State buries two on Tuesday
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Two thousand, five hundred and counting. That’s the number of American troops killed in Iraq in the past three years.
It’s a number that stuns us — wasn’t it just yesterday the death toll surpassed a thousand?
It’s a number that numbs us; The death toll stories mix with the stories about roadside bombs, terrorist hunts and Donald Rumsfeld and make us change the channel.
Gotta' check out that new ABC reality show, anyway.
But this week, those numbers had Nebraska names. Brent Zoucha. Ben Slaven.
They had faces familiar to Clarks and Beatrice.
That snapped us to attention like the honor guards saluting two closed caskets outside of two small-town funerals.
Two. That was the number of soldiers buried in our state on Tuesday. Seems like a pretty big number, doesn’t it?
Slaven remembered as 'jokester' with serious side
By CARA PESEK | Lincoln Journal Star
BEATRICE — The scrapbook just inside the entrance of St. John Lutheran Church showed the evolution of an ultrasound picture to a soldier.
It showed twin baby boys on their mother’s lap. A few pages later, those same twin boys played in a swimming pool.
A tow-headed kid with a bowl cut held up a Christmas present. Toward the end of the book he had his own little Christmas tree.
On the second-to-last page, he was all grown up, but still wearing a pair of silly glasses.
And on the last page, there was no picture, just a program from a memorial service for Benjamin J. Slaven.
Slaven, a member of the U.S. Army Reserve, died on June 9 after a roadside bomb detonated near his Humvee in Ad Diwaniyah, Iraq.
He was 22 years old, a member of the Lincoln-based 308th Transportation Co., which was less than three months into its tour of duty when Slaven was killed.
On Tuesday, hundreds of mourners filled St. John Lutheran Church, where seven months earlier they had mourned Army Spc. Darren Howe. Howe died last November, three weeks after he was injured in a roadside blast.
Pastor Joann K. Kramer described Slaven as a “loving, caring, jokester of a boy.”
Mourners laughed and cried as she described one of his favorite tricks, running across the room and then falling down after hitting an imaginary clothesline.
He did that one time in Wal-Mart while his twin brother, Sean, was working there.
After shoppers realized that Slaven was OK, they cheered, she said.
His family thought he could be a stuntman.
Instead, he became a soldier.
Slaven had a serious side, too.
Kramer said he was respectful. He liked little kids. He loved his job, working with developmentally disabled teens at Beatrice State Developmental Center.
And he was serious about his duties as a soldier, she said.
Hundreds of Beatrice residents lined the streets and showed their support for his decision to become one.
They lined the 2 1/2 miles of highway from the church to Evergreen Home Cemetery, waving flags, hands over their hearts, just as they had when Howe died. Some held signs that said, “Thank you.”
The Patriot Guard Riders lined the entrance to the church, forming a corridor of flags.
Across the street and a block north of the church, about a dozen members of the Westboro Baptist Church picketed Slaven’s funeral, as they had the funerals of many soldiers killed by improvised explosive devices.
But they were barely visible, even from the church parking lot.
“It’s as though they weren’t there,” said Bob Selzer, a Patriot Guard ride captain from Lincoln.
At the cemetery, just after Slaven’s parents were each given a folded American flag, the Patriot Guard presented them with a plaque.
“It’s kind of a new thing we started,” said Nebraska Capt. Cliff Leach. “We do it to pay our respects to our fallen heroes.”
And Slaven fit that bill.
Shortly after his death, his father, Bruce Slaven, received a phone call from the wife of Ben Slaven’s first sergeant, Kramer said.
The caller said her husband had described Slaven as one of the most responsible and respectful soldiers he had ever had, the type of guy who actually volunteered for duties like cleaning the floor with a toothbrush.
That was just how he was, Kramer said, from the time he was a tow-headed kid until his death.
“Ben Slaven was a good man.”
Reach Cara Pesek at 473-7361 or cpesek@journalstar.com.
Hundreds pay respect to Zoucha
By MATTHEW HANSEN | Lincoln Journal Star
CLARKS — It looked like the reddest, whitest and bluest parade ever held in Clarks.
Hundreds of people and hundreds of flags lined the two-block main street.
Stooped World War II vets struggled to hold large flags aloft; Little Leaguers in uniform waved mini-flags and held hands over hearts; cheerleaders wore red, white and blue skirts.
Nobody smiled or threw candy to the children. And many residents had run their front-yard flags only halfway up their poles, as they had every morning since the bad news traveled from faraway Al Bu Hardan, Iraq, to this town of about 375 people.
Others mounted Old Glory on pickups and Harleys. They drove past the flags on main street, past the flags at half-staff and into the traffic jam surrounding St. Peter’s Catholic Church.
Hundreds walked through the church’s main doors and down the aisle toward the final American flag, this one covering the coffin of 19-year-old Brent Zoucha.
An estimated crowd of 500 packed into the sanctuary, balcony, basement and then onto the front lawn and listened as the Rev. Ken Vavrina told them the young Marine had lived a life that honored the flag and died trying to protect it.
“There are some people, and thank God, who say ‘What can I do to make life better for others?’” the priest said.
“Lance Corporal Brent Zoucha was one of those young men.’”
Zoucha, an infantryman who worked with mortars, died June 9 when a land mine exploded.
He was more than a soldier, family and friends said during and after the service.
He was a natural with a wrench who took pride in fixing up an old pickup before he left for Iraq.
He was one of the state’s top small school tracksters and a standout basketball player for High Plains Community High School before he graduated last year.
During one practice he dunked a basketball so hard he shattered the backboard, best friend and pallbearer Levi Lindburg wrote in a letter read during the service.
“We just laughed because it was so cool.”
He loved hunting and fishing, he loved high school sweetheart Meghan Hammond and he loved causing mischief and concealing it with a smirk recognizable to everyone in town.
But mostly he loved the idea of being a Marine, following older brother Dyrek into that branch of the military last year even as the situation worsened in Iraq.
“It’s just what they always wanted to do, serve the country,” said Loren Lindgreen, a close friend of Brent’s two older brothers.
“Being a Marine was what he lived for.”
During the service, the priest urged Dyrek to stay in Nebraska instead of returning to Iraq, where he’s served for two years.
“I know there’s nothing you want to do more than … get revenge for this,” Vavrina said. “Don’t do it.”
That would spare mother Rita Zoucha from “the agony of thinking she may lose another child” in Iraq, the priest said.
The church bells rang and hundreds of people got back in their flag-decorated vehicles and headed back down a main drag awash in red, white and blue.
After those assembled at Calvary Cemetery said the Lord’s Prayer, flinched through a 21-gun salute and wept as a lone trumpeter played “Taps,” a young Marine took the flag from Zoucha’s coffin and handed it to Rita Zoucha.
This flag wasn’t fluttering. It was folded neatly and clutched tightly between the hands of a sobbing mother.
Reach Matthew Hansen at 473-7245 or mhansen@journalstar.com.
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