“Dad, I don’t even know him and I am crying,” she says.
She is holding an American flag she got from Jeff Mortimer, who that morning had dug through his garage and found a dozen flags left over from the Fourth of July. Mortimer’s plan was to watch the procession until the hearse passed through town and then dash home for his daughter’s high school graduation party.
The hearse edges by him, but he decides he can’t leave. For the next 20 minutes he stands silently holding his flag.
“I am so proud of Woodstown,” he says to Elizabeth and her father.
The hearse passes the borough hall and a small stone memorial to Russell G. Garrison and Marvin L. Watson — the two Woodstown boys killed in the Vietnam War — then stops at Lawnside Cemetery.
Janice Tighe Hogan, the mother of Spec. Richard C. Emmons III, sits under a green funeral tarp with her family. She is wearing a black dress and sunglasses. She had thought about burying her son at Arlington National Cemetery but decided that she and her family would never be able to visit him. Instead, she chose a funeral plot next to his father, who died when Emmons was 10.
He spent his high school years in Granby, Conn., and had wanted to join the Army right after graduation, but his mother persuaded him to try college. He enlisted two years later, in May 2009.
“I finally did it,” he told her after he signed the paperwork at the recruiter’s office. “You are looking at a soldier.”
The chubby teenager became a solid block of a soldier. In Afghanistan, his battalion commander tapped Emmons to work as his communications specialist charged with keeping his radios working on the battlefield. He was killed May 31 in Logar province, south of Kabul, when a rocket-propelled grenade struck the armored vehicle he was driving.
A few days later, Emmons’s fellow soldiers at Forward Operating Base Altimur in eastern Afghanistan named the base gym after him.
At the cemetery, the honor guard soldiers lift the American flag off his casket so the priest can sprinkle holy water on it. The troops fold the flag into a triangle, tucking it tight with their white-gloved hands, and hand it to the general overseeing the ceremony. He goes down on one knee and gently lays the flag in Hogan’s lap. She hugs it tight to her chest as the general delivers a slow and deliberate salute.
About 50 people stand silently in the parking lot of the abandoned Acme Supermarket across the street from the cemetery. One of them is Cathie Turin. Her husband, a Vietnam veteran, died 11 years earlier from Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer common among veterans exposed to Agent Orange.
“Today that soldier is everyone’s brother,” she says. “He’s everyone’s son.”
After the ceremony, Turin, 59, meets up with two friends from town. They talk briefly about the funeral and the war.
“I am not a war protester, but we need to think realistically,” she tells her friends. “Those people in Afghanistan have been fighting for centuries. We aren’t going to stop them. Besides, we have enough problems at home.”
A red hatchback, with its windows down and its radio blasting, moves slowly down the road by the cemetery. The street is packed with early-season beach traffic.
“Would you turn that down, out of respect?” Turin yells at the driver.
“For the funeral?” the driver asks with a hint of irritation in her voice.
“For a man who was killed in Afghanistan,” Turin replies.
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