How Four Families Bore the News

By KURT ANDERSEN

Grief and anger cloud their loving memories of the victims

For most Americans, the horrifying thing about the news from Lebanon was the number of Marines lost, the gross body count. But for more than 200 sets of loved ones, the Beirut explosion was only incidentally a massacre; for them, one particular casualty--the son, husband, brother, buddy--made the week's bad news an ordeal. The families and friends of four victims spoke with TIME last week.

Private First Class Alejandro (Alex) Munoz was going to be home in New Mexico for Christmas. After the Sunday bomb attack, his parents and eight siblings despaired of ever seeing him again. But then, unlike most of the families of troops who had been billeted at the destroyed building, Jesus and Manuela Munoz got good news from the Government. On Monday, an aide in the Capitol Hill office of one of New Mexico's Senators phoned and said that Alex was alive. "We jumped up and down hugging each other," says his father, a machine operator. "All my friends came over to congratulate me." Next morning Jesus went off to work at the El Paso Natural Gas Co. Within hours he was back home. "My wife was crazy, running in the street and screaming. The neighbors were holding her." Two Marines in full-dress uniform had come to their immaculate little stucco house and told Manuela Munoz that her son was, after all, dead.

Alex Munoz, 20, was born in Mexico, but like his parents, who moved to the States in 1968, he was a permanent legal resident in the U.S. Since 1974 the family has lived in the small (some 65 homes) company town called simply Chaco Plant, adjacent to the gas plant, on the gorgeous high plains of northwest New Mexico. The land is desolate and vast--Bloomfield High School, Alex's old school, is 21 miles distant--but the family is warm and close.

Alex played three sports at Bloomfield and lifted weights besides. He was something of a ladies' man. But even rodding in and out of Johnny's Drive-in in his Camaro, he was not the stereotypical rowdy jock. "He was more mature than normal seniors, more levelheaded," says Tony Dinallo, his high school counselor. His mother says he was a serious boy and the quietest of her children.

"We tried to talk him out of enlisting," remembers his brother Ignacio, 26, who has the same job as his father. "But he said this place was too boring for him." He also wanted to emulate his eldest brother Juan, who had been in the Marine Corps. Two years ago, while still in school, Alex got a bootcamp-style skinhead haircut. Says Dinallo: "Alex's feeling was that the Marines were a No. 1 bunch of guys and that's where he wanted to be."

A radioman and Beirut volunteer, he was a year into his four-year service and planned, despite a C high school average, to go to college afterward. A Marine stint, his family told him, would smooth his U.S. citizenship application; the parents had finally applied last spring, just after Alex went to Lebanon.

In a letter, Alex wrote that Beirut, with its shanties and vivid street life, reminded him of Juarez, his border-town birthplace. The family left Juarez when Alex was five; but his mother remembers that as a baby there he would throw a fit whenever she washed his hair. That does not seem long ago to his parents. Says Jesus Munoz: "He was still like a kid."

Gunnery Sergeant Edward Kimm, 33, was no kid. Rather, he was a decent man who ungrudgingly kept up his child-support payments and arranged to spend a month every year with his two daughters, 7 and 6, who live in Lincoln, Neb., with their mother. Last week his stepdaughter Christina, 9, recalled that during his last visit, Kimm prepared them for the worst. "He said that if two Marines came to the door at our house, then he would be dead."

The Marine messengers arrived the morning after the news from Beirut, both in Lincoln and two hours northeast at Kimm's mother's home in Atlantic, Iowa (pop. 7,789). "I think the girls are trying to block it out," says Janet Kimm, his exwife. "I've been trying to get them to break down and get it out of their systems." Kimm, a Marine cook whose chili the girls remember fondly, would have been whipping up Sunday breakfast for some 300 men when the explosion came.

He had decided to become a cook at age ten, his sister Elizabeth says, after he baked his mother an unaccountably successful cake. And he decided to become a Marine at 18, after his older brother Clarence died in Viet Nam.

When Ed Kimm enlisted in 1969, he had an idea about somehow redeeming his brother's death, and put in for a tour in Viet Nam, which was refused. He became a lifer anyway, planning to retire (and buy a horse ranch, he figured) around the turn of the century. But his peripatetic Marine career evidently did not jibe with marriage: the Kimms split in 1978.

All five of his siblings live in and around Atlantic. They and his mother (his father, a World War I veteran, died last year) sensed in Ed a grim apprehension when he last visited in April, before Beirut. "He didn't joke around like he normally did," says Elizabeth. "This going to Lebanon bothered him," and he was "kind of withdrawn." Says Letha Kimm, 66, "I think he had a premonition."

Lebanon? "It ain't our war!" barks Kimm's brother John, 28. But all mourn regardless. Each house around Letha Kimm's has a black ribbon tied to the porch. And in the rich, rolling countryside some miles east, Ed Kimm will soon be buried in Pleasant Hill Cemetery, not far from the graves of his father and brother.

The members of the Meurer family are primarily angry. They blame the Government for the killing of Lance Corporal Ronald Meurer, 21. They think his death was a stupid waste. One evening last week they gathered in his parents' house trailer near Westport (pop. 200), a Louisville exurb on the Kentucky bank of the Ohio River, to rage and cry together.

"As far as I'm concerned," says Mary Lou Meurer, "my son died in vain. My son died for nothing." His widow Deborah, 23, does not go quite so far. "I'm just so mad," she says. "We're all together on that." His brother Jay, 22, has written a protest manifesto ("We the people who have signed this petition feel that it was wrong that President Reagan sent the Marines to Beirut!") in longhand on a yellow tablet. If Reagan makes a condolence phone call to them, Mary Lou says, "he'll be put on hold."

Partly it is the odd nature of the Marines' mission that angers the Meurers, and that apparently galled Ronald. Until he went to Beirut, according to his mother, "he was gung-ho. He was all Marine." Explains his sister Robin: "He'd always felt like he had to prove himself, and he thought if he could make it in the Marines, he would. He just wanted his family to be proud of him." But when he returned to the States on leave this summer, his mother says, "he didn't want to go back. He said it was nothing but a big joke. He was sent to guard a tunnel and took his gun, but he had to keep the ammunition in his pockets."

Partly, too, the family seems upset by fate's particularly dreadful timing. Ronald's brothier-in-law, Lance Corporal Terry Roberts, a Camp Lejeune Marine buddy who had introduced Ronald and Deborah last year, died in a car wreck in July. The shock apparently sent Deborah, eight months pregnant, into labor, and Ronald arrived home on an emergency leave the day before Jennifer Meurer was born. The little family bought a trailer near Camp Lejeune; they were briefly happy. But Ronald shipped out for Beirut on Sept. 19. His tour was to have ended next week. Deborah, who had agreed to marry Ronald after a four-day, love-at-first-sight courtship, got two letters from him the day after he died. "He said he'd rather be home with his wife and little baby."

The Meurers are fond as well as bitter. "We had beautiful times," says Ronald's father. He remembered the winter night four years ago when Ron and another son resuscitated 200 live mail-order chicks that had arrived nearly frozen. He described how the boys "lay in front of the fireplace rubbing them and bringing them back to life." Around the room last week there were chuckles at the memory, and sighs--and then quiet.

The hush was of a different, edgier kind when the Marine Corps captain and sergeant stepped up to the suburban Baltimore apartment with news of Lance Corporal Davin Green. His mother had utterly persuaded herself that Davin, 20, was a survivor. "How do you know it's really him," she protested after the men delivered their message, "if he's all blown to pieces?" Days later, her daughter-in-law was refusing to concede she was a widow. "I know he's not dead," said Deborah Green, 19, whom Davin married 48 hours before shipping out for Beirut. "I know he'll call real soon. He'll tell me everything is O.K., that it has all been a bad dream and he'll soon be coming home and hold me close again."

Of course, Green is not coming home. His room in his family's tidy two-bedroom flat, crammed with artifacts of childhood, may remain suspended in time. Football trophies sit under a huge portrait of Bruce Lee, the martial-arts movie star, and stuck in a closet are stacks of Archie comic books. The plastic model airplanes he built, however, are gone, tossed out by his mother. "I do wish I hadn't thrown them all away," she says, now coveting every reminder, even the memory of the crazy feast he ordered the night of his high school graduation (shrimp, fried chicken, ice cream, strawberry shake, orange juice). "But we didn't know--what would happen to him."

Green was a devoted reader of military history, and had long been determined to enlist. "He was al ways talking about joining up," recalls Brother Damion, 14, who wants to become a Marine himself. "I didn't much like Davin going in at first," his mother admits, "but then there isn't much you can do. He did love the Corps so."

The Marine Corps, one of its sl gans claims, builds men. Patricia Briscoe (Davin's mother's name by a second marriage) insists it is so. "When he left home on July 13,1981, he still called me Mama. When he returned from bootcamp he called me Mother. Like a film running too fast, he suddenly grew up, so quick it stopped my heart for a second." Some of Green's letters from Lebanon are a record of his growth. Said one from Sept. 10: "This is the hardest thing I've ever done. You walk through the towns on patrol and the little kids wave . . . We really don't want to be here, but when we see how we are helping these people, it makes you feel good all over. ' ' Yet in his last letter he was boyishly reassuring and, to his mother, reassuringly boyish: "Things have cooled down a little. Don't worry. I'm O.K. Really! Please send Tastykake, Cheetohs, chocolate graham crackers, BBQ chips and Jolly Rancher candies." Green's mother is hesitant to judge geopolitics. "I do so hope my son hasn't died in vain," she says. "He tried so very, very hard to do what is right." The injustice she sees is a classic one: they are so young. For instance, Green, like most of those killed, was a child when the U.S. left Viet Nam. "It seems unfair all those boys haven't lived yet. And now they are stone cold dead one Sunday morning."

-- By Kurt Andersen.

Reported by James Baltimore and Robert C. Wurmstedt/Bloomfield, with other bureaus

With reporting by James Wilde, Robert C. Wurmstedt/Bloomfield This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.