Corner store, community remember 4 lost to war on terror by helping South Portland troops

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — A letter arrived at South Portland High School late the first week of June 2008.

“I remember trying to make sense of what was in my hands, who it was from, how I was receiving it now, and then looking carefully at the date and coming to the realization that writing this letter was one of the last things that Justin ever did,” recalled Jeanne Crocker, who was the principal of the school at the time.

The letter, sent in appreciation of the teachers and staff at the high school, was written by alumnus Justin Buxbaum while he was serving with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. It arrived just a day after his funeral.

Buxbaum was killed by a gunshot wound on May 26 of that year, the day he mailed the letter. Memorial Day.

He is one of four men with South Portland ties — three of whom were graduates from the high school — to die at war in the Middle East in the last five years. The war on terror’s toll on South Portland has been greater, in that regard, than on any other town or city in Maine.

The tragedies this community has absorbed, and that it continues to send young people overseas, gives Memorial Day here a special poignancy.

“South Portland in the past two wars has lost four of its young men directly in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Kevin Battle, who retired in January from police work after 26 years with the local force. “Those are young boys I remember playing soccer with my sons, or basketball. I remember talking to them as students in the parking lot when I was the high school resource officer. To me, I know them and remember them.

“If you go around town, other people will tell you the same thing,” he continued. “Everybody has their memories. For us, these aren’t just distant names on a television. People not only remember the person, but remember the person growing up to the man they’d become. Unfortunately, they paid the ultimate sacrifice, and now we have the memories, so they can live on.”

South Portland in the Middle East

Employees at Broadway Variety can rattle off the preferences of men who are thousands of miles away. Gill likes chocolate chip cookies. Seth likes spicy food. Mackenzie likes Humpty Dumpty barbecue-flavored potato chips.

The corner store at 771 Broadway has become South Portland’s pipeline to local men who are serving overseas, with owner Rose West keeping diligent records of who is enlisting, who is being deployed and who is coming back. She asks family members about what foods or supplies they prefer, tracks their mailing addresses across the Middle East and regularly sends out care packages of about 30 pounds apiece.

Members of the community stuff the donation jar on the counter or drop off items to include in the care packages. In case visitors to the store are unaware of the local custom, West sometimes mischievously leaves the big boxes in the aisles of the store — large, conspicuous labels announcing their imminent departure for Afghanistan — so even the least observant shoppers can’t help but stub their toe on the staff’s benevolent mission.

West said there are always about four South Portland natives stationed in Afghanistan at any given time.

“Every one that comes back, another local boy takes his place,” West said.

And the numbers of South Portland High School graduates stepping up to join the military has only increased after news began coming in of their fellow Red Riots’ deaths overseas.

Former high school soccer star Angel Rosa, 21, was fatally wounded while serving with the U.S. Marines in Iraq on March 13, 2007. Jason Swiger, 24, whose mother Valorie battled with the city over whether she could post supportive yellow ribbons on utility poles four years earlier, was killed by an improvised explosive device while stationed in Iraq with the Army on March 25, 2007.

Joshua Kirk, 30, who came to South Portland as a student at Southern Maine Community College, died from wounds suffered when his Army unit’s outpost was attacked by insurgents wielding small arms and rocket-propelled grenades.

“This community knows what it means when the platitudes about ‘the ultimate sacrifice’ come out,” said Laurie Wood, Buxbaum’s aunt and assistant principal at South Portland High School. “This community knows what that means.”

Yet, the year after Buxbaum was killed, Wood said, seven graduating seniors from the high school joined the military. Historically, she said, one or two people from each graduating class would join.

“Our school began recognizing those going into the military during the seniors’ final assemblies,” Wood said. “We give them flag pins. We ask them to come up and be recognized, and they’re the ones who get the standing ovations from the community there that night.”

With the memories of lost loved ones still fresh, signs of military support can be found in all corners of the long, narrow city. U.S. Marine Corps and American flags hanging on a stop sign, the names of the four South Portland casualties on the marquee at A-Best Windows.

Lemonade Day Maine will bring its mock start-up stand, run by entrepreneurial teens as part of a business education program, to Broadway Variety on June 3. But in South Portland, the stand will give 75 percent of its proceeds to the Wounded Heroes of Maine charity instead of the program’s typical 50 percent.

In South Portland, it seems, everybody gives a little more to the cause.

South Portland in history

The city’s deepened connection to the ongoing wars in the Middle East appear to have helped rekindle awareness of past foreign wars. Wood said a Vietnam plaque that had spent decades on an out-of-the-way stretch of wall at the high school was moved in recent years to a more prominent location in the lobby’s trophy case.

West and Battle were among those on a citizens’ committee that raised money for a military appreciation monument, installed last year in Mill Creek Park and now awaiting a summer of landscaping and park revitalization. They’re now raising money for granite benches at the site.

Air Force veteran Lee Humiston last year opened the Maine Military Museum and Learning Center in South Portland, displaying his vast collection of artifacts and memorabilia from wars gone by.

“I would definitely say South Portland has a bit of a heightened recognition,” Wood said, adding that Red Riots classes from the past few years will know more about 20th century wars than South Portland graduates “over the previous 20 years” combined.

“I think Memorial Day means a lot here in South Portland,” Edward Cook, Korean War veteran and former commander of South Portland’s VFW Post 832, told the BDN. “We’re very patriotic in South Portland. Very patriotic. It’s not just another day off for people here.”

It doesn’t take much homework for students to uncover a strong military history right in their backyards.

In the early 1940s, the entire Cushing’s Point waterfront neighborhood was cleared out and leveled to make way for wartime shipyards, drawing in 25,000 shipbuilders to work at New England Shipbuilding Corp. on what is now the park area surrounding Bug Light. Along with Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding and South Portland Shipbuilding, the city was home to day-and-night mass production of bare-bones military supply vessels known as Liberty Ships.

New England Shipbuilding Corp. reportedly pumped out 244 Liberty Ships during its three years of operation.

Going back even further, the area now established as South Portland was also home to a Civil War mustering camp, as well as the 1803 Fort Preble, remnants of which still can be found on the campus of Southern Maine Community College.

At war today

“I’m hoping this is the last place I live,” said South Portland metalsmith and artist Jac Ouellette, who created the red steel “eternal flame” sculpture found atop the new monument. “It’s just such a great community. People are active, and I think people really care about their neighbors there.”

Store owner West is quick to point out that a folded and framed American flag, which was flown over Camp Phoenix in Afghanistan on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that helped instigate the current wars, is a gift not to her and her store but to the South Portland community.

“Every [care package] box includes a little note that says, ‘From your friends and neighbors in South Portland,’” she said.

West said one local store or business in every town should assume the role of headquarters for care package collections, an idea echoed by Miranda McCallum. McCallum’s son, Seth, is a 2009 South Portland High School graduate currently serving in Afghanistan with the Marines.

“I’m a single parent, and Seth went to Afghanistan and I guess I found myself to be alone with no support, and I don’t think that I would have made it through without Rose and Broadway Variety,” she said. “They’ve just made me feel like people care, and that all the troops are being supported.

“This is a great town and I feel blessed to be here,” McCallum continued. “I really believe that God puts you in certain places for certain reasons, and I just don’t know how I would have dealt with it if I wasn’t in this town. I’m honored to be a citizen of South Portland.”

The South Portland Memorial Day parade is scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. Monday at Broadway and Breakwater Drive, and travel down Broadway to Mill Creek Park. There will be a wreath-laying ceremony at noon near Bug Light Park.