One day last week, when Bonnie Bonnell was reading The Columbus Dispatch, the newspaper she saves for her three sons in Iraq, she noticed a change. The war dispatches that dominated the front page for almost a month had nearly disappeared. Soon the questions from neighboring sheep farmers and friends near Marysville, Ohio, changed, too. Instead of asking Bonnie and Ken Bonnell what it was like to have three sons at war, friends wondered aloud when the boys might come home.
But Ken, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a Vietnam veteran who served two tours, knows from experience that danger is not over when a war ends.
He thinks of Vietnam and “the crazies,” he calls them, the fanatics with guns who have nothing to lose. He sees looting in Baghdad, unrest in Karbala, and he hopes his boys have not let down their guard.
The father of Brett, Bryon and Brad knows all too well that the adrenaline of battle doesn’t last. When he was shot in Vietnam, it was not the bullet racing through his abdomen that rattled him as much as the hours afterward, when he was recovering. He realized then how close he had come to being killed, and that understanding made him tremble.
He worries about Brett, his oldest at 37, a major in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division and a helicopter pilot and maintenance officer who supervises mechanics. Twice Ken was shot down in a helicopter in Vietnam. The third crash was a mechanical failure. He survived each with aches and pains that still haunt him, but other soldiers were injured, and some were killed.
He worries about Bryon, 35, his middle son and a major in the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. Ken remembers the stress of managing men, the weariness of fighting, the fatigue of little sleep.
He worries about Brad, who at 31 is his youngest, the baby of the family. Brad was the one closest to the fighting, the enlisted man “at the tip of the spear,” as Ken says.
Ken, who is 58, worried so much when Brett and his wife, Diane, were in Desert Storm that he thought of rejoining.
What scares him now is the possibility of accidents and friendly fire. Ken lost five soldiers in Vietnam when improperly loaded artillery backfired. He lost others when lightning struck a radio tower. His middle son was hit with shrapnel during a training exercise, and his youngest was parachuting when the static line failed and slammed him into the airplane.
“All the planning in the world,” he says, “and it still happens.”
Bonnie, who is 60, cannot talk about her sons without crying. She understands what her three daughters-in-law are enduring. She remembers being pregnant when Ken was stationed in Germany, when a helicopter carried her to a Nuremberg hospital. She remembers giving birth to Brad while Ken was protecting a bridge from the North Vietnamese. The worrying was harder then than now, because she didn’t know what Ken was doing or where he was; she tried to assure her young boys that their father would come home.
When Ken was injured, weeks passed before notification came. By the time a battle appeared on TV, the fighting was old. A friend telephoned to say she was sorry to read in the newspaper that Ken Bonnell had been killed. It wasn’t him, but the scare it gave Bonnie was real enough.
Newborn democracies are messy and dangerous. So no matter how deep inside the newspaper the war stories go, Ken and Bonnie will worry.
On the 153-acre farm where the Bonnells live, about 40 miles northwest of Columbus, hope comes in the form of the American flag.
Flags wave from bird houses. They flutter atop a pole in the front yard. There are flags on the dining room table, flags on the place mats, flag-themed door mats stacked in the foyer beside the stairs.
The last time the Bonnell brothers were together was here on the farm a year and a half ago, just days before Sept. 11, when they gathered for Brad’s wedding. Of all the boys, Brad is the most sentimental, and there was never any doubt that his second marriage would begin on the farm owned by his great-grandparents or that his three best men would be his father and brothers.
Brad is the orneriest among them, too, the one at the heart of a playground fight when they lived in Germany. Ken remembers the Bonnell boys, back to back in a circle, ready to take on any bully in a squabble over marbles.
Brad was the biggest eater, Brett the most persistent, and Bryon the brain with a nearly photographic memory.
Brad was the one most likely to take a dare. He shot himself in the hand with a BB gun to see how it felt, and he swallowed Brasso one day while his father was using it to polish medals.
Despite their competitive nature – all were state champion wrestlers, all Eagle Scouts, all Airborne Rangers – the three brothers are close.
Ken thinks this is because they grew up in unfamiliar places and relied on each other. They were born in separate states and graduated high schools in other states. Even when Ken had short-term training exercises and the Army wouldn’t pay to relocate the family, he and Bonnie took the boys.
Brad grew up in and around Army bases in Virginia, California, Alabama, Connecticut, North Carolina, Texas and Washington state. Unlike his brothers, who attended Ohio State University like their father, Brad went straight into the Army. None of the boys wavered in his desire to follow in Ken’s footsteps. Their father says, “They didn’t know anything else.”
Ken and Bonnie have been asked why the Army won’t let one of the boys come back. They have heard about Saving Private Ryan and The Fighting Sullivans, the World War II movie about the five Iowa brothers who were killed when their ship took enemy fire and sank. Ken explains that there is no rule today that prohibits brothers from serving in the same unit in a volunteer Army.
Brad was the last to join but he has the most combat experience. While the brothers joust over who pinned their opponent faster, who had the most Boy Scout badges, who hit the most home runs, who ate the most snakes during survival training and who earned the most parachute jumps, they do not compare medals.
The last night the Bonnell brothers were together, Bonnie went to bed and left them with their father in the den, where pictures of Gen. George S. Patton hang opposite deer antlers and mounted fish. They drank Jack Daniels together from a bar where their father’s many medals and ribbons are kept safely behind glass and the shelves are crowded with steins collected in Germany. Late into the night, the four watched selections from Ken’s 120-tape collection of John Wayne movies.
Many months later, Ken saw the war coming not only in what President George W. Bush was saying, but in the battle drills keeping his sons busy. Bonnie recognized the signs, too, in the endless series of inoculations.
Bryon left first, on Jan. 21, from Fort Stewart, Ga. Brett and Brad left on March 1, from Fort Campbell, Ky., about six hours apart. Because of his rank, Bryon was able to travel before the fighting started, so he greeted his brothers after they arrived in Kuwait.
Ken and Bonnie followed their sons via the nightly news. What MSNBC fed them, they patched with reports from their daughters-in-law, and Ken marked the routes the boys took into Iraq on an old National Geographic map. Bryon was the easiest to trace because his unit frequently made news. Of Brad’s whereabouts, the Bonnells learned the least. Brett stayed in closest contact, once e-mailing that he was stationed at an undisclosed airfield west of the capital and often making guesses about the locations of his brothers. Yesterday, he wrote to say he was traveling to Baghdad and hoped to track them down. “No promises of finding them,” he said.
In a front window of the Bonnell farmhouse, facing the gravel driveway and a country road, hangs a Blue Star Banner, the kind many families displayed during World War I. On it are three stars, one for each boy. Beneath it burns an electric candle that will stay lit until all of them return home safely .
In the meantime, 50 head of Suffolk sheep must be fed in the morning before Ken leaves for the drug treatment center he manages, and before Bonnie heads to the nursing home where she works. There are six acres of grass to mow, and fields of alfalfa, orchard grass and clover – plenty to take their minds off a war that, for them, is not over yet.
<!– ART CREDITMONICA LOPOSSAY : SUN STAFF PHOTOS
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTAt their sheep farm in Marysville, Ohio, Ken and Bonnie Bonnell hang a flag with three stars – one for each son fighting in the war in Iraq.
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ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTFamily pride is three sons in the Army. From left, Maj. Brett Bonnell, Maj. Bryon Bonnell and Sgt. 1st Class Brad Bonnell.
CUTLINE TEXT–> <!– ART CREDITMONICA LOPOSSAY : SUN STAFF
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTBonnie Bonnell finds some comfort with her barn cat. Her three sons are fighting in the war in Iraq.
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