The Train to Memphis, Indiana
Twin brothers lost to war and grief
“We hope you can forgive us”
It wasn’t until the second day that the casualty assistance calls officers — CACOs — offered their condolences.
The first day that the CACOs pulled up in Cosey Spears’s driveway to deliver an emergency dispatch, she mostly felt bad for them. The pair were very nice, but so nervous.
“I was just trying to be normal,” she says. “Just trying to talk about this or that.”
Eventually she gave up on small talk and went to her bedroom.
“I was just wishing and praying that Greg would get home,” she says. Greg is her husband.
“It was payday and I’m just taking it so easy,” Greg Spears recalls. He’d dropped his paycheck off at the bank and was headed home in his work van. He keeps his ringtone low while at work and didn’t notice the missed calls.
“When I turned in the driveway,” he says, “I saw a truck with government tags on it and thought, ‘well this isn’t good.’”
Cosey met him in the driveway. An emergency dispatch from the USS Makin Island had arrived. Corporal Jordan Spears was missing at sea. Search and rescue operations were ongoing. There wasn’t anything else to report.
The two Marines returned at 1 p.m. the following day. Family and friends had gathered. “That’s when they gave us the whole ‘we regret to inform you,’” Greg says, his voice cracking.
That Friday, two days after the CACOs first arrived, they received a call from Jordan’s commander. “His first words were, ‘I hope you can forgive us,’” Greg says.
Greg asked to speak with the crew, and the commander obliged. “I just told them, ‘You guys gotta keep going, keep moving.’” Greg wanted to give them words of encouragement. “I knew they would be hurting as much as we were.”
When the government van first pulled up to the house, Nathan Spears, Jordan’s identical twin brother, didn’t have to leave the garage — he knew why they’d come. At work the night before, an overwhelming feeling of dread washed over him. It was so powerful that he had to pull his truck over and let it pass. Something had happened to Jordan.
“It was like stepping into the bathtub”
Aboard the USS Makin Island, Corporal Jordan Spears was ready to take off on a mission to support the American embassy in Bagdad. It was the very early stages of American engagement with ISIS.
A crew chief, he took his place near the window of his MV-22 Osprey, but moments after taking off, the craft began listing heavily. Without generating enough lift, the Osprey barely cleared the deck before plunging toward the Arabian Sea, striking the water.
Fearing that the aircraft might be lost, the pilots signaled for the two crew chiefs to evacuate. Jordan, following the order, stepped out into the choppy water.
“It was like stepping into a bathtub,” Greg says, they were that close to the water. The V-22’s twin rotors struggled overhead to pull the craft out of the ocean, generating turbulent wash and kicking up blinding spray.
Once in the water Jordan pulled the chords on his life preserver, expecting the device to inflate, but nothing happened. Weighed down by more than 60 pounds of equipment, Jordan tried again without success. His fellow crew chief — whose life preserver had only partially inflated — gave his breathing apparatus to Jordan, who had resorted to attempts at manual inflation.
In order to perform the manual inflation maneuver, Jordan had to let go of the other Marine.
But each time Jordan would try to blow air into his life preserver he would go under, only to claw himself up to the surface again. His vest refused to inflate.
Eventually the combined weight of his body armor and flight suit were too much to overcome. Jordan went under and did not resurface.
Immediately a search and rescue mission was launched. The search involved three ships, eight UH-60 helicopters, c-130 and p-3 planes, and specialized rescue divers. But the efforts did not recover Jordan.
On October 2, 2014 at 1709, Corporal Jordan Spears was officially pronounced deceased. The 24-hour search had been called off.
Two years later, on New Years day of 2017, Nathan, would take his own life.
“In a sense,” Cosey says, “we lost both Jordan and Nathan to the war.”
“Think about being connected to somebody before you are even born”
Identical twins, Nathan and Jordan Spears arrived less than an hour apart. Nathan was the eldest by “forty-eight long minutes,” according to Cosey.
“It was fun raising them,” she says over the phone. “They were just all boy.”
Nathan and Jordan shared a love of baseball, the outdoors, and BMX biking. “There was an unspoken competition, but it was never nasty, not even an ounce of it,” Cosey explains.
“They were kind of like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird,” she says chuckling.
“They always did things together, and when they weren’t together I know there was always that connection.”
There was also an understanding between the brothers that Cosey can’t quite put into words. “They didn’t judge each other. It was just different. I mean, think about being connected to somebody before you are born.”
Cosey recalls a time in high school when the family had concerns about a girl Jordan was seeing. “Jordan’s sister tried to give him some advice. I think his friends did, too. It wasn’t a good situation, [the relationship].” Everyone was trying to get in Jordan’s ear — everyone but Nathan.
“Nathan left it alone,” Cosey says. “He didn’t go there. They just understood one another.”
The twin brothers also shared an exuberant sense of humor. “I’m a children’s entertainer,” Cosey explains. “I do fun shows for little pre-schoolers.” For her shows she’ll often will wear costumes, among them giant Frosty the snowman and Teddy bear outfits.
“Well one day, I look out the window to see Frosty and Teddy pulling out of the driveway. I come to find out that Jordan and Nathan had gone down to the McDonald’s and were there entertaining the kids!”
“It was fun,” Cosey says again. “It was very much fun raising them.”
“Jordan first began talking about the Marines when he was eight years old,” their father Greg says. “Not Army, or Navy, or Air Force. It was always the Marines.”
In high school, when Jordan decided to get serious about enlisting, Greg and Cosey were supportive, as long as he understood what it was he was signing up for. Greg urged him to talk to veterans and those who have seen combat. “We just didn’t want him making a rash decision,” Cosey says.
“It’s a calling,” Greg explains. “That’s what I’ve learned through talking to other gold star parents.”
Nathan thought about joining the Marines as well, but a congenital deformation of his right hand prevented him from performing pull-ups, a requirement of any Marine.
“Nathan was so proud of Jordan,” Greg says. “I remember how proud he was when we went down to Parris Island for Jordan’s graduation. That was special.”
Even though they’d be living apart, Jordan and Nathan were never out of each other’s thoughts. The brothers had twin tattoos — a train on its way back to Memphis. “People would always confuse it with Memphis, Tennessee,” Cosey says, “but Jordan would just let it go. He knew what it meant.”
N29 10’ 51” / E049 02’ 07”
I land at Louisville International at 9:25 am. The sky is a pewter gray and rain streaks down the window of my plane as we taxi to the terminal. I text Cosey to let her know I’ve arrived safe. The Spears live about half an hour’s drive from Louisville, in Memphis Indiana.
Indiana wears military pride on its sleeve. Trucks with Army and Marine Corps flags plastered across rear windows speed by, and Navy recruiting centers dot the roadside. Turning off the highway leading away from Louisville I drive along quiet clearings of dormant farmland.
I meet Greg and Cosey at the Fireside Grill where we chat over lunch. Greg is mild mannered with an open smile. He talks slow and picks his words carefully. Cosey is warm and quick to laugh. It’s our first time meeting in person.
Cosey asks about the countries I’ve visited, and they tell me about how they met at a Reds game so many years ago. Cosey is a few years younger, but always knew about ‘long legged Greg.’ They’ve been married now for 38 years and raised six children together.
We finish our meal and drive to their house, which sits on a three-acre plot backed by a forest of young trees. But before we turn for home, Greg and I make a stop at the cemetery where Jordan and Nathan are memorialized.
The ground is soaked but neither of us mind, and Greg leads me to the two markers.
“Jordan isn’t buried here,” he says. “It’s a symbolic marker, really. It’s nice having a place you can go to.” Jordan’s body was never recovered.
We’re silent for a moment. The air is still. Greg notices something on Jordan’s headstone and moves toward it.
“There are supposed to be eight quarters here,” he says, concerned, motioning to the seven coins that rest on the marble marker. The quarters were placed there by Marines who served with Jordan and who were present when he passed, he explains. He fishes out a quarter from his pocket and lays it next to the others. Satisfied, he takes a step back and we stand again in silence.
Greg tells me he’s used google maps and the coordinates given them by the Marines to look up the location where Jordan was last seen, a spot miles away from land in the Arabian Gulf.
N29 10’ 51” / E049 02’ 07”
“People will tell me it must be really hard having never gotten Jordan back — that he was lost at sea,” he says. “But it actually doesn’t bother me a great deal. I’ve learned about how some sailors even request to be buried at sea. That’s helped a bit, I think.”
A months long investigation into the mishap that led to Jordan’s death concluded that human error played a role in the Osprey’s failure.
Upon takeoff, the aircraft was set to a kind of maintenance mode, robbing the engine of nearly 20 percent of its power. After the accident this setting came under intense scrutiny, and within six months of Jordan’s death, Bell-Boeing gave the V-22 a software update that would prevent similar mishaps in the future. “We were told it was the quickest fix they’d ever seen,” Greg says.
In their living room there’s a wall with two large prints of Jordan and Nathan, framed side by side. We sit and talk for hours, about Jordan and Nathan, about life after their deaths, about the grief and the attendant isolation.
For months after Jordan’s death, Cosey was unable to work. “How could I get up there and perform?” she asks.
When she finally did begin doing shows again, her joy was gone. “It was like I was behind this mask,” she says. “It was almost like being out of my body.” She would cry in the car before her shows, before assembling the strength and energy she needed to put on a happy face.
Greg went back to work within a couple weeks. He threw himself into his work. He worked himself so hard that one day he passed out in the men’s room. He knew he had to be easier on himself, but work offered a small relief from the loss.
Friends didn’t always know what to say. “Just say anything,” Cosey exclaims. “Even just a little, ‘Thinking about you,’ makes a huge difference.” But she understands. “Grief is a really, really tough thing to deal with, and you don’t want to say the wrong thing.”
“But we want their names to be spoken,” Greg says. “We want them to be talked about.” He supposes that part of the discomfort stems from them having lost not one but two sons, and part of it has to do with how Nathan died, having taken his own life. “There definitely is that stigma,” he says. “People really don’t know what to say,” Cosey adds.
“But if you have a broken leg, and you have another broken leg, you still need help after the second broken leg,” Cosey says. “It’s like they feel like nothing they say is big enough, but you don’t have to know the right words — just hug somebody, just tell ’em you’re sorry.”
They turned to each other for support. “We made sure that we were there for each other, especially on the weekends,” Greg says.
“I do feel joy, now,” Cosey says, “when I’m up there performing and I get to see the kids smiling and having a good time.”
“Nothing is going to make it better,” Greg says, “but we’re getting closer to regaining some kind of a sense of normal.”
Greg and Cosey don’t know why I want to tell their story, and the story of their two sons. I tell them that I think it’s important to bear witness, that it’s almost a responsibility we have to them, and to ourselves. I say I’ll do my best to tell it right even though I’ll never get it all, couldn’t possibly get it all.
When Jordan passed, the family attended grief counseling, both as a group and individually. Cosey and Greg kept a particularly keen eye on Nathan, and, although he was clearly grieving, no one around him could have suspected that he might hurt himself. “At the time, he really didn’t show any signs,” Cosey says. “In hindsight, though, he hadn’t been sleeping for a couple weeks,” she adds.
On New Years Day 2017, Nathan took his life on the train tracks not far from their home. Greg recalls hearing the distinct sound of a train hitting its emergency brakes, and of police sirens wailing past their house.
Nathan had used a rifle he had given Jordan. The rifle bore an inscription of the Marine Corps insignia — the eagle, globe and anchor.
“He did leave a note,” Cosey says, her voice shaking. In it Nathan wrote: “I want to be with my brother.” So he went home to be with him, on a train to Memphis, Indiana.
