The Long Fifteen Yards by Michael Kassis The plane ride was supposed to be short but was made long by the task. I had flown from western Virginia to Northern Michigan, then down to Arizona. It had been a long journey, too long. A journey that should have only been a couple of hours, but it had felt like an eternity. The burden of this journey had weighed me down, almost like an anchor buried into the ground being pulled by a ship. I had delivered the one message many parents dread: the body of their child who had died doing something they had thought right. The body of a fallen soldier. In the early part of the week of the beginning of April, I had been called into my commanding officer’s office. He had received a notice that a fellow Marine, a boy from my town, had been killed in action over in Afghanistan by an insurgent. The boy, or the PFC, had been brought back to the States and my job was to escort his coffin back to our town, his home where his parent anxiously awaited, and hoped that he wouldn’t come home as he would. I escorted his body home, which made the plane ride longer as I have said before. When I arrived at the final airport in Arizona, a man in a dark suit met me there. He introduced himself as the funeral director. He helped me get the coffin into his hearse (along with four other airport workers). He drove both of us to the little town. He told me about the boy, about the PFC. His name had been Gary Rein. Gary had been a great kid, a scholar. He had been an exceptional athlete his whole life, star football and baseball player. He was a strong kid too, bigger than most. But besides all that he had been kind, caring, quiet. Gary never was arrogant about his skills, he just was quiet and kind. He was supposed to go to college, the funeral director said, but he joined up after the attacks on 9/11. He was a kid dedicated to his country, fighting for something bigger than himself, giving his life for what he believed. Within a couple hours, the director and I arrived in the town. Gary’s recruiter and a few Marines met us at the funeral home. We unloaded Gary’s coffin and carried it into the home. The recruiter introduced himself to me. He had been with Gary all the way up to his death. He said Gary would have been flattered that a superior officer had decided to escort his body home. I would have liked to have met the boy. The next day I was introduced to the family. I had been instructed to give them the items he had possessed while overseas. I handed over these items which, in tears, they took. The father told me about his son while his mother sat next to him, turning the items over in her hand, crying. I fought hard to hold back my own tears, in which I was successful. It hurt though, watching a once happy family lose their only child, their whole world. It hurt. The morning of the funeral was long and hot. The black dress uniform that every Marine is assigned was chafing at my neck. I felt it scratching at my neck while the heat beat down. I felt the weight of the heat on my shoulders. But it didn’t matter, I ignored all this annoyance. There was no time for annoyances, only time for the funeral of a good Marine. The call to attention came from a superior officer, as the coffin was walked to its grave. The long fifteen yards as they called it, or the last. It signified the last steps a soldier took before finally ending his watch. I could hear people crying in the back as I saluted the procession as it
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