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Posted on Sat, Dec. 13, 2008

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FOR ALEX: SEVENTH OF A SEVEN-PART SERIES

Life after Alex's death

BY ROY WENZL

The Wichita Eagle

Family and friends find solace at Alex's grave

Down this road

That i walk

So many turns

So much thought

Where are we going?

Where is the end?

Where are you now?

Why is it dark

once again?

I can hear your voice

calling out to me

God shine your light!

so that i can see

Fragment of a poem by Alex Funcheon, undated

In the 20 months since Alex Funcheon rode down the road to his death, the war that killed him took more lives, though the killing tapered off.

Generals serving President Bush said the troop surge worked.

In September 2007, five months after Alex died, his platoon commander, Lt. Jon Bland, was again riding in the second vehicle of 1st Platoon's convoy when a bomb blew up the lead Humvee, an explosion so big that soldiers in the rear thought both the lead Humvee and Bland's Humvee had disintegrated.

But this time, because the Iraqi trigger man fired the bomb too late, the copper shrapnel ripped through the lead truck's cargo bay and missed the soldiers.

First Platoon was supposed to come home in October, six months after Alex died, but the Army extended many combat tours. Exhausted and grieving, 1st Platoon fought an extra three months.

By then, Bland, a 25-year-old college graduate, a patriot who had volunteered for combat "so that I could really do something for my country," had been removed from command.

In the months that followed, he declined to say why, except that it had something to do with questioning superiors about sending 1st Platoon on too many risky missions.

When Bland and Alex's buddies left Iraq in December, Bland struggled with his marriage and his grief. He said that in spite of thousands dead and billions spent, Iraq was no safer or more secure.

He still blamed himself for the deaths of Alex Funcheon, Brian Botello, Jay Martin and Murphy, the Iraqi interpreter. He still dreamed about blood.

In October 2008 he left the Army.

He drove from Fort Carson, Colo., toward Raleigh, N.C., where his parents live.

But after a day of driving, Bland stopped in Bel Aire, Kan. He'd met the Funcheons a few months before, when they came to Fort Carson and met the survivors of 1st Platoon. Now the Funcheons gave him a bed for the night.

At his request, they took him to Alex's grave, in a cemetery north of Wichita.

Bland is not religious. But he asked for a few minutes alone. He stood silent beside Sgt. Funcheon.

Later, after he reached Raleigh, he admitted that something he had seen at Alex's grave bothered him.

On the gray granite tombstone, the Army had carved:

ALEXANDER J FUNCHEON

SGT US ARMY

IRAQ

MAR 2 1986

APR 29 2007

But on the tombstone's other side, Bob had ordered more words:

CALVARY SCOUT

HE EARNED

HIS SPURS

Bland noted that the word was not spelled "cavalry" as in mechanized armored unit, but as "Calvary," the name of the place where Christ died.

Alex's folks were religious.

Was this deliberate? Or a typo carved in stone?

"Should I say anything to them?" Bland wondered.

He decided not to.

• • • 

Months earlier, on Sept. 11, 2007, at Kansas State University, soldiers walked onto campus to mark the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks. When freshman Gloria Funcheon saw the camo fatigues, she got upset.

Later, when someone at her dorm overheard her vent her feelings, authorities were called, and Gloria was taken to a hospital and asked whether she felt suicidal. She did not feel suicidal and had a Spanish test to study for. Answering this question infuriated her.

Bob smiled when he heard. "I feel sorry for anyone trying to corral that girl."

Karen Funcheon cried in her bathroom alone many times.

She says she has cried every day since Alex died.

She makes quilts for families of killed and wounded soldiers. She and Bob, in spite of the pain it causes them, counsel other soldiers' grieving families.

For a long time, Karen carried a snapshot and showed it to friends. It shows Alex's broken body in his Class A uniform lying in his casket.

The autopsy report, which the Funcheons requested, showed that the copper shrapnel shredded Alex's body from shoulders to knees. Death was nearly instantaneous.

• • • 

They all watched the long national election cycle. So did Sen. Pat Roberts, who has met many families of Kansas soldiers killed in Iraq.

Roberts spoke with The Eagle about the Funcheons in December 2007, when the primary elections had not yet resolved whether the Democratic Party would nominate Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Roberts, who personally liked his two Senate colleagues, thought they were wrong about the war.

Democrats, he said, "are content to let the Bush-haters have their way with him."

If Democrats won the White House, he said, "then they will have to take charge, and they might be saying something entirely different then.

"They will be the ones who will inherit the wind. They know, because they get the same briefings that I get, how dangerous it would be for the world if we just picked up stakes and left."

Bush himself, in an interview with ABC News anchor Charles Gibson on Dec. 1, spoke candidly about his regrets over the war.

He said U.S. intelligence agencies' incorrect claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were the biggest disappointment of his presidency.

He said he was "unprepared" for war when he became president.

When asked whether he would have gone to war had he known the intelligence claims were wrong, he said "that is a do-over that I can't do."

But once those American soldiers got into Iraq, he said, he kept them there, even after the intelligence proved false, because "I listened to this voice: 'I'm not going to let your son die in vain.' "

• • • 

From the moment he heard about Alex's death, Bob Funcheon wanted to know whether his son died for nothing.

In hundreds of prayers since then, he's told God he does not understand.

He still loves and trusts God; but he can't help but think that his troubled son was robbed of life just after he'd turned himself into a good person.

Bob and Karen counseled families; they made friendships that would not have been possible without the catalyst of grief.

• • • 

Gloria goes to Alex's grave sometimes, on weekends home from K-State.

Karen goes once a month.

Bob goes at least once a week, and talks to his son.

Spelling "cavalry," as "Calvary" on the back of the tombstone was a simple spelling error, Bob said recently, embarrassed. He said Alex would have howled with laughter.

Bob talks to Alex a lot at his graveside. Sometimes in bitter tones.

"You dummy," he told Alex one day.

"I've met your Army buddies. All of them."

"They told me they looked up to you, that they trusted you with their lives. A scout platoon of some of the Army's best combat soldiers told me they put you in the lead Humvee on the most dangerous missions because you were the best they had.

"I never got to meet that guy, Alex.

"I never got to meet him.

"And now I never will."

• • • 

The facts of Alex Funcheon's death are these:

When Alex joined the Army in 2004, Bob Funcheon was not proud of his son.

But after he died, having heard from Alex's fellow soldiers what kind of man Alex had turned himself into, Bob Funcheon and his wife sought a meeting with the president of the United States.

And they told the president they wanted the war to amount to something, because they were proud of Alex.

They gave him Alex's dog tags, and showed him Alex's photographs, because they were proud of him.

They brought their daughter aboard Air Force One, knowing she did not like Bush or his policies or his war, and they told her she could say anything she wanted to him. And their daughter grilled the president about his policies and his plans. They watched her go after him, and when they walked off that plane, Bob said, they held their heads high because of both their children.

He wondered for a long time whether Alex died for a purpose.

We may never know whether the Iraq war was worth it, Bob said.

But he knows one thing came out of his son's death.

He learned, from the intensity of his grief, that when someone dies, we must do what Bob himself had told Sgt. Medrano to do:

Keep on living. But don't do it just for yourself.

Do it for those you love.

Do it for your brothers.

Do it for Jay, and Brian. Do it for Alex.