Fathers, Sons & Brothers
April 2, 2003
Jack Kennedy, of Wantagh, keeps in close contact with the football coach and the principal of Chaminade High School, in Mineola, where his son, Kevin, now 21, held the Chaminade rushing record in 2000, his senior year. It led to his recruitment by the U.S. Naval Academy, at Annapolis, Md.
Kevin first attended an academy prep school in Newport, R.I., where he discovered that he was not attracted to the Navy but loved the Marine Corps. His father had served as a Marine from 1975 to 1979. The elder Kennedy had attended a linguist school in Monterey, Calif., and had become an Arabic linguist. He worked at a CIA base in England with British linguists.
Kevin enlisted and served out his active duty for two years in the Marines and then joined a reserve unit that got called up nearly seven weeks ago. He was sent to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, first, for extra training, then deployed to Kuwait, where his unit became attached to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
When his father learned that, he e-mailed Chaminade principal the Rev. James Williams and wrote, "Kevin is in Kuwait, headed for Iraq. Please keep him in your prayers."
"They're very loyal to their graduates over there," Kennedy said. "And Kevin was a popular kid at Chaminade. Father James e-mailed me right back and said, 'We will.' He added that maybe Kevin would run into other Chaminade grads over there. I smiled, but I said to myself, 'It's not likely. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force is out of Camp Pendleton, in California.
"The next day," Kennedy said, "I get the first letter from Kevin. It had been six weeks since we'd heard anything. He says in the letter that while he was in Kuwait setting up comm [communications] for Camp Commando, which is headquarters in Kuwait, he was catching some sleep in the back of a Humvee. He started talking to this kid that he had seen, once, at 1st Comm, and somehow the question of high school came up, and it turned out that they both went to Chaminade. The kid's name is Scott Werner Jr., and he's from Port Washington, the letter said. He's also 21. He'd graduated in 1999. It made me feel good that Kevin was with somebody who was that caliber a person. It made us all feel good that he was OK. My wife, Christie, had been going crazy.
"I tried to contact Scott Werner, his father," said Kennedy, a driver for The New York Times. "I found his number and kept calling and getting the answering message, and I didn't want to just leave a message. Finally, he picked up. We had a pretty emotional chat. In fact, we got real close, real fast." Both sons were in the same reserve unit, and both had been among a handful of Marines who had volunteered to set up a communications liaison between the U.S. Marines and the British Royal Marines.
"Days later," said Scott Werner, "[Kennedy] called me again, and this time, he had gotten a phone call from his son. The letter was 10 days old by the time I'd heard of it, but this time, his son had gone back from Iraq to the communications center in Kuwait and jumped at the chance to get a call out. So now, he was passing on more immediate information that my son and his son were OK. Then, he invited me to join him and his family at his brother Terrence's house on a Friday night, just to talk and get to meet each other. Let me tell you, it was an extraordinary experience.
"But first," Werner said, "earlier that day, I had gone to lunch in Port Washington, where I ran into a man who had coached my younger son [John, now 15] two years ago at the Port Washington Athletic League."
The man, John Meehan, of Port Washington, who also had served in the Marines, and who had three sons who also went to Chaminade, one of them a former teammate of Kevin Kennedy's, asked Werner if he had heard from his son. Werner told him the story of the call from Jack Kennedy and Meehan told Werner that he knew Jack Kennedy well.
Werner, a manager for Hitachi Data Systems in New York, met the Kennedy family that evening at Terrence Kennedy's house. "It was like discovering another family that you didn't know you had," he said. "There were brothers, sisters, kids-a warm, close family if I ever saw one. They made me feel right at home, and, as we all talked for several hours, we realized how much we had in common. We agreed that we would like to get together again, soon, and I am sure we will.
"We also promised, God willing, to get together and take our sons out to dinner, when they come home."
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc
