Dec. 10, 1964 - Mrs. E.L. Stoneburner saw the messenger walking up the steps, and she knew. Her last son was dead.
“You can’t go through it twice and not know,” she said.
She spoke quietly, a few hours after learning that her third son, Maj. John Stoneburner (pictured), 34, was killed Tuesday in a Viet Cong ambush in Vietnam.
Twenty years ago, she lived through the same scene — twice.
John was just a boy when his older brothers went off to fight in World War II.
Bill, a lieutenant and a pilot in the Army, died in 1943. His plane went down in the North Sea.
Earl, a private, was killed in infantry action a month after he arrived on the front, in 1945.
“John was all we had left,” said Mr. Stoneburner, 68, a retired railroad conductor.
The parents, numb with shock, did not want to discuss the war in Vietnam.
“We, like everyone else, are confused by it,” said Mr. Stoneburner. “It doesn’t make it any easier or harder to take. John was a West Point man, just doing his duty.” Mrs. Stoneburner said: “The suffering is enough without asking why.”
Major Stoneburner, who held a master’s degree in nuclear science, arrived in the combat area on Thanksgiving Day.
He wrote his mother when he first arrived: “It’s beautiful — a garden spot.”
Before he left the United States, his parents drove to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to see him, his wife, and three children.
“John sent our Christmas present home with us,” said Mr. Stoneburner. “I don’t know if I’ll ever open it.”
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