Jay Gauthreax laid to rest

VACHERIE -- Hardly anyone ever leaves this unassuming town, which hides from the coursing Mississippi River behind a great earthen levee.

But Jay Gauthreaux did eight years ago to take up a soldier’s life, which ended Dec. 4 with the explosion of a roadside bomb near Balad, Iraq.

Escorted by St. James Parish deputies on motorcycles, a white hearse bearing Gauthreaux’s body pulled in front of a brick church this morning and was reverently borne before the altar.

Members of the Patriot Guard, a group of veterans and supporters of fallen soldiers who arrived on motorcycles, stood outside the church bearing American flags as mourners filed inside to offer condolences.

A funeral Mass was scheduled for noon today, followed by interment in the church mausoleum with full military honors.

Tuesday night, as Vacherie’s people made ready for the farewell, many acknowledged that Gauthreaux’s death has done something newspapers or television never could.

The war in Iraq is now, for them, something more than an occasional headline.

"It’s really hitting close to home now," said Rose Strickland, as she tended to customers at a shop called The Daiquiri Explosion. Like most of the people gathered there Tuesday night, Strickland grew up in Vacherie, the place the U.S. Census Bureau says has the lowest rate of people moving out of any community in the nation. The 2000 census showed 80 percent of Vacherie’s 5,787 people living in the same homes they occupied in 1995, compared to 56 percent for the nation as a whole.

The small-town atmosphere and the way everyone knows everyone else, a sense of time standing still, are among the things residents say is so appealing about this pocket of gentility, lined by sugar-cane fields and dotted with convenience stores that serve as satellite town squares.

The social insulation also makes it easy to look at bad things happening elsewhere and feel detached, residents now say, as if the ugliness cannot reach them.

"When it is somebody I know, it is more difficult," said Debbie Folse Inness, who owns the IGS supermarket where Gauthreaux’s grandmother shops and who remembers him as a high-school boy.

NOTHING TO SING ABOUT

The grandmother, Claire Gauthreaux, is a community icon who once delivered everyone’s mail. Now retired, she lives in a neatly kept house with green slate siding, outside of which a small placard reads "We salute our troops."

Whenever she would visit the Le Petit Flower Shoppe, Claire Gauthreaux had a song on her lips. Nobody remembers which song in particular. But she always came in singing or humming.

Then one morning last week, she entered and was silent, recalled floral clerk Frances Badeaux.

"I asked her why she wasn’t humming and she told me she had nothing to sing about," Badeaux said. "And then she told me about Jay. It really brings the war close to home when you know the family."

At The Daiquiri Explosion, Eric Becnel, who grew up with Gauthreaux and attended St. James High with him, said he was holding up but wasn’t sure how well he would do at the funeral services.

"Now it’s come home. I was always against the war. But now friends are dying," said Becnel, a heavy-equipment operator who branded President Bush a "glorified redneck looking for a place in history."

"Our boys should be home," Strickland said from behind the bar, relating what she knows about Jay Gauthreaux’s devotion to his 4-year-old son, Devin, who was cared for by relatives while he was overseas.

ULTIMATE SACRIFICE

The Rev. Michael Miceli, pastor of Our Lady of Peace, did not know Jay Gauthreaux but did know his grandmother, whom everyone in town calls "Miss Pinut," an old nickname.

Even as many of his parishioners expressed misgivings about the war -- especially in light of Jay Gauthreaux’s death -- the priest questioned whether rejection of the stated mission in Iraq is wise.

To him, the issue at hand is more like that which largely justified U.S. involvement in World War II, the idea that a group of people are willing to use violence to impose their will.

Miceli has no doubt that Jay Gauthreaux was fighting evil and that his death, like that of Jesus Christ on the cross, a matter of laying down one’s life for the sake of others.

Gauthreaux’s loved ones -- like many families of service members who have died in this war -- express pride in his sacrifice, maintaining that his continued military service was a direct result of his desire to make the world safe for his little boy.

SOLDIER’S PRAYER

They gathered Tuesday night at the Ourso Funeral Home in Donaldsonville, before the open casket within which their soldier reposed, in a room heavy with aromas of red, white and blue floral arrangements.

All seats were filled, and young men -- some of whom had served in Iraq with Gauthreaux -- talked in clusters as women openly wept.

"Jay had hundreds of best friends; that’s what made him so special," said a former Army comrade, 27-year-old Mike Harnois.

On a table near the casket were photographs of Gauthreaux, including one in which he holds his son, Devin. And there was a copy of a poem by Heather Kready called "A Soldier’s Prayer."

"Remember me as I walk away, for you I lived and died this day," it reads, concluding with the words "My eyes are heavy, let me rest, I know now I have done my best."

From the Comet

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