GINNY LUTHER

Ginny Luther’s son, Lieutenant Robert “Bart” Fletcher, served in the Army. His MOS was Cavalry. He was a tank commander based out of Fort Hood, in Texas.

When Bart turns sixteen, he decides he wants to go to Portugal as an American foreign exchange student. He thinks being fluent in a foreign language will help him get into West Point. Getting in will be a challenge. But Bart is a kid who thrives on big challenges—especially personal challenges.

Challenging is the word I’d use to describe Bart. His father and I separated after Bart was born, and I became a single parent of two children—Bart and his older brother, Nick. It was completely overwhelming. During the day, I worked at a psychiatric facility with very young children who were suffering from emotional disabilities, and I returned home each evening to a child who acted like a tyrant. He was defiant and disruptive and had major temper tantrums.

He was also very precocious—and very bright. At eighteen months, he was talking at the level of a four-year-old. People couldn’t believe the stuff that came out of his mouth. He was enthralled with guns at a very early age. He would make one out of his toast and pretend to shoot me—and I was mortified, partly because I’m scared to death of guns. My dad took his life with a gun when I was fourteen.

I thought Bart would outgrow it, but his infatuation grew stronger. He kept asking me for a real gun, and I kept telling him no, and he kept having temper tantrums. His control issues were major—with me but also with babysitters and nursery school teachers. It was just difficult. He was a kid I couldn’t take out in any public forum because of his insistence that the world go his way. One day when he was two, I was holding a wooden spoon and threatening to punish him when he turned around and pulled down his pants.

“Come on,” he egged me on. “Spank me, Mommy.”

Right then I had an epiphany: I have got to do something different. At that moment, I realized the negative impact I was having on him—that my responses were dictating his responses, having a huge impact on him. He was two. I was thirty-one! What if I chose to respond differently?

I was the one who had to change. Not him.

That moment started me on my own journey of shifting myself first. That meant to quit taking it personally and begin to see Bart’s behavior as a call for help. I created a peaceful parenting business to help not only Bart but myself—and Bart became my first client. His defiant characteristics were actually the characteristics of leadership, and my job was to encourage him. At a very early age it became clear that he wanted to join the military. “I want to serve my country,” he told me several times. “I want to support people’s freedom.”

And now here we are.

And I don’t want him to go.

“Bart,” I say, “you can’t go to Portugal and do the whole West Point thing. If you go to Portugal, do you realize what you’ll be faced with when you come back? You’ll have to make up your junior year and do your senior year and apply to West Point.”

He stares at me, incredulous.

“You know what, Mom? My agenda for my life is not your agenda. You either are going to support me in this or you’re going to fight me in this. Which way do you want to go?”

My jaw drops. He’s sixteen. He’s sixteen and such a wise soul. He was always that kind of kid.

“I want to support you,” I say.

“Okay. Good.”

“If you really want this,” I tell him, “then you have to create it.”

  

When Bart was six, I married a man who had two children of his own. We have a loving, caring family, and Bart and I have a very, very deep relationship. When he returns home to Florida, fluent in Portuguese, we have a deep discussion about everything he learned overseas. He also tells me a lot of stuff I don’t want to know—like how, when he arrived, the family that was supposed to sponsor him suddenly dropped him. They found him another family, but it wasn’t an ideal situation. The neighborhood was rough, and the parents were working ridiculous hours and weren’t around to supervise their children and Bart, which forced him to negotiate this unknown, dog-eat-dog environment on his own.

Bart has to make up for all the academia he wasn’t able to enjoy over in Portugal. He does that while also jumping through all the hoops and doing all the things he needs to do in order to even apply to West Point.

“You know,” he tells me, “I’m a man now.”

“Tell me why you think you are.”

“The thing I realized when I was over there was that I’m the one who’s responsible for me. Nobody is responsible for me, and I’m totally responsible for every choice I make.”

“Yes,” I say, “you are.”

“Now that I’m a man, I’ve fallen in love with Katie.”

I’m not surprised. They met when they were fifteen and have been going out, or whatever the kids call it now, for a while.

“I would like to have sex with Katie,” he says. “I want to have it here, at the house, so I want your permission.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, you know, I’m a man now, so…”

“That’s great that you’re a man now,” I say. “I’m so glad you are. I appreciate you asking and the answer is no. I’m sure you’ll figure something out, but it ain’t going to be in my house.”

Bart gets accepted at West Point with a caveat. His math score was a bit low, which isn’t a surprise since math isn’t his greatest suit, so in order to attend he has to take a summer course and do some other work for the math program.

“I’m not going,” he says.

“What? Why?”

“I don’t want to waste that time catching up. I’ll be a whole semester behind.”

Which isn’t true. The truth is, he wants to stay with Katie. The truth is, I don’t want him to go to West Point, either.

I’m holding the acceptance letter. I’m reading the part that says “Do not accept this based on what your parents say to you. This has to come from you totally” when I say, “You’re giving up the opportunity of a lifetime. If you don’t take it, I think you’re making a big mistake.”

“Mom—”

“I know they told you not to listen to your parents. But I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to come back when you’re twenty-seven and say, ‘Mom, why didn’t you…?’ I’m going to say I did. I did tell you.”

He chooses not to go.

He stays home, goes to a community college, becomes class president, and gets the perfect grades he needs to transfer to the University of Florida. He attends U of F and joins the ROTC. He becomes the top cadet, graduates from college with a 4.0 grade point average. He’s eager to go to war.

Bart was in middle school when 9/11 happened, and even though it scared him, seeing what happened only fueled his desire to join the military. It’s October of 2008 and we’re still at war, and my son cannot wait to get to Iraq.

  

The hardest part about Bart going off is knowing he’s going to be on the front lines. That has been his drive all along, to be on the front lines, and he’s done everything he can do to become the best he can—paratrooper training, this training and that training, all these extra things to up his skills. Knowing he’s going to be sent to war—it’s indescribable, the inner angst sitting in the back of my brain and core of my gut.

Bart calls me from Fort Hood, in Texas. “It’s time, Mom. I’m going to be deployed.”

Underneath the warrior is a kid who played video games and loved watching the History Channel. A boy who, when he was three, asked for a G.I. Joe outfit and a tea set for Christmas. He loved playing house with all the little girls and loved to interact with them in such a positive way; he had such a positive little energy about him. After he put on his G.I. Joe outfit, the little belt and hat, over his pajamas, he opened the tea set and then sat down and asked to have tea. He didn’t want to open any more of his gifts. In that moment he was so, so happy.

“Mom? You there?”

“Okay,” I say. “When?”

“Next week.”

“Okay. I’m flying you home for a few days.”

Over the next few days, before Bart flies to Florida, I find myself thinking about an incident when he was sixteen.

Teenagers have a funny way of telling you they need to talk. When I returned home from work one night after ten, I saw Bart sitting on the couch, and I could tell he wanted to talk. It was either going to be a quick conversation or a very long one.

When I sat down next to him, he started to cry.

“I don’t know if I’m making the right decision,” he said. “I so badly want to serve and make freedom. But I’m not sure if this is the way to go.”

I knew he was experiencing all kinds of fear about his decision to pursue a life in the military. He knew we were at war—knew there would be a good chance, if he joined, that he would be sent to either Afghanistan or Iraq.

“I want to be a hero,” he said. “But there’s a problem.”

“What?”

“I know I’m not going to live a long life.”

My heart was racing, my throat tight. “What do you mean?”

“I just know I’m not going to be on this planet for a long time.”

I was completely stunned…and yet, from the time he was born, I’d been fighting that same feeling.

As I walk into the house, I realize this is going to be our last time together. It’s very, very surreal.

Bart is in the home office, on the computer. This is it. I have to say something to him.

I run a business teaching parenting classes. Lots of discipline classes. On a shelf I keep a stash of little blue stars, glass trinkets I give to parents dealing with difficult children. The star is a reminder: S is for smile or stop. T is for take a deep breath. A is for and. R is for relax. I take one star and put a hand on Bart’s shoulder.

He turns around. I put the star in his hand and say, “Bart, you are a warrior. You are a hero. There are going to be times when you’re really scared, so I want you to have this star to remind you to breathe. Breathe deeply. For your soldiers and for yourself. If you don’t remember to do that, remember I’ve got your back.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

A few days later, he calls me as he’s about to get onto the plane. He’s going to lead a platoon that just lost their lieutenant.

“I’m scared,” he tells me. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“You can do this. You’ve got this, Bart. You’ve got it.”

  

His tour ends in January of 2008. I want to go to Texas, where Bart is based, to be there when he returns to Fort Hood—to receive him and the other soldiers—but I can’t because my mother is on the verge of dying. She has an aggressive cancer, and I’m her major caretaker.

A month later, Bart and his fiancée, Katie, come to Florida to attend a wedding near me and reunite with his family and his grandma. Bart is with me when my mother dies—a good thing, since she was close to him, too. We’re able to help her pass and transition that weekend. Then it turns chaotic, with the funeral services and people coming from all over to pay their respects. There’s no time to talk.

Bart feels he hasn’t done his service to the country because his deployment was cut short. Since he didn’t serve a full tour, he wants to make it up to his officers and the soldiers in his platoon. He does this by giving up his vacation time and picking up their slack, working day and night, weekends—anything and everything so people can get their deployment breaks, vacations, visitations, whatever they need. On top of all that, he’s working to get everyone ready for the next deployment.

Two months later, Bart and Katie return home one weekend for a surprise engagement party. My family is gathered outside, on our patio. I sit next to Bart. It’s the first time we’ve been together like this, without all the chaos.

“Was Iraq everything you wanted it to be?” I ask.

He looks at me for a long moment.

“You don’t want to know,” he says.

I can see there’s a piece of him that’s broken.

“I don’t even know how some of these soldiers survived,” he says. “But the thing is…It’s not hard in Iraq, Mom. It’s hard here. The soldiers here at home are hard to discipline. They don’t respond to it. I’m dealing with domestic violence, stuff like that. I feel like I’m a social worker.” He sighs, his gaze lingering on me when he says, “It’s more dangerous here than it is in Iraq.”

Two months later, I fly to Dallas to do a speaking gig. I want to drive to Killeen, where Fort Hood is based, to see Bart.

“I’m working long hours,” he tells me. “We’re trying to get ready for deployment. I’m going to be really busy. You’re not going to see much of me.”

“I’m okay with that.”

When I meet Bart at Fort Hood, he seems so peaceful. I’ve never seen him so okay with himself, so at peace. He radiates so much joy as he takes me through his company and shows me the tanks. He’s just so happy with who he is, what he has, and what he’s done.

He climbs up on top of a tank. He’s squatting, wearing his Stetson, and the sun is setting behind him. I wish I had a camera to capture this perfect moment, but my phone doesn’t have one. He’s looking at me and I’m looking at him, and I say, “Stay right there. I’m going to take a shot,” and I put my fingers up as if I’m taking a picture and I make a clicking sound. He smiles, my beautiful son who is in all his glory. It’s the most amazing picture, in my mind. It’s the last one I’ll ever have of him.

Two weeks later, two uniformed officers knock on my door.

“On behalf of the president of the United States, we regret to inform you, Mrs. Luther, that your son, Lieutenant Robert Fletcher, was killed by one of the soldiers in his company.”

  

When I get to Texas to recover his body, I want to see my son, but the Army won’t let me. They say he was shot in the chest and I want to drive to Dallas and see him, but they won’t let me go there and see him.

“You’re not going to cremate him now,” I tell them. “We’ll eventually cremate him, but we want to have an open casket just for the family.”

My husband and I make arrangements to bring his body back to Florida—and I have to do it quickly. A major hurricane is threatening to hit Texas.

I go to the funeral home with my husband and Bart’s siblings. As we drive, all I keep thinking about is all these plans Bart had for his life after the service—like how he wanted to become an ambassador. He was going to study international relations at Georgetown. He had all kinds of plans—and he had all kinds of skills. And his captain knew that. His captain told me how, the night before Bart died, he had been talking to Bart about one of the soldiers in the company, this man named Jodie, who had been suspected of stealing some highly sensitive night equipment and selling it on eBay. The original plan was for Bart to go to the captain’s office and together they would travel to the soldier’s apartment, which was off base, in Killeen. They needed to collect the goods, before the man was to be discharged the following day.

Bart, though, had another idea. “No, I’ll do it,” he told the captain. “You go to the office. I’ll get up early, and I’ll go.”

And he did. Bart took a master sergeant with him. They weren’t armed, because the apartment was off base. Jodie’s apartment was in a motel-like complex, on the corner of the second floor. It had a balcony with an iron-rod fence. All the blinds were shut.

They knocked on the door. Nobody answered.

The master sergeant went to the apartment manager. “We would like to talk to him, but he’s not answering. His car is parked in the driveway, and we’re kind of concerned that maybe something’s going on, because we know he’s in his apartment. We can hear him.”

The apartment manager tried to open the door, but it was locked from the inside.

Bart and the master sergeant became even more concerned. They knew Jodie was in there, and he wasn’t answering. They were all thinking the same thing: Had Jodie killed himself?

The balcony had a sliding glass door. The blinds were drawn there, too. The apartment manager got his tools and they removed the kitchen window.

Bart felt all sorts of alarms going off in his brain as they looked through the blinds, into the kitchen area and beyond. The place was a mess—alcohol, guns, and all sorts of crap scattered over the counters, tables, and floor.

Jodie came out of the bedroom with a Glock in his hand.

Bart grabbed his phone. He dialed 911 and turned to the master sergeant and apartment manager. “Get off the balcony,” he said.

They got off the balcony.

Bart did not. He spoke to the dispatcher, who urged Bart to get to safety.

Too late. Jodie stepped outside, onto the balcony, the Glock tucked in his pocket.

Bart tried to talk Jodie down. “Listen, we’re just here to visit with you,” he said, and then he tried to negotiate with Jodie a little bit, talk him down.

Jodie walked back inside the apartment. Now was the time for Bart to leave.

But he didn’t. He thought he could talk Jodie down.

When Jodie came back out, he was more agitated. Then he heard the police sirens—and now he was even more alarmed. Jodie lost it and pulled his gun.

And went right for Bart.

Bart had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. He turned away and shots belted out from Jodie’s gun. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam.

The police arrived. Shots were exchanged. Then Jodie shot himself and fell on my son, who was carrying in his pocket the little star I had given him the night before he deployed. I’d always thought he’d thrown it in the garbage. I’m told he carried it with him all the time.

  

I arrive at the funeral home to see Bart.

As they open the casket, I recall what the captain told me on the phone: “You need to be prepared. Bart might not look…There might be a little shift in how he looks.”

I thought he was shot in the chest. He can’t look that different.

The person lying inside the casket doesn’t even remotely look like my son.

That’s when my husband sees a bullet hole behind the ear. “Oh, my God,” he says. “I think he was shot in the head.”

My husband and I and Bart’s brother stand there, stunned. They said Bart was shot in the chest, not the head. But Bart was shot in the head not once but five times. Jodie literally blew his face off.

They knew. The Army knew what had happened, but they didn’t tell me the truth.

They won’t tell me why.

  

I never had to forgive my son’s killer because, in my mind, Jodie was the person I feared Bart would become if I had not put in the hard work to help Bart go in the direction he needed to go.

Was I angry that this happened? Yes. But all I had for Jodie was empathy. Jodie had a background that was very stressful. He experienced lots of trauma. The reason he went to war was because of 9/11. He went to Washington and saw the devastation there and then he went to New York and saw the destruction and said, “I’m going to enlist, I’m getting into the Army, that’s what I’m doing.” And he did. Jodie had the same mission as Bart, but he wasn’t there for the right reasons.

My work has always been focused on helping very young children be able to regulate social and emotional behavior so parents don’t have to engage in warfare. Conflict always starts with an upset emotional state. If we can see it as a call for help, we can teach kids to regulate their emotions so they don’t feel as though they need to be aggressive. Jodie never got his needs met. He was a homeless kid, living on the streets with his mother. No father in his life. He was very depressed and struggled all through school. He never got the support he so desperately needed. He never got a chance to learn resiliency, which is the ability to take disappointment and conflict and turn it into something better. Get through it.

Which got me thinking: what if we built a foundation of early-childhood centers that could help the Jodies of the world? These early-childhood centers are mom-and-pop places, and most parents can’t afford the high-tech schools, the family privilege schools and nurseries that are out there. What if we could provide not only parents but also teachers with the critical skills needed to help children build resiliency?

That is the mission of my nonprofit, Bart’s Blue Star Foundation: to transform aggressive, scared boys and girls into powerful leaders like my son.

Bart got to live his dream. That’s the good news. My son lived his dream and always followed his heart.

And the military was so about his heart.