Island Icon Sharron “Sherry” Handly Martin:
The Accidental Activist Who Helped Change History: By TAYLOR BALDWIN KILAND, FOR THE CORONADO HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
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his piece was adapted and reprinted with permission from the St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School magazine, The Saints Life. It was 2:30 a.m., on July 9, 1967, when 8-year-old Michelle Martin heard a loud knock at the front door of her Coronado, Calif., home. In 1967, this small town was full of Navy families, and the Martins were no exception. Sleeping adjacent to the front hall, Michelle was jolted awake by the sharp rap at the door. Rubbing her eyes, she jumped out of bed. “It totally scared me,” she remembers. Clad in her nightgown, she slowly opened the front door. There, silhouetted by the porch light, was a man standing erect in his Navy uniform, his face ghoulishly illuminated by a flashlight under his chin. He asked to speak to her mother, Sherry Martin. Michelle ran down the hall to wake Sherry, a graduate of the St. Agnes Class of 1952. She, too, was startled by the commotion on the front porch, but Sherry’s maternal instincts kicked in. “Go back to bed, honey. Everything is fine.” Sherry knew everything was not fine. Military families like the Martins did not receive visits in the middle of the night from U.S. government officials unless something had gone terribly wrong. Composing herself, Sherry approached the man at her front door, dreading what she was about to hear. Solemnly, he
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Portrait taken in 2023 by Jamie Howren. Courtesy of Jamie Howren. delivered the news: Ed’s A-4 Skyhawk attack plane had been shot down while on an air strike over North Vietnam. He had managed to safely eject from his plane and parachute to the ground, where Ed was immediately surrounded by villagers. It was assumed he was captured, but they honestly did not know. Ed was missing in action. Missing? How could he be missing? Casualties were a fact of life in the military. Men were killed in combat. But missing? It seemed incomprehensible. The United States was in the middle of a war with North Vietnam, a country
that was refusing to provide a full accounting of the American servicemembers it was holding captive as prisonersof-war. Was Ed alive or dead? Was Sherry a wife or a widow? She would not know for four years. The military had no structure or policy in place for families other than notification by a senior officer or a chaplain, who famously told one wife whose husband was a prisoner-of-war, “I’m here for you. I’m in my office Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 4:00.” What’s worse, Sherry and other families whose husbands were miss-