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Friends recall that if Thom dove into something, from emergency medical training to playing basketball in high school, he gave it his best. "He never made the first string, but he was always close," says Jon Turner, his English teacher and a Vietnam vet. "If he got in, he'd win the game for you." That was true whether he was square dancing as a kid or out on a county search-and- rescue mission. His steady marksmanship enabled him to bag a four-point buck, whose weathered rack sits on a fence beside his house. Around town, folks knew Thom was coming when they saw "Baby Huey," a battered green-and- rust 1972 GMC pickup. He would zoom through mud puddles in it, yelling at friends, "Just like a Jeep commercial!"
Though Thom had long wanted to join the Marines, the first time he talked with his dad about it the answer was no. Tom wanted his son to go to college. So he studied criminal justice for a year, planning to become a peace officer. But he got restless and asked again. This time the answer was yes. Explains Jenkins: "I have a saying -- save the boy, destroy the man."
At least 15 other local men and women are in the gulf, a consequence of the convergence of patriotism and economics in rural America. Their parents are proud but also worried that their child could be next. At home, TVs blare incessantly. Parents stay awake at night hoping for reassuring phone calls from the front. They get headaches. They cry, they hug, they pray.
There was some talk around Coulterville about building a permanent memorial for Thom, but it has been silenced. "We're postponing that decision because he may not be the only one," explains Sharon Tucker, a close family friend. Thom's cousin Ed Jenkins and his friend Jason Turpin are signed up to join the Navy this summer, after they graduate from high school. Ed is the last male in the Jenkins line. "I don't know whether to serve my family or my country," he says. But in his heart he knows he will join the Navy.
The last time Tom Jenkins saw his son alive was after drinking several cups of coffee with him at the breakfast table three weeks before he left for Saudi Arabia. Two days before the funeral, Tom paid a solitary visit to the funeral home in nearby Sonora. He propped Thom's wooden-framed portrait in front of the gunmetal-gray steel casket, then stood quietly to one side, his eyes misting up. It was the first time he'd been alone with his son since Thom ) returned from the Persian Gulf. "Good memories flow," said Jenkins. "They just keep flowing."
Shortly after Thom's death, this poem "for Tommy J." from "Kathy B." appeared on local bulletin boards:
When Old Folks Die
I Don't Cry
It's Time
But
When The Young Ones Go
It Grieves Me So
Who Can Count The Cost
Of A
Young Life
Lost?
The Sharpest Sorrow
Is For What Might Have Been