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The Last Letter Home
When a Solider Falls, Commanders Face a Solemn Task

By Michael M. Phillips
The Wall Street Journal

'How do you start a letter like this? How do you end it?"

Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel spoke those words as he sat down to write a letter to a father who would never see his son again.

Images ran through the colonel's mind. His own two toddler boys, growing up quickly every day he is away at war in Afghanistan; and the parents of Pfc. Jessy Rogers, whose own child would be forever 20 years old, his age when insurgents detonated a bomb under his Humvee.

Col. Fenzel, commander of the 1st Battalion (Airborne) of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, started writing, then stopped again. He pressed his forehead into his palms. "Jesus, this is hard," he said.

Many things have changed during centuries of American warfare. One thing that hasn't: Army commanders still write letters, often by hand, to console the families of fallen soldiers, share stories of the good times and-perhaps-describe the circumstances of death.

The letters began as a common courtesy among militiamen fighting in the Revolutionary War. Shortly after World War II, the task became obligatory. After the next of kin is notified, via telegram or a knock on the door, the dead soldier's commander is to write a detailed letter explaining what happened.

"The letter should show warmth and a genuine interest in the person to whom it is addressed," said a 1948 Navy manual in a six-paragraph passage on the matter.

These days, Chapter Eight of Army Regulation 600-8-1, "Preparation and Dispatch of Letters of Sympathy, Condolence, and Concern," has grown to eight pages. The rules can be chillingly specific. "Avoid unfitting compliments and ghastly descriptions," they say. "Do not send photographs depicting casualties."

That's not much help to a commander who sent a soldier to his death. Each time a man goes down, Lt. Col. Fenzel finds himself struggling for words to ease the pain.

"Sir, we are so very fortunate to have known and served with your son," the colonel wrote to Pfc. Rogers's father, David, a construction worker in Alaska. "We all know the irreparable loss you and your strong family have suffered, and we also know there is very little any of us can say that will provide you any comfort."

Col. Fenzel has already notched tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. On previous deployments, he was the No. 2 in his unit. This time he's in command. So before coming to Afghanistan from his home base in Italy, he bought some stationery bearing the crest of the 173rd Airborne. He didn't want to use printer paper.

His 800-strong battalion has lost 12 men since it arrived last May. Pfc. Rogers died last July, along with three of his comrades, in a roadside bombing.

'The Words Will Come'

Col. Fenzel didn't know Pfc. Rogers very well. Soon after the death, he invited four of Pfc. Rogers's squad-mates to his office to talk about their friend. It gave the colonel a better sense of the young man. He and other soldiers had already phoned the family to offer immediate comfort. Still, months passed before the colonel was ready to write the letter that would stand as a more permanent record.

"I wait to find the words, and they will come," he says.

Col. Fenzel found his words one evening in November, after returning from a mission and savoring some new photos of his two boys sent by his wife. The next morning, he knew it was time to give Pfc. Rogers's parents a glimpse into their son's military life.

Pfc. Rogers grew up in Chickaloon, an Alaskan village of 200 people, 12 of whom were his brothers and sisters. He was the fourth child, home-schooled by his mother, Donnetta.

"Jessy always enjoyed the double-take any of us would give him the first time we found out just how big his tight-knit family really was," Col. Fenzel wrote to Mr. Rogers.

Jessy joined the Army because he was angry about the Sept. 11 attacks. But he also hoped to see a bit of the world. "I want to do something different," his mother remembers him saying after he returned from meeting a recruiter.

He told his mother that, after his eventual discharge, he would return to Alaska and work construction with his father and brothers.

"The only thing that gives any of us any real comfort-and I've said this to myself over and again-is knowing that he gave his life fighting for our great country, as a hero and alongside men that he loved and respected," Col. Fenzel said in his letter.

After Jessy's death, the Rogers family received a boxful of condolence letters. The ones that meant the most came from Col. Fenzel and other servicemen. "They're in a war, and he takes the time to write a handwritten letter to us," says Mrs. Rogers. "That's what I noticed."

The letter helped her envision her son's Army life, his friends, pleasures and hardships. "This leaves a huge gap, but I know where he's at," she says. "I had this fear for Jessy, and I'm glad he's out of harm's way now."

The Army assigns responsibility for writing condolence letters to battalion commanders such as Col. Fenzel. But others are free to send notes of their own. The most intimate ones are often penned by junior officers who knew the fallen soldier best. Officers such as 30-year-old Capt. John Gibson of Shreveport, La.

Capt. Gibson, a West Point graduate, commands a company of 180 or so of the soldiers in Col. Fenzel's 800-strong battalion.

His first and, so far, only condolence letter was sent to the mother of Pfc. Thomas Wilson, a 21-year-old from Woodstock, Va., who dropped out of a college wildlife program to enlist.

Pfc. Wilson was in charge of the armory, maintaining the unit's weapons. It's a job that could keep a soldier in the relative safety of a well-defended base. Instead, Pfc. Wilson talked his way onto patrols. The paratroopers patrol riverbeds and mountainsides. They try to win goodwill among locals by providing mosque-refurbishment kits that include solar-powered speakers and new prayer rugs for the mullahs.

But the Americans also engage in firefights with insurgents from nearby Pakistan.

When Pfc. Wilson's convoy was ambushed last summer, he was manning the turret machine gun in a Humvee. He fired off two cans of ammunition. When he bent over to grab a third, an insurgent's round drilled through the Humvee's protective metal and killed him.

'Our Brother, Your Son'

For Capt. Gibson, the shock of losing his first man was sharp. He decided to write to Pfc. Wilson's mother, Julie Hepner. His intention was to describe what a fine soldier her son had been. Yet he wasn't comfortable describing the precise circumstances of his death. Instead, he told Ms. Hepner that the other paratroopers spent five days hunting down the insurgents responsible for the ambush.

Capt. Gibson says he crunched up two drafts before feeling he had struck the right tone. Only later did he learn that Ms. Hepner had never received his letter. So, recently, he sat down to write it again.

Meantime, last October, Col. Fenzel had written his own letter to Ms. Hepner. "It has been almost a month since we lost your brave son Thomas to enemy fire," it began. "And the days that pass in between don't make it any easier to be without our brother, your son."

The colonel went on to describe how, during the fatal ambush, Pfc. Wilson manned his machine gun "bravely and brilliantly" in an intense firefight. His actions saved the lives of 10 other paratroopers, the colonel wrote.

"Please also know that you have gained nearly 800 of Thomas's brothers as your sons, if you'll have us," he wrote to Ms. Hepner.

It was the message she wanted to hear. "What more can a mother ask for," she says, "than knowing that he died in the arms of people who loved him?