Military community shares grief of first Iraq-war casualties

OAK HARBOR — A quiet, subtle grief settled over this longtime military community as the news sank in that three sailors assigned to the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station were killed in Iraq on Friday.

Though American flags were flying at half-mast on Tuesday, there were no makeshift memorials, no bouquets of flowers left at the gates of the base, no outward signs of sorrow for the town's first casualties since the Iraq war began four years ago.

But in a community where just about everyone knows someone who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan, the loss is being felt as a shared pain that's made the war all the more real.

"When you don't regularly have your sailors getting killed ... this brings the war and the reality of the war very close to home," said Dale Leach, principal of North Whidbey Middle School, where 55 percent of students have at least one parent in the military.

Leach fought back tears as he leafed through the construction-paper sympathy cards students made for seventh-grade science teacher April Billiter, the wife of Chief Petty Officer Gregory Billiter, one of the sailors who was killed in combat near Kirkuk, Iraq.

"We have kids who have parents on the ground in Iraq; we have kids whose parents are leaving today. We're a Navy town," Leach said. And while the sadness "is new for us," he said, "it's not new in the thousands of communities that have gone through this in the last four years."

Billiter, 36, originally from Villa Hills, Ky.; Petty Officer 1st Class Joseph McSween, 26, of Valdosta, Ga.; and Petty Officer 2nd Class Curtis Hall, 24, of Burley, Idaho, were members of the Explosives Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 11 based at Whidbey Island. The U.S. Navy has not released details of the circumstances surrounding their deaths, except to say the men died "from enemy action."

The families of Billiter and McSween could not be reached for comment, but Hall's sister-in-law said the sailors' bodies had arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

Hall, the youngest of five children, called his mother Thursday night to wish her a happy birthday and was killed the next morning, said his sister-in-law, Tina Hall, in a phone interview from Montrose, Colo. One of his brothers is now en route to Delaware to retrieve Hall's body and take it back to Idaho, she said.

Outside North Whidbey Middle School on Tuesday, Christine Herana waited in a parked sport-utility vehicle for her 13-year-old son, one of April Billiter's students. Herana's husband is in the Navy and will deploy to the Middle East this fall.

"Anything that happens with the military, everyone is affected, everyone is saddened," she said. "We grieve with the families."

Kim Martin, a spokeswoman for the Whidbey Island station, said a memorial service will be held for service personnel and community members at the end of the month, once the families have had time to privately grieve and bury their loved ones.

"It's a very tight-knit community," Martin said of Oak Harbor and the roughly 7,800 sailors stationed at Whidbey Island. "Lots of our sailors, we think of them as part of our family. It kind of makes us all hurt."

Oak Harbor is unlike any of the other communities where Lenny Marlborough was stationed during his 27-year Navy career. Marlborough, now the police chief of the Coupeville Marshal's Office in Coupeville, about a 10-minute drive south of Oak Harbor, said the Navy's explosives experts, criminal investigators and other skilled personnel work closely with local police, which has cemented bonds between the Navy and members of area law-enforcement agencies.

Combined, Oak Harbor and Coupeville have a population of about 45,000 — and roughly 10,000 residents are retired Navy personnel, he said.

"This is the kind of place where you hit the ground, turn around and there's a lot of caring people. You get sucked into the community really easily," Marlborough said. "The civilian population and the military, they're intertwined; they are as one.

"I went to five different states and this is the only [community] that was like that. It's what kept me here."

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com