Today is Memorial Day-a day set aside to remember and honor those who perished in service to our country.
Please take a moment today to remember the many people who sacrificed everything so that our United States of America could contimue to grow and prosper in freedom and representative democracy.
Not to Keep by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
They sent him back to her. The letter came
Saying... and she could have him. And before
She could be sure there was no hidden ill
Under the formal writing, he was in her sight—
Living.— They gave him back to her alive—
How else? They are not known to send the dead—
And not disfigured visibly. His face?—
His hands? She had to look—to ask,
“What was it, dear?” And she had given all
And still she had all—they had—they the lucky!
Wasn’t she glad now? Everything seemed won,
And all the rest for them permissible ease.
She had to ask, "What was it, dear?"
“Enough,
Yet not enough. A bullet through and through,
High in the breast. Nothing but what good care
And medicine and rest—and you a week,
Can cure me of to go again.” The same
Grim giving to do over for them both.
She dared no more than ask him with her eyes
How was it with him for a second trial.
And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.
They had given him back to her, but not to keep.
Let us all keep those who serve, and those who made the ultimate sacrifice for, our country in our hearts.
One Last Mission: To Rescue A Fallen Marine’s Purple Heart from the Wall Street Journal BY BEN KESLING
Members of Walter O’Haire’s old unit, including a Journal reporter, save medals from auction
I remember the day Lance Corporal Walter O’Haire was killed in Fallujah. Known as Gator to his friends, Lance Cpl. O’Haire was on a rooftop with his squad on a sweltering May afternoon in 2007, watching over fellow Marines on the street below when a sniper hit him about 2 inches below the back of his helmet.
It was a blow to Golf Company, where I was a young lieutenant, the first and only death in our unit during a seven-month deployment in Iraq. At the memorial service on base a few days later, the company first sergeant, equipped with a voice like a force of nature, boomed out the formal roll call. He ritualistically demanded Lance Cpl. Walter O’Haire respond. Three times he called his name, and three times he was met with silence.
Gator’s body arrived back home inMassachusetts on Mother’s Day and he was buried on his 21st birthday. His mom got his medals, including a posthumous Purple Heart, packaged in a handmade display case.
After a few more years in the Marines, I left the service as a captain and became a journalist covering veterans and the Pentagon. My own medals were stored away in a box at home, and my ribbons remain pinned on my old dress blues, provoking occasional questions from my kids.
“Dad, are these prizes from the Marine Corn?” my 4-year-old asked me recently.
A career in the military is laid out in those medals and ribbons, which can be read like a résumé. Mine show that I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan, that I was awarded a couple of personal-achievement awards, that I saw combat but was never wounded. Even now, when I look at them, that distilled summary of years in uniform, I’m taken back to the places where they were earned and remember the people who were there.
Certain medals, like the Purple Heart, stand out like talismans.
I thought of Gator every so often when passing by a memorial roster somewhere in the nation’s capital, scrolling over the lists of war dead posted in a House of Representatives hallway, maybe. But mostly, all that was in the past.
‘Legal, but crummy’
Early this February, I received a message from Charlie Williams, who was a lance corporal on that Golf Company deployment. He had gotten wind that Gator’s posthumous Purple Heart certificate, his medals and what was described as the flag that adorned his casket were all for sale through an online auction site called Alexander Historical Auctions.
“This strikes me as the kind of thing that’s legal, but crummy,” he said in an email.
The items had gone missing years ago, through a series of family misfortunes. For years, Gator’s mother, Maureen O’Haire, struggled with finances and threats of eviction. Her house caught fire in 2015, destroying nearly everything. The family saved the few things they could, including the urn containing her husband’s ashes. A firefighter who had served with Gator in Fallujah showed up to that blaze, knew where the medals were, and ensured they were recovered.
Maureen died soon after, in 2016, and many of her possessions ended up in a storage unit. In the aftermath of the house fire and then Maureen’s death, Gator’s siblings never found out what happened to the medals. There seemed to have been a lapse in paying the storage fee, but nobody knew for sure.
His family certainly didn’t want them sold and didn’t know who was selling them.
The online auction clock was already ticking away when I clicked on the website. The bidding had gotten to a few hundred dollars, inexpensive enough for Gator’s friends to come up with, but there were still days left in the bidding. Who knew how high the price might go?
Mr. Williams told me as soon as a bid was placed, somebody immediately topped it. The family and friends were worried the nameless seller was trying to juice the price. Gator’s family and friends had tried everything they could think of to reclaim the medals, he said, with no luck.
Would I be able to help?
Of course I was going to help. Could there be any question?
Walter O’Haire was pushed by his family to graduate from high school, something he had to do to join the Marines. His father, Thomas, died just before the young man shipped off to boot camp in 2005.
Maureen came from rock-ribbed Irish stock and at the time of Gator’s death took care of four other biological children and four adopted children.
Gator was close with his family, especially his older brother William, who had been in the Navy, and the two traded joking insults about choosing the wrong branch of the military. Gator often sneaked away from Camp Lejeune, N.C., to go home on weekends. He was especially fond of absconding from base to get plastered at Boston’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade.
High-jinks aside, the young Marine was an outstanding infantryman, says Brian Mullen, a staff sergeant in Fallujah, who served more than two decades himself, eventually retiring as a master sergeant. He never heard the young man complain, even though griping comes second nature to most grunts.
“He was out to prove himself every single day, not to someone else, but to himself,” Master Sgt. Mullen remembers. Gator’s death hit him hard. “It feels like it happened yesterday every single day,” he said.
Master Sgt. Mullen and the other Marines from Gator’s platoon kept close to Maureen after her son’s death.
At his memorial service back in the states, the O’Haires weren’t somber, they were jovial. “The O’Haires were joking and smiling and having a good time, they were celebrating his life,” Master Sgt. Mullen says. “That was such a big deal to me.”
When he was buried, the state police shut down I-93, right there in the middle of Boston, to give the funeral procession a clear run.
The next year, Maureen paid for a handful of his Marine buddies to come to Boston for his beloved St. Paddy’s parade. They marched in it. They drank beer with the band Dropkick Murphys. It was a Gator-sized celebration.
The oldest award
The Purple Heart is the country’s oldest military award, first given by Gen. George Washington to troops during the Revolutionary War as a Badge of Military Merit.
The modern version, whose criteria were established in 1932, is awarded to troops wounded in combat. For those who make the ultimate sacrifice, it is presented posthumously to the surviving family.
There’s a federal law prohibiting the sale of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for military heroism. But no such law exists for other military medals. That means anyone at a pawnshop, antique mall, swap meet or online auction house is free to buy, sell and trade the memorabilia.
For collectors, the Purple Heart has become a bauble that can fetch a premium. Some medals are awarded to troops for doing little more than signing up to join the military. But the Purple Heart requires sacrifice and is recognizable to many Americans. It brings the aura of war to the den of any armchair warrior.
The monetary cost of the medal is a bargain compared with what was paid by the person who earned it. Those presented posthumously, and which can have the deceased’s name engraved on them, are especially tempting to collectors because they are a one-of-a kind representation of pain, loss and heroism.
I wanted to better understand the mind-set of the collector. So I contacted Army Major Zachariah Fike, a well-known figure among those who buy and sell Purple Hearts. He started collecting military memorabilia as a young officer. He had returned from a stressful combat deployment to Iraq and found the hobby to be healing. He dived deep to research the background of this or that trinket from a long-ago battlefield.
In 2009 his mother gave him a Christmas present to add to his collection: a posthumous Purple Heart from WWII that she’d haggled a dealer down to $100.
“This was my first U.S. medal,” Maj. Fike said. “I was excited that my mom got it but then I was struck by a sadness because I knew what the medal symbolized.”
He deployed to Afghanistan soon after and was hit by shrapnel from a Katyusha rocket, earning his own Purple Heart. When he got back from that deployment he vowed to about the Purple Heart his mother had given him. He eventually found the relatives of the original recipient and returned the medal to them.
Maj. Fike’s story made the national news and soon people were asking him to help find lost medals. He founded Purple Hearts Reunited, a nonprofit to help with awards that have been lost, stolen or otherwise separated from the proper owner.
The group has reunited more than 800 military medals, including Purple Hearts, with recipients or families since its official inception in 2012. Some, Maj. Fike included, believe there is an unseen power at work that helps them in their mission.
“Without making me sound loony, I have seen things over the past decade that made my hair stand up,” he said. “It’s like these guys are willing these medals to return.”
In the case of Gator’s anonymous medal seller, we initially thought we had the culprit in our sights. Mr. Williams told me a man named Adrian Torres had been reaching out to Gator’s friends, asking for background information on the Purple Heart and their dead comrade. Mr. Williams assumed Mr. Torres had the medals and was trying to drive up the auction price.
Suspicions
I tracked down Mr. Torres. Our suspicions proved to be unfounded.
True, Mr. Torres is a military memorabilia collector. He scours the internet to find items from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, in early February, the offerings of the medals of Walter K. O’Haire caught his eye.
It was the first time he’d ever seen what appeared to be a posthumous Purple Heart from either Iraq or Afghanistan for sale on the web.
“I came across that grouping and saw how modern it was and how weird it was that it was being sold off for auction,” he told me. “I always contact the family if I find them.”
Mr. Torres sleuthed around Facebook, found posts related to Gator and tracked down some of the Marines who had served in Golf Company. He sent them messages to alert them to the online auction under way with its clock ticking down.
The collector merely wanted to make sure the objects made their way back to where they belonged.
My next call was to the president of Alexander Historical Auctions LLC, Bill Panagopulos.
I reached him while he was waiting at the phlebotomist and he warned me he’d likely have to jump off the call when the needle was ready for him. He had prostate cancer and was undergoing treatment.
The 63-year-old auctioneer has been in the business for about three decades, selling all manner of military memorabilia, including Nazi relics. When we first spoke he was brokering the sale of Adolf Hitler’s toilet seat, a Berchtesgaden collectible that turned out to be worth thousands of dollars.
He was also smarting from an email Charlie Williams sent him—it was more threat than request—seeking to get the medals back.
I tried to soothe him, telling him my story, vouching for Gator and the efforts being made, and apologizing for Charlie. After all, what else should he expect from a hotheaded Marine?
It seemed to work. Mr. Palearn nagopulos said he didn’t own the lot, that he was just a broker but that he’d immediately take the medals off the auction block. He’d buy them from the consignor, the guy who legally owned them, with his own money if he had to so that Gator’s memorabilia made it back where they belonged.
He declared loudly over the phone that he was proud to do it. It would be a mitzvah, he said. And while he, himself, was Greek, a mitzvah would undoubtedly count seeing as his wife was Jewish and all. There was a tender heart underneath the brash facade. It wasn’t about money, he said.
Who knows—he might need the cosmic goodwill. Mr. Panagopulos told me that coming face-to-face with his mortality had contributed to his desire to curry a little divine favor. He said his dad had been in the Navy, that he loved history and respected service.
Once a Marine…
He soon after called to inform me that he was securing the medals. He wouldn’t reveal the identity of the consignor. That would be bad for business. But he did say the guy was a frequent dealer and wasn’t into charity cases.
And yet, despite the financial outlay, Mr. Panagopulos wanted nothing from the O’Haires in return.
No, wait, he did want something, he decided. Something small. He wanted a Marine Corps flag signed by Gator’s Marine Corps pals, by the guys who knew him best. He could put it on his office wall, look up at it and remember his good deed. He also maybe would like to present the medals himself to Gator’s buddies or family, a nice bookend to the story.
“I have to grandstand, I have to promote my business,” he said, before adding, “But not at the expense of Gator.”
I called one of Gator’s old platoon mates who said he had a USMC flag from that Fallujah deployment that everyone could sign. Then I decided to do Mr. Panagopulos one better than a flag.
I sent a note to the Marine officer whose signature was on Gator’s Purple Heart certificate, the one included in the auction lot. I didn’t know if I’d get a response because the old Marine had since moved up in the world and was no longer in uniform.
I wrote to him not just as a reporter but as a Marine. I asked if he would maybe send Mr. Panagopulos a note of thanks for doing the right thing.
A response came within hours with the good news he’d be happy to express his gratitude to Mr. Panagopulos.
“It is unsettling to think of those items reflecting Walter’s service and sacrifice bouncing around the internet and winding up with someone who might well not appreciate their true meaning,” the now-retired officer wrote.
And he signed the email not as a former secretary of Defense, but as a Marine: “Semper Fi, Jim Mattis.”
The most important thing seemed done. Mr. Panagopulos said he was removing the medals, flag and certificate from the market and that he was ready to send them wherever they should go.
The brother
I had never met Gator’s brother William before, but I gave him a call.
William O’Haire’s accent is like a stream of pure, distilled Boston. He grew up in South Boston, but now lives in Lynn, Mass., with his wife and two kids. William served more than a half decade as a Navy submariner, getting out of the service long before his younger brother, Walter, enlisted.
William never could figure out how the medals ended up in the hands of the mysterious consignor. “The last thing I knew, it was in my mother’s bedroom,” he said. “When I cleaned up storage, it wasn’t there. I have been trying to figure out what happened.”
He was outraged that someone would be able to sell off the essence of Gator’s legacy.
“I don’t think people should be able to sell that,” William O’Haire said. “It’s memories of a dead person, you shouldn’t be profiting off a life that was given for freedom.”
Then, just before the medals were to be mailed, I missed a call from Mr. Panagopulos, who left a spirited voice message followed up by a surprising email.
“You know what? I just now received a letter from the Maryland Attorney General whom William O’Haire has sicced on me,” Mr. Panagopulos wrote.
As I was working my diplomatic efforts, and unbeknown to me, attorneys general from two states were slowly turning the legal cranks in response to complaints registered before I got involved.
Just before Charlie Williams sent me the last-resort email, a local veterans group contacted the Massachusetts AG’s office to let them know about Gator’s medals. Someone from the office spoke with William O’Haire and the machinery got moving.
Since Mr. Panagopulos is based in Maryland, that state’s AG was contacted. The result was an official inquiry mailed to Mr. Panagopulos to find out if the medals were obtained legally or if there was any wrongdoing.
Mr. Panagopulos turned sour and replied simply that according to state and federal laws, the medals were the property of the consignor and not the O’Haires or anyone else.
The medal was now tangled up with attorneys-general inquiries and Mr. Panagopulos would be on the hook for a $450-an-hour lawyer to sort out the problem. Besides, Mr. Panagopulos said, he was just an auctioneer, a middleman, a broker.
“I’m probably going to simply return it to the consignor who will be free to sell it, burn it, or throw it in Long Island Sound,” Mr. Panagopulos told me.
For Mr. Panagopulos, to legally own something is to legally own something. And to sell it is to sell it, simple as that. If William O’Haire was going to take the legal road with him, well, goodbye to the mitzvah.
Mr. Panagopulos suddenly seemed like the arch-villain from a comic book. And at one point I asked him how he could put a price
on something like this? In true Panagopulian fashion, the voluble auctioneer took two hours, three bourbons, dozens of profanities and at least one cigar to explain his mindset over the phone.
He told me that it saddens him every time a set of medals comes up for auction because it means that the service member no longer has anyone to care for his or her legacy. Oftentimes, some distant relative finds the stuff in an attic and gets rid of them, sometimes a descendant just needs some pocket money. He’s seen it so many times that he figured that was the case with Gator’s memorabilia.
“I said what the hell kind of family would give this up?” he told me. “I didn’t feel comfortable offering it for sale but that’s my job.”
And, he added, the collec- tors he’s worked with for decades aren’t disrespecting the memory of deceased warriors, on the contrary, they’re honoring them.
Collectors often buy Purple Hearts and meticulously research the deceased in the National Archives. They display the medals in a place of prominence.
“They become the new family, and you can quote me on that,” Mr. Panagopulos said. “They live vicariously through it. They feel like they’re standing next to the guy when he threw that grenade into that pillbox.”
When a family abdicates taking care of a service member’s legacy, Mr. Panagopulos feels it’s his job to make sure his memorabilia ends up in a place of reverence. Why not in the hands of a dedicated and sympathetic collector?
I was taking flak from both sides. William O’Haire was peppering me with questions and Mr. Panagopulos was calling on me to resolve the impasse. The whole thing was falling apart.
So I thought about it all. And I sent the auctioneer a message.
I told him that none of this was about him, or about me or anyone else. This was about doing right by the legacy of a Marine who gave his life in service of his country. This was about Walter K. O’Haire.
I told him there was still time to make good on that mitzvah.
On a Saturday, a note came from Mr. Panagopulos that he’d had a horrible infection as he was getting ready to start a new round of radiation. He’d been stuck in a Philadelphia ER suffering for 33 hours.
“This is karma, or ‘bad joss,’ ” he said. “Give me your mailing address. You got ’em.”
He later insisted he had made the decision to return the items before the recent round of woes befell him, and that he doesn’t really believe in bad karma or curses. And yet, as he prepared to ship them, he fired off another text: “Hope Gator forgives me.”
A few days later, a large, unmarked brown box arrived on the front porch of my house in Chicago. Inside were the medals, the flag, the certificate. Lance Cpl. Walter O’Haire’s medals were off the market, sitting safely at my home.
Extraordinary care
I opened the box, which Mr. Panagopulos packed with extraordinary care. I saw that the frame that held the Purple Heart certificate had been damaged somewhere along the way, as had the frame surrounding the medals. I took them to my neighbor’s basement wood shop and we repaired them together.
The framed shadow box, something many service members use to display their achievements, had been made using no nails, just wood joinery, a work of craftsmanship and of love, it seemed. And the back had been signed, in gold pen, by a man named Frank DeAngelis.
I found Mr. DeAngelis’s son, who told me about his father and about this particular shadow box. A WWII Navy vet, Mr. DeAngelis started a hobby of making boxes and in his retirement and up until his death made it a nearly full-time endeavor. At some point during the Iraq war he made it his mission to give a box to the families of every Marine killed in the conflict.
I held one of them in my hands. I was doing my part to restore it and continue the legacy. I couldn’t think of shipping this by mail again. I decided I had to hand deliver it to William O’Haire.
When I got to the airport the next day, trundling through security with all sorts of bubble-wrapped frames, an airline employee told me that I couldn’t carry on four items, it was against policy and FAA regulations and this and that.
I told her the story and she said, simply, ”You’re good.”
I landed in Boston, rented a white Hyundai and drove to Lynn, where I met William and handed over to him the bundle, which he unwrapped and spread out on his living-room couch, under a hand-drawn portrait of Gator he’s had for years.
“I’m just happy to have it back,” he said. Then he went off to retrieve a binder of letters the family received after his brother’s death. From a congressman, from commanding generals, from the Secretary of Defense, from President George W. Bush. He grabbed other mementos of Gator: family photos, his identification tags, even Gator’s Humvee driver’s license and his chow hall meal card.
“I don’t throw anything away,” William said.
It turns out that the flag that was on the auction block wasn’t the burial flag. William showed the actual flag to me, on display in its own case, on its own shelf, in a place of reverence at the back of the house.
He walked me outside to say goodbye and smoke a Newport as we talked about some of the other Marines from Golf Company, the ones who helped get the medals back and who live in the area. Some of the other Marines who aren’t around anymore.
We shook hands and I said I’d come back up, once the pandemic had subsided, and we could get everybody together and drink a beer, or a dozen, to toast the memory of Gator.
William said, absolutely, we would. It’s what Gator would have wanted.
The PurpleHeart is the country’s oldest military award, first given by Washington.
FROM TOP: DAVID DEGNER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; GETTY IMAGES
ROBERT L. HANSEN (2)
Lance Cpl. Walter O’Haire, known to his friends as Gator and pictured at far right, was killed just days short of his 21st birthday. His mother, shown at the funeral, died in 2016 and his service medals vanished. An auction site owned by Bill Panagopulos, above, posted the memorabilia for sale by an unknown consignor. Members of Lance Cpl. O’Haire’s old unit, Golf Company, including Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Kesling, rallied to try to save the decorations. After a lengthy lobbying campaign that drew the support of former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the buddies managed to get the medals back. Mr. Kesling traveled to the Massachusetts home of Lance Cpl. O’Haire’s brother William, shown top right, to hand over the materials.
Reporter Ben Kesling received Lance Cpl. O’Haire’s medals and Purple Heart certificate from Mr. Panagopulos, but the frames that held them had been damaged at some point. He took them to his neighbor’s basement wood shop and they repaired them together.
FROM CLOCKWISE: KRISTON JAE BETHEL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; GETTY IMAGES; DAVID DEGNER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)
Mr. Kesling hands Walter O’Haire’s Purple Heart certificate to the fallen Marine’s brother William outside his home in Lynn, Mass., above. Family and friends held a joyful celebration of Gator’s life in 2007, below. When he was buried, the state police shut down I-93, right in the middle of Boston, to give the funeral procession a clear run.
