My town of Franklin, Tenn., suffered the loss of a Marine who graduated from high school here in 2004. Lance Cpl. Richard A. Buerstetta, 20, was killed in action Sunday in the al Anbar province in Iraq by an IED. Also killed, probably in the same blast (not yet confirmed by the Marine Corps) was Lance Cpl. Tyler R. Overstreet, 22, of Gallatin, Tenn., just north of Nashville. Both men were Marine reservists of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment.

Lance Cpl. Buerstetta’s high school is only two miles from my home. Both my sons graduated from that school. Funeral arrangements for both Marines are incomplete. Marine officials said it would take a few days for the remains to be transported here. Lance Cpl. Overstreet left behind a son born two days after he deployed to Iraq about a month ago. Lance Cpl. Buerstetta is survived by his parents, I don’t know whether he had siblings. The Tennessean’s story is here. It’s a sad day in the Nashville area. A soldier from Springfield, Tenn. was also was also killed in action over the weekend. Please keep all these families in your prayers.

I have said before that Braden Files is the least known jewel of the blog crown that I am aware of. Now stop reading my site and go there to read the answer to this question: How many able-bodied Marines does it take to hold a hill against a concentrated assault of enormous numbers of fanatically religious, heavily armed attackers?

Just wait until you read “the rest of the story” there.

It always happens - right after I announce one of my rare recesses from blogging I find a topic so compelling that I break my own vow to take time off writing.

In this case it is the combined media project between Time magazine and the Rocky Mountain News. They shared coverage of the procedures of US Marine Maj. Steve Beck, on whose shoulders falls the sad duty to notify families of Marines over a few western states that their loved one is dead.

Time’s version is almost exclusively a photo-essay with minimal narrative while RMN’s is a fairly detailed written narrative with extensive photo-illustration. Both are gripping, compelling pieces that should be read by every American.

They took me back to Dec. 2 when 10 Marines were killed and 11 wounded by bombs in Fallujah.

My son is based in Fallujah. Would I have heard by now that he is one of the ten? I don’t know. I don’t know how long notification takes. …

Now I know how long: not long. There is a frenzy of necessary confirmation activity by Headquarters, Marine Corps and the headquarters of the officer who make the notification, then the two-Marine notification team drives to the next-of-kin’s home and makes the notification. If the NOK isn’t there they wait. Out west, where Maj. Beck is assigned, the longest delay is often the time it takes for him to travel to the NOK’s home, which may be one or two states away.

The stories also took me back to the one time that duty fell to me. It was peacetime, the early 1980s - before cell phones or GPS to navigate. I was a first lieutenant assigned to Fort jackson, SC. My name reached the top of the installation-level duty roster just in time to be tabbed for NOK notification. I reported to the post’s casualty office for instructions. There I was assigned a government van and driver and given a written packet of information about the deceased soldier, the address of his NOK, a map and a government credit card.

My instructions were simple: “Memorize this paragraph. You are required to state it verbatim, without notes, to the next of kin. That’s all you have to do.” Unlike the Marines, the Army assigns different officers to notification duty and survivor-assistance duty. An assistance officer (actually a senior NCO) would be assigned to help the dead soldier’s parents with the funeral and settling his affairs; the soldier had not been married.

I got one final instruction before departing: “You must make the notification between 0600 and 2200. Use the credit card for any expenses related to this mission, including food and lodging if you need it. Don’t come back until you have made the notification.”

The dead soldier had been a member of the 82d Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, NC. He had died in an auto accident (fact was, he was DWI, but relating that fact was not my problem). The civilian casualty staffer at post HQ told me that tthe soldier’s father already knew his son was dead (via unofficial grapevine channel from his unit), but that it didn’t matter: the Army always sent an officer, in Class A uniform, to deliver the official word. Unlike Maj. Beck, I was alone; my driver was a driver, that’s all. I was also distinctly forbidden to call the NOK by phone, even to ask directions.

We set out for rural northwest South Carolina. The NOK’s address was an RFD box from a very small farming town. Because it was wintertime darkness had long fallen when we arrived. Absolutely everything was closed for the day; there wasn’t even a place to get a cup of coffee.

The van needed fuel and we did manage to find the town’s one gas station. It was, thank heavens, still open. I asked the attendant where Mr. “Smith” lived and showed him the address without telling him why I wanted it. The man shook his head and said he’d never heard of “Smith,” but that the RFD route started along a certain state route heading out of town, so maybe if we began at the first mailbox and kept going, we’d find it.

I remember clearly the RFD box number: 479. What a plan.

Refueled, I bought some snack crackers and a coke for my driver and myself and we drove off to find the state route. Much to our surprise, once we left the town the first mailbox was number 100. (Apparently, all the RFD numbers were three digits.) But the next was, yes, “101.” We kept going.

Believe it or not we followed the mailboxes all the way to number 479. There were many stops, wrong turns and restarts as we tried to stay on the state road; intersections were often not marked which road was which. Many mailboxes also were not marked at all and we simply proceeded on faith. Sometimes we drove a long way without seeing any box, then there would be one.

After almost four hours of navigating in the darkness, a mailbox marked 479 in simple handwritten, white paint ghosted into the headlights. It was 2145 hours. The house was set off the road about 40 yards. Bright lights shone through every window from interior lights. We turned in and parked near the front stoop. When I opened the door my ears were assailed by soul music coming from the house, very loud. I reached into the back seat and got out my Class A blouse (coat for you civilians) and saucer cap.

“Good luck, sir,” my driver called as I turned to go to the house.

“Thanks.” I walked up the wooden, rickety steps to the front door. I paused and ran my hands along my blouse to make sure it was straight and checked my cap. Then I knocked on the door loudly so it would be heard over the music. Momentarily a middle-aged (or so he seemed, hard farm labor can age you quickly) man opened the door. He was bleary-eyed and I immediately saw why: there were several open bottles of liquor on side tables behind him.

“Sir,” I said to him, “I am Lieutenant Sensing from Fort Jackson. I am told this is the home of Mr. ‘George Smith.’ If so, I would appreciate very much speaking with him.”

The man motioned for me to come in and said, “That’s me.” I stepped inside two steps, removing my saucer cap as I did. A young man in the room yelled at a boy to turn off the music, who quickly complied. I recall that there were a couple of women in the room, too.

“Mr. Smith,” I said very formally, “on behalf the secretary of the Army, I extend to you and your family my sympathy in the death of your son, Sergeant ‘Jim Smith.’” I don’t remember after so many years the paragraph I had memorized then. I know I said that another officer would contact them about making arrangements and settling their son’s affairs, and that he would be able to answer all their questions.

Uttering those words was 100 percent of my duties. I finished and Mr. “Smith” mumbled, “Thank you.” He offered his right hand. I shook it and said, “I really am very sorry for your loss, sir.” We dropped hands and briefly looked at one another face to face: he of a weatherbeaten black face, an uneducated farm laborer who had toiled in tobacco or bean fields all his life, who had worked dawn to dark to see his eldest son graduate from high school and become a soldier with a bright future. Then his son got killed one day on a rural road in North Carolina. And the next day I, a lily-white young officer, walked into his home from the night’s darkness. With no personal connection to his son, I stood in his sharecropper’s home purely by random chance of a duty roster to tell him that the secretary of the entire US Army mourned his young son’s death.

Mr. “Smith” turned away and so did I. There was nothing else for either of us to say to one another. I stepped out the door and walked back to the van, placed my blouse and cap in the back and slid into the front seat. The driver asked, “Home, sir?”

“Yes,” I answered, “if you’re okay to make the drive. We’ll stop for supper on the interstate.”

“Roger that, sir.” He turned the van toward the road where mailboxes were, or were not, marked with plain white numbers that haunted the roadside at 2200 hours, local time.

Before we reached the pavement, the former home of the dead soldier was reverberating again with loud soul music, booming through the darkness.

We have just returned from saying farewell to our son, Lance Cpl. Stephen Sensing, who deployed with his unit to Iraq yesterday.

More with photos later - now sorting through receipts from the trip a few hundred emails received while I was gone.

I posted yesterday about the 14 Marines killed in one blow in Iraq, and the seven who died Monday. All 21 were from the same unit, 3rd battalion, 25th Marines.

Maj. David High emailed me the link to a web page with news about the battalion, ReminderOnline. Particularly sobering is the fact that their page of 3/25 Fallen Marines lists the names and photos of 27 Marines the battalion has already lost. This week’s losses bring the total to 48.

Reuters reports,

Fourteen Marines were killed in a roadside bomb blast in western Iraq on Wednesday in one of the single deadliest attacks against US forces since the beginning of the war.

The bomb exploded near a Marine amphibious assault vehicle as it was travelling south of Haditha, a town on the Euphrates river about 200km (120 miles) northwest of Baghdad. A civilian translator was also killed. One Marine was wounded.

It is the second major deadly attack against Marines in the area in the past three days. On Monday, six Marines were killed in clashes with insurgents in Haditha and a seventh was killed by a car bomb blast in Hit, southeast of the town.

The western Anbar province of Iraq is the heartland of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency and has been one of the deadliest regions for US forces since they invaded in March 2003. The towns of Falluja and Ramadi are also in Anbar.

That makes 21 Marines killed in action this week (post), and the week is only half over. All 21 KIA are from the same Ohio-based Marine Reserve unit, a terrible loss for them. The 14 killed today were all riding in the same amphibious assault vehicle (AAV), which serves as the Marines’ armored personnel carrier on land and sea.

My son, Stephen, is an amphibious assault vehicle (AAV) crewman in Alpha Company, 2d AAV Battalion, part of the 2d Marine Division. A Co. is presently undergoing predeployment training at March AFB, Calif. They will go to Iraq next month.

Stephen called last night and among other things said that they are doing a lot of training in IEDs and ambush procedures. As one of only four Marines in his platoon trained as combat lifesavers, advanced first aid training adapted from an Army program. As such, Stephen is a crewman of the section leader’s track and is positioned about a third of the way from one end of their convoys. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, however.

Beginning today (I think) his unit will train intensively in small-unit combat in buildings. At week’s end they will fight mock close-quarters combat using paintball equipment. I told him if he got painted I’ll kick his rear in (rhetorically speaking only, of course, since a 19-year-old combat-trained Marine can easily outmatch a 49 y/o retired Army slug).

I am confident that Stephen’s training is the best to be found for their tasks ahead, but the grim news from Iraq this week is chilling for a dad whose son will go there.

I posted a little while ago another Marine story, this one of a New Year’s Day firefight. I guess with my son’s call last night and the news from Iraq this week, the Marines are on my mind. God bless ‘em all.

Update: Marine Maj. David High, a friend who returned from Iraq earlier this year, emails some enlightenment:

March AFB is where the Marines do SASO (Stability & Security operations) training; it is the culminating point of the pre-deployment training. They use the abandoned housing area and have re-created an Iraqi village. A complete interactive scenario is in place (i.e., you ask the right person the right question, the whole cell can be rolled up). Included is the local cafe and hangout, “The Camel Toe”. Marines — you can’t take them anywhere polite.

All of the officers of my unit, 1/23 Marines, are scratching our heads over 3/25’s rough ride. The focus has shifted from Fallujah/Ramadi to the west. I anticipate reinforcements and wholesale scrubbing of the corridor.

That IED must have been enormous — at least 4 155 rds stacked.

I am sure it was a big bomb, but it takes much less IED to smash an AAV than it does an Army Bradley. Four 155mm artillery shells, rigged as a bomb, would do a serious jay-oh-bee on a Bradley. Such an IED would certainly smash an AAV to pieces.

The Marines are supposed to receive a replacement for the AAV, called the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. But the earliest date I’ve found for the EFV arriving in units is in 2007, most units later than that.

The EFV is an armored, fully tracked infantry combat vehicle that will be operated and maintained by a crew of three Marines, and have a troop capacity of 17 Marines with their individual combat equipment. The EFV is a replacement for the current Assault Amphibian Vehicle (AAV) which was originally fielded in 1972 and will be over 35 years old when the EFV begins production. The total EFV requirement is for 1,013 vehicles.

Here is a photo gallery of the EFV.

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This email was written by US Marine Maj. Thad Coakley, a staff judge advocate officer for Marine Task Force 1/23 in Iraq. Used here with permission, it tells of a firefight on the bank of the Euphrates river last New Year’s Day.

On New Year’s day, our riverine patrol returned to the scene of an earlier small arms engagement in a palm grove along the Euphrates. You can just see this clump of dusty treetops from the decks of the dam as the river makes its first bend and travels out of sight on its meandering way past Hit, Ramadi, Fallujah and Babylon where I watched the same waters shimmer by a Saddamite palace in 2003. When the patrol beached their craft and foot patrolled up into the grove, an IED exploded, followed by an onslaught of RPG rounds, automatic rifle and machinegun fire. The explosions and rifle fire could be heard and seen at the dam.

During the melee, our battalion suffered its second KIA since we’ve been here, and several wounded. The fatally wounded Marine had just arrived here two weeks ago when Small Craft Unit did a relief in place; they had started off with the great success of finding three large weapons caches in the same area just day before.

My friend Capt Jon Kuniholm, our battalion engineer was hit, looked down at his right side and said: “my arm’s gone.” It was hanging by a bootlace sized strip of sinew. Under fire, he told the Marines he was okay, then calmly walked back to the boat, carrying the one hand with his other. There he coolly waited until all the Marines retrograded to the shore before reflecting that he “wasn’t feeling well and, if everyone was back, maybe they should head back to the dam.”

Jon’s a highly intelligent design engineer, who at 33 is a partner in a small Durham design firm, where if you have an idea but don’t know how to build it, you send the idea to his firm and they figure it out. He was a private pilot who took handicapped kids up in his plane so they could experience the freedom of flying/controlling an aircraft. He volunteered to come to Iraq, but was studying to transfer to the Army National Guard when he got home and fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a Blackhawk helicopter pilot. A great sense of humor and I’d always walk into his room where he’d have a different obscure early 80’s song playing everytime (I can’t remember the last time I’d heard the Violent Femmes before coming here). He was a dedicated professional officer who had worked with one of his engineer Marines and his firm to create a robot to go forward and inspect/blow suspected IEDs to alleviate the risk to his Marines, and he was fighting to get his engineers explosives ordinance disposal pay; something they do, but bureaucratic obstacle was precluding them from receiving. Just the night before at the New Years’ “Talent Show,” he had played a surprisingly solid rendition of “Silent Night” on the guitar. Jon made it back to the dam, then to Al Asad, where they had to amputate his right forearm below the elbow. He’s now on his way to Germany and then home. He will lose his pilot’s license and have to learn to become a leftie. But he’ll tell you he’s happy to be alive. If anyone can design a better prosthesis, it’s Jon.

The corpsman who was with the patrol was also hit, but nobody knew it. He got to the wounded amidst the firefight and treated them, providing emergency aid that saved the lifes of at least two Marines. It was only after they all got back to the dam and he’d turned the wounded over to the aid station corpsman, briefing them fully on the Marines’ injuries and status, that he commented his arm hurt. It was shot through, and his whole side was soaked in his own crimson blood, but he hadn’t said a word or taken a moment to staunch his own wounds.

I spent a couple hours up on top of the dam after the casevac helos took them all off. Saw Marines toting the shattered rifles and bloody, torn kevlar vests off to Supply. Played some tunes from your MP3, watched the grove, talked with the Air Officer and the F-18’s orbiting over Haditha looking for any remain behind terrorists we could strike, then came in and took down the Christmas decorations in my office/berthing space. It’s 2005.

This morning the bn assembled on the dam as the sun began to dawn over the river. At 0700, as the first rays chased away the night’s damp, the formation was called to attention. As we did for Corporal Kolda last month, the Chaplain led a memorial before an M-16 upended in sandbags. The dogtags of LCpl Parrello clinked against the black, plastic forestock, a sun-faded helmet sat atop the rifle butt, and crusty boots sat forlornly, but straight-laced, at the fore. The CO and some of Parello’s squadmates said some words; I guess the same kinds of things that have been uttered since men first went forward under a banner, but had to carry a comrade from the field. The Spartans’ wives would tell them “come back with your shield or on it,” the Romans followed the legion’s golden eagle embossed “For the Senate and the People of Rome,” an outnumbered English king once proclaimed “We few, we happy few.” Men of arms have died from time out of memory for a slogan, a flag, a tradition, a belief, a brother-in-arms. Some in our country would ask what our Marines died and were maimed for; I am here and I would say that it was for all these things and, that if you can only believe it was for a strip of dirt in a grimy palm grove along the river of a country in which we have no business, you just don’t get it.

The Marines get it. Everyone of them waited patiently in the chill air to individually stand before the rifle and salute this fallen Citizen before moving off to pick up their own rifles and helmets and get back to work. As we dispersed, it was as if you could once again feel the life all around us, from the roaring of the river to the wheeling,crying gulls.

Uncommon valor is still a common virtue among the Marines.

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This November marks the 230th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps. So, reports Word Unheard, “the United States Treasury has depicted a branch of the armed services on a coin for the first time with the 2005 Marine Corps Silver Dollar.”

They’re real beauties, too:

I’d like to point out, of course, that the US Army celebrated its 230th birthday last month (June 14). So where’s our coin? Alas, the Marines’ Capitol advocates have always been better than the Army’s.

You can order coins directly from the US Mint.

Update: I suppose it was inevitable that someone would auction these dollars on eBay, jack the price up by $15 over the US Mint’s price, and say they will ship them seven or eight weeks after the Mint releases them - then tell you what a great deal you’re getting. PT Barnum’s maxim is still in effect, I guess.

And I discover there was a US Military Academy commemorative silver dollar in 2002.