Promise of the Brave Family and friends reveal the character of a fallen Marine who received the Medal of Honor. Story by Staff Sgt. Scott Dunn, HEADQUARTERS MARINE CORPS, Washington 
Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, recent posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor.
Out of bed in the wee morning hours, Dan Dunham went to the sliding-glass door.
On the back porch stood Jason, translucent and grinning.
Dan guessed it was a dream, but a suspension of disbelief allowed him to accept his son’s report from the afterlife.
Jason didn’t talk. He just smiled his Jay smile.
In a way, the smile said, “You did the right thing, Dad.”
Dan smiled back. A weight he had carried since ordering Jason off life support would now become easier to bear.
Dan slid the door shut and went back to bed.
Days later, Dan told his wife all about the dream. Deb, upset over not seeing Jason in her own dreams, asked Dan, “Why didn’t you let him inside the house?”
“Because that wouldn’t have put it to an end for me,” he said.
Dan had found his own peace. He assured Deb that she would find hers.
Beyond a small, sleepy, Western New York town, in a smaller, even sleepier town, a mother sits in a rural, double-wide mobile home at a small desk, mouseclicks at her smallish computer and searches a slide show for her biggest hero.
Helicopters on a desert apron. Click.
Marines on a sand-bag detail. Click.
A half-grinning lieutenant stirring a half-drum of flaming field feces.
Keep clicking.
In the grainy, digital images, Cpl. Jason L. Dunham’s face blends into an overexposed Iraq desert and jumbles with other sand-salted Marines carrying full fighting loads for 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. Debra Dunham easily spots the eldest of her four children.
“Come look, Dan,” Deb beckons to her husband.
Dan Dunham sits a safe distance from the screen and opts not to look at pictures of his son at war: “I don’t need to look. I’ve lived it for the past two years and seven months, roughly.”
Clicking to the next photo, Deb notices the back of a shaved head topped by a smidge of blond. A slight bending on top of his ear gives Jason away.
She stops clicking and steps into the kitchen for a second. Dan moves to the computer. He takes Deb’s chair and fingers his glasses - the photochromic ones that darken in sunlight. He wiggles the mouse. He clicks the cursor.
And though weary from poring over his son’s death every day for the last 30-odd months, and wary of those who would make Jason’s death a political instrument or a media sensation, and weary from shedding sudden tears while driving to and from the crane yard where he makes a living, Dan looks at the last pictures of his son.
He looks because Jason would have looked, and he looks because some matters remain unresolved. Matters of honor. Matters of rest.
“I was sitting there,” frets Deb, coming back to her filled chair.
“Now I’m sitting here,” Dan deadpans. “Move back; don’t crowd.”
Their jokey quarrelling, as much as their unadulterated affection, keeps a lasting marriage.
He asks, “When you’re teaching, do you like somebody leaning over you?”
Deb, a schoolteacher, replies, “Yeah, I can get close like this.”
Deb puts her arm around Dan, and together, practically cheek to cheek, they look at war pictures.
It’s early November, and Deb and Dan have planned a drive from their home in Scio, N.Y., to Virginia where President George W. Bush will speak at the Marine Corps’ national museum grand opening. Jason’s officers and New York’s senior senator have pushed for the Marine to receive America’s highest military decoration: the Medal of Honor.
Before Jason, the last Marine actions to earn the medal occurred in Vietnam in 1970. Only the president can confirm such a citation, and the Dunhams want to hear him do so.
The citation means finally putting Jason to rest, said Dan.
“Peacefully and completely,” Deb added.
In fall 2003, Cpl. Dunham joined 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, based in Twentynine Palms, Calif. The battalion, aka 3/7, had just returned from its first Iraq deployment.
Mark Dean was a lance corporal returning from post-deployment leave when he first met Dunham.
“I walked into my barracks room and found a sergeant and two corporals playing the video game ‘Medal of Honor,’” said Dean, an Owasso, Okla., native. Dunham was one of the corporals.
The sergeant chewed out Dean for entering without knocking. Dean explained that this was his old room, but he would move to another.
“(Dunham) immediately stood up, introduced himself, and offered to help me find a room and help me move,” said Dean. “It shocked me ... I had no clue who this Marine was, and he was senior to me. Senior Marines didn’t help junior Marines with stuff like that, but Jason always took care of everyone else before himself, even if he didn’t know them.”
Dunham was a poster Marine - his physical fitness test scores perfect and his military correspondence studies complete. During his previous assignment guarding nuclear submarines in Kings Bay, Ga., the muscular, athletic Dunham and a handful of security force company Marines won Kings Bay’s 2004 Super Squad, a team competition of endurance and tactics.
Dunham attached to Kilo Company, 3/7, where leaders made him a squadleader, a role typically bestowed upon broadly developed riflemen.
Dunham, a machine gunner who mainly specialized in weapons, had much learning to do, like how to draw defense plans and draft enemyengagement instructions in standard five-paragraph fashion.
“It speaks a lot about him that he was trusted to be in that position,” said Gunnery Sgt. John Ferguson, who was Dunham’s platoon sergeant.
The brawny, six-foot-one-inch Dunham led by example and without aggression and quickly earned respect from his peers and subordinates.
Dunham’s mother said Marines under his charge later described that “he wasn’t going to ask anybody to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.”
Within weeks after Dunham checked in at Twentynine Palms, the battalion prepared for its return to Iraq.
SCIO, N.Y.- The Dunham home, in Scio, N.Y., is where Jason lived from 1996 until entering the Corps in 2000.
Photo by Staff Sgt. Scott Dunn
Dunham phoned the news to his mother in her classroom at Scio Central School.
She had paid close attention to media reports and sensed why he was calling.
Deb tried not to let him hear her sobs.
Jason flew home to Scio (pronounced sigh-oh) for winter holidays and good-byes.
“He made quality time with everybody - both sides of the family,” said Deb, who made a list of everyone Jason needed to see.
He had fun working his way through it, checking off names as he went.
“Have shot’s, Grandma,” said Jason, encouraging grandmother Pat Layton to join him for drinks. Layton, one of Jason’s cohorts, merrily obliged.
The easygoing Jason exuded cheerfulness toward children and elders alike; however, occasionally he revealed a serious side.
Talking what-if business on the back porch at Christmastime, father and son discussed Jason’s will and the likeliness of being wounded in action. Jason made it clear he didn’t want to be in any vegetative state.
“Don’t let me be like that,” he told Dan. “I don’t want to be on life support.”
If he died, Jason wanted Dan to use the survivor money to build a back porch facing west so Deb could watch sunsets.
Deb asked Jason if he wanted to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Jason, raised in Scio, preferred to be buried in Scio. Born on the Marine Corps birthday, he preferred dress blues and military honors.
But Jay planned to live.
“He promised his men they would all come home alive, and he promised his mother he would come home,” said Dan.
His four-year enlistment was expiring in July, 2004, but Dean said Dunham extended his service contract to stay with his men for the full deployment into September.
“I told him he was crazy and asked why he would want to extend to stay in the biggest ****hole in the world,” said Dean. “And his response was to bring all his guys home to our wives, family and friends.”
In February of 2004, Dunham was in Iraq. Within a month, 3/7 was handling operations in Al Qaim. Kilo Company, commanded by Capt. Trent Gibson, operated to the west in Karabilah, and Dunham’s platoon augmented another company even farther west in Husaybah along the Syrian border.
Husaybah, Karabilah, and the ambiguous settlement in between known as the H-K Triangle, crawled with insurgents and foreign fighters anxious to rattle newcomers.
In the first days, Dunham helped fortify
3/7’s outpost in Husaybah.
Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, recent posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor.
Attacks from mortars and shoulder-launched rockets had Marines hunkering down, but when all was clear, the Marines resumed filling sand bags and constructing barriers.
“It got to be so routine that we were getting those mortars a few times a day,” said Ferguson.
“You just keep the helmet and flak on and wait it out.”
But the insurgents, who went relatively unseen in the first few weeks, turned out to be inept mortarmen. When Dunham was permitted to call his parents from a satellite phone, mortars began exploding in the distance.
“Hang on a minute,” he said, putting his father on hold.
Not giving up a rare telephone opportunity, Dunham got back on the line and said with a laugh, “Don’t be worried. They’re lousy shots.”
Dunham knew how to spread light in dark situations. Chem-lights were sometimes helpful, as Dean learned while winding down a security shift at a building in Al Qaim. Yukking it up all night with two other Marines, Dunham cut open a lightstick and poured its glowing chemicals all over Dean and another lance corporal.
“We were all sitting around in the dark, glowing and laughing,” said Dean. “Once everything settled down, we hit the rack for some sleep before we started our patrolling for the next few weeks.”
As Dean lay in his bed that night, a heavy sense of emotion came over him.
“I cried and prayed to God,” he said. “I had no clue what was going on. I just felt something heavy on my heart. Till this day, I believe it was about what was going to happen two days from then.”
Around the time her son phoned home, Deb dreamed she was up all night talking with Jason, but she couldn’t make out the words. The next morning, while making the bed, Deb told Dan, “I felt like I talked to Jason all night long. We had a really good visit.”
Two weeks after the dream, Deb got a letter from Jason asking for someone’s mailing address and a family photograph to replace the one he had lost.
The letter was peculiar to Deb. She interpreted it as a good-bye.
“He said, ‘Don’t worry too much, Mom. I’ll be home when the time is right. Tell everybody I love them,’” said Deb, quoting the letter from memory.
On April 15, two weeks after the letter, she got another phone call.
Wall Street Journal reporter Michael M. Phillips, covering the war in Iraq alongside 3/7, first introduced Dunham’s story to a mass audience with a front-page article published May 25, 2004. He later wrote the unabridged story in “The Gift of Valor; A War Story,” which narrates Jason’s life and death, from growing up in a one-trafficlight town, to giving his life in service to country, to an eight-day journey home battling a mortal brain injury.
Phillips’ reporting and the Dunhams’ close contact with the Marines of 3/7 gave Deb and Dan answers to their son’s last days.
The loss, they said, was hard to accept, but his selfless act was pure Jay.
Dan said, “From the blast, he began a journey ... to fulfill his promise to come home. Several people that we talked to said it was a miracle he lived past the blast.”
As Deb processed all the details after Jason’s passing, she said she took much comfort knowing someone was always by her wounded son’s side, holding his hand in that journey home.
A gunfight broke out as Sanders and another Marine retrieved Dunham from ground zero. Ferguson kept one enemy gunman at bay with suppressive fire, and Sanders radioed a supporting Kilo Company element, which quickly arrived and evacuated Dunham out of the H-K Triangle.
From the evacuation, he was flown by Blackhawk helicopter up a chain of care. He was first treated at a shock-trauma tent in Al Qaim and forwarded to a Navy field hospital in Al Asad, some 80 miles east by Blackhawk.
“When they first took him into triage, they assessed him and put him in the expectant room. ‘Expectant’ there means you’re expected to die,” said Deb. But he wouldn’t let go.
In Phillips’ reporting, doctors figured the comatose Marine’s condition was grave, and in battlefield medicine, where time and resources are limited, patients less likely to die take precedence.
“He moved and was breathing, so the nurses asked doctors to reevaluate him,” said Dan.
Doctors decided to fly Dunham to the Army hospital in Baghdad where he would undergo brain surgery. After a surgeon successfully removed some of the shrapnel and relieved some swelling, Dunham was transported out of Iraq by airplane.
Being moved around a lot doesn’t help with a brain injury, Dan noted. He said that at this point, doctors and nurses were just trying to get Jason home before he expired.
Dunham made one more stop at the Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, before finally boarding a plane to the United States, a week after being wounded.
Deb and Dan had not slept in days when they boarded an early-morning flight April 21 from Rochester, N.Y., to Washington, D.C. However, Deb said the Marine Corps was “phenomenal” in handling their travel, including the drive to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
They hadn’t heard much more about Jason’s condition. Some bandages had been removed - perhaps a good thing. They didn’t know. They did know their son was expected to arrive at Bethesda that evening. Before he did though, Deb and Dan tried to get some rest. They stayed a short walk from the hospital at a comfort home provided by the Fisher House Foundation.
At 10 p.m., they waited in the hospital until Jason arrived.
“He didn’t say how he would come home,” said Deb. “But he did.”
Deb and Dan flanked Jason’s bedsides and told him he was home. Dan held one hand; Deb held the other. Jason, breathing through a respirator, held on a little longer.
“There was no Jason no more,” said Dan. Jason’s chiseled body now lookedlimp and depleted. The doctors were busy with tests and confirming medical reports from Germany, so until the next step was determined, they asked the Dunhams to get some sleep back at the Fisher House.
The next morning, while Deb washed up in the bathroom, she heard Dan answer the phone in their room.
“Whatever you need to do, you do it now for him, and I’ll sign the papers later,” said Dan. Deb came out of the bathroom and saw Dan looking pale.
When Deb and Dan returned to the hospital, neurosurgeons confirmed that Jason’s injury was terminal and he would never be conscious again. The damage was too great. He would need life support to survive. A risky surgery would relieve pressure, but it would not change his status.
The parents took a walk and searched for answers.
“Ultimately, it was up to me,” said Dan.
“But it was really up to both of us. We decided Jason wasn’t going to stay that way. He didn’t want to be that way.”
They sat with Jason for a few hours.
“As he heard our voices, his condition got worse,” said Dan. A fever persisted. One lung collapsed and the other was filling with fluid. Jason had fulfilled his promise to come home to his mother. Now he was letting go.
Gen. Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant at the time, visited the hospital.
He hugged Deb, spoke to the parents and presented Jason with the Purple Heart.
Dan knew what Jason would have wanted, and life hooked up to a machine wasn’t it. He watched as fluid swelled and swelled in Jason’s right upper shoulder.
As doctors massaged the swelling down, Dan’s decision became clear.
“He was more or less just suffering at this stage,” said Dan. Jason’s deterioration was telling Dan that he was not coming back.
“I think we’ve had enough of that,” said Dan. He told the doctors to tend to patients who could use the attention.
Deb and Dan waited by Jason as doctors cut life support. Dan said his son’s suffering vanished immediately. Jason relaxed and looked more familiar, almost smiling. He let go at 4:43 p.m., April 22, 2004.
The basketball court at Scio Central School doubles as a multipurpose auditorium with a picture-frame stage at courtside. The court has many uses, but in the daytime, students at the prekindergarten-through- 12 school primarily take to the court for physical education. From here, bouncing balls and squeaking sneaker sounds echo down the main hallway that leads to Deb’s homemaking classroom.
SCIO, N.Y.- Deb Dunham holds the boot-camp picture of her son, Cpl. Jason L. Dunham.
Photo by Staff Sgt. Scott Dunn
Jason was a letterman player here on the Tigers hardwood. He shined even brighter on the school’s baseball and soccer teams and graduated in 2000 as Scio’s goal leader and baseball MVP. He holds the single-season batting record with a .414 average.
When he grew tall enough to unlatch the door, young Jay would sneak out to play basketball before his parents awoke. Deb, always the teacher, had Jason work on his spelling during games of H-O-R-S-E, which turned into variations of spelling words. She even had him read the TV Guide if he wanted to watch television. A charming scamp, no stranger to carefree antics, Jason once dyed his hair Scio blue.
“He had that impish grin that could get him out of anything,” said Chick Casagrande, a close friend to Deb.
Deb recalls Jason’s playing days with a fondness, but memories of his basketball prowess come attached with sorrow.
When Dan and the kids pop in a home video of young Jason in a basketball game, Deb is reluctant to watch.
Such recollections are hard for Deb because when Jason returned from Iraq to a grieving Scio, the basketball court served a different purpose. A funeral.
The capacity auditorium of more than 1,500 people overflowed with mourners as townspeople came to honor Jason and rally around the Dunham family.
Brother Kyle, who was 15 when Jason died, was comforted by the preacher who said, “God must have found others who needed Jason more than we did.”
Many who could not fit in the auditorium stood outside or waited on their porches as the casket passed in procession from the schoolhouse to nearby Fairlawn Cemetery. Jason, in his dress blues, was saluted with military honors.
Jason’s scholastic athleticism made him known throughout Allegany County, and people from rival towns such as Wellsville, Friendship and Fillmore, came to mourn and support Scio’s loss.
“The whole county was grieving ... not just Scio,” said D’Arcy Fuller, a teacher who has taught all four Dunham children. She said Allegany showed countywide gestures of respect with flags lowered at half-mast and a moment of silence.
Fuller said that because Jason hailed from a small community - a proud, hardworking town of 1,878 - his loss pierced deeper into local hearts than if he had been from a large city. Jason’s graduating class had 37 students.
“Perhaps that’s why the impact of it has been so great,” she said. “One person’s loss is a huge loss because it’s not that big of a community to begin with.”
Fuller last saw Jason at a basketball game when he was home from Twentynine Palms.
“He gave me the biggest, hardest hug,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t know that was the last time I was going to see him.”
The Scionian spirit is neighborly, and the Dunhams subscribe to that sense of community, whether giving or receiving.
“Deb has been there for me, too,” said colleague and longtime friend Casagrande. When son Brian deployed to Iraq with the hard-hit 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, based in Ohio, Deb was her biggest comforter.
Casagrande had been distressed by a news report that snipers in her son’s battalion had been killed.
“We didn’t know if my son had been one of them,” said Casagrande. “Deb sat with me that whole day, in spite of the fact that it brought back everything for her. She was the first one I wanted to call. And she was there.
“And it doesn’t surprise me how (Jason) turned out. He was always looking out for his friends. He’s truly a person to be respected and appreciated for what he has done - not just in the Marines. He will always be very special to us here in Scio, to his Scio family.”
Nearly three years after Jason died, the town still holds fast its support for the Dunhams. An act of Congress saw Scio’s post office rededicated in Jason’s name, and the local library has a special room in Jason’s honor. The family’s only wish now, is that history remembers Jason - that his gift to America and his fellow warriors goes recognized with the highest distinction.
But only Jason can do that. Dan and Deb act only as vessels for what they believe would be Jason’s wishes. They don’t campaign. They don’t petition. They are invited into pundit circles and activist forums, but they shy from media circuits and never get political.
Mostly they just wait. They know Jason can do it on his own.
Two days before Dunham’s funeral in Scio, Marines, sailors and soldiers in Iraq paused in a ceremony paying tribute to the corporal who made the ultimate sacrifice sparing Miller and Hampton, then recovering from severe shrapnel wounds.
Meanwhile, officers from 3/7 were investigating Dunham’s actions in the H-K Triangle.
“It was obvious. He put his helmet over a grenade,” said Gibson, who helped platoon commander 2nd Lt. Brian “Bull” Robinson compile evidence and witness statements attesting to Dunham’s valor.
Lt. Col. Lopez, the battalion commander weighed the facts.
After seeing the remnants of the helmet and hearing witness accounts, he set in motion a nomination for the Medal of Honor, a proposal that, according to official criteria, requires incontestable proof and describes extraordinary merit.
The last Marine actions to earn the medal happened May 8, 1970, in Vietnam. Lance Cpl. Miguel Keith’s Medal of Honor citation details a machinegun charge that inspired a platoon facing nearly overwhelming odds: Wounded, Keith ran into “fireswept terrain.” Wounded again by a grenade, he still attacked, taking out enemies in the forward rush.
Keith fought until being mortally wounded. His platoon came out on top despite being outnumbered.
Dunham would be the first Marine and second recipient to earn the medal since the war in Iraq began. Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith posthumously earned the medal for organizing a defense that held off a companysized attack on more than 100 vulnerable coalition soldiers, April 4, 2003. In the defense, Smith manned a .50 caliber machine gun in an exposed position until he was mortally wounded.
To earn the Medal of Honor, Dunham must have committed a selfless deed that “conspicuously distinguishes him above his comrades.”
The battalion commander had no doubt.
“Had he not used his helmet and body to absorb the blast of the grenade, we would have lost at least two more Marines,” said Lopez. “He gave his life for his fellow Marines.”
On the 231st Marine Corps anniversary, Nov. 10, 2006, Dan and Deb arrived in Triangle, Va., where President Bush was to dedicate the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Jason would have turned 25 that day. The Medal of Honor nomination had spent years and months making its way to the White House. The Marine Corps backed the proposal, and Sen. Chuck Schumer gave it his public urging. It now only needed presidential approval.
Bush nodded.
“By giving his own life, Cpl. Dunham saved the lives of two of his men and showed the world what it means to be a Marine,” Bush said in front of approximately 15,000 people.
WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush applauds as Dan and Deb Dunham hold the Medal of Honor for their son, Cpl. Jason Dunham, during a ceremony at the White House Jan. 11. Photo by Cherie A. Thurlby
“And on this special birthday, in the company of his fellow Marines, I’m proud to announce that our nation will recognize Cpl. Jason Dunham’s action with America’s highest decoration for valor, the Medal of Honor.”
The announcement drew a single, booming “Oohrah!” - a spirited cry among Marines - and a long applause followed.
“As long as we have Marines like Cpl. Dunham, America will never fear for her liberty,” Bush said.
Addressing Dan and Deb, who held each other in the front row, the president said, “We remember that the Marine who so freely gave his life was your beloved son.”
Deb said. “At that point, Dan and I were missing Jason a lot.”
The nation did its recognizing two months later.
When the medal is presented posthumously, it is encased in oak and glass; otherwise, its bearer would wear it around his neck. But the latest Marine bestowed with the honor was not present in the flesh.
In spirit, on the other hand, Jason filled every corner of the White House.
“We wish that Jason would have been able to be here so we could watch him,” said Deb at the Jan. 11 ceremony. “But we know he’s watching.”
“Jason believed that all men on this earth should be free,” said Dan, an Air Force veteran. “He also believed in his friends.”
In a lively reunion of sorts, more than 80 Marines from Jason’s battalion soaked up their stately surroundings - many with digital cameras. Lounging about the White House and bedecked in dress blues, far from the muck of war where one another’s company is no less appreciated, the men laughed and cried as a band of brothers, a bond Gibson said was forged in combat. Gibson is now a major instructing Naval ROTC students at Virginia Tech.
Six venerable Medal of Honor recipients attended the ceremony, as well as some of America’s highest military and government figures. Seated among others in the East Room were Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, Sen. John McCain, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Peter Pace, and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway.
Before the citation was read, the president gave personal praise to Jason: “He had a natural gift for leadership and a compassion that led him to take others under his wing. The Marine Corps took the best of this young man and made it better.”
Bush said Jason represented the best of young Americans.
The room came to attention as the president took his position beside the mother. The narrator began reciting: “The President of the United States, in the name of the Congress, takes pride in presenting the Medal of Honor posthumously to ...”
Hearing her son’s name, Deb’s body began wrenching slightly, apparently trying to contain her emotions. With a tearful president at her left and Dan at her right, Deb held their hands throughout the citation - or they held hers. Dan and Deb’s three children stood behind them.
The citation went on: “By his undaunted courage, intrepid fighting spirit, and unwavering devotion to duty, Cpl. Dunham gallantly gave his life for his country ...”
With the citation given, Bush presented the family with the encased medal — a bronze medallion hanging from an anchor sewn to a sky-blue ribbon. And like two months before when the president first announced the award, Deb and Dan received a fitting applause. But this clapping of hands symbolized finality. The name of a grinning, American son from Scio was etched into history.
Dan regarded the honor as “an example of the good in men that is still out there - that a lot of people have.” Befitting of Jason’s selflessness, the parents extended the honor to all service members.
“Their names are all attached to this medal,” said Dan. “They’re all courageous. They all have valor. It’s something that I want them all to know: They’re part of this medal. It’s as much theirs as it is Jason’s.”
Up the sloping Fairlawn Cemetery, walking distance from Scio Central School, stands Jason’s tombstone. The Dunhams visit regularly, at least weekly - sometimes accompanied, sometimes alone.
And when Deb does her tending there, she’s never surprised to see anonymous artifacts left for Jason; be it a thank-you letter or a full beer offered by a Camaro driving drifter.
Deb believes sometimes she can feel Jason’s presence at Fairlawn.
Sometimes it feels humorous or comfortable or not there at all. But when she visited the grave site July Fourth, the summer before the medal, shefelt uneasiness in the air.
“It just didn’t seem right, and I didn’t feel that he was OK,” said Deb.
“He seemed agitated or angry, and that was the first time I had been there when I didn’t feel like he was OK.”
Deb returned the next day and something was still amiss. That night, Deb dreamt of Jason for the first time since his death:
Dan and Jason were wrestling in the kitchen, and Jason was letting Dan win, like he usually did. He looked up over his dad’s shoulder and he grinned.
Jason stood up. He had a mark on his forehead contrary to where he was injured. He said, “Mom, they just didn’t understand that I needed to be home. I had to come home.”
“It’s OK. You’re home now,” said Deb.
“I’m OK. They didn’t understand that I had to come home, but I’m OK Mom,” said Jason.
Deb woke up from the dream.
“Dan, Dan. Are you awake? I got to tell you something,” she said.
Dan was fast asleep and Deb couldn’t wait for him to wake up in the morning.
“I got to talk to Jason,” said Deb, kind of giddy. She spent the next few days feeling really great about the dream.
Since his passing, others have felt extrasensory connections to Jason.
“We all feel Jason around us – not very often, but every now and then,” said Marine buddy Dean.
“You can just tell when he’s around, and my wife and I just talk to him. I know all the other guys do too.”
For Grandma Pat, it was a butterfly. The Maya believed butterflies were the spirits of dead warriors in disguise, descending to earth. Just days before, she had watched a documentary describing something like this when a butterfly fluttered into her back porch and landed on her. She watched it flit away and land on Jason’s aunt, then onto other children.
“I was overwhelmed with joy,” said Pat. “I knew that that butterfly had to be Jason coming back and telling us he was OK.”
With the memory of Jason resting in legend, Deb said she and Dan feel at peace, but it’s too soon to tell. Nevertheless, Deb welcomes the feeling of closure as an opportunity to start healing. And putting Jason to rest means moving on to the next chapter. They are still parents to three other children, and that is where they need to focus, Deb said.
SCIO, N.Y.- Dan and Deb Dunham on the back porch in Scio, N.Y., with their children (from l. to r.) Justin, 24, Kyle, 17, and Katelyn, 13.
Photo by Staff Sgt. Scott Dunn
Justin, 25, is getting married next fall. Katelyn, 14, is showing her soccer chops. And Kyle, who just turned 18, is in what he calls his “final transitions into adulthood.”
Kyle graduates high school this year, and though he wanted to enlist in the Marine Corps like Jason, he thinks he’ll first work on a college degree, perhaps studying psychology, he said.
Long before Jason became a Marine Corps hero, he was a hero to his parents, but so are Justin, Kyle and Katie.
“All of our kids are heroes to us,” said Dan. “That’s our life.”
Although Jason never sought colors or conflict, Dan said he’d like to see a statue in Scio erected in Jason’s likeness. He’s bashful about the idea, and doubts he even has the energy to pursue such an undertaking.
But it’s an idea.
“It’s something I’d like to do so that 100 years from now, people remember that there were these guys in Iraq,” said Dan. “Because maybe 100 years from now, Iraq will be a free and peaceful country, and it will be due to what our military has done. Maybe it won’t be. If it isn’t, I want my kids and their kids to have something that reminds them of Jason and those who have fought in this war.”
In the meantime, history books will have to do.
Marines Magazine