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Teammates. Until the end

Sporting News, The, Dec 23, 2005 by Dave Kindred

The old man leaned on a cane as he rose from a restaurant booth. In the dim light, I tried to read the gold lettering on his baseball cap. When our eyes met, he carne over and said, "I saw you watching me." He shook my hand. "I'm a World War II veteran."

A lifetime ago, he must have been a tall, strong young man. Now, in December 2005, he was bent and trembling, his voice weak.

"I was in the first American invasion," he said. "We went into Africa, 1942."

"To face the Germans," I asked, "and Rommel?"

"Damn right," he said.

"Thank you," I said.

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Africa was another time, in a good war, and the old man was proud still. Our brief meeting reminded me of the reporting I had done that day on another war.

I had talked to the coach of two young football players who had been best friends forever. They had played together for four years at a small high school in Maryland that's an hour north of Baltimore. They had graduated in 2002 and enlisted in the Marine Corps together. Both had been to Afghanistan. Both had then gone to Iraq. There they had died six weeks apart.

Lance Cpl. Norman W. Anderson III was killed October 19. A car bomb.

Cpl. Joshua D. Snyder was killed November 30. Small arms fire.

"We have 11 kids who've gone to Afghanistan and Iraq," the football coach says. His name is Steve Turnbaugh. In 12 seasons at Hereford High School in Parkton, Md., his teams have won three state 2A championships and were a runner-up another time. When he speaks of "kids," he does it the way the best high school coaches do--as if the young men in his charge were part of him, kid brothers, even his children.

"We have two there right now, and one has been wounded three or four times," Turnbaugh says. "You know they're gone, you know they're in a war, you know all that. But you don't really think about it, you know?"

He meant you don't think about kids dying.

"Then it happens."

The coach says nothing for a second.

"And it happens again."

Norman Anderson was a charmer. The coach says he'd get you mad and you'd wind up laughing. He was a running back, a good one, best off-tackle and bouncing outside. The son and grandson of military men, a boy who grew up intending to become a Marine, Anderson wanted to enlist immediately after planes flew into buildings on September 11, 2001. He was persuaded to stay in school. He scored an important touchdown in Hereford's 2001 state championship game.

Last summer, home on break, Anderson married his high school sweetheart, Tori Worthing. Three months after their honeymoon, his widow spoke at his funeral service. She was proud. The Marines, she said, had a piece of her husband's heart she could never have. She heard him say, "They need me more over there than you need me over here."

In his first month over there, in Karabilah, Iraq, Tori Anderson told friends her husband had saved the lives of men in his company by ordering them out of an alley. He stayed and opened tire on the driver of a speeding car carrying what our military calls an IED, an improvised explosive device. Near Anderson, the bomb exploded. He was 21 years old.

Although Joshua Snyder, a wide receiver, didn't make the Hereford team his senior year, he still worked out with his friends daily and became, in Turnbaugh's eyes, "almost an assistant coach, just an awesome kid willing to give of himself to help anybody." Seniors came to Turnbaugh before the state playoffs and asked that Snyder dress for the big games. That he did. He was in for six or seven plays in the championship game.

"Every day now, when I go in the weight room," Turnbaugh says, "I see Norman and Joshua in our team picture." They were so close, the coach says, that Anderson's death caused Snyder to tell friends, "I don't want to come home if he's not there."

Snyder believed, as Anderson did, that it was necessary to fight in Iraq.

His younger brother, Brian, told a Baltimore Sun reporter that Josh had said, "I ain't coming home until the job is done." He was on patrol in Fallujah when he was killed. He was 20.

On Wednesday this week, Josh Snyder was to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Norm Anderson was buried there on November 1. I thought of them as I talked to the old man in the restaurant. I thought of young men in war who never get to be old men, thanked for what they once did.

Teammates. Until the end

Sporting News, The, Dec 23, 2005 by Dave Kindred

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