by Maurine Jensen Proctor
Editor-in-Chief, Meridian Magazine

Editor’s Note: Fallen soldiers receive a paltry sum in insurance benefits to maintain their families in their absence. The family would appreciate any contributions, which can be made to the Cawley Children Memorial Fund at America First Credit Union. The phone number outside of Utah is 1-800-999-3961.

Staff Sergeant James W. Cawley’s body came home Sunday night amidst a light snow, the same day that President Hinckley mentioned his name with sorrow in a General Conference session.

Fifty mourners, including his wife, Miyuki and his stricken children Cecil, 8, and Keiko, 6, were there to meet the body of the first Latter-day Saint and, at 41, the oldest soldier yet killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Four Marines and four policemen draped the coffin with a flag before it was taken to a waiting hearse.

His funeral will be held Thursday at noon in the Bountiful Regional Center. To commemorate the occasion, the Interstate freeway will be shut down while a funeral procession that is expected to be two to five miles long will be accommodated. “We are expecting 500 police officers,” said Julie Cawley Hanson, James’s sister, and a military flyover.

“People have been so kind,” she said. “Police officers took up a collection to bring Miyuki’s mother from Japan and the ward took up a collection to bring her best friend. Someone has called and offered to replace all the windows in her home. Someone has offered to put all of her pictures on CD. Another has offered to give her lawn care for life.”

Throughout the Utah area, signs and marquees reveal gratitude, “Thank you James Cawley for defending our freedom.”

Cawley, a member of the lst Platoon, Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marine Division, commonly called the Saints and the Sinners because it was divided between Latter-day Saints and other harder-living soldiers, was killed March 29 during a firefight when he was hit by a Humvee outside Nasiriyah, 200 miles southeast of Baghdad.

A member of the Salt Lake Police Department and a Marine reservist, his sister Julie said, he was foremost a family man. His wife and children received his utmost care and concern. He was a protector.”

After 9/11 he wrote his children, “…when America was attacked I knew that I would eventually have to go and I was filled with a deep sense of sadness.” He told his brother and sisters that the evening of 9/11 his grief at the atrocity that was leveled at our country could only be comforted by going to his children’s room in the early hours of the morning and holding them tight until he was brought some peace.”

Activated in January 2002 to Camp Pendleton in California, he was scheduled to return home in January 2003—until the announcement came that no troops would be deactivated with war in Iraq looming. “He was very torn,” said Julie. “He knew he needed to serve his country, but I can’t express to you what a family man James was. “The night before he was supposed to leave, at 4:00 a.m., he stayed awake writing each of his children a letter, telling them about every detail of their lives that he could remember and instructing them on how he wanted them to grow up.

“They are overwhelming to read,” said Julie. “There aren’t many men who can express so eloquently their feeling and love as James did in those letters. Before he was finished, he sent me an email with specific instructions on what his funeral arrangements should be if he were killed. He told me, he didn’t plan on being killed, but you never know. It was a very sobering email to read.”

He asked if the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling could be read, and “maybe you could find someone to say a kind word about me.

“Truth is,” Julie said, “for several weeks before he left, I had a terrible sense of foreboding, and after he was gone, I had this awful feeling that he would not return. Before he left he went to the bishopric and asked for a blessing, and they later told me, that after the blessing they all looked at each other with this same sense. In retrospect, we think that James knew it too.

“Every time he went on police duty, every time he had to leave again for Camp Pendleton, he said, ‘I’ll be back.’ The Monday after we learned of his death, Miyuki received a letter from him. This time his final words were, ‘I will see you again.’

“You have this foreboding sense, but you just keep hoping that you’re wrong,” said Julie.

As a young child, the family called him Jamie. He was a rolly-polly thing and Julie’s first recollection of him was his insistence that he have his cereal in the same speckled, plastic cup each morning. “It could only be stirred with a fork, not a spoon and if that ritual wasn’t followed, we all paid the price. That was indicative of his life. For him there was a right and a wrong and he had a strong sense of that. Growing up, he was always the obedient one.”

His favorite toys were green army men and that was a necessary part of the gift at every special occasion. “From the earliest time, military was just something that engulfed his life,” said Julie. James’ dad, Cecil had been in World War II landing on the beach at Normandy on D-Day and had fought in Korean and Viet Nam. “It is so bizarre that our father should be a veteran of three wars, and then James is killed in the first battle he ever fought in,” she noted.

Growing up, James was quiet, shy, nearly reclusive, but he was generous and trustworthy. The family sang together and James had a keen intellect and loved reading.

James had saved up money for his mission, yet when the time came to go his grandmother was on her deathbed in England. His mother had not been home for 15 years, so James offered his mission money to her to go home to say goodbye.

Instead, James enlisted, and after boot camp, deferred his military for his mission. He was called to Fukuoka, Japan where he learned fluent Japanese. Where most missionaries do not master the language to be able to read and understand extensively, James loved the language and pursued it avidly until he was superior in his abilities.

When he returned from his mission, he had blossomed in confidence, and particularly felt comfortable around the Japanese people. He switched from the army to the Marines, hoping to be assigned to Okinawa where he could use his language skills. Instead he was sent to a lonely post in Adak, Alaska where he felt isolated and was one of only two returned missionaries in the serviceman’s branch there.

Finally, after years in Alaska, he received the longed-for assignment in Okinawa and there met his wife whom he loved from the beginning. The days of loneliness were over.

“She is not a member of the Church,” said Julie, “but this experience is giving us a chance to teach her. I showed her the demonstration of the hand and the glove to represent the spirit and the body, and when Elder Bruce Porter of the Seventy came to give her a blessing the Sunday morning only hours after we learned of James’ death, she was promised that this would bring her to a knowledge of the gospel.”

James Cawley was a man who surveyed the world and wanted to fight the bad guys whether as a policeman or a marine. He had a strong protective sense, a need to stand up for the right. At the police academy he graduated with top honors, receiving the Top Gun Award for the top marksman in his graduating class and the Blue Shirt Award, presented to the top recruit in each graduating class. Gentle with children, he was tough on evil, and told his sister (who could not have children) that every time he saw abused children in his work he wished, “He could give them all to her.”

He would never have chosen to leave his own wife and children. In his Marine unit, he was known as the papa to whom everybody looked up to and deferred for advice. “We are hearing from his company that they are devastated, that they are lost without him.”

His family wrote, “Sgt. James W. Cawley has paid the ultimate sacrifice. He lived life honorably and died valiantly. He strongly believed that the citizens of Iraq needed to be liberated and that the current regime was a threat to our freedom. Our family prays for those soldiers fighting for this just cause.”

They quote from a song from the play Threads of Glory:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
John 15:13

Again, as a reminder from Meridian’s editors: The family would appreciate any contributions, which can be made to the Cawley Children Memorial Fund at America First Credit Union. The phone number outside of Utah is 1-800-999-3961.