Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 1, 1991 TAG: 9103010481
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"To be real honest, nobody's talking about the end of the war at this point," waitress Penny Senter said. "He's the main topic of conversation."
Terry Plunk, the Army lieutenant with the All-American resume. One of Vinton's most illustrious sons. Star athlete. Prom king. Class valedictorian. Tenor in the church choir. Now dead at the age of 25, killed in action clearing mines during the allied advance on Kuwait City.
Word of Plunk's death reached this town of 7,665 only hours before President Bush declared the war over, and the news cast a pall over what should have been a day of celebration.
"It got one of our best," said Frances Obenchain, owner of Obenchain's Flowers. "Our little town is shaken today."
At the Dogwood, the TV was turned off after the breakfast rush Thursday. There's no more news worth listening for anymore, at least news the networks can report. Instead, what people want to know are things like when the funeral will be (it hasn't been scheduled). And how Plunk's mother, Doris, a teacher's aide at William Byrd High School, and her two daughters are bearing up.
"He must have been a great kid," Senter said. "Everybody asks about him. Mostly we get older people in here and they're trying to figure out if their children or grandchildren knew him."
And it seems just about everyone did.
"It's strange, here in our little town," Obenchain said. "We're all in church together. Our children are all in school together. It's all like one big family. That's what this town is."
And now, when there's a death in the family, "it touches the hearts of everyone," Obenchain said.
Even some who didn't know Plunk personally felt like they did. "He's been in the Vinton Messenger so many times, excelling," said Carolyn Rector, who runs the town's Troop Support Center. "Everything he's done was something you'd admire. He would have been the perfect husband for your daughter. Not only good-looking, but excelling at everything."
And now, he's a memory - a memory that people in Vinton clung tightly to on Thursday.
At the town hall, the post office, the high school, American flags fluttered at half-staff. Obenchain's son put a handwritten note in the store window. It quotes from a sad song from the '60s: " . . . `it seems the good they die young; we just look around and they're gone' . . . God be with you, Terry."
Down the street at the Troop Support Center, a storefront meeting place for military families that sprang up a month ago, the walls are covered with pictures of local soldiers and sailors.
Plunk's photograph is now framed by three small white roses - a red, white and blue ribbon tied around their stems. The sign on the center's donations bucket has been changed, so that it's now taking up a collection for a Terry Plunk Memorial Scholarship Fund.
With the news of Plunk's death coming when it did, conflicting emotions jostled for attention at the center Thursday.
For many who stopped by, there was relief, joy, exhilaration. A stranger opened the door and shouted in: "It's a great day, isn't it?" Two men walking by, men old enough to remember V-E and V-J day, flashed a V-for-victory sign.
Parents came by to look at their sons' and daughters' pictures and bring in more.
"All the proud mamas and papas are coming in to show off their babies," Rector said. "They're smiling. And these are ones who haven't been in before. They just want to look at the pictures and smile and say, `Hey, that's my kid.' They're so moved."
With that in mind, Rector was already making plans for a gigantic homecoming parade for whenever the troops start coming back.
Yet there was still grief, a cold, hollow feeling that made Rector feel like something inside her had died. People streamed in to ask about Plunk's family, even an old Army buddy from Roanoke who had served with Plunk in South Korea. A volunteer with a tissue wrapped around her fingers dabbed tears out of her eyes.
"How can you be elated the war's over?" Rector asked. "It didn't get over before we had tragedy. It didn't get over soon enough." She cast a forlorn look over at "the wall" of photographs she and the other volunteers had lovingly and painstakingly put together over the past weeks.
"We got so near the end; I thought we wouldn't lose anybody on the wall," she said. "We didn't have that many and now he's gone."
"It's ironic just a few hours before it's over, we get this message," Obenchain said.
Even before Plunk's death, Vinton had felt a ripple of pain from a distant desert war.
On Tuesday, folks got word that Army Pvt. Sabrina Simmons' ammo truck had overturned, pinning her underneath and injuring her leg. Simmons is from Lynchburg, but her grandparents live in Vinton, so Vinton has counted her as of one its own.
And then Wednesday, two Army officers arrived at the high school to break the news to Plunk's mother.
Thank God, one woman said, that Vinton is such a small town. "It's small enough that as soon as [principal] Bob Patterson saw the men coming, he knew what it was for and he knew right away to call her minister, and we know who her best friends were so they can give her support." That wouldn't happen in a big, impersonal city, she said.
Vinton also is small enough that a man who had been visiting the high school when the Army officers arrived likewise sensed their mission, immediately sought out Rector on the street and told her to be prepared.
From there, "it just went like wildfire," Rector said. "Teachers, friends, everybody came in, saying `we've heard a rumor, tell us it isn't true.' Yes, it's true. That's what happened yesterday. Everybody came in, looking at that picture."
"Everybody felt bad about it," said Senter, the waitress whose restaurant is directly across the street from the support center. "The girls over there came over yesterday. They were all crying."
Thursday, most of the tears had been stanched, and people in Vinton were left to ruminate on the awful randomness of war. With so many American soldiers, and so few casualties, how did it happen that one of them would have to be from a little place called Vinton, Va.?
And then to have it be Terry Plunk, the guy that everyone seemed to remember as an all-around great kid?
At the Dogwood, a glum-faced neighbor reminisced about Plunk. "He came over to get me to help with his homework, but he was so far above me," the man recalled. "After awhile, he'd figure it out on his own. He was so smart."
The man remembered helping the family move to a new house some years ago and how Terry took charge of carrying the furniture. "He'd always grab the heaviest corner and try to do his part," the man said. "It really hurts to see him gone. It seems like the best ones always die."
Rector passed on stories about Plunk's thoughtfulness for his mother, who was widowed in 1985, and how even when he went away to war, he looked out for her.
"On Valentine's Day, he arranged to send her the biggest, prettiest bouquet of roses they could make," Rector said. "That's the type of person he was. Yesterday was a horrible, horrible day for Vinton."
Thursday, it still was.
by CNB