, she said, "because he had no other place to go." Before he enlisted in 2004, he'd dropped out of school and lived in a trailer with listless friends.

At his funeral the day before, Gloria and Andrew Eldridge, Alex's best friend, had listened in puzzlement to e-mail messages read aloud from Alex's fellow soldiers.

Eldridge loved Alex, the natural leader, the guy who got the parties started, but even Eldridge conceded how mean Alex had become. And now they heard sincere tributes from combat soldiers.

Her parents said the Army had grown up Alex.

"Maybe," Gloria said. "But I never saw it."

But sometimes, sitting at the kitchen table, Gloria's eyes strayed to a bookshelf a few feet away, where two photographs had been stuck into a crack to make them stand up together: Alex in fourth grade, Gloria in first grade, their hair cut exactly the same -- bangs in front.

Gloria adored her big brother so much back then that she'd told the barber to cut her hair like his.

• • • 

"I think i was here for 2 hours before we got our first rockets from them. They obviously dont like us to much."

--Alex Funcheon, Oct. 30, 2006, in one of his first e-mails from Iraq

Every night now in Baghdad, 1st Platoon Lt. Jon Bland went to bed dreaming visions of blood.

Every night his mind replayed Funcheon's Humvee disappearing in a blast of flame and dust. Every night he slept under the same roof as Iraqis, some of them probably traitors, and wondered whether Funcheon and Martin and the others had died because Bland screwed up.

Every night before he went to sleep he relived the blast moment by moment, including how he'd wanted to hose the Iraqi bystanders with his M4.

And every morning he slipped 30-bullet magazines into pouches and took 1st Platoon on patrol.

They'd come here gung-ho, laughing at Martin's political sermons and Funcheon's alcohol-drenched stories. Now, surrounded by enemies, grieving for dead brothers, 1st Platoon patrolled relentlessly, trusting no one.

Coming Tuesday: The Funcheons meet the lead Humvee's sole survivor.