It's always Memorial Day for Mary and Gregory Huxley, of Forestport.
Mary and Greg Huxley kneel behind a memorial marker in Forestport for their son Gregory P. Huxley Jr. who was killed in Iraq in 2003. He was the first Central New York military casualty in the war on terror.
That night, the dogs didn’t bark. Nobody ever figured out why. The officer banged on their door. Normally, the slightest noise roused the dogs. That night, nothing.
The officer drove to a bar — it was well after midnight — poked around and found a phone number. He called from their doorstep. The dogs barked, and the parents emerged to learn their son, Gregory Jr., was dead.
That morning in April 2003, the Iraq war came to Central New York.
Specifically, it banged on the door of Mary and Gregory Huxley, of Forestport, about 25 miles north of Utica.
“Life will never, never be the same,” Mary Huxley said last week. “Any parent who has lost a child knows exactly what I mean. There is a part of my heart that will never be filled.”
On this Memorial Day weekend — that traditional interlude of picnics and parades — the U.S. military death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at nearly 5,500. Of those deaths, 46 had geographic ties to Central New York, and 205 came from Fort Drum, the Army post near Watertown.
Pfc. Gregory Paul Huxley Jr., 19 and not a full year out of Adirondack High School, was this region’s first military casualty in the war on terror.
View full sizeGregory Huxley Jr.
“Does time heal?” Mary Huxley wondered, seated at her kitchen table. “Well, I don’t think this ever heals. People ask me how I’m doing, and I just say, ‘I’m functioning.’ Because that’s what you do. You learn how to function.”
She glanced at a photograph of her son. It held a prime position on the living room wall, surrounded by pictures of her three other kids — adults, now — and their children.
“Kids and grandkids,” she said. “That’s how you get by.”
Gregory Huxley died April 6, 2003, three weeks into the invasion. A rocket-propelled grenade hit his armored personnel carrier. He was in the wrong place. Three days later, U.S. troops stormed Baghdad, Saddam Hussein fled to the countryside and America hoped for a quick end to the war.
That week, the Forestport community seemed to converge upon Wall Street, a side road near Black River Reservoir that leads to the Huxleys’ house. It soon became a parking lot, choked with cars from visitors offering condolences, an outpouring the Huxleys say they will never forget.
On April 17, a flag-draped casket carrying Gregory’s remains finally arrived at Syracuse’s Hancock Airport. A dramatic motorcade — 11 police cars and five motorcycles — guided the hearse and the family onto the tarmac, and patrol cars led them on the 55-mile journey home to Oneida County. Next day, people lined the streets of Forestport and Booneville, where the trees held yellow ribbons, for the soldier’s funeral procession.
The parents hoped the worst was over. They were only getting started.
“I can tell you that there is no secret way to get through this,” said Gregory Huxley Sr., 50, holding his wife’s hand at the kitchen table. “Nobody is alike. Everybody faces it differently. I tried therapy. We both did — of course, we laughed about it at first, it was a joke. And then — well, I don’t know — eventually, I gave up on it. I was on medication for some time, and then I gave up on that.”
He shook his head and studied the photographs on the wall.
“Kids and grandkids,” he said. “That’s all.”
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Do they follow news accounts of the war?
Mrs. Huxley shook her head. It hurts too much, she said.
“I watch it, and I read the propaganda into it,” Mr. Huxley said. “I think there’s a lot more happening than we’re allowed to know. In a way, I don’t think the public should be privy to everything. But they should at least be privy to what we’re doing over there, what it is we’re doing that is good.
“I remember Vietnam,” he said later. “I was a kid. Every day, you saw the death toll, and it was followed by a report of what was going on. Now, it’s like the only reports we hear from Iraq ...”
His voice drifted off, and he shrugged.
Was the war worth it?
“We had to do it,” the father said, after a pause, thinking about the Iraqi families the U.S. has helped. “There are a lot of children who are living better lives now. And Greg was all about kids.”
Both their daughters, Nicole and Rebecca, married military men. One son-in-law, George James, has served five tours of combat, including two in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. (Mary Huxley called his last deployment “the longest 15 months of my life.”) The other, Robert Crosby, works with the U.S. Air Force in Rome.
Their son and daughters, and their five grandchildren, all live near Forestport.
Mr. Huxley worked 20 years for New York state as a developmental aide at the Marcy Psychiatric Center, and in its later incarnations as the Utica Psychiatric Center and the CNY Developmental Services Office. He is semi-retired. Mary Huxley is a corporate secretary for National Electrical Systems in Booneville.
Talk turned to memories of better times. In the 1990s, Mr. Huxley was strong-armed into coaching a little league farm team, though he “knew next to nothing about baseball.” He put 8-year-old Gregory at second base, Gregory’s older brother Bernard on the pitcher’s mound and Nicole in right field. After the final game, the Huxleys hosted an ice cream party on their eight-acre spread. The kids played hide-and-seek until it was too dark to see.
“Those kids, they were so amazing, so demanding — so wonderful,” Mr. Huxley said.
In high school, Gregory decided to join the Army, but he vowed to return.
“He was never going to leave us,” Mr. Huxley said. “He would say, ‘You’ve got enough room, I’ll be back.’ It’s a little place, but we’ve got plenty of backyard. ... He was going to take over my lawn-mowing business someday, and I would work for him.”
Soon after graduation, Gregory left for Fort Benning, Ga. He returned home briefly in January 2003 to mourn the death of his grandfather, then shipped out to Kuwait. His parents never saw him again.
“We knew the deal,” Mr. Huxley said. “We knew he was going to war.”
State troopers and Syracuse police, some with tears running down their cheeks, salute the casket of Gregory P. Huxley, Jr., a Forestport soldier killed in action in Baghdad April 6, as it's unloaded from a commercial plane at Hancock International Airport April 17.
Monday, the family will attend a modest Memorial Day ceremony in town. Nobody asks them to make speeches or lead parades. They prefer to stay low-key.
“People make us feel comfortable,” Mary Huxley said. “And we know they’re there to honor Gregory.”
Three years ago, the community renamed the Route 28 span over the Black River as the Pfc. Gregory Huxley Jr. Memorial Bridge.
“Sometimes it makes me smile,” Mr. Huxley said. “Sometimes it makes me sad. But you know, I figure, about 5,000 times a day, somebody sees that bridge, and they see the name. ... Sometimes, when I meet people, they recognize the name. When that happens — well, they get a picture.”
“Show him the picture,” Mary Huxley said.
He opened a cupboard and fished out a stack of small photos of Gregory.
“This is what I give them,” the father said. “When I run out, she just runs off a bunch more — I laminate them and cut them — because people still ask about Gregory.”
In the last seven years, Mr. Huxley said he has given out thousands of the pictures.
The family has also established an annual $500 scholarship fund for two local high school students in their son’s name.
Scholarship fund
Donations for the Pfc. Gregory P. Huxley Jr. Memorial Scholarship Fund can be sent to the fund in care of Adirondack Senior High School, Route 294, Booneville, NY, 13309.
“It’s not really a scholarship,” Mr. Huxley explained. “Maybe the kids aren’t going to college. Maybe it’ll just help a kid with a car insurance payment or something. It’s just to help.”
To fund the scholarships, Mrs. Huxley makes and sells magnetic clasp bracelets.
The Huxleys would go to the cemetery this weekend. But in many respects, it would be no different.
To the parents of a fallen soldier, it’s always Memorial Day.
The Huxleys stood in their front room and smiled at the pictures on the wall.
Kids and grandkids.
“They keep you from going crazy,” Mr. Huxley said. “Trust me.”
Contact Hart Seely at 470-2247 and hseely@syracuse.com.
For a full list of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, go here.