I’m specifically asking this about the United States.
My wife’s cousin was massively wounded in Iraq about three weeks ago. He’ll live, but everyone else he was with in his hummer was killed. He requires 6-8 weeks of hospital stay due to major injuries, including breaking nearly half his bones.
We’re happy he’s alive, but it’s been a big shocker for everyone.
Anyway, my mother-in-law sent us the local newspaper clipping reporting his injuries. His parents said, “We were concerned about his injuries, but just glad it was a phone call instead of a limousine arriving at our house…”
Obviously, they meant they were glad the military had not arrived by car to inform them of his death.
I have no idea why they said limo instead of car, but this leads to my question.
Does the military still drive out to every soldier’s parents/spouse to inform them of his/her death? If so, who does this? Has anyone experienced this(recently)?
My former roommate had a brother in Iraq. One day, after he left for work, two uniformed men knocked at the door and asked for him. My immediate reaction was “oh, shit”.
His brother had been killed.
I wasn’t at all close to my roommate, and I had never met his brother, but the entire situation was very upsetting…and surreal.
As I had never closely dealt with anyone in the military, I had no idea what the procedure was before this.
I couldn’t help but imagine the men knocking on my mother’s door after I almost died in Iraq. By “almost died” I mean that I should not be here right now, I was two heartbeats away from death. I can’t help but think on how she’d be before they knocked. What would have been going through her mind? What was her biggest worry? And I know that as soon as she saw them she’d know why they were there, and how whatever she was stressing about no more than three seconds earlier would have been pushed aside, how she went from being to content to having her life destroyed all with a knock on the door.
Nearly? I’m only halfway through and I can barely see the screen. I had to take a break.
I’m glad you made it back, Rand. I think Marines would rather storm a hill butt naked and holding a plastic sword than do the notification job. Kudos to the guys that do it.
Telegrams of any kind were something you really didn’t want to get. One day while I was in the army my mother was writing a letter to my sister. The town taxi, which delivered telegrams, pulled up in front of the house and the driver came to the door. It was a telegram telling her that a cousin of hers had died. The remainder of her letter is an almost unreadable scrawl.
I’m really sorry about that. It must be pretty tough to lose a father you might never have seen.
On a website about B-26 outfits in the ETO I ran across a message from a John Smith, Jr. (fake name, obviously) asking if anyone had any information about John Smith, Sr. who was killed in a plane crash after the war had ended.
Smith, Sr. was in my squadron, in fact he and I were in the same pyramidal tent in Belgium. I wrote him a short note of my recollection. Junior had only been about 2 years old and 60 years later was still wondering. Sad, and another reason to wage war only as absolutely the last resort.
That article was so sad… I kept telling my husband the details in it, because it was very hard to read alone.
I lived on a military base in Germany during the first Gulf war (as a civilian, though… my mom is a teacher). Grades 4-6. No one I know suffered the loss of a family member, but a large proportion of my classmates had a mother or a father deployed in the Gulf. I remember kids going off to cry once in a while, just out of worry of never seeing their parent again, then coming back to class and going on with their day. I guess I didn’t really understand what they were going through, seeing as my mom was teaching in another school 5 minutes away, and my dad was working in a restaurant. When the war ended, and the troops came back home to the base, there was a huge celebration - “Stand down” . People we so happy.
Re: telegrams… I saw a series of those in the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, ON a while ago… “We regret to inform you that John Smith (I forget the actual name” is missing in action…" then “We regret to inform you that John Smith is believed to have died…” and then, months later… “We a pleased to inform you that John Smith has been found in a POW camp… will be returning home…” I cried, just thinking about the hell that family must have gone through.