Remembering the fallen

The Long War

Since the Sept. 11, 2011, terrorist attacks, the nation has fought two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and engaged in combat throughout the Middle East.

Here’s a look at the human cost of the war among U.S. service members.

Operation Iraqi Freedom

4,411 U.S. service members dead; 31,953 wounded

Operation New Dawn-Persian Gulf region

73 dead, 295 wounded

Operation Enduring Freedom

2,216 U.S. service members dead; 20,049 injured — Afghanistan

Other locations: 130 dead; 43 wounded

Operation Freedom’s Sentinel—Afghanistan

28 dead; 128 wounded

Operation Inherent Resolve — Middle East

29 dead; 17 wounded

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Defense. Totals are through Nov. 7, 2016.

The Gold Star families of the fallen bear the burden of the loss of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers.

More than 2,200 U.S. service members died in Afghanistan and more than twice that many in Iraq since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks launched the nation into wars in the Middle East.

America’s longest war marked 15 years in Afghanistan last month with thousands of American troops still there.

On this Veterans Day, we give tribute to four of those who did not come home, and to their families, who display photos, plaques and medals in their homes as a memorial to their lost sons.

They can never forget. We shouldn’t either.

Army Staff Sgt. Wesley R. Williams

The last time Army Staff Sgt. Wesley Williams left his parents’ house to fight a far-off war, he asked his mother not to watch while he drove away.

Linda M. Williams walked back into her home near New Carlisle.

“He said, ‘Could you please not stand there and smile and wave because it makes me want to turn around and come home and that makes me angry with myself,’” she remembers her son telling her.

“So everybody else stood out there and waved and I slowly turned and went into the house and I watched from in here where he couldn’t watch me watch him leave.”

The Tecumseh High School graduate deployed to Iraq twice before the Army sent him to Afghanistan. On his first patrol in Kandahar, on Dec. 10, 2012, Williams was killed by an improvised explosive device. He was 25 years old.

“He felt it was the last (deployment),” his mother said. “I felt it was the last, but as a mom you do what you have to do and that was really hard not to have that last look or that last phone call, but it made it easier for him to face what he knew he was facing.”

Wesley’s wife, Krista, was pregnant with their second daughter. In addition to his parents, he is survived by two sisters.

He was an infantry soldier who was stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash. When he was deployed a second time to Iraq, he wished to head to Afghanistan instead because there was more happening, his parents remember.

Both his parents wear a dog tag their son wore. Linda, 49, pairs it with a picture of her soldier son, while father Lars, 50, wears a second dog tag his father wore in the Army.

“To lose a child as a parent, that’s the toughest part,” Lars Williams said. “Because you want to talk to him.”

Wesley Williams knew what he wanted in life and even in death.

He gave his mother and his wife carefully thought out instructions on everything. “He prepared for the ‘what if,’” said Linda Williams. “In ways that people in everyday life just couldn’t imagine if they were to hear every single thing.”

One of those requests was to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

“(He) made it very clear to his wife and to myself that if (he) didn’t make it back that he earned his spot in Arlington and he wanted to be buried there with his brothers because he had buddies out there who had passed,” his mother said. “He’s where he wants to be. That’s where he should be.”

Wesley knew what he was going to do since he was the age of eight, his parents say. He watched the John Wayne film, “The Green Berets,” his mother remembered. “He turned to me when it was over and said, ‘That’s what I want to do,” she said. “It was something he was born to do. He just had that drive in him.”

A memorial stands at his high school remembering the fallen soldier. As a student, he performed with the Junior ROTC drill team, and spent hours in the back yard practicing with a ceremonial rifle.

“He always had to be the best at everything, no matter what he did,” his mother said.

“He hated to hear the words ‘you can’t,’” added his father. “If you told him, ‘you can’t do this,’ it was sure to get done.”

Prior to the terrorist attack on America on Sept. 11, 2001, Wesley was a typical 14-year-old who enjoyed skateboarding, video games, Scrabble and playing the guitar.

On the day of the attacks he came home from school, asked his mother to provide a fake birth certificate so he could enlist and became “really, really angry” when she said no.

“He never, ever got angry with me, but that was a really hard day because he couldn’t understand that I wasn’t going to go out and do what I could to try to put him into that,” Linda Williams said. “I told him, ‘Be a kid right now and unfortunately the war is going to be there when you graduate.’ And from that day on, there was absolutely … going to be no holding him back.”

An Army veteran, Lars Williams noted his son and his peers volunteered to join the military with the nation at war.

“They knew exactly what they were going to get into,” he said. “So for a bunch of 18-year-old men to volunteer to be infantrymen like Wesley did — to me, it’s just amazing.”

His son liked being a soldier. On his first deployment, “they were in Baghdad, kicking down doors, and going house to house,” his father said. “…He loved the guys, the camaraderie. He just enjoyed it.”

Linda Williams always told her soldier son to be careful and to be safe.

“I just focused on he’s coming home,” Linda Williams said. “That last one, when he said Afghanistan, my heart just bottomed out. I just didn’t feel like it was going to be like it had been. But I didn’t let him see that.”

In Afghanistan, the soldier found out over Skype that his wife was pregnant with their second child. He named his unborn daughter Valerie Marie.

When he was in Iraq, Wesley often called his mother, sometimes in the middle of the night.

“He needed to hear my voice,” she said. “He would call me up and I knew they had a rough time when he would call me up and say, ‘Mom, just talk. I need to hear you.’ And so I would ramble on.”

In Afghanistan, the staff sergeant did not want to call home.

“He told me it was getting harder to hear my voice on the phone,” she said. “I told him, ‘that was OK. If it was too hard to call me, don’t call.’ I said, ‘Just call out to me. My heart will always hear you no matter how far you are.’ And I didn’t get any phone calls. That was the first tour I didn’t get any phone calls.”

She has no regrets about his choice to serve in war.

“I’m not angry,” she said. “I’m not resentful. There’s no hate in my heart for who did it because God will deal with them. They took my son. I’m not giving them anything else from me because then it takes away from Wesley. It takes away from his sisters. It takes away from his wife. It takes it from his kids and that’s just not fair. I’ve accepted things.”

Marine Cpl. Paul W. Zanowick II

Every time Nanette Zanowick drives by the road sign on Ohio 725 with her son’s name on it in his hometown of Miamisburg, she hits the high beam headlights.

Marine Cpl. Paul W. “Rocky” Zanowick II was killed by a sniper’s bullet in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan on June 3, 2011. The Miamisburg High School graduate was a married father of a young son. He was 23 years old and on a second deployment to Afghanistan.

“I blow the sign a kiss every time I drive by and I hit it with my high beams so other people notice it when they’re driving by,” his mother said. “I hope people read his name and say his name and remember him.”

His parents, Paul and Nanette Zanowick, live with “grief ambushes.”

“Getting the visual of our son being shot by a sniper out of my head sometimes is almost impossible,” said his father, Paul Zanowick, 60. “I don’t know what you’d call it, but we suffer from a broken heart.

“We can be doing any normal thing that a person would do in a day and some song might come on that our son played or that reminds us of an earlier time we were doing something,” he said. “…You fall into this state of grief that’s just unbelievable and it’s uncontrolled sometimes. You can actually bawl, cry.”

“As our daughter would say, we were the whole table,” Nanette Zanowick, 58, said of Paul’s sister, Nicole. “We had four legs and we were sturdy. Now, we’re three-legged and there’s not sturdy, no stability and it’s devastating to lose a child.”

The couple has shared their loss with those who understand: other Gold Star families.

“It’s because our loss is unique and so it’s good to be with others that have the same loss,” Nanette Zanowick said. “You don’t have to try to explain. They get it, so it helps.”

The death of their Marine son at times overshadows the routine of everyday.

“Sometimes something as simple as figuring out what to have for dinner can be a major problem,” Paul Zanowick said. “… But the funny thing is when we were with our Gold Star families, they’re like, ‘Oh yeah. We know that.’ All the things we’ve gone through, they’ve gone through.”

Paul Zanowick II was a Boy Scout and an Ohio State Buckeyes fan who “loved football.” He talked of one day attending Ohio State.

His father talked to him about going to college and becoming an officer before enlisting in the Marines.

“And he says, ‘Dad, I can’t do that. He said that, ‘If I’m going to be an officer and lead the men, I want to have been where they are.’ … And I couldn’t argue.”

The younger Zanowick wanted to have a ranch one day where family members would work together.

“He liked to make people laugh,” his father said. “He would go out of his way to get you to laugh and his laugh was infectious just by itself.”

Zanowick was moved to enlist in the Marine Corps after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, his parents said.

“He said he didn’t ever want to see that happen in our country again,” his mother said. “He said when he grew up he wanted to make a difference.”

Before his last deployment, Zanowick trained Marines in his unit at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif., on the dangers of improvised explosive devices.

“He was bound and determined that he was not going to lose any of his Marines, his boys, to IEDs,” his father said. “Wasn’t going to happen. And he trained them and trained them and trained them.”

At a charity run in Miamisburg set up to remember the fallen Marine, nine of his “brothers” came to Miamisburg and met with his family. The experience was “healing,” his mother said.

“They were Rocky’s brothers,” she said. “They’re now our adopted sons.”

“We were sitting there talking, eating having a good time and I was just happy,” his father said. “I sat there and listened and noticed that these guys took on the behavior that they had in country in Afghanistan. They were doing their banter and they were doing what they do and I thought, ‘What a gift.’ We got to see his boys, his guys, his Marines together being them and it was easy to visualize Rocky with them.

“There’s remorse there because they came home and our son didn’t and they feel bad about that,” he added. “It’s good for them to connect with us and to see that we don’t hold them responsible for our son’s death.”

His parents have received the unexpected. “People, have reached out to us from everywhere,” Paul Zanowick said.

One was an Afghan translator who knew the Marine and called his father.

“He was crying at one point,” he said. “He said, ‘I loved your son.’ He said of all the Marines our son was his favorite Marine and that was one of the reasons he was compelled to call and personally tell me a little bit about Paul and what he meant to him. That was a blessing.”

Army Pfc. Gustavo R. Rios-Ordonez

Gustavo A. Rios-Ordonez died fighting a war for a country in which he was not a citizen, his sister remembers.

The Columbian-born soldier lived in Englewood before he joined the Army and headed to Afghanistan. He was killed on foot patrol June 20, 2011, by an improvised explosive device in Kandahar province. The 25-year-old soldier was married and had two daughters.

While he was a U.S. resident, he was not yet granted citizenship when he joined his adopted country’s military, his sister said.

“I think one of the most impactful things about my brother is the fact that he wasn’t even born in the U.S. and not even five years into living in this country he decided that he was willing to put his life on the line for a country that he had only lived for a little amount of time,” said his sister, Jennifer Rios Perretta, 28, of Chicago.

“I think he did it because he saw it as an opportunity for himself and he understands that living here is about the American dream and trying to follow what you want to do with your life, and even though he was trying to figure it out one day at a time, at least he had the opportunity to do that,” she said.

“He appreciated this country because (it) gave my parents their opportunities to help their children to succeed,” she said.

Rios-Ordonez moved to the United States at the age of 21 to be with his parents, Gilberto and Diana Rios, and his two younger siblings. They moved to New York City and later settled in Richmond, Ind.

Diana Rios, 55, remembers her son’s love for his wife, Tiffani, and two daughters, Isabella and Elizabeth. One of his daughters launched a helium balloon last May in Eaton with a written message in his memory. It landed in Massachusetts, 850 miles away.

Gustavo worked in his mother’s Mexican restaurants in Englewood and Eaton until he decided he wanted to do something else with his life, Rios said.

He told her, “I want a different experience,” she remembered.

She did not like her son joining the Army, she said.

“I think after a while he just figured out he wanted to continue to go to school, but he wanted to strive to be something different especially now that he was a father,” his sister, Jennifer said. “I think that kind of is what pushed him to go into the military.”

Army boot camp and the deployment to Afghanistan were “really hard for him,” his mother Diana remembered.

Unfailingly, he would call home on Tuesday mornings – the day his mother was off work – and “send me letters all the time,” she said.

It was difficult for her, too, to say good bye to her son as he traveled to a war zone in Afghanistan, not knowing if he would come home.

“I cry,” she said. “I pray for him. It’s really hard for me.”

His death “changed everything,” she said.

It changed the life of his siblings too.

“I personally definitely look at my life and just live everyday as if today could be my last,” Rios Perretta said.

During their video chats when he was in Afghanistan, Rios Perretta remembers how tired and exhausted her brother would look.

“He would just talk about how it’s a difficult situation and a lot of the things he went through, especially with boot camp, he didn’t expect,” she said. “But he kept pushing himself. I think he was really proud of himself for continuing to do something that was really hard for him. He didn’t let an obstacle stop him from continuing.”

Strangers lined the streets of Eaton the day of his funeral, she remembered.

“It was an amazing experience,” she said. “Something we’ve never seen before. You go through things in life and sometimes you don’t realize that even though you don’t feel a part of a small town because you’re not originally from there and you’re very new, that people are really there to support you.”

Army Cpl. Nicholas H. Olivas

Adolfo Olivas lives “a new normal.”

The former Hamilton mayor visits the cemetery every week to stand at the grave site of his son, Nicholas.

The Army paratrooper from Fairfield was killed at age 20 by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan on May 30, 2012. He was married and had a son. he avid hunter and angler was a wrestler at Fairfield High School.The soldier was the son of Adolfo and Marian Olivas, who declined comment for this story.

“There are days when the memories lift you up and there are days when the memories drag you down,” said his father, 60. “But there’s an emptiness. You cannot replace that. Sometimes it hits you because you are doing something fun and a moment of guilt, I’ll call it, hits you.

“There are days when I feel like he’s been gone a decade. And there are days when I feel he has been gone 10 minutes. There’s no explaining it. There’s no words for it. Everyone grieves differently. I tend to be pretty quiet about it, although when I lost him I immediately sought out all his buddies. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to be there that moment with him.

“As a parent, you never want your kid hurt,” he said. “You always want to take the bullet for them. Of course, I couldn’t do that, but at least I could live that moment.”

Some of his son’s fellow soldiers called from Afghanistan. Others he met in person when they returned to Fort Bragg, N.C.

“I regret so many didn’t come back and he was one of them,” said Olivas, a lawyer at the non-profit Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio.

“But you can’t regret public service no matter the price you pay. … If every father who’s concerned about his son’s or daughter’s life says, ‘No, you can’t go,’ then who’s going to stand up for us? I’d like to have been the one who served and not him. But we don’t have those kinds of choices.”

The hijacked passenger jetliners that flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 changed the lives of many. Olivas remembered that day as Hamilton’s Republican mayor in the midst of emergency preparedness. He did not know the day would reverberate into his life more than a decade later.

“If 9/11 hadn’t happened, perhaps my son would be alive today,” he said. “…Little did I think that someone had put an hourglass on my son’s life at that point. Because, really, that’s what we did to all our soldiers that we’ve sent into harm’s way. We started their final clock ticking.

“But I can’t regret that,” he said. “…Where would America be if we had been isolationists and not stood up to Nazis and fascism. Where would America be if we had not stood up to communism? We might not be having this conversation.”

Olivas encouraged his son to enlist “because I think the military is a very worthy career. Still do. It’s dangerous. So is being a firefighter. So is being a police officer. So is being a mayor some days.”

His son’s last words to a sergeant were: “Tell my son I did my best.”

“To have the presence of mind as you’re laying on a foreign battlefield torn up from the waist down and bleeding out … I don’t think I would have that presence of mind,” Olivas said.

Twice, he has lost things his son touched, only to find them later.

One was a “challenge coin,” a symbol of his Army unit, the paratrooper gave to his father.

“My son is never out of my memory but this gives me something tangible that was in his hand that I can touch anytime and many times,” he said.

Olivas believed he had lost the coin at a courthouse entrance where people must empty pockets of metal objects to walk through an X-ray machine.

Unexpectedly, one day a court bailiff gave him a replacement coin. Many months later, Olivas discovered the original in a suit coat pocket after it was sent to the dry cleaners.

“It was not in the pocket when I sent it to the dry cleaners,” he said. “At least that’s what I believe. People don’t believe in miracles. Well, that’s fine. Maybe they don’t need to believe in miracles and maybe I do.”

The second lost object was an arrow Nicholas shot into an oak tree one Thanksgiving. It disappeared, then reappeared on the lawn two years later as he was cutting the grass, his father said.

“I’ve had things like that happen to me where I needed him to be around and then something of him popped up,” he said.

Olivas has met Gold Star families in his home in Hamilton and elsewhere.

“There is something to be gained because no one else understands,” he said. “…Even those of us who have lost someone can’t really comfort someone else. But we’re there. We know that the silence doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to say. It’s just that we can’t say anything.”

Gold Star families found themselves in the midst of a contentious presidential election when Khizr Khan spoke at the Democratic National Convention in July to condemn remarks GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump made about putting a temporary travel ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Khan’s son, Humaya, was a U.S. Army soldier who died in combat in Iraq in 2004. Both sides of the political aisle criticized Trump for his comments on the Gold Star family and it’s sacrifice.

Olivas posted a rebuttal to Trump on Facebook this summer only to shut down his social media account hours later “because of the idiotic responses.” The Gold Star father’s experience led to a story in the Associated Press.

“It just shocked me that someone could defend Trump’s comments to the Khan family,” he said. “They’re indefensible and apology is not a word that’s in his dictionary.”

Olivas said his son “was a peacemaker.”

“He wouldn’t let anyone say anything about family or friends,” he said. “But if he saw two people having a disagreement …. he’d be the one to stand between them and say, ‘Look, this ain’t right. Think this out.’

“He was a good kid,” he said. “They’re all good kids. Every one of them that’s been lost is a good kid. They were defined by their willingness to go and write a check to the government that said, ‘you can take everything I’ve got.’”