March 22, 2004
In small Illinois town, Marine’s death lingers a year later
By Don Babwin
Associated Press
ST. ANNE, Ill. — When Deborah Cotton told her second graders at St. Anne Grade School recently to draw a picture of someone they’d like to see honored with a postage stamp, she figured they’d turn in an Abraham Lincoln or two and maybe even a Britney Spears.
The most popular choice didn’t come from a history book or the pages of People magazine, though. Ryan Beaupre came from down the street.
On March 21, 2003, the day after the United States launched an attack on Iraq, 30-year-old Marine Capt.Ryan Beaupre died in a helicopter crash, one of the first American servicemen to die in the war. For St. Anne schoolchildren, the young man who once sat in these same classrooms made the war real.
“He was one of them,” says Cotton, who once counted Beaupre as a student.
This week, as the country marks the first anniversary of the war, Beaupre still is very much a part of life in this school. Some children are more worried about their safety, their futures. They’re a bit more willing to show their affection toward their parents, and to their teachers’ ears they sound a bit more patriotic, especially when they recite the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning.
“I’m a lot more careful now,” says Olivia Norman, a 13-year-old seventh grader. “You don’t know if a bomb will come down. You don’t know if you are going to die that day.”
Her classmate Mallory Boomsma, also 13, says that since Beaupre died it’s became more important to express her feelings for her family.
“I always say ‘I love you’ now to my mom before I leave,” she says.
At St. Anne Grade School, as in the rest of the northeastern Illinois town of about 1,200 residents, connections to Mark and Nicky Beaupre and their family run through the school like vines. Members of the Beaupre family still attend the school. The principal’s secretary is a cousin and the staff can’t count the number of parents who grew up with the Beaupre kids. And children throughout the school have relatives in the military.
The children took an active role in St. Anne’s tribute after the school gym was selected to hold Beaupre’s wake. By the time the more than 2,000 people — nearly twice the town’s population — filed past the casket, students had lined the walls with posters they’d made to honor Beaupre.
Today, long after the posters came down, long after much of the talk about Ryan Beaupre has waned, he remains a big part of life at the school.
“It makes the realization that things do happen, (that) it’s not always somebody else,” says Caleb Johnson, a 13-year-old eighth-grader. “I just think about the future more.”
The war is more real to 11-year-old Haley Zelhart. A friendship between her aunt and Beaupre’s mother led to a correspondence between the girl and a Marine pilot who was good friends with Beaupre. Now she worries.
“They do the same thing. Ryan died in a helicopter crash and Dom drives an airplane,” she says. “You don’t know what can happen.”
From his vantage point as principal, John Palan sees children more willing to express affection for their parents. And it seems parents, always interested in what goes on in school, are even more willing to take part in things like parent-teacher conferences and open house.
If they’re not talking about Beaupre as they did last year, there are signs they’re thinking about him. Cotton sometimes sees students simply standing over a monument dedicated to soldiers who served in Iraq, quietly reading the inscription.
They’re also thinking about the war.
“They do have a sense of understanding that it’s not just something you see on TV, read in the newspaper,” says Adam Ehrman, a social studies teacher who went to high school with Beaupre’s brother.
What they don’t appear to have, though, are the kind of doubts about the war that have surfaced elsewhere. “There is more support, seeing as how he died for his country,” says Mallory, one of the students.
“They have full faith (that) what he gave up was worth something,” agrees Ehrman, the teacher.
Maybe it was three second-graders who say the most about how Beaupre’s death has affected this school. If a year passes quickly for adults, for children it is a monumental chunk of time — the jump into a new grade, a new classroom and a new teacher.
“It is a lifetime,” Cotton says. “So many other things have happened in their lives.”
And yet they chose Beaupre to honor with a stamp.
Cotton’s theory about why Beaupre has stayed in the kids’ minds has less to do with their understanding of who he was or what is going on in Iraq as the memory of seeing their town “overwhelmed with grief.”
One of those students is 7-year-old Destiny Torres. She can’t put into words as clearly as some of the older kids what Ryan Beaupre meant to the school. Still, when it came time to select a subject for her stamp, she thought of only one person.
“Because he was a nice guy when he died, and stuff. It was kind of being sad when he died.”
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Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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------------------------------------------------------------ Out of every 100 men, ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are just targets, Nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back." - Hericletus, circa 500 BC
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