NORTHAMPTON — On Monday, thousands of people are expected to attend the Florence Memorial Day Parade. Among them will be two women whose families paid the highest price.
The women will join others as part of the parade’s Gold Star families, honoring those whose family members have died during their military service. For both women, it will be their first time participating in that capacity in the Florence parade, although both have a long history of remembering and honoring their fallen loved ones.
Northampton resident Susan Loehn grew up attending the Florence parade and for four decades her mother, Joan Johnson, was a mainstay of the Gold Star Mothers. Her mother became involved after her son was killed in Vietnam.
“She took it very seriously. She was part of the group and she used to write letters to other mothers who lost their children in war,” Loehn recalled.
This year, Loehn will take her mother’s place. Loehn’s older brother, Kenneth Johnson, was killed in action while serving in Vietnam. A student at Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School, Johnson enlisted at 17 after his father signed the papers allowing him to do so.
“Some of his friends had been there and come back and talked to him,” Loehn said of her brother’s desire to enlist. “Ken really believed that it was the right thing to do.”
Loehn, who was against the war, recalled having conversations with her older brother about it but he told her he was going to protect her and the family.
“I never thought he wouldn’t come back,” she said. “I was only 17. I did see friends come back. I watched the TV and all the horrible things that were happening but you just don’t think its going to happen to you.”
Johnson joined the Marine Corps on Nov. 29, 1966, and arrived in Vietnam on Nov. 7, 1967, where he was assigned for duty and served with Company B, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, 3rd Marine Division.
He was killed on Feb. 16, 1968, in Quang Tri Province in South Vietnam. Loehn said he died during the Tet Offensive. Even 50 years later, Loehn remembers getting the news her brother had been killed.
It was a Saturday morning, she said, two days after he died. Her father was at the VFW, her mother had gone shopping and she was at her boyfriend’s house in Northampton, leaving her younger brothers and sisters home alone.
“They called me and said there were two men in uniform at the door,” she said.
She told her siblings to call their father. She thought maybe her brother was wounded. Maybe 15 minutes later her dad called and said, “He’s gone,” Loehn recalled.
She took a taxi home but was crying so hard she couldn’t even tell the cab driver her address.
Loehn said the outpouring of support at the time from the community was tremendous but Johnson’s death changed her family forever.
“The Memorial Day parade, I don’t think about it all the time,” she said. “I’ve had a good life and I’m so grateful for my brother and sisters and their families.”
In addition to her siblings and their memories, Loehn has all the letters her brother wrote to their parents describing what he saw, funny things that happened and how much he missed home.
For Chicopee resident Tracy Taylor, participating in Memorial Day parades and being active with the Gold Star Mothers is a way to honor her son.
“It gives me a platform where I am able to say my son’s name … I’m able to share him with other people,” Taylor said. “It’s all about his sacrifice and what he chose to do and how he protects this country still.”
Army Spc. Kenneth J. Iwasinski enlisted after receiving his GED with help from the Army, his mother said. He spent his 21st birthday in boot camp at Fort Benning, in Georgia, before being sent to Fort Carson, in Colorado, where he trained for the infantry.
Taylor remembers talking to her son shortly before his deployment about a Red Sox no-hitter in September 2006. Iwasinski was deployed to Baghdad as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom on Oct. 6, 2006. “As he would tell me, the red zone,” Taylor said.
The next time she saw her son was for his 22nd birthday. He was home on leave for two weeks, she said.
“I remember sitting at my kitchen table and he was just chowing on Chinese food,” she said.
There are also pictures to remember the occasion — Iwasinski sitting next to his mother with his younger sister Amanda Taylor, lying across their laps. Taylor and Iwasinski would talk some while he was in Iraq. Each time the call would come from a different number.
Iwasinski was killed on Oct. 14, 2007, when a roadside bomb went off near the Humvee he was driving. The shrapnel from the explosion severed his femoral artery, killing him, Taylor said. When she learned of his death, Taylor said she could not wrap her brain around it. Her son was the only one in the Humvee who died, and normally served as the gunner, she said.
After his death, Taylor said, she wrote letters to the other soldiers urging them not to have survivor’s guilt.
“It was not Kenny’s wish to have them suffer,” she said.
He was 22½ to the day when he was killed and had been in the military a year and a half. More than a decade after his death, Taylor said she is still waiting for new memories and photographs that won’t come. Taylor remembered her son last week as a lover of Halloween, NASCAR and a fierce protector of his sister.
“In Kenny’s eyes, she walked on water,” Taylor said of the siblings’ relationship.
“He walked on water for her,” Peggy McKinnon, Taylor’s mother, added. “They were a mutual admiration society, those two.”
McKinnon remembers her grandson’s impish streak, highlighted by the time as a toddler he tried to drive a bulldozer. It was Easter and Kenny’s uncle had taken him and his cousin to burn off some energy, McKinnon recalled. Construction work was being done at the end of the street and at the site was a bulldozer.
Her son-in-law put Iwasinski up into the cab of the bulldozer and then walked around to put his daughter in the side, she said. He didn’t realize the keys were in the ignition.
“Kenny tries to start it. It makes such a big noise, his cousin ends up in the mud off the edge,” McKinnon said laughing. “And Kenny is up there saying ‘Push dirt. Push dirt.’”
Rain holds a special meaning for Taylor since Iwasinski’s funeral. It rained that day and ever since then, Taylor said it has rained every time she has had something associated with Iwasinski.
“Just like the teardrops of the fallen. That’s the way I saw it that day. That’s the way I still see it,” she said. “It’s so odd. It’s like a comforting feeling for me because it happens at the most important days to remember Kenny, to honor Kenny. It’s like he’s telling me he’s there.”
Emily Cutts can be reached at ecutts@gazettenet.com.