When Marine Cpl. Jonathan Bowling came home from Iraq, the entire town closed down to grieve.
More than 5,000 people from Stuart and the surrounding countryside waited hours on a snowy February night to pay their respects to his family -- too many for the funeral home to accommodate, so his coffin was placed in the auditorium of Patrick County High School where he had graduated five years earlier. The next day, stores closed as hundreds of residents lined the streets to watch the hearse pass by. Many saluted and cried, waving flags and banners, saying, "We love you, Jon Boy."
In this town of 1,000 in southern Virginia, where everyone is connected, the only son of Darrell Bowling and Robin Feron seemed to belong to them all.
"You spend all those years watching a kid grow into someone you're proud to have around, and just like that, he's gone, in the blink of an eye," said Mary Alley, proprietor of the Coffee Break diner, where Bowling used to eat cheeseburgers. "Losing Jon has made a lot of us bitter about the war."
Many lives touched
Though Bowling was only 23, he had touched many lives. So his death on Jan. 26 when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his Humvee left a sense of loss in many corners here.
As a volunteer firefighter and rescue worker, he rushed into burning buildings and pulled motorists from wrecks. He worked as a police officer in nearby Martinsville, and he had been an elder in his church from the age of 14.
Small things provided an equal measure of the man. He visited elderly relatives. At the local produce stand, he helped ladies load groceries into their cars. When he noticed a wobbly table at the Downtown Cafe, he came around with a wrench to fix it.
"He always sat in the corner booth by the window," said owner Harold Slate. "People say they can't look at that booth now without seeing him there."
Slate's wife, Susan, has ordered a brass plaque with Bowling's name to mount on the wall above the booth. "He was too good to be true," she said.
Stuart, named for the Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, has always sent its sons off to war. On the courthouse lawn, the World War II memorial bears 64 names. The Vietnam War memorial lists seven men who did not come home.
High unemployment has caused many of Stuart's young to seek opportunities in the military. Almost everyone knows someone who has been in Iraq or Afghanistan, or who is about to go.
A yellow ribbon is still tied to a tree trunk outside the log house where Bowling lived with his father. Above it is a black ribbon.
Darrell Bowling remembers when his son, who joined the Marine Reserves after graduation, was about to be deployed to Iraq. The father is a state trooper, and he offered to make some calls to see if Jonathan could be assigned to a military police unit that might be less likely to see action.
"Jon stopped me cold," he recalled. "He said, 'What will I tell my grandchildren? My daddy kept me out of it?' He felt it was his duty. Nobody could stop him."
As a trooper, Darrell Bowling is an Andy-of-Mayberry type, more likely to issue a stern lecture than a ticket. Now he has trouble writing any tickets at all; everyone he stops for speeding hugs him.
'All my plans included him'
Father and son shared a dream that Jonathan would follow in his father's footsteps.
"It was my hope he would take care of folks around here, after I'm gone," Bowling said. "I've lost a big part of my life. All my plans included him."
From Iraq, Jonathan called family and friends in Stuart every two or three days, usually in what was the middle of the night for him.
He talked with his mother about his Scottish terrier, Mac. She was watching the dog until his return.
"We never talked about the war," said Robin Feron, cradling Mac in her arms. "We kept the conversation light. As a mother, I wanted to ask questions. As a mother, I couldn't."
In the entryway to her house, Feron keeps her son's dress blue Marine jacket and his white cap hanging on a coat rack, as if waiting for him to come back and try it on. For weeks, she could not eat steak, because it was his favorite food. Recently, she and her husband, Gregg, had a steak dinner as a hallmark of trying to move on. She often looks out her back window at the white bench where he sat during cookouts.
"I feel him there," she said.
His twin sisters, Brooke and Ashley, are attending college. He took out an insurance policy before he left for Iraq and directed that the money should pay for their educations. They are the future, he wrote in a letter he mailed to a family friend to be opened if "the worst" happened.
Before Jonathan Bowling's death, many people in Stuart thought of the war as a remote conflict played out on television. Now, it feels personal.
"In the abstract, we all want democracy and freedom, and we all want terrorism punished," said Barnie K. Day, a bank vice president. "But if you say, 'Give me Jon,' well, maybe we'll back up and discuss that question a little bit."
At the Coffee Break, it's hard to find anyone who now thinks the war was worth giving Jon.
"The whole thing we're doing over there is not worth one Jonathan, much less 1,500," said Mary Alley.
Several memorials are planned. An April 23 motorcycle ride will raise money for a scholarship in his name. His death is the inspiration for a "wall of honor" in the county building, that will list Stuart's war dead back to the Revolutionary War. An American flag will go up on a wall in the Martinsville Police Department, in a shadowbox with his name on it.
Clint Weidhass, Jon Bowling's best friend from childhood, plans to make his life's work a personal tribute. This summer, Weidhaas will start training at the state police academy for a job he and Jonathan had talked about doing together one day.
"When I think of Jon, and how he served his country and helped people, I feel compelled to do this," he said. "Jon wanted me to do this, and work with him. Now I'll do it alone."
