John Wayne Saw a Man Alone at a Military Funeral in the Rain and Quietly Changed Everything

Arlington, Virginia. November 1968. There is a particular quality to November rain at Arlington National Cemetery that is different from rain anywhere else. It is not heavier. It is not colder necessarily, though it is cold. It is the rain of a place that has absorbed a specific kind of weight for over a hundred years.

The weight of what is being marked and what is being left. And the rain falls through that weight and arrives at the ground already carrying something. The cemetery is 350 acres of it. The graves go in every direction. They go up the hills and down the hills and along the flat sections near the river and up toward the Custis-Lee Mansion on the high ground that looks out over Washington across the water.

They are marked with white stones, uniform, the uniformity being the point, the democracy of it, the insistence that what each stone marks is equal to what every other stone marks regardless of what the name on it was worth in any other accounting. On a Tuesday morning in the second week of November 1968, a burial was taking place in Section 60.

Section 60 was not yet what it would become. It would become, in the years after this morning, the section most associated with the Vietnam War, the section where the war arrived in its final form, which is the form of the permanently still. In November of 1968, the war had been producing its final forms for three years and Section 60 was already filling stone by stone, name by name, with the permanent stillness of young men who had been sent and had not returned.

The burial that morning was for a man named James Colton. He was 24 years old. He had been a corporal in the United States Army, Second Infantry Division, and he had been in Vietnam for seven months when the thing happened that produced the burial in Section 60 on a rainy Tuesday morning in November.

There were six people at the burial, the chaplain, the honor guard, a captain from the Army’s casualty notification office who was there as a representative of the service, and one civilian. One man in a dark coat standing alone in the rain on the far side of the grave from the honor guard, holding his hat in front of him with both hands in the specific posture of a man who is present to something and does not know what to do with his hands.

His name was Arthur Colton. He was 51 years old. He was James Colton’s father. He was the only family member present. He was, so far as anyone at that burial could determine, the only person in James Colton’s life who had come to mark his passing from the world. John Wayne was at Arlington that morning for a different burial.

This is important to establish because the story gets told sometimes as though he had come specifically to section 60, as though he had known about James Colton and made the decision to go. He had not known. He had come for a different service, a service for a man he had known, a veteran of a different war in a different section, and that service was over.

And he was walking back toward the entrance along one of the cemetery’s main paths when the path took him past section 60. He heard the chaplain’s voice. He slowed. He looked toward the sound. He saw the six people, the honor guard, the chaplain, the captain, the flag folded on the casket, and the single civilian. He stood at the path for a moment.

He looked at the man in the dark coat standing alone in the rain with his hat in his hands. He stepped off the path. He did not approach the burial immediately. He stopped at a distance that was respectful of the service in progress and stood there in the rain with his own hat in his hands and waited while the chaplain finished. The chaplain finished.

The honor guard raised their rifles for the three-volley salute. The shots went out across the November cemetery and disappeared into the low sky. The bugler played taps. If you have heard taps played at an actual military burial, you know what it does to the air around it. The specific quality of that melody in that context, the way it is simultaneously the most formal and the most naked thing the military does, the one moment in all of the ceremony where the armor comes off entirely, and what is left is just the fact of the loss.

The bugler finished. The honor guard folded the flag. The captain carried it to Arthur Colton and presented it with the words the army uses, the thanks of a grateful nation, and Arthur Colton took it and held it against his chest with both arms, holding his hat now between the flag and his body, and the captain stepped back. Wayne came forward.

Arthur Colton heard the footsteps on the wet grass and looked up. He had been looking at the casket. He looked up and saw a large man in a dark coat coming toward him through the rain, and he took a moment to process the face, because the face was not a face he expected to see at his son’s burial, and it took a moment for expectation to accommodate reality. He did not say anything.

Wayne came to him and stopped. He said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” He said it the way he always said the important things directly, without ornament, the way a true thing is said when the saying of it is the whole point, and anything added to it would only dilute it. Arthur Colton said, “Thank you.” He said it automatically, the automatic response of a man in grief receiving a condolence he has been receiving for days, the phrase worn smooth from repetition.

Then he looked at Wayne again and said, “Were you Did you know Jimmy?” Wayne said, “No, sir. I was here for another service. I heard yours.” Arthur Colton looked at the casket. He said, “You didn’t have to stop.” Wayne said, “I know.” He stood there in the rain. He did not fill the silence with anything. Arthur Colton looked at the flag against his chest.

He said, “He was my only one.” “His mother passed in ’61. It’s been just the two of us,” he said, “was just the two of us.” He said it without the correction being pointed at anything. Just the grammar of loss adjusting the tense in real time. Wayne said, “How old was he?” Arthur said, “24.” He said, “He enlisted. I didn’t push him.

He made up his own mind.” He said, “I want you to know that. He made up his own mind.” Wayne said, “That matters.” Arthur said, “I keep thinking about whether it should.” He said, “If he had made a different choice, if I had said something different, whether he would be” He stopped. Wayne said, “You can’t think about it that way.

” Arthur said, “I know.” Wayne said, “It doesn’t stop you thinking about it that way.” Arthur said, “No.” They stood at the grave. The rain came down the way November rain comes down at Arlington, steady and without urgency, as though it has all the time in the world. They walked together to the main path, not because they had decided to walk together, because the path was in the same direction for both of them, and the walking was something to do with the standing still.

Wayne fell into step beside Arthur Colton. Arthur carried the flag in both arms. They walked without speaking for a few minutes through the stones, the uniform white stones going in every direction on the wet hills, each one a name, each name a person, each person a specific instance of the thing the stones were marking.

Arthur said, “He never saw this place.” Wayne said, “No.” Arthur said, “He grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia. We never came east. I kept meaning to bring him. You know how you mean to do things?” Wayne said, “I know.” Arthur said, “I thought we would come when he got back. I thought that was going to be the trip.

He comes back and we come east and we see Washington and we come out here.” He looked at the stones. He said, “He would have wanted to see it.” Wayne said, “What kind of man was he?” Arthur looked at him. The question landed differently than the condolences. The condolences had been about the loss. The question was about Jimmy.

The question was asking for the person rather than the vacancy the person had left. Arthur said funny. He said, you wouldn’t necessarily think that first. He was quiet. He didn’t put himself out there, but when he had something funny to say it was the funniest thing in the room. He had this timing.

He said he got that from his mother. She had the same thing, the timing. He said he was good with his hands. He could fix anything. I never had to call anybody for the house. Anything that broke, Jimmy fixed it. 15 years old and he was doing the electrical. He said he liked baseball. He played in high school. He wasn’t going anywhere with it, but he liked it.

He said he was a good man. He was still becoming one. You know how they are at 24, still becoming it, but you could see what he was going to be. He stopped. He looked at the flag. He said, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Wayne said, because I asked. Arthur said, you asked. Wayne said, yes.

Arthur was quiet. He said, nobody has asked me that. In the last two weeks since the notification, people have been very kind. People have said I’m sorry and they’ve brought food and they’ve sat with me. Nobody has asked me what he was like. He said, they ask how I’m doing. They ask if I need anything. Nobody has said tell me about him.

Wayne said, tell me about him. They sat down on a bench near the path. The rain continued. Neither of them had an umbrella and neither of them appeared to think about this. Arthur talked for 45 minutes. He talked about James Colton the way a father talks about a son when someone has given him permission to, which is completely without organizing it into the highlights that a brief condolence conversation requires, without editing for the listener, with the full texture of a specific person who had existed in the world and done specific things and

had specific qualities that were funny and frustrating and remarkable and ordinary in the way that real people are always some mixture of those things. He talked about the electrical at 15, about the baseball, about the way Jimmy had handled his mother’s death at 14, quiet and steady. The way he handled most things, and how that steadiness had scared Arthur a little because he was not sure a 14-year-old should be that steady.

That the grief should have been bigger and louder, and he had worried for years that Jimmy was carrying something he had never put down. He talked about the enlistment decision, about the conversation they had had, which had not been a long conversation, which Jimmy had approached with the same quiet directness he approached most things, telling his father, not asking him, and Arthur had understood the distinction and had respected it because Jimmy was 23 and it was his life, and Arthur had not raised him to ask permission for his own life. He talked

about the letters. Jimmy had written every 2 weeks reliably. A letter from Vietnam, not long letters. Jimmy was not a long letter writer, but regular. Arthur had them at home. He had read them many times in the past 2 weeks, the way you read the last things that someone left, looking for what they meant and whether they said what the person would have wanted said.

He said, “The last letter came after the notification.” He said, “The mail is slow. He wrote it before. He didn’t know it was going to be the last one.” He said, “He said he was fine. He said the rainy season was starting and it was not much fun, but he was fine.” He said when he got back he wanted to get a truck.

He said, “He had been talking about that truck for years. He never had a vehicle of his own. He always used mine.” And he had decided what kind he wanted, and he had it worked out how long it would take him to save for it, and he wrote about it in the letter. He said, “And 2 weeks later I got the notification.

” He was quiet. He said, “A truck.” He said it again. Not as an absurdity. As the specific grief of the almost, the truck that was not going to happen, the ordinary future that had been canceled without ceremony, the way ordinary futures are canceled without regard for what they were going to contain.

Wayne said, “What kind of truck?” Arthur looked at him. Wayne said, “What kind of truck did he want?” Arthur said, “A Ford F-series.” He had the model worked out and everything. He had been reading about them. Wayne looked out at the stones. He said, “I drive a Ford F-250.” Arthur said, “I know,” he said, “I recognized you.

” He said, “It took me a minute and then I recognized you.” He said, “Jimmy would have liked this. He would have thought this was something.” He said, “He liked your pictures.” Wayne said, “Which ones?” Arthur said, “The Westerns mostly. He grew up on them. We used to watch them on the TV on Saturday nights, he and his mother and me.

” He said, “After she was gone, it was just the two of us, but we kept doing it. Saturday nights, Westerns on the television. It was our thing.” He said, “He would have liked this.” He said it again, quietly, the way you say something when the saying it is the whole point because the person it was true about cannot be told.

There is a thing that Wayne did next that is the hardest part of the story to tell without making it sound like something it was not. He did not make a speech. He did not say something quotable about duty or sacrifice or what Jimmy Colton’s death meant in the larger context of anything. He did not do what famous people often do when they are in the presence of grief, which is to bring the famous self to the grief and make the grief about the encounter.

He did the thing that was harder than all of those things. He sat on a bench in the rain at Arlington National Cemetery for 45 minutes and listened to a man he had never met talk about his dead son. He asked questions that kept Arthur talking because Arthur needed to talk and had not been given the room to talk since the notification, and the room was what he needed more than anything else that anyone could have offered him.

He listened with the complete attention that the saddler had noticed, and the hatmaker had noticed, and the mechanic’s daughter had noticed, and all the people across all the stories had noticed. The attention of a man who is not waiting for his turn, but is actually inside what is being said.

He did not try to fix it. He did not try to reframe it. He did not try to produce in Arthur Colton an emotion more manageable than the one Arthur Colton was having. He sat in the rain and he listened, and he asked what kind of truck, and he let the question be the small human specific thing it was, the acknowledgement that Jimmy Colton had wanted a Ford F-series and had it worked out, and had not gotten it, and that this was as real and as worth acknowledging as everything else.

When Arthur was done, or as done as a man in his condition can be at the end of a conversation, they stood up. The rain had diminished to the particular fine mist that comes after rain in November. The air still wet, but the weather no longer making a point of it. Arthur held the flag. He looked at it. He said, “I didn’t think I would be the only one.

” He said it quietly, not accusingly, as a statement of how he had imagined the day would be against how the day had been. He said, “Jimmy had friends. I know he had friends. The men he served with. I don’t know how to find them. I don’t know their names. I got the notification and I came here and I didn’t know who to call.” He said, “I thought maybe someone would know.

Someone would reach out.” He said, “Nobody reached out.” Wayne looked at him. He said, “Can I ask you something?” Arthur said, “Yes.” Wayne said, “Do you have the letters?” Arthur said, “Yes.” Wayne said, “The return addresses. The ones from Vietnam. Would there be unit information on them?” Arthur thought about it.

He said, “There might be. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at them that way. Wayne said, “When you go home, look at the envelopes, the unit designation. The Army can help you find the men he served with. You write to the unit and you tell them who you are and they will find the men.” He said, “They will want to know, the men he served with.

They will want to know that someone came.” Arthur looked at the flag. He said, “You think so?” Wayne said, “I know so. I have known a lot of men who served. The ones who made it back, the thing they carry hardest is the men who didn’t. They carry them for the rest of their lives. If they know that someone came to mark it, that someone stood in the rain in November and held the flag, that matters to them.” He said, “Find them.

Tell them you came.” Arthur Colton looked at the cemetery, the stones going up the hill in their rows, the wet white stone in the mist. He said, “All right.” He put his hat back on his head. He put his hand out. Wayne shook it. Arthur said, “Thank you for stopping.” Wayne said, “Thank you for telling me about him.” Arthur said, “He would have liked this.

” Wayne said, “I know.” He said, “I think I would have liked him.” Arthur looked at him. He said, “You would have.” He said, “He had the timing.” Arthur Colton went back to Wheeling. He went through the letters. He found the unit information on the envelopes, the designation in the return address, the specific numerical identity of the unit Jimmy had served with.

He wrote a letter to the unit chaplain at the base through which the unit’s mail had been processed. He wrote it explaining who he was and asking if there was any way to reach the men who had served with his son. He received a response 6 weeks later. The response was from a man named Dennis Kraft, a sergeant who had been in Jimmy’s squad, who had been stateside since August with wounds that had ended his deployment, and who had been since August carrying the specific weight that Wayne had described, the weight of the men who had

not made it back. Kraft had not known how to reach Arthur Colton. He had not known Jimmy’s father’s address. He had written a letter to Jimmy’s home address in Wheeling, and the letter had come back because he had the address slightly wrong, and he had not known how to correct it, and he had been living with the inability to correct it since August.

He drove to Wheeling in February. He and Arthur Colton sat at the kitchen table, and Kraft told Arthur things about Jimmy that the letters had not contained. The things you do not put in letters home because the home is the place you are protecting from those things. The things that Kraft had been holding and that Arthur had been wanting to know.

He told Arthur that Jimmy had been a good soldier, not as a formality, specifically. He told Arthur what good had meant in the context of what they had been doing and where they had been doing it, and the specificity made it real way that the general statement could not make it real. He told Arthur about Jimmy’s timing.

He said, “He could make anybody laugh in the worst moments, not to avoid it, not to pretend it wasn’t bad, but he had this way of finding the thing that was also somehow funny. I can’t explain it, and he’d say it, and suddenly you could breathe.” He said, “I have thought about that a lot since August.” Arthur said, “His mother had the same thing.

” Kraft said, “You must miss her, too.” Arthur said, “Every day. More now.” They sat at the kitchen table in Wheeling, West Virginia in February, the two of them, and the kitchen was full of Jimmy Colton in the way that kitchens are full of people who are gone, in the habits and the objects and the specific quality of a room that a person has moved through for 24 years.

Kraft stayed for dinner. He came back the following Thanksgiving. He came back the Thanksgiving after that. He kept coming back the way people keep coming back when the returning is a form of honoring, when the table is where the honoring happens, when the person being honored cannot be at the table but is present in the fact of the gathering.

Arthur Colton lived until 1987. He was 70 years old. He lived in Wheeling for the rest of his life. He was not a man who moved. He had been in Wheeling since before Jimmy was born, and he stayed in the house where Jimmy had grown up, which some people thought was sad, and which Arthur did not consider sad because the house was not a monument to loss, but a place where a life had been lived, and he was still living his.

He became, in the years after 1968, a man who showed up to things. This is the quiet way that the story continued, not dramatically, not in a way that made news, but in the specific form of a man who had been alone at a burial in the rain and had been found there, and had understood from the finding what the not being alone had meant, and who made it his practice to be the person who showed up.

He went to the funerals of veterans in Wheeling when he heard about them. Not the funerals of men he knew, the funerals of men who might be alone. He was not always needed. Sometimes the funerals were full, the families large and present, the community there in force, and Arthur stood in the back and was one more person in a room of people, and that was fine.

But sometimes he was needed. Sometimes he was the man who came and stood in the rain. He did not explain himself to the families he went to, not usually. He stood and paid his respects, and if someone asked, he said he had known a veteran, too, and he understood what it was to have someone come. He stood in the rain for 19 years.

Dennis Craft told the story at Arthur Colton’s funeral in 1987. He told the part about the cemetery and the single civilian and the rain and the man who had stepped off the path. He told the part about the letters and the unit designation and the February drive to Wheeling. He told the part about the Thanksgivings.

He did not tell it as a John Wayne story. He told it as an Arthur Colton story, which it was, which it had been from the moment Arthur had started talking on the bench. He said, “Arthur told me once that a man stopped at the burial. He didn’t say it was John Wayne for a long time. He finally said it years later, and I asked him why he hadn’t said it at first, and he said because it didn’t seem like the point.

He said, ‘He was right. It wasn’t the point.’ He said, ‘The point was that somebody stopped.’ He said, ‘The point was that someone asked what Jimmy was like.’ He said, ‘I have been asked many times over the years what my time in Vietnam was like, and I have answered in many different ways. The best answer is this: Jimmy Colton had the timing.

He could make you laugh in the worst moments without pretending it wasn’t bad. He said, ‘Arthur kept those Saturdays after we started coming to Wheeling. We watched the Westerns,’ he said. ‘Every time a John Wayne picture came on the television, Arthur would get a specific expression.’ He said, ‘Not nostalgia. Something more than that.

‘ He said, ‘He would get the expression of a man who had been sitting alone on a bench in the rain and had looked up and seen someone coming toward him.’ He said, ‘That expression, every time.’ He said, ‘I asked him about it once, and he said, “That man asked me what Jimmy was like.”‘ He said, ‘I think about that a lot.

‘ He said, ‘In all of it, all of those years, the thing that stayed with him the most was being asked that question.’ He said, ‘What was he like?’ He said, ‘Three words.’ He said, ‘The right three words.’ He said, ‘Remember that.’ Section 60 at Arlington is what it became. The stones are there. The names are there. The rain falls through the weight of what they mark and arrives at the ground still carrying something.

James Colton is there, in his row, in his section, with the uniform white stone that marks him as equal to every other stone in every other section across 350 acres. The stone says his name. The stone says his rank. The stone says his dates. It does not say he had the timing. It does not say he wanted a Ford F-series and had it worked out.

It does not say his mother had the same gift and he got it from her. It does not say his father stood in the rain for 19 more years for other men’s sons because a stranger had once stood in the rain for his. The stone says what stones say. The rest lives in the places where it was kept. In the letters in Wheeling.

In the Thanksgivings. In the expression on a man’s face when a Western came on the television. In a bench in the rain in November, 1968. Two men, one of them famous, one of them holding a flag. Three words between them that were the right three words at the right moment on the right bench. What was he like? He was funny.

He had the timing. He was his mother’s son. He was going to get a truck. If this one found you, pass it on. Share it with someone who has sat alone in the rain. Share it with someone who knows the right three words. Go find the person who needs to be asked. Ask them. Subscribe if you haven’t yet. More stories coming.