The War Comes Home: One family lost a son, but the nation gained a hero

SNOHOMISH -- A year ago here in the foothills to the Cascades, Brian and Shellie Starr began Memorial Day as they always had. It was the start of summer, a weekend of camping, cookouts and catching up.

THE WAR COMES HOME

STARR'S OWN ACCOUNT
Read Jeff Starr's own account of a 2004 firefight in which insurgents had surrounded him and his fellow Marines.

HOW TO HELP

A memorial fund to build a climbing wall in Jeff Starr's memory at the Snohomish Boys & Girls Club has been set up by the non-profit organization Operation Homefront Washington. Checks noted "Jeff Starr Memorial" can be sent to Operation Homefront Washington, P.O. Box 704, Snohomish, WA 98291-0704.

PREVIOUSLY
To read some of the previous stories in this series, visit seattlepi.com/specials/thewarcomeshome

P-I SERIES
This story is one in an occasional series on soldiers returning from Iraq and their families and communities in Washington. We would like to hear from soldiers and their families on the home front or war front. Call 206-448-8018 or e-mail us at WarComesHome@seattlepi.com.

Brian drove to his office. "I had all these errands to run," Shellie recalls.

With their son a Marine serving in Iraq, the thought crossed her mind to attend a memorial for a Marine from Lynnwood who had been killed in action in 2004.

"I thought maybe I should go to it, but I had no time," Shellie recalls. "Later that morning, the Marines made time for me."

Returning from a noon lunch with her daughter and an exchange student, she received two Marine Corps casualty officers at her front door. The Starrs' 22-year-old son, Cpl. Jeffrey Brian Starr, had been killed in action in Iraq at 1:30 a.m. Seattle time.

A sniper found the shoulder opening of Starr's armored vest. The 7.62 mm bullet ripped across his chest and into his heart. He fell instantly.

"The cliches of it being a parent's worst nightmare are true," Shellie says. "I don't remember last summer at all. The fog didn't begin to lift until September."

When it did, however, Jeff Starr's last memorable words would resonate with others, from his family, girlfriend and close buddies to the nation's most powerful newspaper and the president of the United States.

'Just another patrol'

It was 12:30 p.m. Iraq time when Jeff Starr stepped into a Ramadi alley. He was leading his team with Iraqi security forces on patrol. One by one the squadron of 13 men took turns crossing the small, exposed alley that paralleled a notoriously dangerous street.


		KAREN DUCEY / P-I
	Shellie Starr drops off birthday balloons at the gravesite of her son, Jeff, at the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery. On Thursday, Starr would have turned 23. Starr was killed last year on Memorial Day, just two days before he would have returned to civilian life.

Starr was nearing the end of his third deployment. He served with the 1st Marine Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, the first U.S. unit to enter Iraq after the war started in March 2003.

On his second deployment a year later, he thought he was going to die. His squad was trapped behind enemy lines in Fallujah. He called the April 13, 2004, firefight a nightmare straight out of the movie "Black Hawk Down."

A rocket-propelled grenade knocked out the squad's amphibious landing vehicle, or "track," behind enemy lines. In a running firefight, scores of determined insurgents hurled bullets, RPGs and themselves to wipe the Marines out. Ammunition was dwindling. The battle raged from afternoon to dusk, when rescuers finally slugged their way in.

A year later, Starr and his team were facing danger again. One of Starr's men, Steve Rivera, wrote Starr's parents about their son's last moments.

Normally, there were signs of impending danger, Rivera said. "Mothers would usher their small children inside, shopkeepers would close their doors, etc. But that day there wasn't a hint of that. Small children would run up to us and beg us for candy, soccer balls, pencils, etc. It was just another patrol."

Starr checked the alley both ways and started across. Midway, he turned to check on the man behind him. A single shot rang out. Starr fell.

Fellow Marines dragged him from the exposed street. They tore off his flak jacket, and helped a Navy corpsman who was working on Starr. They kept trying to revive him long after it was apparent he was gone. Other Marines raced house to house to find the sniper. Only a 7.62 mm shell casing was found on a roof.

Rivera was 15 feet away when Starr fell.

"I remember thinking when I saw Jeff go down two words. 'TWO DAYS! Two F%$*ing Days!' because that's the amount of days Jeff had left before he would have been off the line awaiting a ride home."

Yet, Rivera told Starr's parents: "Jeff passed something on to me. Something greater than him or me.

"Jeff had dreams, ambitions and goals; he had a bright future. But more than that, he had principles and ideals he lived by. It's those principles that allow us the freedom we enjoy today. I want you to know that I carry those same principles in my heart, and wherever I may be sent, I will hold them more dear than my own life."

Strength in numbers

Twenty-three-year-old Emmylyn Anonical of Seattle's Green Lake neighborhood was immersed in finals week at the University of Washington on Memorial Day last year.

She was worried, too, about her boyfriend at war in Iraq. Starr usually phoned, messaged her or e-mailed every couple of days. Anonical last spoke with him five days earlier on his birthday, May 25.

The two were excited he was coming home after four years in the Marines. He would enroll at Everett Community College. Marriage was an unspoken reality.

"My sister was in town from California. We went for a walk at Green Lake that morning, and I said I was a little worried about Jeff, and I would call Shellie later and see if she heard anything," Anonical recalls.

"Then I got a phone call from Jeff's friend, Adam. He said, 'Have you heard from Shellie?' He sounded weird."

Moments later Shellie phoned and broke the news.

"I wasn't expecting it. I was so sure he was going to come home," Anonical remembers. "I was home alone, and I freaked out. I didn't know what to do."

Shellie Starr knew what to do. "She already had sent Adam to get me to take me back to Snohomish to be with them."

This year she won't be alone, either. Starr's best friend in the Marines flew out with his girlfriend to spend the weekend with her.

"It's been tough. It's a week I don't know what to do with myself," she says.

Words touched a nation

Before his last deployment to Iraq from Camp Pendleton, Calif., Starr stored his personal effects in his little yellow Hyundai that fellow Marines teased him was a "scoop of puddin'." He parked it at his uncle's home in California.

Two months after his death, Starr's belongings were at his parents' home in Snohomish. Brian Starr was overcome with emotion when he booted up his son's small computer.



	A photo submitted by Shellie Starr shows the casket of her son, Marine Cpl. Jeffrey Brian Starr, being offloaded from an airplane at Sea-Tac Airport on June 4, 2005.

"Dear Emmylyn" began a letter. Jeff Starr had written it and meant it to be found if he died in Iraq.

Anonical and the Starrs shared parts of the letter, in which the Marine spoke of his belief in the war, with the Seattle P-I and The Herald in Everett. The rest was a personal message to Anonical.

The Starrs found themselves in an unwanted political controversy after The New York Times picked up the story on the letter but didn't quote Starr's support of the war. Conservative pundits had a field day pointing out "sins of omission" in the story and that it misrepresented Starr's reasons for rejecting a $24,000 re-enlistment bonus last year to return to civilian life.

His plan had always been to spend four years in the Marines. Meeting Anonical only strengthened that conviction.

While Brian and Shellie are on different sides of the political fence, they were united in their determination to clarify their son's feelings about serving in the war and leaving the Marines.

At one point, a White House speechwriter phoned the couple seeking permission for President Bush to quote from Starr's letter.

In November, Bush was visibly moved when he closed a speech at the Naval Academy and began to quote Starr.

"If you're reading this, then I've died in Iraq," the president read. "I don't regret going. Everybody dies, but few get to do it for something as important as freedom."

'He was my first love'

When she first read her boyfriend's letter, Anonical says: "It was almost like a shock. I could hear his voice saying everything.

"Reading that part about going on with my life is hard. He was my first love, and I can't imagine experiencing that again. Everyone says, 'You're young and will find someone again.' At the same time, I don't want to.

"I feel I have had this great love with Jeff, and I'm lucky for that. And if it doesn't happen again, it doesn't happen. A lot of people married for years don't have the kind of love that we had."

She decided to share her letter, however, sensing it spoke importantly and deeply to personal sacrifices.

"I could have spent the rest of my life with him."

The two met on an outing with a group of friends while he was home on leave in mid-2003. They sensed a connection when they danced the rest of the night together.

A long-distance relationship blossomed after Starr returned to Camp Pendleton, each cautiously aware that military life was tough on relationships. That fall Starr invited her to fly to Las Vegas and accompany him to the formal Marine Corps Birthday Ball on Nov. 10.

"I flew down to be with this guy I really didn't know, who I hadn't seen in three months, to a place I had never been, and it just seemed so natural," she recalls. "It was crazy."

Starr, a romantic, swept her off her feet with flowers, rose petals, poetry, even a song he had researched and rehearsed.

"It was perfect. I was blown away," she says. "He was sweet, loving and trustworthy."

Starr's return to war the next year tested and solidified their commitment.

"In Fallujah when he got caught in that house behind enemy lines in 2004, he wrote me an e-mail a month afterward. He said he knew I was something special. He told me that when he was in that house the one thing he thought of was he had to get back to me. That meant a lot to me. I felt the same way."

Mourning, and celebrating

Each day at 2:30 p.m., Starr's watch alarm goes off. His mom and dad, who unpacked it with his other belongings they received last August after he was killed, wonder why he had set it for that hour.

In Iraq where he set it, the alarm would have sounded at 1:30 a.m. Did he set it to call his girlfriend? Or to prepare for the mission on which he died?

Times and dates took on raw significance in the year since his death. The family skipped Christmas and went to Hawaii. Anonical's Christmas gift to them: a tribute site to their son at MySpace.com.

In the last week, the Starr family has mourned and celebrated.

Shellie left balloons at Starr's grave for his 23rd birthday last Thursday.

The Starrs celebrated their 28th wedding anniversary Saturday.

They were in Loma Linda, Calif., to celebrate the graduation of their daughter, Hillary, from medical school. She'll be coming closer to home, too, to serve her residency in family practice in Tacoma.

Today, they will return to Snohomish and gather privately in Jeff's memory.

After Starr died, his younger sister, Emily, carried a quilt made from his shirts to all her high school tennis games. Her brother had promised he'd attend them and cheer her on. She won all but one for him.

Shellie says she is "still engaged" in watching news of the war as she did when her son was in Iraq. She is now forming a non-profit chapter of Gold Star Families, made up of those who have lost loved ones in war, with Myra Rintamaki, mother of Cpl. Steven Rintamaki, the Marine killed in Iraq in 2004. It was his memorial service Shellie Starr thought of attending last Memorial Day.

"Memorial Day takes on more meaning because we understand, unfortunately, the sacrifices behind the day."

The Starrs are spearheading an effort to build a climbing wall in their son's name at the Snohomish Boys and Girls Club.

"I can't see Jeff as a park bench," his mom says with bemusement.

Anonical and Starr's friends meet at the Starr home once a month. "Emmylyn decides when," Brian says.

They meet in the downstairs day room to toast and remember him. The room would have been his bedroom had he made it back from the war and started college. It's filled with Starr's keepsakes, medals, photos and other memorabilia.

"We love to talk about Jeff," Shellie says.

LETTER HOME

The following letter was written by Marine Cpl. Jeff Starr to be opened by his fianc�e, Emmylyn Anonical, if he was killed:

Dearest Emmylyn,

I'm writing this for one reason only. On April 13th, 2004, I thought I was going to die. My only regret is that I hadn't spent enough time with you. That I hadn't told you everything I wanted to. Being in Iraq for a third time, I don't want to feel that way again because it was the worst feeling ever. So this letter is in case I won't ever get the chance to tell you.

Obviously, if you are reading this, then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this; that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going. Everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq; it's not to me. I'm here helping these people so that they can live the way we live, not to have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators, to do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.

I don't want to leave you behind. I saw myself marrying you, having a family and growing old together. Unfortunately, I won't get to experience those things. I know you are crying and, sorry to say, but I'm glad to have someone as beautiful and special as you to cry for me. I'm only asking that you don't cry for very long. This is what has happened and there is nothing that can be done. Don't ever forget me and remember that there are good men out there who will love you as much as I do. Find the one that makes you happy. You deserve this.

I'm sorry that I won't be able to see you again. I'm sorry I won't be able to see you graduate college. I'm sorry I won't get to kiss you or hold you again. I'm sorry I won't get to feel your touch or your hand in mine again. I'm sorry because those were the best moments in all my life. I really love you, not the puppy love or the college love. Not the love you say because you feel it's time in the relationship to say it.

I really, really loved you. Everything about you.

Well, I can't type forever. I know you want to read more but I thought simple and to the point would be easier.

I love you with all my heart.

Goodbye, my Love.

(Reprinted with permission from the Starr family and Emmylyn Anonical.)

P-I reporter Mike Barber can be reached at 206-448-8018 or mikebarber@seattlepi.com.

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