The woman who picked up my guest pass with my ID was Kelly, the wife of my son, and she did it for her father. I learned this in the back seat of a black sedan with a Marine driver, between the hotel and the parade deck, with Colonel Reyes in the front seat reading a folder with his reading glasses on his nose. He had pulled the picture from the visitor center camera, and the picture showed Kelly in a sun hat, holding a driver license that was clearly mine, laminated and fake. The license had my photo from the badge of the VA. She had a printer, a laminator and a very good eye.
“Why would she want your seat?” the colonel asked. I did not know. Then he turned a page and gave me the answer. The father of Kelly, Wayne Dudley, wears every Memorial Day a Marine dress cap and a row of ribbons, and tells people he served at Khe Sanh. There is no record of any Dudley at Khe Sanh, or in the Marine Corps, or in any branch. I worked thirty years as a ward clerk at the VA hospital in Columbia, and I know what a real discharge paper looks like, and I know the faces of the men who earned it. Kelly knew I would know.
I sat with my hands on my purse, with the Purple Heart of Frank pinned on my navy dress, and I felt the old rage of a woman who has been polite for seventy six years. The colonel said, “Mrs. Maloney, I do not need you to make a scene. I need you to be exactly where Private Maloney asked you to be.” I said, “Colonel, I have never made a scene in my life.” He smiled for the first time that morning. “Mrs. Maloney, I believe that is why the Marine Corps likes you.”
A borrowed license gave one daughter in law the length of a parade morning to bring a grandmother back to the truth on Parris Island.
I gave my terms to Kelly, Doug and Wayne Dudley at the edge of the parade deck, in the second row of the reviewing stand, which the colonel had cleared for me, with the band tuning in the distance and the flags snapping above us. I said that the fake license would be handed to the colonel before the ceremony ended, that Wayne would take off the ribbons and cap in the parking lot and never put them on again, and that Doug would explain to his son the whole truth that very day. I said none of it would be said on the deck. I said it very quietly.
Kelly took off her sunglasses. She said her father had talked about the war for so long that her mother, who passed in 2015, had stopped correcting him, and that Kelly had grown up believing it because it was easier. She said when she heard I would be there with the medal of Frank, she panicked, because I would see at once. “Agnes, I did not want him ashamed in front of Ryan,” she said. “He is the only family I have left.” I looked at her face, forty years old and frightened. I said, “Shame is not what makes a Marine, Kelly. Honesty is.”
Wayne Dudley, a big man in a white cap, did not take it quietly. He grabbed the fake license from the hand of his daughter, snatched it clean, meaning to run it to the nearest trash can and be done with it, and he bolted down the steps of the reviewing stand in his polished black shoes with the license in his fist. The colonel did not move. A drill instructor on the rail looked down at the man, then at the colonel, then at me. I said, “Sergeant, I believe he is in a hurry.”
The causeway to the parade deck crosses a tidal marsh, and the tide had just turned. Thousands of fiddler crabs were coming up out of the mud to cross the road, a rolling red and tan carpet with one big claw raised each, as they do twice a day. Wayne stepped into the carpet and stopped as if he had run into glass. The crabs went up his trouser legs. He danced. He hopped. He tried to find a clean place to put his shoe, and there was none. A young recruit in the formation whispered, “Sir, you have to wait for the tide.”
Colonel Reyes took the license, and the legal office of the base wrote a letter I am told was brief and unfriendly. Wayne never wore the cap again. He sold the ribbons at a flea market in Beaufort, for a few dollars, and confessed at his church the following Sunday, which his pastor told me later was the bravest thing he had seen. Doug apologized to me in the car, eyes on the road, hands at ten and two, and said it was the worst weekend of his life. I said it was not mine. Ryan, I added, had three more years of service to look forward to, and so had the family.
In the name of Frank, who passed in 2019, I started the Frank Maloney Eagle Globe Fund. It pays for plane tickets, hotel rooms and guest passes for grandparents who cannot afford to attend a boot camp graduation, in Richland, Lexington and Beaufort counties. In the first year we sent twenty one grandparents to Parris Island, and the first was a retired school custodian from Orangeburg named Mr. Gadsden, who had saved for two years and fell eighty dollars short. Colonel Reyes holds a seat at the front of every ceremony with a handwritten card that says, “Reserved for Grandmother.”
At the actual ceremony the following morning, at nine o clock sharp, I stood on the parade deck in my navy dress with the medal of Frank over my heart. The colonel walked me to the front. When the platoon came by, Ryan turned his eyes right without moving his head, and I saw them find me, for one second, and go bright. After the last note, he marched over, stiff as a post, and held out his hand. I pinned the eagle, globe and anchor on his collar myself, with fingers that did not shake. “Tell Grandpa I did it,” he said. I said, “He knows.”
