On the eve of what might be considered a momentous Super Bowl LVII rematch (and perhaps Super Bowl LVIII preview) between the Chiefs and visiting Philadelphia, Eagles offensive tackle Lane Johnson played host to a more enduring endeavor.
For some 90 minutes at the Eagles’ team hotel, Johnson on Sunday night met with three Gold Star families from around the region and presented them with signed jerseys and tickets for the Monday Night Football game (one family will receive tickets for a future game). But the real gift was to engage with empathy and hear their stories. “A warrior never truly dies unless we fail to remember them, and that’s the mantra I go by,” Dana Puchalla of Overland Park said at a conference table during a group talk with Johnson. She added, “Say their name. Say their name. People need to know who they were.”
So they spoke of and honored anew her son, Gabriel, a St. James Academy graduate who was 18 when he died in March of an aortic rupture at Marines Corps Base Camp in Lejeune, North Carolina. They spoke, too, of Marine Sgt. Nicholas Walsh, who was 26 when he was killed in 2007 by a sniper in Fallujah, Iraq. “We want people to remember him, so to be able to come tell our story is a real honor,” his widow, Julie, from Millstadt, Illinois, said as she was turned toward Johnson and later added, “Every day for us is a Memorial Day. Every day for us is a Veteran’s Day.”
After the group session, Johnson also spoke to and with the family of Edgerton native Shane R. Austin, who in 2006 died at age 19 after an Iraqi insurgent threw a grenade in his tank. Austin was memorialized in The Star, which wrote of his family not being surprised he’d be the one of the brothers to ride a soapbox racer down the roof of a barn and that his sacrifice reflected a “similar blend of courage and loyalty.”
The meeting on Sunday was part of a broader initiative by Johnson, who has met with Gold and Silver Star families during every Eagles road game this season. It stems from a variety of reasons, including grandparents who served in World War II, to honor late childhood friend Wade Williams’ work toward counseling veterans and his friendship with former Marine and trainer Gabe Rangel — who has orchestrated the meetings.
But it also is rooted in Johnson’s years-long battle with anxiety and depression that led to a three-game absence in 2021. Since then, he’s sought to offer support to others who could be struggling and to help de-stigmatize mental health matters. “Suffered a lot in silence,” Johnson said after the meeting on Sunday, adding, “I ran from my problems for a long time instead of confronting them.”
On Sunday, he listened intently to what the Gold Star families had to say about their loved ones and contending with the unspeakable losses. Julie Walsh recalled the knock on the door while she was feeding her infant son, Tanner, and sending his older brother, Triston, then 4, to answer. When Triston called out that “dad’s friends are here,” she was at first puzzled and then hoped they had the wrong house.
As they started to speak, her knees started shaking and she felt all the air sucked out of the room when they began to say, “We regret to inform you your husband’s been killed in action.” Puchalla recalled a similar dynamic when she was on her way home and one of her young daughters told her by phone that two Marines had stopped by.
While none of their deaths define them, especially as their lives continue to be treasured for who they were, each death also revealed something fundamental about them. When Puchalla later went to Camp Lejeune and walked through the last day of Gabriel’s life as he was dying from previously undetected cancer, the corpsman who found him collapsed told how he hurried to him and held Gabriel’s head in his lap as he was checking for vital signs. Just before he died and was “deployed to Heaven,” as she put it, he said, “Thanks, Doc.’”
“His last words, of course, would be gratitude,” she said. “Because that’s him. He loved his family, he loved his country, loved his God, loved his corps.” Just like Austin and Walsh and so many who serve and are exemplified in this microcosm. Tanner Walsh, now 16 and in high school at Belleville Township West in Illinois, put it eloquently in an essay he wrote for the occasion. He wrote of the love he came to learn about between his father and mother and his father’s “unwavering sense of duty” and “warm sense of humor” and “strength of character.” He wrote of the pain and struggles in the aftermath, the ever-since, really, and he wrote of how he has come to feel his presence now
“I believe that he has always been there for me, and now he is opening another gate for me by being able to see my first NFL football game like I knew he would have taken me to,” he wrote. ‘The experiences that people have given me throughout my life have changed me for the better and … molded me into the person that I knew he would always want me to be. “Thank you for honoring my dad and helping to carry on his legacy so that people still speak his name often and he is not forgotten.”