JOHNSON: Outside the spotlight, grief

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Matt Mcclain / The Rocky

A Monte Vista fire truck carrying the coffin of Sgt. Glen Martinez, 31, drives through town Tuesday following the Marine's funeral in the gym of Monte Vista High School.

Sgt. Glen Martinez was killed May 2 by a roadside bomb in Fallujah.

The young girl was seated at a table just off the hotel lobby, picking at a cinnamon roll and sipping her milk. She looked up, a puzzled look on her face.

Was I here for a business meeting, she asked earnestly, or was I here for her cousin's funeral?

When I told her, her eyes grew wide and a broad smile crossed her face.

"Do you think he will make the national news?"

Well, I finally told her, I think he ought to make the national news.

This, though, is more of how it happens, playing out in deep sorrow in tiny towns like this one, the bright focus of the nation's attention drawn elsewhere.

Tuesday morning arrived overcast gray and cold, the empty sidewalks of Adams Street and Broadway in the town center here lined with American flags placed 10 feet apart, each flapping furiously in the biting wind.

It is one of the first signs that a soldier has returned home for the last time from the faraway war.

I have seen this before.

It was just before 8 a.m. when I arrived outside the high school gymnasium. Young women, as they do on such mornings, were affixing still more flags on fence posts. Paramedics assigned to the lone ambulance in town were placing bunting and flags on their rig.

The service, as is often true, would be held in the high school gym. Of the many churches that dot this small farming town of some 5,000 people, not one is large enough to hold the hundreds of mourners expected.

It does seem appropriate in a way, since many of the soldiers and Marines carried for a final time inside a gym had starred as an athlete a few years earlier on the very same floor.

The casket of the Marine being honored Tuesday would be placed atop the wrestling mat on which he'd become a three-year state finalist some 15 years earlier.

"We just think it is appropriate," said Eric Hotz, 40, a science teacher and the current wrestling coach. "He was a kid who was very driven to be successful in everything he did, that if he took something on, he just dedicated himself to it."

For James Canaday, 42, a social studies teacher at Monte Vista High School for the past 17 years, it seemed surreal that he was fussing with the cables to the sound system to be used at a funeral, especially this one. He had known the dead Marine since he was a young boy.

"I always thought he was someone who would go into, maybe, athletics. He loved working with kids, the competition and dedication. I thought he'd go into coaching. I mean, you couldn't ask for a better human being. I guess he did what he thought he had to do."

Many in town remembered this Marine as the star quarterback who led Monte Vista to state three years in a row, the baseball star and wrestler who'd go to the mats with a busted thumb or bum knee and still pin his opponent in the first minute.

This was a Monte Vista boy who got to choose between college athletic scholarships in all three sports, who finally picked Ottawa University in Kansas for baseball, who later earned two college degrees in math and land surveying and who was working on a master's at CU in hydrology in 2002 when he decided his country needed him, and he joined the Marine Corps.

"Excuse me, I just had an emotional moment," a teary-eyed Julie Mitchell, 36, said as she emerged from the back room of The Petal'er flower shop on Adams Street. "At a time like this, you know it's pretty hard on everyone."

She had just finished putting together bouquets for the funeral, coming up with her own arrangements of red, white and blue stems, festooning each with flags and complementary-colored ribbons.

She'd grown up with the Marine, was best friends with his older sister, Lori.

"He was younger," Julie Mitchell remembered, "and maybe I razzed him some back then. I'm crying now because today he is an American hero, and I'm proud of what he fought for."

"Such a waste," Randy Martinez, the Marine's uncle, said as we braced ourselves against the chilling wind in the parking lot of a Chili's restaurant in Alamosa on Monday night.

Even with all of his degrees, his nephew chose to go to boot camp as an enlisted Marine so that he would one day have an appreciation for the work and dedication enlisted men put forth.

"He was going to put in for officer-candidate school after this tour," said Randy Martinez, of Denver, looking away. "It was the kind of kid he was, the person he was. He wanted to see the Corps from both sides."

More than 300 people filled St. Joseph's Catholic Church here Monday night for a rosary service for the dead Marine. In the pews and in the overflow area of the hallway leading to the parking lot, people sobbed miserably.

There were more photographs there, too, the largest being one taken of the Marine with his wife, Melissa Sue, like him, a Marine sergeant who was serving in Fallujah. She would accompany his body home from Iraq.

They met while digging holes during training at Camp Pendleton, marrying in February 2006. They would renew their vows in a formal ceremony in Golden late last year.

He was in his dress blues, she in a white satin gown. He twirled her, the two of them kissing, on the dance floor.

"Glen and I are leaving for Iraq!" Melissa posted in February on the blog of the photographer who shot their December wedding. "We are excited to go and do our part once again to help out those less-fortunate than ourselves," she said. It was their second tour of the war.

"Our last deployment to Fallujah was a fantastic experience. We really felt appreciated. . . .

"Seven months will go by and, before we know it, we'll be on U.S. soil again."

On May 2, a roadside bomb planted on a Fallujah street exploded, killing Sgt. Glen Edward Martinez, 31, of Monte Vista, and three other Marines.

They laid him to rest at the Colorado State Veterans Center cemetery here Tuesday afternoon.

And an entire small Colorado town wept.

Yes, little girl, it should have been national news.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

• May 14, 2008

  8:04 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  mobbs1107 writes:

  I attended the funeral also and although saying goodbye to an American Hero is sad the small town atmosphere of kindness and family made it a bit easier. I was an "outsider" but treated like family. You're right, it should have made national news!

  Mike
  Highlands Ranch, CO

• May 14, 2008

  8:07 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  sheepherder writes:

  Semper Fi brother...

• May 14, 2008

  6:31 p.m.

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  seanmoore44 writes:

  Rest in peace Glen. I wish I could have been there on Tuesday for you and your family. I hope that my son grows up to be someone with the same values and heart as you.

  Martinez family, it has been a while since I have been back to Monte but if there is anything I can do please let me know. Be proud, and know that there are many that will never forget Glen and his sacrifices.

  Sean

• May 23, 2008

  1:24 p.m.

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  JaredWilsonPhotography writes:

  Hello,
  I am the photographer who was given the honor of photographing Glen and Melissa's wedding, as well as Glen's Memorial services. To hear more, and to see a photo tribute to Glen, you can visit my blog at: http://www.jaredwilsonblog.com/index....

  Glen was a great man and great servant of our country. It was truly an honor for me to be able to give back to his wife and his family in any way I could.