Leave No Man Behind
But the soldier’s family? That’s a different story.
A decade after J.P. Blecksmith’s death on Veteran’s Day 2004,
his family can tell you time doesn’t heal all wounds.
Not long ago, Ed Blecksmith found himself — physically and emotionally — in a sprawling cemetery, though not the one just past San Marino’s city limits where his youngest son and first wife rest.
On a French bluff overlooking hallowed Omaha Beach, Blecksmith stood among the graves of Allied soldiers killed during World War II’s invasion of Normandy. Weeks later, and without hesitation, the Vietnam War veteran and ex-Marine can tell you how many crosses and Stars of David are in the Normandy American Cemetery: 9,437.
Get the number right, Ed implores, because each soldier’s D-Day sacrifice should be counted individually. Each one of them matters to someone.
Scanning the 9,437 grave sites, Blecksmith thought, I know how each of your families felt.
In the 10 years that passed since his youngest child, J.P., was killed in action by a sniper in Fallujah, Iraq, Ed has tried everything to keep his son’s memory alive: granted interviews to documentary filmmakers and cable news networks, shepherded a foundation in J.P.’s name, and spoken with psychic mediums in an attempt to channel messages to his son.
But legacies are built on more than sharing messages; they’re strengthened on receiving them, too. When Ed placed a rose on the cemetery’s statue depicting a soldier ascending to heaven, the father wept for his son, and for those J.P. left behind when he died 10 years ago Tuesday — on Veterans Day.
“The unsung victims are the families of the fallen,” Ed said. “It’s a burden you bear for your entire life. You’re never the same. … A piece of your heart is gone forever.”
To understand a decade of pain for Ed and others who loved J.P., you have to go back to where they lost him: on a dirty rooftop in the Al Anbar Province of Iraq in 2004. It’s where Marine Corps 2nd Lt. James P. Blecksmith stood before he fell, directing the India Company of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, to clear the district’s buildings of insurgents.
The Flintridge Prep and Naval Academy graduate never saw the shooter who killed him. As a bullet entered his left shoulder and ricocheted through his heart, J.P. reportedly said, “I’m hit,” before falling to his knees. By the time help arrived moments later, one of San Marino’s favorite sons was gone at age 24.
In the months and weeks leading up to J.P.’s death, his parents and two siblings admitted harboring dark beliefs that he would never come home. The sense of angst overwhelmed J.P.’s parents, Ed and Pam, and his older siblings, Christina and Alex. “When I’d drive home from work, I’d dread coming around the corner and seeing a [military] car parked there,” said Ed. On Nov. 11, 2004, following a Marine Corps dinner party, Ed breathed a sigh of relief when he found no strange car parked in front of his home.
But inside, Blecksmith found a teary-eyed Pam speaking with a Marine Corps captain and war officer. The military men delivering the tragic news had parked their vehicle a few houses up the street.
An estimated 2,000 mourners crowded into San Gabriel’s Church of Our Saviour and surrounding buildings for a hero’s funeral nine days later. By the end of a four-hour-long receiving line, wet makeup from grieving embracers caked the shoulder of Alex’s suit jacket.
In the days leading up to and following J.P.’s burial at San Gabriel Cemetery, the Blecksmiths hosted hundreds of San Marino well-wishers, who arrived with meals, beer and memories.
But when the visitations slowed, the Blecksmith family struggled to cope with a new sense of normalcy. In December, Ed and Pam were invited to San Francisco as the guests of honor for the Emerald Bowl college football game, featuring J.P.’s alma mater, the Naval Academy. Before the game, Pam said to Ed, “I don’t know if I can go on living without J.P.” Ed reassured her, but two months later, doctors diagnosed Pam with stage 4 colon cancer. Within three years, Pam was gone, too, and the family laid her to rest next to J.P.
Around his hometown, the name is unavoidable. Thanks to the J.P. Blecksmith Leadership Foundation, the soldier’s name is on a plaque in Lacy Park, a banner for the July 4 charitable 5K run, a Marine Corps building in Pasadena, a graduate program for veterans at USC and a scholarship at Flintridge Prep.
However, a legacy isn’t about what’s to come, but what’s been left behind for others. The memories of the manner in which J.P. lived — full-throttle, seeking adventure and honor — have changed his older brother and sister after his death.
Alex, 35, who grew up as the cautious and careful Blecksmith boy, hiked the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim last April and aims to scale Mexico’s tallest mountain in February. Christina McGovern, now a mother of three, began running long distances to have quiet time to think about — and talk to — J.P. The training culminated in an emotional Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., in 2005, where the only thing tougher than making it to the finish line was finding the finish line, as tears filled her eyes.
“When I run, I run for him, because he can’t anymore,” said Christina, who said she doesn’t mind if onlookers think she’s batty when she’s talking to J.P. as she runs alone. “Every time I wanted to quit, I knew he was there.”
Ed, now 71, won’t be climbing mountains or running marathons to honor a son who he said would have become a Marine Corps general or CEO of a big corporation. Instead, the father tried to learn from his own mistakes through the lesson of losing J.P.
In Vietnam in the fall of 1967, Ed lost 14 men in combat as a second lieutenant, and said he was callous in reporting the deaths to the soldiers’ families. “I had no idea what the families back home were going through,” said Ed, who has remarried and lives in Utah with his wife, Jane. “When J.P. was killed, I talked to two families of Marines I had lost and apologized for not making a greater effort to communicate back in the 1960s.”
When Ed needed more than memories — such as that of the young, military-minded J.P. dressing in his father’s fatigues and combat boots and digging a foxhole in an abandoned lot — he looked further for a connection to J.P. He found symmetry between J.P. and legendary Gen. George Patton: Both were San Marino natives who were baptized at Church of Our Saviour, and J.P. was killed on Patton’s birthday. More recently, Ed has reported feeling his son’s presence in his home on more than one occasion and sought out a psychic medium to communicate with him, which he said helps the grieving process.
“I don’t run around with a foil hat on my head, but the bottom line is that I miss him terribly. I don’t want to get mystical, but I think he’s my guardian angel now,” said Ed, who thinks of J.P. when he reads his favorite poem, A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” “He’s frozen in time. He’ll never get old. He’ll never fail.”
Beyond the Blecksmiths, the memory of J.P. is perpetuated by his best friends. His senior photo is on Peter Twist’s refrigerator in Philadelphia, and Twist still owns letters the pals traded back and forth when the Blecksmith family moved to Seattle for five years in the late 1980s. J.P. died on Twist’s 24th birthday, and Twist said his annual birthday calls from old friends eventually turn into J.P. story swaps.
Those stories also get shared at a local annual Christmas party, according to friend Robert McKinley, who invites the Blecksmith clan to his family’s holiday party each year. Another high school buddy, Ross Fippinger, said J.P.’s tale has value for the next generation.
“Young people need to know the story about J.P. so they can take a step back and realize how good they have it because of the sacrifices men and women like J.P. have made for our country,” Fippinger said. “J.P. brings a special bond to the San Marino community. We all have a piece of him and are proud we came from the same place as him.”
And, far from San Marino, in airports all over the nation, close friend and frequent traveler Alex Christian approaches uniformed military members to thank them and pray for them.
“I think deep down it made me feel like I was somehow talking to J.P. through all of them, which I know may sound silly to some, but in some ways it helped give me closure,” said the Dallas resident, a new father who lamented that his child wouldn’t know J.P.
The soldier’s sister, Christina, knows the feeling. She’s moving on — she doesn’t leave an extra place setting at the table for him like some might, she said — but Christina is still disheartened that her daughters won’t meet her hero.
“My brother is part of me, part of me they’ll never know, and I want my daughters to know that they had this amazing uncle,” said Christina. “When I think about how I want my girls to grow up, I want them to have his drive and passion for life, and to have the courage to stand up for what they believe in.
“For me, that is his legacy: something I feel like I need to teach my children.”
Standing 6 feet, 4 inches and weighing 230 pounds, J.P. owned the chiseled physique and a megawatt grin tailor-made for a casting agent looking for an American hero for a Hollywood film. He played the part, too: According to Ed, the former high school star quarterback selflessly switched to wide receiver at Navy without complaint, and never received a demerit in Annapolis.
Alex Blecksmith, who lives in Pasadena, said all the good things about J.P. have been crystalized in his mind. Unfortunately, the current state of Iraq is also clear to the Blecksmith family, which reopened their emotional wounds before they had healed.
Following J.P.’s death, the family always sought comfort knowing his sacrifice occurred during an initially successful — if divisive — military engagement in western Iraq. Any semblance of that justification is gone today.
When Islamic State of Iraq militants took back Fallujah, Christina began to wonder if her brother had died in vain, and Ed and Alex’s blood boiled during telephone calls with each other.
“It was a punch to the gut,” Alex said. “You see news reports that ISIS is marching all over Iraq … but when they take back the city where J.P. was killed, you think, ‘What was the point?’”
The retaking of Fallujah wouldn’t be the final time the family was confronted with heartache related to J.P.’s loss: In June, Flintridge Prep alum Scott Studenmund — who called J.P. his inspiration to join the armed forces — was killed in action in Afghanistan. Two months later, Ed sat with Studenmund’s mother, Jaynie, and tried to support her in the way people in San Marino had comforted him a decade ago.
Despite it all, the meaning of a military sacrifice like J.P.’s extends beyond the overseas operation. One example: a West Point grad is walking from Seattle to Baltimore for the Dec. 13 Army-Navy football game, dedicating each kilometer to a different fallen soldier. The final two kilometers will honor former Army quarterback Chase Prasnicki and Navy wide receiver J.P. Blecksmith.
More than 2,300 miles away from his hometown, the march into M&T Bank Stadium next month is yet another reminder of a man who won’t be forgotten.
“His legacy isn’t just that he was killed making the ultimate sacrifice,” said Christina. “It was everything he did in the 24 years before he deployed…and talking about him keeps him alive.”
Originally published for the San Marino Outlook Newspaper on Nov. 6, 2014.
Charlie Peters can be contacted on Twitter
or by email at charliepeters7@gmail.com.
