By Brian Kelly
Herald Writer
EVERETT – It was almost as if someone had poured Tabasco into Kathy Kelly’s bowl of oatmeal Thursday morning.
Halfway through her breakfast, Kelly’s eyes grew big and she started pounding the kitchen table with her hand. She stopped eating and ran upstairs to wake her husband.
The war in Afghanistan had just hit home, courtesy of Kelly’s morning Herald. She had opened the paper just after 5:30 a.m. to see a picture of three Marines at the airport in Kandahar playing the board game Risk. Her son, Cpl. Ryan Dixon, was the one in the middle, sitting on a box of food rations.
“Now I know for sure where he is,” Kelly said.
Dixon, who is stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, had left the States in August for a six-month tour. “Then September 11 happened,” Kelly said.
“We didn’t get to say goodbye. Next thing we know, our son is involved in the war.”
Although the family had received several e-mails from Dixon, and he was able to call twice in the days before Christmas, the Marine wasn’t able to tell his family where he was at exactly. “He said: ‘Mom, all I can tell you is, watch the news,’ ” Kelly recalled.
Even so, the family had an inkling he was in Afghanistan, and probably near the Marines’ base at Kandahar International Airport. That was confirmed Thursday when the family saw their son in the picture taken by an Associated Press photographer.
One of six children, Dixon, now 20, graduated from Mountlake Terrace High School in 1999 and joined the Marines without telling his parents. But Kelly said they supported his decision to volunteer for military service after they found out.
Kelly, a seventh-grade math and science teacher at Heatherwood Middle School, has since recruited her students for a letter-writing campaign centered on her son. Her class sent the Marine a package with about 90 letters a couple of weeks before Christmas.
In one of his brief early-morning phone calls just before Christmas, Dixon said he had received the letters, and he told his mom he was already making plans to come home on leave when he can.
Kelly is now hoping that he’ll be back before school gets out so he can visit with her students at Heatherwood. Until then, his family will continue to hope and pray that he’ll stay out of harm’s way and return safe.
“I just have to have a positive attitude. Every day I go on the assumption that no news is good news,” Kelly said. “I have to go on the faith that God is going to take care of him.”
You can call Herald Writer Brian Kelly at 425-339-3422 or send e-mail to kelly@heraldnet.com.
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