Our Delaware is a monthly series that will explore the history of communities and the institutions that serve them around the state. To suggest a potential topic for an upcoming feature, email Editor-In-Chief Jacob Owens.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Today is Memorial Day, a national holiday when we pay respects to our fallen servicemen and women who have protected our country and its rights. Judy Faunce, of Wilmington, is the mother of U.S. Army Capt. Brian Faunce, who was killed in Iraq in 2003.
Judy Faunce was on the phone with a hometown friend when the moment came that would change her life.
They were talking about a mutual friend he had started dating when the doorbell rang. He was going to hang up when Judy told him it was probably nothing and to hang on.
As she walked down the stairs to her front door, she saw two pairs of shiny black shoes followed by two pairs of legs in dress green uniform pants.
“I told Bill, ‘There are two Army officers at my door.’ And he said, ‘Uh oh,’” she recalled.
She dropped the phone and yelled at them to go away. Instead, they pushed the door open.
A determined kid
Judy grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, meeting her ex-husband, Richard, and starting a family of three children, Samantha, Brian, and Danielle, in Bensalem, Pa.
It was Brian, her “monkey in the middle,” who was the most determined of the bunch, she recalled.
“If there was something he wanted, he didn’t ask—he just went for it,” she said.
One Halloween when he was nearly 2 years old, Judy had put the bowl of candy up high where Brian wouldn’t be able to get to it. It was the middle of the night when she was awakened by the sound of breaking glass. Then she heard that familiar static of TV after programming had ended for the day.
“I went downstairs and this child, who I thought was afraid of the dark, had climbed up on the counter in complete darkness to get to the candy. He couldn’t reach it, but he had pushed dishes off the counter and accidentally turned the TV on,” she recalled.
When Brian was 12, a Civil Air Patrol officer came to talk to his school and he came home raving about the opportunity. They enrolled him, but found that it was more than a passing curiosity – Brian spent more time shining his shoes than he did doing homework. They ended up forcing him out of the program for a marking period as a punishment.
“One of the things that I really admired about Brian was that he never complained to me once,” Judy said. “He would take whatever hand he was dealt and make it the best hand that he could ever have.”
Brian was also someone who cared about the team, and tried to help where he could. He came home one day in high school to tell his mom that he’d joined the marching band – despite never having played an instrument.
“He said, ‘That’s OK. They just need someone in the formation,’” Judy recalled.
When he graduated high school, he was determined to attend Penn State University. He wanted to attend the main campus at State College, but his parents thought he’d do better closer to home. Brian was first accepted to the Abington campus under the engineering program, but he secretly applied again to the main campus as an undecided student – and wasn’t accepted.
As a result, he was stuck at Abington and had lost his engineering seat. To make matters worse, Abington only offered Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC – there was no Air Force component.
But once again, Brian didn’t complain. Despite years of attending Civil Air Patrol and dreaming of planes, he switched to the Army and fell in love with the branch.
Risk becomes real
Judy always expected her son to join the military – he had been talking about it nonstop for years. Her father and uncle were World War II veterans and two of her brother-in-laws had served.
But it didn’t really set in what that meant until Brian brought home a uniformed recruiter when he was 17.
“I remember looking at this recruiter from across the table and thinking, ‘Wow, this is real. He’s here in my house,’” Judy said.
When Brian finished college in 1996, he was commissioned into the U.S. Army and assigned to Fort Drum in northern New York as part of the famed 10th Mountain Division. At the time, the U.S. wasn’t involved in any direct wars and was largely in peacekeeping mode, so Judy said that she didn’t worry.
After 9/11 though, things began to ramp up. Brian was promoted to captain, married a New York local, Cheryl, and began transferring often to get more training, ultimately ending up at the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, at Fort Carson, Colo. His unit was preparing for the invasion of Iraq and he left in April 2003, just before his second wedding anniversary.
“The last conversation I had with him, he called to say, ‘Mom, I will be perfectly safe.’ I said, ‘Brian, you’re going to war,’” Judy recalled. “He said, ‘Mom, you don’t understand. I’m a planning officer. My only weapon is my computer. I will be away from the action.’”
She wrote to her son almost every day that he was at war, although many of them went undelivered as his unit moved throughout Iraq. She began numbering them to figure out when he did receive them.
Judy, who worked for decades in health care technology, said that she was at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia one day when it struck her that somewhere at that moment, her son was in the middle of a war. It sent chills down her spine.
“Before he left, he sent me a Blue Star flag and the history with it. I remember reading the history, and how the blue star can turn to gold,” she said, wiping away a tear drop.
The last letter that Judy received from her son was the first time she sensed that he was a bit downbeat, having been pushed to the front lines in June 2003 after being promoted to company commander.
“He wrote, ‘It would be easier if I thought we were making a difference, but the people don’t want us here,” he said.
A conscientious soldier
Brian’s division was among the first to deploy to Iraq, entering through Kuwait in April 2003 just after the war broke out. They briefly stopped in Baghdad – Judy even has a photo of Brian inside one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces – but made their way to the country’s northwest, basing operations out of Al-Asad Airbase.
While he mostly planned military operations for the first few months, after he became company commander he was increasingly in harm’s way. Their unit was principally responsible for hunting down caches of weapons hidden by insurgents.
Acting on one tip about such a cache, Faunce’s company raided a house in Iraq and he made one thing clear.
“He said, ‘Just make sure that once you tear everything apart, you put everything back just the way you found it,’” Staff Sgt. Shawn Dodd recalled in an interview with the Associated Press. “I said, ‘Are you serious?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’”
Judy said the first time she heard that story, it resonated.
“He knew that his actions were going to be long remembered by the people. He knew he was an ambassador in a way,” she said.
It was Sept. 18, 2003, when Faunce’s company spotted Iraqi men attempting to remove weapons from a disabled tank. They gave chase in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and as they crested a hill, Brian’s weapon snagged a low-hanging power line hidden in a treeline. He died from the electric shock.
He was 28 years old.
A blur of grief
As the Army officers sat with her to explain what had happened, Judy was in shock. They called a friend to come be with her, and after a short time she began calling her ex-husband, daughters and family friends to inform them of what had happened.
Thinking of that day, Judy grew quieter.
“It was tough. It was a difficult time,” she said. “The only peace you get is sleep and I couldn’t get any. I went to the doctor to get sleeping pills the next day.”
There was little time to dwell. Just a week later, the Faunces hosted funeral services at Fort Carson and back in Fort Monmouth, N.J., near where Judy was living at the time.
In New Jersey, the pews were packed by family, friends, service members and the community. The man who had talked to Brian’s class more than 15 years before about the Civil Air Patrol even flew in from California.
But just two days after the funeral, Brian’s widow, Cheryl, wanted to fulfill his dying wish: to have his ashes scattered where they had their first date.
For Judy, it was a romantic gesture in keeping with her son’s personality, but then she learned the location: the top of Algonquin Peak, the second highest mountain in New York.
It took the family four hours to crest the mountain through rain, sleet and snow on Oct. 1, 2003, to scatter Brian’s ashes. It took more than five hours to get back down.
Holding on to memory
How to remember and honor a child lost to war is a difficult task.
Shortly after Brian’s death, Judy went out on a group hike for single mothers and met someone new.
“We were chatting and she asked about my family, and I told her that I had just lost my son. She started crying, and I felt terrible. So the next time that I was in a situation where somebody asked about my family, I didn’t tell them about my son and then I felt terrible,” Judy said. “So I swore that I would never do that again. I would never pretend I didn’t have a son just because I didn’t want to make someone else feel uncomfortable.”
She felt dread every year as the anniversary to Brian’s death came back. Her mood would worsen and she’d become more disagreeable.
“I was like, ‘Just put me in a closet and close the door because I’m not any good right now,’” she recalled.
But the moment always found ways to honor Brian.
The Faunces had always vacationed in Cape May, N.J., and Judy remembered the flag-lowering tradition that a local veteran and retailer, Marvin Hume, had started decades prior. For 20 years, she brought Brian’s flag to Cape May to have it flown over the beach and lowered on the anniversary of his death.
She also founded the Capt. Brian Faunce Memorial Fund, which supports a Penn State University ROTC cadet and a Civil Air Patrol cadet, among others. It has given out more than dozen scholarships over the years.
More recently, she’s been involved with the New Jersey Race for the Fallen, a five-day, 225-mile trek that honors every New Jersey service member who died during the Global War on Terror. Each mile is dedicated to an individual and their family.
It was a chance encounter in her second year participating in the race that again changed her life and those of many others.
A new generation learns
As Judy is standing in the parking lot of the Sandman Consolidated School in Cape May waiting for the honor runners to arrive, she hears a commotion.
As she turns, she sees that the entire school, chorus and marching band had emptied to honor her and her family’s sacrifice. She was already overcome by the display when the school’s principal presented her with a pile of letters from the students to her family.
The next year, she asked to visit a sixth grade classroom who had helped to direct the efforts to share with them about her son.
After she successfully obtained a marker for Brian at Arlington National Cemetery, she asked whether the class might be interested in attending the dedication ceremony with her. The school board wouldn’t allow the school to organize the trip, but they allowed families to pull their students from school for it if they were interested.
Judy didn’t get her hopes up and went about planning the day’s events.
Two weeks before the May 2015 dedication, she received an email from a parent, who wrote, “I hope someone’s been telling you what the kids have been up to.”
Two of the 12-year-old girls felt strongly that the class should be able to attend the dedication. Within a month, they petitioned the school board to overturn their decision, raised enough funds from the community to rent a bus to make the trip to Washington, D.C., and secured enough chaperones from the local Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion posts to make the trip.
“This bus full of kids came down to be with me. They were dressed to the nines. They were beautifully behaved,” Judy said. “I still hear from some of these kids.”
Grief decades later
Looking back now, Judy said that she isn’t angry at her son for serving in the military.
He was living out the dream that he first dreamed as a 12-year-old sitting in his middle school auditorium.
But she’s also sad to not see how far he would go in his career and what his family might look like today.
Judy has found some solace in aiding other Gold Star families, both in her new home in Wilmington’s suburbs and nationally through the Department of Veterans Affairs’ medical centers and the Warriors Helping Warriors nonprofit.
But every time the clock hits 11:11 – which was Brian’s birthday, and is perhaps not coincidentally also Veterans Day – she is reminded of her “monkey in the middle” son. The one who loved his sisters immensely, who was the first to lend a hand, who never complained, and who served his country faithfully.
“Enjoy the barbecues. Enjoy the sales. But take a minute to remember the lives that were cut way too short, and the families that wake up every day to an empty seat at their table,” Judy said. “Just for a moment or two, remember what they sacrificed.”