‘I didn’t get to say goodbye’: Gold Star mother honors fallen soldier son

Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware has hundreds of Gold Star families who have suffered the loss of a loved one in military service. On Memorial Day, we remember the sacrifice of their service members in the protection of America.

Kristen Giordano had just returned from a spring walk around her Dover neighborhood when she sat down on her couch. 

Her husband, J.P. Blandin, was trying to find something for them to watch when he noticed the men in uniform walking up their driveway.

“These must be recruiters looking for Tyler,” he said to her of his youngest son in their blended family. 

But Kristen knew.

“My heart just sank,” recalled the daughter of an Army master sergeant. “I knew something was really wrong, but your mind plays tricks on you. Maybe Joey was just hurt and they’d be taking me to him …”

A military heritage

Joseph “Joey” Marquez was born prematurely on June 17, 2002.

As a nurse whisked him to the neonatal intensive care unit, his grandmother caught a glimpse of her new grandson. From that first moment in life, his face was marked by deep dimples – the features that framed the smile that would define his life.

To family and friends, he was “Dimples” or simply “Dimps.”

Growing up, Joey was a determined kid who loved sports. His mother recalled when he was 2 years old, he broke his leg and had to wear a cast. She found him putting a sock over the cast so he could go outside and play soccer.

“He was a lot of fun – very high energy and really athletic,” Kristen said. “But he was also a real momma’s boy.”

Coming from a large Italian family, Joey was very close to his sister, Alexis, and his grandparents and uncles.

Kristen is a bit of an Army brat herself, having grown up at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where her father was an administrator. Both of her grandfathers were combat veterans as well, and her older brother joined the Army out of high school.

From a very young age, Joey developed a close relationship with Kristen’s dad. Perhaps it was fate – after all he was named after him.

“I think Joey really looked to my dad as his father figure,” Kristen said. She split with Joey’s father when he was 13.

Two passions in life

For Joey, the future was likely to include only one of two things: the military or sports.

In particular, Joey loved baseball, having started playing when he was just a few years old. When Kristen met J.P., the longtime baseball coach for Delaware State University, he used sports as a bonding opportunity with his stepson.

“We had a batting cage in the backyard, and I would throw him batting practice all the time to try to get him ready for his senior year of baseball,” he recalled. “When I came into their lives, I just wanted to be their friend. Baseball gave me an opportunity to do that.”

When Joey’s senior year of high school in 2019-20 was derailed by the COVID pandemic, J.P. called in favors to colleges and high schools in the area. He gathered a group of ballplayers to run a short COVID league in order to give Joey a proper final season.

But shortly after graduation, Joey asked his grandfather to accompany him to see an Army recruiter. It sealed the deal.

“I remember I had given Joey a really nice baseball bat that I had first given my son, and that summer after school I asked him if he had any summer games to play. He said no and gave me back the bat, which really felt like him saying, ‘Thanks for the opportunity, but I’m focused on what’s next,’” J.P. recalled. “I was always so blown away by how mature he was.”

Love of service

Joey enlisted and shipped off to basic training at Fort Leonardwood in Missouri in January 2021.

Kristen wasn’t worried. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was underway and America was likely heading to an era of peacetime service. Although her family had long military service, no one was ever killed nor did she know anyone in the military community who had lost a loved one.

Joey wrote her letters and called her as often as he could through the nearly six months of basic and advanced infantry training. 

“He loved it. He was a top performer,” Giordano recalled. 

And he got a nickname within his unit: Private Dimps.

When his graduation approached in June 2021, Kristen planned a whole weekend of sightseeing with him in St. Louis. She was so excited to get to see him, even if for just a few short days.

But as she boarded her flight, she got a call from Joey. He had just received his orders to report to Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, and wouldn’t be able to stay for their vacation.

Kristen was disappointed, but Joey was excited. He wanted to see the world, and the new assignment was about as far west as he could go in the continental U.S.

Joey would return home only once more, in October 2021. His family gathered to celebrate his progress and Kristen recalled that his hugs seemed just a bit longer than normal. After seeing his grandparents off, Kristen asked him if everything was OK.

“He looked at me and said, ‘I just feel like I’m never gonna see them again,’” she recalled. “It probably was more about them than him, but now it just feels like a premonition.”

An unexplained loss

In Washington, Joey was training as a motor transport operator, or the driver of heavy trucks that haul cargo or troops. His unit often spent their days in the Yakima Training Center – a remote, dusty piece of ground that resembles the Middle East’s conditions.

By the spring of 2022, he was often conducting field training exercises and the long hours were wearing on him. One Sunday night in April, he called home but sounded tired, saying that he had a migraine.

“They weren’t sleeping and they had been getting up early to train on driving while wearing night vision goggles,” Kristen recalled. “I told him to get some sleep, and that I loved him, to be safe and that I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

She would never get to talk to her son again.

At 5:40 a.m. April 25, 2022, the truck that Joey was riding in attempted to descend a hill, but hit a soft shoulder and rolled several times. He was killed instantly and two other soldiers had to be flown out with injuries. 

Unfortunately, such fatal accidents are not uncommon in the Army, with about 10 service members dying from them each year. Joey was just 19 years old.

It would be hours later that casualty notification officers came to Kristen’s front door – in a state of shock, she doesn’t remember what they said to her.

She spent the rest of the day contacting her family to let them know of the tragedy before they saw it online or in the news. In particular, Kristen was worried about Joey’s older sister, Alexis, who was his best friend.

It would take the family 10 days to receive Joey’s body back for burial – and it was then, in watching his coffin come off the plane, that reality set in for Kristen.

“I didn’t get to see him because he was in such bad shape, and that didn’t help,” Kristen said, wiping away a tear. “I was kind of hanging on to this hope for months that it wasn’t really him; that they had made a mistake, and he was just gonna come walking through the door. 

“That part has been really, really difficult. I felt like I didn’t really get to say goodbye.”

Finding purpose

For months after Joey’s death, Kristen couldn’t go back to her job working in human resources for the Caesar Rodney School District. It just didn’t feel meaningful enough anymore.

She struggled to find purpose until she began volunteering with the USO, the nonprofit that assists service members and their families. Now she works full-time at the USO center on Dover Air Force Base, providing a community for service members to get a snack, play pool or just hang out with their friends.

“I think about Joey and his friends, and how they probably would have loved somewhere to go like that, being so far away from their families,” she said. “I think having that purpose has helped me in a lot of ways, it’s almost been like an extension of therapy.”

Through the USO, Kristen also connected with Mission BBQ, the restaurant chain that honors service members and Gold Star families, where she was hired as a community coordinator for several years. She flew around the country to help open new locations and bring in Gold Star families.

Kristen also organized 5K runs in Joey’s memory, raising money to help build a Gold Star Families Monument in the Delaware Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Millsboro.

While all of those things have helped her to honor the memory of her son, the loss still feels fresh, especially around days like Memorial Day.

“I hear people all the time talk about how they’re getting an extra day off or they’re making plans to drink some beer down at the beach. But they don’t realize what a day like Memorial Day means for families like mine,” Kristen said. “I loved Joey with my whole heart, and just because he’s not here anymore doesn’t mean I love him any less.”