Just before 11 a.m. on Monday, Haines’ fire chief Brian Clay stood scanning the graves in the Jones Point Cemetery, many freshly decorated with American flags in honor of Memorial Day.
Clay, an Army veteran, weaved through the gravestones, stopping to point at Frank Wallace’s grave. “I knew him, he was the fire chief here.”
He stopped and pointed out a World War I veteran’s grave, then another from World War II, saying “his son is my brother-in-law.”
“Regardless of the service, they all did something that had to be done,” he said.
Vietnam veteran and Lynn Canal American Legion Post Commander Terry Pardee walked up to steer the conversation toward Army veteran Howard McRae’s grave.
Pardee, who enlisted in 1967, said McRae had been his command sergeant major during Pardee’s time in the Army at Fort Bragg.
“I swear to god, it never quit raining,” he said as he approached McRae’s grave. “Here it is. His claim to fame, he’s a Vietnam veteran, and Korea, and he was also one of two green berets who were pallbearers at JFK’s funeral.”
Pardee grinned when asked how he knew McRae. “Meanest son of a bitch I ever met in my life.”
He recalled meeting McCrae after getting into a fight in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
“The [military police] and Fayetteville cops came in and busted everything up, billy clubs, the whole nine yards you know. I was under a table.
It was like one of those western fights where everything just goes to hell immediately,” he said.
Back on the base, he was told to report to McCrae who confined him to the company area for two weeks and threatened Pardee with a transfer if he ever saw him again.
“So I didn’t. I never saw him, until he showed up in town here after he retired,” Pardee said.
As Pardee was talking, McRae’s niece and former Haines mayor Jan Hill walked up. She joked that she was related to half the people buried in the cemetery, walking to one side to see her father’s side of the family and the other to see her mother’s.
Hill said this year she’s thinking about her own parents, Jean Clayton and Charles “Midge” Clayton.
“They’re both gone. My mother was very active in the American Legion Auxiliary, and actually in the Legion, she served in national offices,” Hill said. She said her grandmother was a nurse in the Army. Her dad was in the military, too.
“I come out here frequently and just check in on my family,” Hill said.
Russell Price, a retired career veteran, said after the ceremony that he carried too many names to think of just one or two people. He was raised in the Chilkat Valley and said he joined the Alaska National Guard in 1988, then got his commission and served for another 26 years before retiring in 2018.
“I won’t specify a particular person because I remember all of them,” he said. “It’s just peers and friends, corps members, too many to name really. We kept a list, you know, for the Engineer Corps, of all the soldiers we lost. I think about that list. It was long.”
Kyle Clayton, who volunteered for the honor guard on Monday, rattled off three names immediately when asked about who was thinking about that day. Clayton was a combat medic in the Army for four years.
“Clark, Jones, Ramirez… they were in my company in Iraq and they all died together in an IED attack, all young guys. One was a father of two,” he said.
After the ceremony, as people slowly wandered around looking at graves or getting up to leave, Tom Morphet and Heather Lende sat on a bench in the sun talking politics.
Morphet said he was thinking of Ray Menaker and John Schnabel – both were Navy veterans. Menaker co-founded the Chilkat Valley News, Lynn Canal Conservation, and supported a host of other civic institutions in town including the schools, library and museums.
Schnabel was a local business titan, reality television star and one of Haines’ largest landowners. The two were also politically opposed and often found themselves on opposite sides of local issues.
“They were just lions. They were great debaters. They were both World War II Navy vets. They both married single moms and they both were builders. They were both vocally anti-war. They were the two, kind of, leaders of our community for 30 years.”
Editor’s note: Kyle Clayton and Tom Morphet are former owners of the Chilkat Valley News.