On Thursday, Aug. 26, 13 young Americans, among the hundreds, went about performing their duties, searching and counting.

Then one man in the crowd walked up to be searched, and pressed a button in his hand. At that moment, among the many dead, the families of 11 Marines, one Navy corpsman and one Army soldier had their lives changed forever.

During the four years of World War II, I watched my mother go through her days and nights.

I watched her in the kitchen making dinner, stirring something in a pot, and each time the phone rang, the air around us froze.

In my memory, in those years, I never saw her answer a ringing phone. Not once.

She just stood there at the stove or with a broom in her hand, sipping coffee, holding laundry, making a bed or combing my hair. When it rang, she stiffened up with her eyes closed. I never heard her talking to God, but I knew she was. You don’t forget moments like that, ever.

On the morning after Pearl Harbor, an old officer friend of my father’s, Capt. Bernard Schwartz of the 7th Naval District, stepped out of a car and came to the door.

Mom was hanging curtains. She dropped them to the floor and stepped back from the window, pressing her fingers to her mouth.

Capt. Schwartz had personally come to tell her that my brother Bud, who was at Pearl, was safe and at sea. She gave him coffee. I stood in the kitchen door and listened.

Today, I have in front of me on my laptop screen, the pictures of 12 young men and one young woman, 11 Marines, an Army soldier and a Navy medic.

They are all smiling in these photos, sent home for families to frame and set on a piano or a shelf in the living room.

All of my brothers served aboard warships in the Pacific, in terrible sea battles. Each of them watched close friends suffer and die. Each of them survived and came home, one at a time, changed forever.

I only have the fading memories of this 11- or 12-year-old boy who watched a woman, my mother, a young widow, spend four years staring out of windows, watching the leaves turn, the snow fall, and when the phone rang, close her eyes and touch her heart. Many times, I had to answer to stop the chilling ring.

Yes, I know that fathers suffer the loss of their warrior children, of course they do, but I had, at the time no father, only a mother to watch as my heart took pictures.

I see that more than 2,400 American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan.

But today, I write of the 13 who were getting ready to leave the battlefield and start the journey home.

Twelve young men and one young women. Eleven Marines, an Army soldier and a Navy medic who were counting the days, hours, minutes from leaving that country and going home.

They were making plans, I think: weddings, school, reunions. Christmas, yes, Christmas.

It was almost over, this adventure, and they would be going home. Aug. 31st, they said. It will be autumn in America then. So close. It was so close.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

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