On a cold January night in 2005, two Marines knocked on the door of David and Joanne Fuller and told them that their son, First Lt. Travis Fuller, had died in a helicopter crash in Iraq. A numbness took over Joanne’s body. She sat at the kitchen table next to David, who was crying. She didn’t cry, and doesn’t remember speaking.
Nothing in her life has even come close to that feeling, she told me.
“It’s like if you came home and your house had burned down,” she said. “It’s a shock, and there’s nothing you can do.”
That woodenness remained as they drove to Boston and then to Maine to tell their daughters — Travis’s older sisters, Rebecca Fuller and Jennifer Francis. It was still there a few days later as Joanne, David and Rebecca stood on a tarmac in Connecticut, and watched as his flag-covered casket was taken off a passenger jet. They were not allowed to see his body because it had been so badly damaged, so Joanne slipped her hand inside and touched him.
At the funeral, the full force of her loss hit her. Travis was gone. So was his future wife, and their future children. She was no longer numb. She was angry.
“I just didn’t know why he had to sacrifice his life,” she said. “What was it for? What were we, as a people, gaining?”
I remember the day Travis died. I was a reporter covering Iraq in those years, and the crash made it the deadliest day of the war for the American military.
I also knew Travis. He was from my hometown, Granville, Mass., a tiny farming community of apple orchards and blueberry lots. His sister Jenny was my grade-school friend, and his father, a carpenter, had done work on my childhood home. I remember Travis playing Legos and riding his bike up and down the driveway.
The nation will soon mark the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and commemorate its victims. But the day was also important for the series of decisions that came next: the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and then Iraq, choices that would come to define an American era. Travis Fuller was one of more than 7,000 Americans who died in those wars, adding substantially to the 2,977 who died on Sept. 11 itself.
This month, I went back to Granville to talk to the Fullers. I wanted to ask if they had found some way to make sense of his death, now that he has been gone almost as long as he was alive. Their family’s grief is essential to seeing the full picture of the 9/11 era, and to understanding the consequences of American actions.
A quarter century after the war on terror began, we are still asking the questions: When is a war worth fighting? And what do you do if your son died in one that you believe was not?
Travis Fuller grew up about a mile away from me, in a house David built in the woods at the end of a long driveway. The Fullers were an outdoor family. They hiked. David was a hunter. Travis used to sleep outside all summer, building forts and exploring.
Travis was born prematurely and was small for his age, but he overcame that by high school, where he became a long-distance runner and joined the wrestling team. He made friends easily and liked to take people under his wing. A classmate with a troubled home life lived with the Fullers on and off for two years.
Travis’s endurance was legendary. He never owned a car and would run the six miles to his girlfriend’s house. In one favorite family story, he met a fellow hiker on the Appalachian Trail, who said he would do anything for a beer. Travis ran miles into a town, bought him one and ran back.
“He was always challenging himself, seeing how hard he could push himself,” Jenny said.
He was also a free spirit. Travis tutored another student, Dan Carroll, in math at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, a state college with a regimented structure, where students often wore uniforms. Carroll said at his first session, he found Travis in the library sitting in jeans and a T-shirt, his bare feet up on a table.
Travis was a sophomore at Mass Maritime when he told his family he would spend the next two summers at officer training with the Marine Corps.
He and his sister Rebecca got into a fight that night. She told him the promotional pamphlets he had brought home sugarcoated the reality of what the military did. Travis stormed down to the basement.
“I just didn’t understand it,” she said. “It just felt like it had come out of nowhere.”
The Sept. 11 attacks affected Travis deeply. He had just graduated from college and was on track to become an officer in the Marines. His family didn’t hear from him for several days. He eventually called David to say that he and several friends had driven to New York City on the day of the attack to help emergency workers.
Joanne remembers people hanging flags from their homes and doing small acts of kindness for each other. When the George W. Bush administration led a coalition of forces that invaded Afghanistan a month later, the country was overwhelmingly behind it.
Joanne was not. The Vietnam War had left a deep scar on her life. Her older brother’s close friend was drafted and never returned. And her sister’s gentle, shy husband came back traumatized.
“What he saw tore him apart,” she said. “It affected the rest of his life.”
Joanne did not think the Sept. 11 attacks justified an invasion. But she understood that many Americans did, including her son.
“I really think it was a trigger for him,” she said. “Before 9/11 it was more, ‘What is my adventure going to be?’ After 9/11, he was really focused on doing something to protect the country.”
Travis reported for duty in November 2001. He was offered the chance to become a pilot, David said, but turned it down in favor of the infantry. The idea of leading a team appealed to him. He ended up commanding a Marine unit based in Hawaii.
Many of his men had come from working-class backgrounds. Several had messy lives, like unpaid child support. Travis told his family that he was spending a lot of time helping his Marines get their affairs in order.
At first, the men didn’t know what to make of Travis. He was just 5 feet 7 inches tall and young looking — far from the stereotype of a polished Marine officer.
“He looked like a goofy 17-year-old,” said John Dugan, a Marine who served in Travis’s unit. “And he liked to party.”
Dugan, who grew up on Long Island and enlisted after the Sept. 11 attacks, said Travis was patient with all his men, including the hard cases.
He “took on all his men’s pluses and minuses and didn’t make them feel” bad about themselves, he said. When Dugan’s family at home was going through a difficult time, Travis wrote to his mother to reassure her. Dugan found out months later.
Dugan was struck by how approachable Travis was — he did not have an officer’s ego. In Honolulu, the two would meet up at the bar at night, even though, as an officer, Travis was not supposed to socialize with enlisted men.
Travis’s leadership style would come to make sense as soon as they got to Iraq.
“Nobody had any idea what we were about to go through,” Dugan said. Travis “became literally everything to us.”
I got to Iraq in April 2003, a month after the Americans invaded. The government had collapsed, and there was a strange feeling of suspended reality. I remember watching someone throw a burning mattress from an upper floor of a hotel in central Baghdad.
By the time Travis and his men arrived in October 2004, suicide bombings were ripping apart Shiite neighborhoods almost daily. They had been assigned perhaps the hardest job of the war: to be one of the first Marine platoons into the city of Falluja, a major source of the violence.
It was night and pitch dark; the power to the city had been cut. Before the Marines emerged from their armored vehicles, an entire corridor of bombs went off. One Marine, who had been sitting on an open hatch, was hit, Dugan said, and when Dugan felt something wet, he realized it was blood. Men were screaming.
Dugan saw Travis trying to control the chaos. He said Travis looked focused and determined. Suddenly, Travis was in front of him, asking if he was OK. Dugan said the blast had hurt his eyes, and Travis told him to retreat to the medical vehicle. But watching Travis lead inspired him.
“I became the bravest version of myself I would ever be,” he said.
Dugan then ran to help the wounded man, whose arm and leg had both been nearly severed. He said they spent the next 12 hours moving just a few blocks.
“He totally changed my life in that moment,” Dugan said of Travis.
Two weeks into the operation, Travis managed a phone call to Joanne. He told her he had not eaten or slept for the first three days. He said his unit had lost a man but now was doing OK, after the initial shock. He asked what people back home thought of what they were doing. She said everybody wanted the Marines to return home safely. But she added that people were also “concerned for the safety of innocent civilians.”
There’s no evidence that Travis ever questioned the mission of the war. His sister Jenny said he had believed the cause was just. He wrote about finding explosive devices in ovens and refrigerators. But she said he had expressed discomfort with some aspects of it, like damaging so many people’s houses during raids.
About a month into the operation, in mid-December 2004, Travis was badly burned when a grenade he had thrown ignited something in a garage. He ended up in a field hospital, watching DVDs with the nurses and pushing one of his men around in a wheelchair.
Bored and frustrated that he couldn’t return to his unit, he opened a care package. The Marines sometimes got them from schools, Girl Scouts and churches, he told his family in an email. In it was a letter from a girl in California.
“She asked me if I had any other hobbies besides war,” he wrote. “It was funny.”
On Dec. 23, he wrote to his family that he had sneaked out to the city to his men but was sent back to the hospital within a day. On Christmas Eve, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made a surprise visit. He gave Travis a coin, a military tradition.
The day after Christmas, Travis sent photographs of it.
“More boring Rumsfeld pictures,” he wrote.
The operation to control Falluja lasted just under two months and had one of the highest casualty rates of the war. One of the generals who oversaw it compared the intensity of its urban combat to one of the bloodiest battles in Vietnam.
When the operation ended, Travis and his men were flown back to the air base in the region. They took showers. They watched the Super Bowl. They drank hundreds of nonalcoholic beers. (The base did not have alcohol.)
“Everyone’s calling their mom, saying, ‘We made it!’” Dugan said.
On Jan. 26, they packed into two helicopters on their way to provide security for Iraq’s first election. One crashed, killing Travis, who was 26, and all the other 30 service members on board. Travis was awarded a special medal of valor for his leadership in Falluja.
I was in the United States when Travis died. I remember the shock of it in my town. But also a strange disconnect: In many places in the United States, the war felt far away.
For the Fullers, those early years were excruciating. Joanne retired from her job as a pension analyst. David kept working at the lumber yard but sank into a depression. They eventually moved out of their house; David could not bear the memories.
Joanne was determined not to drown in her grief. She threw herself into her shaped-note singing, a community-style form of a cappella. Many of the songs are hymns about loss and grief, and belting out the words together with others felt cathartic.
My friend Jenny moved into the family house that her parents had left. The memories helped her hold onto Travis. She and her husband still live there. Every Memorial Day, Granville recognizes Travis. It named the school gymnasium after him.
When I asked Jenny for her feelings about the Iraq war, she said she didn’t think about it. Doing so would only emphasize her feeling of powerlessness and would make her bitter. Travis called the war a just cause, she said. Holding onto that smooths her complicated feelings.
She focuses instead on her brother’s life: his ability to make her laugh at herself, his influence on the men in his unit, on his friends, on his family.
Travis’s other sister, Rebecca, still regrets the argument she had with her brother.
“If I could go back and change one thing, it would be to say how incredibly proud I am of him, and how I have never doubted for a minute that he was the right person for what he was doing,” she said.
Now, when she sees headlines about American military action, she no longer feels a simple rush of righteous indignation.
“In every single news story that you see out there, there is some family just like us who is experiencing a tremendous loss,” she said. “I don’t think you can disconnect from that once you experience it.”
Joanne feels extremely proud of Travis’s life, his kindness and his wisdom as a leader — and still thinks his death was a waste.
“I don’t think the loss of him and his men did anything to benefit us here,” she said. “There’s not even the smallest thing that helped us.”
I asked her how she lived with that.
Her anger and grief have never gone away, she said, but she has managed to become comfortable in them through persistent dedication to her husband and daughters.
“Being there — that’s your obligation,” she said. “You make it known you’d do anything for each other. Nothing is too much to ask.”
She said this was one of Travis’s legacies, too.
“We became more dutiful to each other after he died,” she said.
Every year, the Fuller family gets together on the week of Travis’s birthday, Aug. 12. Over time, the gathering has grown, and now includes four grandchildren and everyone’s partners. They play games, do puzzles and watch movies together. And they bake a cake.
They set an extra place at the table, and then, after dinner, they bring out the cake and sing to Travis.
This year, he would have been 48.
The post This Marine Died in the Iraq War. His Mother Asks, ‘What Was It For?’ appeared first on New York Times.
