Lakota Sioux mourn a son, pray for Eddy - a 'Fiery Star'

Nearly a year after brother dies in Iraq, only sibling chooses to go back to war

Jim Sheeler, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 11, 2006 at midnight

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PINE RIDGE INDIAN RESERVATION, S.D. - The sweat lodge started just after midnight, with a nightmare that had already come true.

On a freezing, overcast night in the Badlands, a sun-bleached buffalo skull lay near the door of the small domed shelter supported by willow branches, covered by a heavy tarp. The Lakota Sioux man closed the flap on the door, leaving them all in deep darkness, except for the pulsing glow of the orange rocks sprinkled with sage.

Clad only in a pair of shorts, Marlin Under Baggage poured water on the rocks, filling the lodge with a pungent, steamy heat that all of them could taste.

"Before Brett left for Iraq, he told me he had a dream that he was going to be shot," Under Baggage said. "He was scared. He didn't think he was coming back.

"Still, he went.

"That is courage. That is bravery."

Ten months earlier, the body of 22-year-old Marine Cpl. Brett Lundstrom, the first Oglala Lakota Sioux service member killed in Iraq, was welcomed home a few miles away.

It was only the beginning.

In the Lakota tradition, mourning takes at least a year, as the spirit of the dead watches over those who grieve on its journey to the other side, where tradition holds that the dead will be reunited with their ancestors.

Every week since then, they've come to the sweat lodge, to continue the journey - for Cpl. Lundstrom, and for those left behind.

"He also worried about his little brother," Under Baggage said to the darkness. "He worried."

A few miles away, Brett Lundstrom's only sibling arrived on the reservation from his own tour in Iraq.

Within months, 22-year-old Army Spc. Eddy Lundstrom could be headed back into battle.

Inside the sweat lodge, the drumbeat began.

Underneath the tarp, the steam again enveloped the darkness, soaking the Lakota people, blasting them with air so hot that some bent over to breathe the cooler air near the dirt floor.

As sweat dripped from their skin and drenched their hair, a sacred pipe filled with tobacco came around, along with the prayers.

"I want to pray for Brett, and for Eddy. I want to pray for the warriors," Glorianna Cordova said. "I also want to pray for all the Iraqi people who have died. All the children."

The prayers continued, followed by traditional Lakota songs. Songs of healing, songs of purification.

Nine months before, many of them stayed awake for 42 hours straight during the wake for Brett Lundstrom. Now, as they welcomed home his brother, it neared 2 a.m.

"One more song," George Apple said, as he picked up his drum.

"I want to sing a song for the soldiers."

Premonition about a phone message

On the night of Jan. 7, Doyla Lundstrom navigated the dark roads of South Dakota, back into cell-phone range, where her phone flashed with a message.

Since she was driving, she asked her fiancé, John Hauk, to check the call. It was a friend, saying that a neighbor was trying to get in touch with her.

She asked Hauk to call the neighbor. The woman told him that she wanted to speak to Doyla, but it could wait until she got home.

During her sons' deployments, Doyla would pause at the stop sign near her house, peering around to the street, looking for vehicles that didn't belong. Each night the chaplain wasn't at her door, she went to sleep saying, "That was a good day."

As she drove, she asked for the phone, to call the neighbor back.

"Did my house burn down?" she asked the neighbor. "Is there a problem with the dog?"

No, the neighbor told her. None of that. There was something she needed to talk to her about, the neighbor said, but it could wait until she got home.

Doyla Lundstrom's first language is Lakota. She grew up on the reservation, without a mother, with a father who drank much of the time. She left the reservation as a teenager, for a foster home. She married a man from the nearby Rosebud reservation who would become a Marine, and a life that took her away from the reservation.

For much of the family's life, it was just Doyla and the two boys, as their father was off on officer training and deployments to Cuba and the Persian Gulf. When he arrived home, they would go on family trips to historic battlefields, where the boys memorized the history and made plans to join it.

Brett had always said he wanted to be a Marine - when he was a teenager, he would tell his friends, "I will die for you."

On Sept. 11, 2001, the family lived 35 miles from ground zero, and his mother knew it wouldn't be long. She was able to convince him to go to college for a year, but he eventually enlisted, followed not long afterward by his brother.

Even after Brett returned home from boot camp, she still called him by his nickname "Brettlee." Eddy was always "Babyson."

Brett was the outgoing big brother, who called his mother three or four times a day, and they talked like teenagers, sharing everything. Eddy was always the quiet one, more like his father, introspective.

"They're both awesome kids," she said. "Awesome in their own way."

In one family photo, Eddy sits on a chair in his Army uniform. Everyone says he looks exactly like his grandfather, who fought in the Army in Korea. The family tradition of warriors goes back generations, to famed Lakota Chief Red Cloud.

'Which one was it?'

As she drove home that night, she asked her fiancé to call the neighbor one more time. She couldn't wait.

"Call her back and ask her if the chaplain came to the door," she said.

By then, boys throughout the country called Doyla Lundstrom "Mom."

Her home was always open to the boys' friends, who would use the home, sometimes as party central - with Doyla watching over them - sometimes as a refuge to escape their own problems. A home away from home.

"I think maybe it has something to do with me not having a mother when I was growing up - I may have overcompensated with my kids," she said. "I always wanted to be there for them."

Her fiancé dialed the phone, and asked the neighbor. "Did the chaplain come to the door?"

She knew by Hauk's expression what was said on the other end of the line.

She pulled the car over, took the phone and called Ed Lundstrom Sr., her former husband and the boys' father, who lives in Detroit. The Marines had already come to his door.

When he answered the phone, he was crying, choking on the words.

"Which one was it?" she asked.

She remembers screaming into the telephone, telling him to calm down.

"Which one was it!"

For what seemed like several minutes, he couldn't speak.

"That was the worst of it all, right there," she said, "those moments of not knowing which one it was."

Best translation is 'Fiery Star'

Late last month, on the morning after the sweat lodge on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Wicahci Kailehya awoke wrapped in his name.

During the three-day wake for Brett Lundstrom 10 months earlier, the two brothers were bestowed with their official Lakota names - one of them, posthumously. The man in the casket was called Wanbli Ishnala, or "Lone Eagle." His brother was dubbed Wicahci Kailehya.

"It can be translated as 'Shining Star' or 'Fiery Star,' " his mother said. "I like 'Fiery Star.' "

After his return from Iraq, she gave him a traditional native star quilt.

On the quilt, yellow diamonds burst from a night-black sky.

"He loved it," she said. "When I woke him up this morning, he was wrapped in it."

Inside the Lakota Prairie Ranch Resort, the traditional drum circle began again.

Only three weeks after Eddy returned from Iraq, the family had returned to the reservation to help dedicate a meeting room at the motel in Brett's honor.

Among those seated at the dedication table, one of the reservation's enforcement rangers bowed his head. In 2003, Francis Jamie Big Crow served as an escort for Lori Piestewa, the first female American Indian killed in the war. Then, in January, he rode his horse in front of a clapboard wagon carrying the casket of Brett Lundstrom.

"It was a tremendously great honor to be on horseback - especially as a horse nation," he said, then had to pause. "Gosh, I can feel it right now, just saying this."

On the reservation, every day is Veterans Day.

American Indians have the highest enlistment rate per capita of any race. According to icasualties.org, 29 "American Indians and Alaska Natives" have died in Iraq.

Inside Little Wound High School in nearby Kyle, they still keep the pictures of each member of the reservation who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A group of mothers has set up a support group. Now the fathers are starting to come, too.

The reservation - set in the second-poorest county in the country - grapples with unemployment, alcoholism and a methamphetamine problem, which gnaws at the tribe from the inside out.

"Brett's death wasn't a tragedy. It was a huge loss, but it wasn't tragic," said his uncle, Marlin Under Baggage. "Last weekend, three young people lost their lives here - one in an accident, one in a stabbing and one from an overdose. Those are the tragedies."

In a place only a few miles from the Wounded Knee massacre more than a century ago, many on the reservation openly question the cost of the current war - in billions of dollars and lives lost - while still remembering the battles that left them on the reservation.

"You go back and look at acts of terrorism. This country committed the first act of terrorism - on the Lakota people. At Wounded Knee," Big Crow said. "People say 'Remember 9/11.' I wish they would also remember 1890. Wounded Knee. Because Native American people were lost."

Still, they continue to serve. At last count, more than 60 Lakota from Pine Ridge were overseas. Recently, a tribe member from Rosebud returned after being shot by a sniper, but survived.

"This is for all of the things all of them have done," Ed Lundstrom Sr. said, of the room's dedication to his son. "Brett is the face of it, but this is for all of them. This is for all of the servicemen and women."

The drum circle played a song written for Brett Lundstrom by a Denver-based drum group called Good Feather - the same group that played at his burial service at Fort Logan National Cemetery.

Wanbli Ishnala, the song is called, Lone Eagle.

After the ceremony, Brett's grandfather, Birgil Kills Straight, looked around the room.

"It's not just four walls anymore," he said. "It seemed sterile to this point. And then it took on a life."

A few minutes later, Eddy and his best friend, Frankie Lugo, stepped outside for a cigarette.

"The songs," Lugo said, his eyes red. "That's what gets me every time, those songs.

"I wish I could understand the words.

"Did you understand it?" he asked Eddy.

The young soldier stared out at the brown hills.

"I understood Wanbli Ishnala, " Eddy said.

'You have to do what you have to do'

Later that night, inside a pizza restaurant in Rapid City, more than an hour's drive from the reservation, Eddy looked up at the television screen at a commercial for Flags of Our Fathers, the movie about the Marines who hoisted the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima during World War II.

"I read the book. I really liked it," he said quietly.

"It's sad what happened to the Indian, though."

Long before the book or the movie, most everyone around here knew the story of Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who helped raise the flag on Mount Suribachi. He returned home a hero, but the quiet, shy man struggled with the attention. Hayes fell into alcoholism and died at 32.

Inside the restaurant, Frankie Lugo watched his best friend as Eddy wound his way over.

"Think of it. Every time he's introduced, people say, 'This is Eddy, he just got back from Iraq. His brother died over there,' " Lugo said. " 'This is Eddy, he just got back from Iraq. His brother died over there.' "

"I don't think he should have to be reminded all the damn time."

As the family prepared to leave the restaurant for a pool hall several blocks away, a snowstorm kicked up, and the family decided to drive.

Eddy shook off the idea, insisting on walking through the storm.

"But you have to walk across a major road," Lugo said.

"I'm not afraid of a few cars," he said. "They don't blow up over here."

By the time the Lundstrom family made it into the smoky haze of the pool hall, Eddy was already there, but he had a large bloody gash on the palm of his hand.

"I had to jump over a fence," he said. "It's no problem, though - all you have to do is cauterize the wound. In Iraq, you have to do what you have to do."

He took the cigarette from his mouth and mashed it into his palm, searing the wound, without flinching.

He then stuck the cigarette back in his mouth.

Sometimes, Eddy will order an extra beer and leave it on the counter without touching it. For his brother.

When people in the bar learned who Eddy was - which did not take long - they gathered around his table. When they found out that his new unit is scheduled to leave for Afghanistan within the next several months, their pride mixed with anger.

"Don't go back, man. Don't go back," said Alfred Leftwich. "We can only lose one Lakota per family. Only one."

"Somebody's gotta go," Eddy said. "Somebody's gotta go."

He took a sip of his beer.

"Don't worry about me," he said. "I got an angel watching over my shoulder.

"Yeah, I got an angel on my shoulder."

Bringing roses to Brett at Fort Logan

At the King Soopers on Sheridan Boulevard in Englewood, the cashiers recognize the soft face of the Lakota woman.

Inside the supermarket, the florist is one of the closest to Fort Logan National Cemetery.

"Every time I come down here I buy eight bouquets - one for all the Marines. Someone does it for Brett, so I do it for them," Doyla said as she gathered up the flowers. "We all just kind of take care of each other's kiddos."

Though many relatives at Pine Ridge wanted Brett buried there, Doyla knew her son always wanted to come to Colorado. When the Marines pulled up at her home in Black Hawk, S.D., she had already placed the house on the market. She recently moved to Broomfield, and she comes to the cemetery at least once a week.

Inside the supermarket, she turned to the red roses.

"I always bring Brett roses - a dozen red roses from me and a dozen from his brother, even though he was never here."

Two weeks ago, for the first time, his brother was there. He appeared from a different aisle in the supermarket, carrying two cans of Budweiser.

"I want to have a beer with my brother," he said.

The day after Eddy arrived from Iraq, his mother loaned him her cell phone to make a call. After speaking with a friend, he snapped the cell phone closed, and saw her screen saver: his brother's headstone at Fort Logan.

"He slammed the phone down and walked off," she said. "He said, 'I can't see that right now.' "

During the wake for his brother at Pine Ridge, Eddy spent much of his time alone, in the bleachers of the gymnasium at Little Wound High School, dressed in his combat fatigues.

According to the Department of Defense, any surviving sibling who has an immediate family member killed in action may request to be kept from further combat.

For Eddy, it was never an option.

"At the wake, grandmothers were hugging him, crying, saying, 'Don't go,' " his mother said. "He said, 'I'm going to go back.' He said, 'I have a job to finish, and I can't leave my buddies behind.' Of course, my thoughts were, 'What about your mom?' But I didn't say anything. I would have never said don't go, because I know that would have made it hard on him. I said, 'Dad and I understand.' "

Last month, after he arrived back from his tour in Iraq, Eddy was on a trip, driving by himself, when he saw an eagle from his car window.

"Mom," he told his mother later. "Brett was following me."

A rifle salute, 'Taps' and a shared beer

Inside Fort Logan National Cemetery, Doyla bent down and kissed her son's headstone. Then she laid out a picnic blanket.

Her niece placed the flowers on the graves of nearby Marines.

Eddy arrived and stood near his car for a few minutes before walking over. When the family first took him to the cemetery last month, he first refused to get out of the car. He eventually circled the grave, but he wouldn't look at it.

This time, he approached the grave slowly, staring mostly at the clean, gray backside of the headstone.

Finally, he walked around, looked at his brother's name and began to cry.

The silence was broken by the shots of a rifle salute from a nearby funeral. Moments later, Taps wafted through the cemetery.

Eddy drank half of his beer and poured the rest onto his brother's grave.

'All we can do is support him'

Near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, Eddy was assigned to a recovery team tasked with - among other things - cleaning up after the roadside bombs. He's told friends of working his way through the carnage of twisted metal and twisted bodies.

"He's been through hell and back," his mother said. "Well, I don't know if he's back yet."

She can't help thinking back to the words of his big brother.

"Brett was really scared for Eddy. He said, 'The Army doesn't train them like the Marines. He's not ready.' He said, 'I'll be all right - I'll be home in three months. It's Eddy you need to worry about.' "

Two weeks ago, she received a call in the middle of the night.

After spending weeks trying to hold his emotions, Eddy called from his bunk at Fort Sill, Okla., where he was alone, the first to return from leave.

"He said, 'Mom, I'm scared.' He was all alone and it was hitting him all at once," she said. "He talked about the nightmares. He told me what he was thinking."

He then described a place she recognized all too well.

"In the beginning, there was nothing, nothing that anybody could do for me. I wanted to die. Sometimes I think about it, and I still have those thoughts. That evil s-word (suicide) can creep into your thoughts," she said. "The pain was just so unbearable."

She heard the same worries in her son's voice. So she made a deal.

"I said, 'I know how you're feeling.' I said, 'You have to remember, I hung in there for you, and you've gotta hang in there for me.' I said, 'You're the reason I'm still alive.' "

Eddy's new unit is scheduled to leave for Afghanistan in five months.

"My first instinct was to get him out," she said. "But if he wants to go, then all we can do is support him again, be there for him."

Even though many in her own family argue against the Iraq war, she says she doesn't take a stand, other than to support her sons.

"I can't really blame anybody. Brett died doing what he wanted to do. He didn't want to die, but he was willing to die for us," she said. "He died doing what he was supposed to do. He died doing what they told him to do. That's what they do."

The tradition of the spirit journey

As Doyla packed up her things from South Dakota to move to Colorado, she found two coffee mugs she had planned to give to her sons.

"Happiness is . . . 'Iraq' in my rearview mirror," the inscription reads. She still hasn't opened the boxes of Brett's belongings that returned from Iraq. She had the Marines put them in the garage, with the word, "deceased" facing the wall.

According to Lakota tradition, she is supposed to burn all of his belongings, so his spirit doesn't return for them, to make it easier for the spirit to make the journey to the other side.

She can't do it.

"I still sleep with his shirt," she said. "Not every night now, but I still sleep with it sometimes. I just hold it like a pillow. It makes me feel better."

Tradition says that Brett's spirit can hear her sobbing, and feel her grief, and that it makes it more difficult for the spirit to make the journey to join his ancestors.

"Everyone keeps saying, be strong, don't cry," she said. "I guess you're supposed to be strong, but I'm not strong."

After she left the reservation, she followed Catholic traditions - both Eddy and Brett were altar boys - but she has recently fallen away from the church. A few months ago, she went through a healing ceremony at Pine Ridge - a ceremony that she says has helped her work through her grief more than any other.

"It's being torn between the way we believe and the way I grew up, the way I lived my life all these years," she said. "I find myself praying to God, and not Tunkashila, and that's where I still feel torn."

She stopped, and sniffled.

"It's basically the same person," she said of the two deities.

In January, she's scheduled to have another ceremony at Pine Ridge - one that signals the end of the official mourning period.

"I guess that I'm supposed to go through a 'wiping of the tears' ceremony at a year," she said.

"I won't be able to do it."

'Tonight will help us find that clarity'

Last Saturday, a nearly full moon rose over the Badlands, and a brilliant orange sunset stretched across the Pine Ridge reservation, painting the tarp on the tiny sweat lodge.

For hours, 24 rocks had heated in a bonfire, which still crackled as it slowly died.

Before returning to the sweat lodge, Doyla's friends and relatives gathered, giving thanks to the "grandpas" - the rocks that are reused for ceremonies. The grandpas, they say, were here before any of us and hold histories of their own. Still, sometimes the heat and water of the ceremony will crack them.

"In many ways, the rocks are like people," Glorianna Cordova said earlier. "You can only use them a certain amount of times before they break."

They had planned to hold a Wopila for Doyla - a ceremony where she would give thanks to the spirits for all the help they had given her through the process.

Instead, she had to wait, as she entered her "sacred time," her menstrual cycle, when tradition holds that her body's own regenerative power would interfere with the power of the spirits in the sweat lodge. Still, her family decided to hold a sweat lodge without her - until she could return for her Wopila ceremony - and send their thoughts through the steam.

In the heat of the "grandpas," the darkness once again enveloped them. They prayed for the ones left behind, and those whose journey have only begun.

For more than an hour, they prayed and sang, hoping to lend strength to the woman who waited at the nearby motel.

Afterward, draped in a towel, sweat still coating his body, Marlin Under Baggage looked into what remained of the fire, and thought of his nephew's spirit and his sister's tears.

"People mourn for themselves because they're left behind," he said. "If there is constant unhappiness, he hears that out there, and he wants to come back. It is supposed to be a joyous occasion, your birth and your death.

"Tonight will help us find that clarity, to work with it in a positive way."

Minutes later, once the sweat lodge was officially ended, the headlights of a car swept across the property. The woman with the soft face got out of her car, and stood on the ground where she grew up, the land she still knows in the dark.

As she walked into the cold night, Doyla wrapped herself in the warmth of the coat embroidered with a lone eagle, and looked up at the shining, fiery stars.

In the Lakota language, there is no word for "goodbye."

sheelerj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2561

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