Note: This article was originally published on Dec. 28, 2003. We’re re-posting it now for our Colorado’s Fallen tribute.
President Bush slowly works the room, moving from one grieving
family member to another.
At every family gathered in a special room at Fort Carson, the
president stops. He offers comforting words, and sometimes a hug.
Then he gets to 4-year-old Dustin Lawton.
“My daddy is dead,” Dustin says to the president. He says it to
nearly everyone he meets.
Sherri Lawton holds her breath.
She thinks Bush must have heard Dustin, but it would be so easy for
him to act as if he hasn’t and just keep moving.
Bush stops.
He turns to look at the boy, and bends down.
“I know he is dead, son,” the president says.
When Sherri Lawton’s husband went to war, she believed he would be
home by Christmas.
She believed he would be there to see Dustin open the gift her
husband most wanted to give him this year, a set of Lincoln Logs he
picked out before he left for war. She believed he would be there
to hold 18-month-old Tanner and bounce him on his knee.
But Mark Lawton, a 41-year-old Army staff sergeant from Hayden, a
small town deep in the Rockies, was killed Aug. 29 – his combat
engineering unit’s first casualty since the Korean War.
So Mark missed Christmas, just as he missed Thanksgiving and his
and Sherri’s fifth wedding anniversary. Just as he’ll miss the
birthdays of his two young sons.
Sherri Lawton is a 36-year-old widow.
Her first holidays without Mark were filled with trepidation and
devastating sadness. She also felt the warm sympathy of the man who
sent Mark to battle. There were even moments of occasional
laughter.
Her decision to join her family on these all-important days was a
testament to her desire to move on for the sake of her children.
Because, the truth is, she’d rather just sit in the cemetery and
talk to the grave.
“I still don’t think that I’ll ever recover from this,” Sherri
says. “Mark was my whole world.”
Family man
A difficult upbringing precedes a military career.
Sherri and Mark Lawton met six years ago, soon after he returned to
Craig, just down the road from Hayden, after a long career with the
Marines. His faltering marriage had come to an end.
Mark, who grew up in a broken home, came to Colorado from Indiana
at 16 to live with his father but ended up living in the garage of
a friend’s home. He became a track and cross-country star, and
joined the Army after graduation.
After two years, he switched to the Marines and fought in the first
Persian Gulf War. When he left active duty and returned to Craig
about six years ago, he drove a truck for a living. Then he went to
work for a coal company.
After fathering a child outside of marriage in his 20s and watching
his first two marriages fall apart, Mark was looking to start over
as a family man. Sherri’s commitment to Christianity appealed to
him.
The couple married a year after they met – on Sept. 12, 1998.
They held the ceremony outside Sherri’s home, by the pond.
It rained. It stormed. Rainwater drained through silk flowers
gathered in an arch overhead and stained her white dress red.
Sherri laughs off this haunting image.
Someone said to her, “I can’t believe you aren’t bawling your eyes
out.”
She answered: “I came here to marry the person I love. It doesn’t
matter what the rest of the day was like. I got my husband.”
Dustin was born Aug. 12, 1999. On June 3, 2002, Tanner arrived.
Left behind
As the nation prepares for war, Mark Lawton’s new life is put on hold.
To understand Sherri Lawton is to recognize that Staff Sgt. Mark
Lawton was her hero.
And to understand the Mark Lawton she married is to recognize a man
who yearned to live as a super-patriot dedicated to serving God,
country and family without question.
Even as a reservist, Mark instructed Sherri – against her fashion
advice – to give him regulation Marine “high-and- tight”
haircuts.
After Dustin was born, Mark joined the Reserves, to complete 20
years of service and earn the benefits he believed would help his
new family.
Once a month, Mark took his family to Grand Junction, while he
trained with the 244th Engineer Battalion.
Mark and Sherri didn’t use babysitters. They were a family that
believed in staying together.
After Sept. 11, 2001, Mark’s unit was put on alert. During the 2002
Christmas season, that meant girding for an invasion of Iraq.
The war veteran and his wife realized the unit and their families
hardly knew one another.
“This is crazy,” Sherri remembers saying. “We’ve been in this
unit three years, and no one really talks to anybody.”
The unit’s leadership agreed, and encouraged Sherri and a friend as
they seized on the idea of transforming the engineering company’s
Christmas party.
They would fill it with games and prizes and presents. Games that
kids play, meant to force interaction. Pass an orange down the line
from neck to neck. Clench a toothpick between your teeth and send
along a Lifesaver.
Mark and Sherri had owned a small business, “Sherri’s Ceramics and
Such,” before the boys came along.
Sherri spent hours painting 98 ceramic pieces to give to the
reservists and their families. She and Mark ordered Army gear and
trolled stores for domestic gifts.
The party was scheduled to begin at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, but
then word came the soldiers were needed for a Christmas parade.
The party was moved to 7 in the morning.
Sherri worried it would be a disaster, and that all her work would
be wasted.
“Oh, man, people were furious that they had to be there at 7,”
Sherri says, her deep green eyes suddenly bright. “They couldn’t
believe this was going to be any fun.”
But it worked.
“They were still going at 3 o’clock that afternoon – and they knew
they had to leave,” Sherri says. “They got to laughing at each
other so hard that day, it really caused really good memories for
them.”
One night not long after the Christmas party, Mark made a comment
about Iraq.
“He didn’t make a big deal about it,” Sherri remembers. “He just
said, ‘I just have a bad feeling that if we have to go this time, I
won’t come home.”‘
She breaks down crying at the memory.
When word came that his unit was to be deployed in February, Mark
became all business.
“‘We knew it was coming,”‘ she remembers him saying. “‘We’ll get
it done. We’ll come home.”‘
For this war, Mark would be with a company of combat engineers. The
41-year-old veteran would be keeping the young soldiers in line
and staying, she believed, mostly out of the line of fire.
They had their minister order a New Testament small enough to fit
in a breast pocket. Mark taped a picture of the family in the back
and one of the wedding pictures Sherri made for him in the front.
In country
God’s hand is seen in a series of coincidences.
On Aug. 29, Mark was in Tikrit. If he followed his normal pattern,
he awoke early, read the Bible, and looked at his family before
hounding his troops to be punctual. His convoy was ready to go 15
minutes early, at a quarter to 8. The medical and supply convoy
that always rumbled past at 8 a.m. was now running 15 minutes
late.
Mark’s colleagues believe the ambush they encountered was staged by
Iraqi insurgents to get the supply convoy’s valuable commodities.
Instead, they got Mark’s engineering battalion.
Before embarking, the staff sergeant did something highly
irregular. He approached the unit’s captain and asked to switch
places.
The captain’s habit was to ride in the lead Humvee, but he agreed
to his subordinate’s request and swapped.
Next, Mark made another decision utterly unlike him.
A skilled operator of heavy machinery, Mark preferred to drive.
That morning, when offered the wheel, he declined, “I drove a few
days ago. I think it’s your turn to drive.”
The convoy had been in transit about 45 minutes, when a pair of
bullets punched through the windshield of the lead Humvee – a
tight, snake-bite grouping.
One of them sliced through Mark’s throat.
Rocket-propelled grenades and small- arms fire struck others. A
soldier lost his leg in the attack. He lived.
In a strange way, Sherri is comforted by the string of coincidences
that put Mark in the bullet’s path that morning. The way she sees
it, God chose Mark – not a random Iraqi assassin.
At the same time the ambush infuriates her. She thinks if it had
been a “fair fight,” a battle between soldiers, Mark wouldn’t
have died.
What seems to have been a sniper’s skill strikes her as the
ultimate cheap shot. She doesn’t care that the U.S. also employs
sharpshooters.
She got the news that afternoon from an Army chaplain who came to
her home in Hayden. She knew what was coming from the moment she
saw the government license tags on the silver van.
Her president’s comfort
Bush offers a hug, kind words.
It is a week before Thanksgiving, and Sherri is about to meet the
president.
Bush is coming to Fort Carson to address the troops. He also is
meeting privately with the families of the 31 troops deployed from
the base who have died in Iraq since the war began.
Sherri is excited to face the man who decided to send her husband
to war.
It’s an opportunity she refuses to miss – when she wakes with fever
the next morning.
“That man is coming clear across the United States,” Sherri tells
her mother. “I can’t stay at home.”
She and her mother, Carolyn Holloway, take turns at the wheel as
they make the long drive from Hayden to Colorado Springs over snowy
mountain passes.
Sherri has brought a quilt she made for Mark’s return. She hopes
the president will autograph it.
She needs this.
When she wakes the next morning – the morning – the fever has
lifted. She is fine.
She and Dustin and Tanner join Mark’s brother, Greg Evans, and
sister, Vickie Owen.
At Fort Carson, Bush works his way around the room, visiting one on
one. Reporters aren’t allowed at the gathering, but, as Sherri
recalls, there are times the president seems uncomfortable. Some
family members refuse to shake his hand. They stand with their arms
crossed tightly across their chests.
Others do make contact. He gives his autograph.
He comes to Mark’s family. He meets the boys and Mark’s siblings.
The president of the United States turns to Sherri and opens his
arms.
“‘Come here,”‘ Sherri remembers him saying. “‘I’ve got to give
you a hug.”‘
He wraps his arms around her, and the two of them cry.
“You have such an incredibly sad face,” he tells her. “My heart
goes out to you.”
Sherri is surprised – and pleased – to receive such attention. She
asks about the quilt. The Army has hung it in the hallway. Bush
says he’ll sign it, once he has completed his rounds.
Then Dustin tells him his father is dead.
Later, Bush signs the quilt Sherri made for Mark’s return, fabric
filled with patriotic panels honoring the 244th Engineers. The
United States. Freedom.
“Oh, lady, you are breaking my heart,” Bush tells her, embracing
her again.
“I do believe your president has fallen in love with you.”
Thanksgiving
A family bonds while another soldier is called.
The presidential visit buoys Sherri, but by Wednesday she fears she
cannot go through with Thanksgiving.
Her boys are battling high fevers. She wants to bow out.
But she already is at her brother’s in Greeley, where the family is
gathering. Always before it had been in Hayden, atop Cog Mountain,
the family’s longtime home.
Sherri turns it over.
No. Mark wouldn’t want her to stop living life, and Mark loved
Thanksgiving.
So she tries.
Tammie Holloway, Sherri’s sister- in-law, is eight months’
pregnant, but she and her husband, Tony, Sherri’s little brother,
work constantly, quietly, trying to juggle a houseful of little
boys and Thanksgiving dinner so that Sherri doesn’t have to worry.
Carolyn and Sherri’s father, Lou Holloway, are alongside them in
the kitchen, putting out appetizers, preparing side dishes.
Lou and Tony are cooking the turkey in a deep fryer this year.
When Sherri cries, Lou or Tony appears at her side. They hold her
and whisper.
At dinner, they are thankful for their children, for each other,
for God’s gracious gifts – for America.
Sherri tells her family at the dinner table she’s thankful she got
to be with Mark as long as she did.
“We only had six years,” she says. “We lived a lifetime.”
The Army assigns “casualty assistance officers” to each primary
survivor of a dead soldier. They help with everything from burial
to re-entry into civilian society.
Sherri’s casualty assistance officer and assistant casualty
assistance officer both have come for Thanksgiving, and brought
their families, to be with Sherri on this trying day.
Sherri’s assistant casualty assistance officer, Sgt. Eric Williams,
35, rejoined the Reserves last year. As a new member of the already
deployed 244th Engineers, the carpenter was betting he would avoid
combat duty.
Eric stood by the coffin. Helped fold the flag. He has done odd
jobs for the Lawtons and helped make sense of the paperwork.
Now, on Thanksgiving, Eric has to tell Sherri he is to be deployed
– very likely for Iraq – on Dec. 7, the anniversary of the surprise
attack on Pearl Harbor.
Sherri is visibly stunned by the news.
She holds Eric like she cannot let him go. On her mind is that she
no longer has faith that the troops come back.
“I love you,” she says, weeping.
Christmas
Nearly overwhelmed, a mother presses on at Christmas.
Mark’s favorite holiday was Christmas, and Sherri is determined to
see it through.
Two days before Christmas, she decorates a small tree at Tony and
Tammie’s Greeley home. It’s red, white and blue. Placed next to the
Nativity scene, it is a memorial to Mark.
On Christmas Eve, she sleeps on the floor with Dustin and Tanner
and steels herself for the day. Dustin has become sensitive to her
crying, she worries. She wants to be strong for him but thinks it
could be impossible to make it through.
Christmas morning finally comes.
When Dustin gets a tall, cylindrical gift, Sherri stops him from
tearing into it.
“Dear Dustin,” Sherri’s card reads. “Your daddy picked this out
for you before he went to Iraq.”
The family explains it until Dustin has grasped its importance.
“My daddy picked it out a long time ago,” Dustin says to them.
Sherri succeeds in holding back her tears.
But a little later, Sherri gets a gift from Mark’s mother.
It is a framed photo of Mark and his brother and sister. Mark wears
the white cowboy hat Sherri bought him.
Sherri starts to cry, and then weep. Lou rushes to her side and
holds her. Tony gets up and calls for a break and goes to his
sister’s aid. Carolyn holds Tanner and wipes her eyes.
Sherri gains control, and Tony’s oldest son, Tyler, brings her a
gift. The boys return to opening packages.
Sherri sits impassively. It is as if she has had the air knocked
out of her. She cannot bring herself to move.
She tries to shake it off. She reaches for the present, and
scratches at the wrapping paper.
She stops.
She touches the photo.
She gets up and steps outside. She closes the door behind her, and
the family gives her space.
As they try to continue having Christmas, they can hear her
weeping. Sobbing.
Dustin and Tanner have gotten lots of presents, from family and
from outsiders, gifts from people in Hayden and Craig and in nearby
Steamboat Springs, gifts from the military. It begins to look as if
a toy store has been emptied into the room.
Tony and Tammie’s oldest boys seem to understand this, as if it’s
been discussed. They don’t have nearly the number of presents that
their cousins have collected – but their father is there, and he
plays with them.
Dustin acts out at times and tries to take gifts from the others.
Lou has to take him aside to calm him. It is what Dustin does when
he grows confused. It is part of a sudden new anger in him Sherri
worries about.
Sherri returns to the living room and takes up her place in the
armchair.
There are many more tearful moments this morning. Sherri gives Lou
hunting gear she had bought for Mark.
She gives Tammie, who is due to have a daughter Jan. 6, a dress she
and Mark had for the daughter they hoped to try for once Mark
returned.
But none of these moments so unnerves Sherri again. She remains
strong.
She makes it through.
Her boys play giddily with their loot.
In a way that almost could go unrecognized, Sherri has acted
heroically this day. She has been the hero she normally saw in the
face of her husband.
“It has to be done,” Sherri says. “You have to do it. Mark would
not want his boys to be without Christmas.”
Flags
Visiting his grave – but not living there.
Each day since Mark’s unit left for Iraq, Sherri has put a
miniature American flag on the fence in front of her home. The
ritual continues, even as the unit’s deployment has been extended
several more months.
Any time she leaves the home, she stops first at Mark’s grave, just
down the mountain from her house. She visits again every time she
returns – and nearly each day in between.
It has been almost four months since Mark died. She has a long time
ahead before she’ll be over this.
A week before Christmas, Sherri approaches the snow-covered grave
and kneels before the Army-issued gray slab she keeps swept clean
of snow and ice.
Looking at the snow-covered grave, she sees a country of sand.
She sees a shadowy figure holding a clearly defined rifle. She sees
Mark slump over in the Humvee, his still-beating heart pumping the
last of his blood onto the seat.
She struggles with an irrational guilt because she wasn’t there to
hold her husband as he took his last breath.
Finally, she stands. She breathes deeply, and grows calm.
She looks to the west. The sun shines over the mountains.
“That’s where he loved to hunt.”
