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Friday, July 29, 2005
Father to say goodbye to ‘Gus’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sometime in the next few days, Jeffry Brunson plans to sit next to his son’s casket in a South Georgia funeral home.
He’s not certain now, but he said he imagines he’ll spend those still, gray moments telling his boy, “Gus,” how proud he is of him. Of how much he’s missed already, in just a week.
Army National Guard Spc. Jacques “Gus” Brunson died in a bomb blast in Iraq.
If he could, Brunson would look down into the coffin at his son’s face, his body clad in his Army National Guard uniform and remember the man he was before.
Before the bomb on the side of a Baghdad road tore into the Humvee Spc. Jacques “Gus” Brunson was traveling in on Sunday. With Brunson were three other Georgia soldiers of the Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team. All died.
Jeffry Brunson said he figures the blast was ferocious because he’s been told the casket will need to be closed for the service.
The Lawrenceville man looked through photographs of his blue-eyed boy on Thursday, searching for just the right one to set atop the coffin.
“There’s this one where he just finished boot camp,” Brunson said softly in a telephone interview. “He looks great in his uniform. He was everything a man could be.”
Before he told stories about his son, the 30-year-old Guard specialist, he spoke of Gus, the rambunctious child, the second of Brunson’s four children.
They nicknamed him after the old Schlitz beer commercial with the slogan, “Go for the gusto.” At the time, the 10-month-old was proving to be a real handful himself, so his father decided to start calling him Gus.
He wasn’t sick much as a kid. Didn’t get a cold really until he was 18. Once, he (or maybe his little brother, Brunson said) set the curtains in his bedroom on fire, but he learned his lesson. For the most part, he was a pretty good kid. Could have had something to do with the time Gus and his siblings spent at Antioch Baptist Church in Sylvester, the town where he spent a good bit of his life. Worth County schools educated him and he gave the high school the best he had as a center for the football team, the Worth County Rams. His mother, Cathy, still lives there and is the county’s deputy tax commissioner.
He eventually had two children of his own, Kayla, who is 9, and Jake, who is 8. The job he had at Sumter County Correctional Institute as an officer wasn’t working as he’d hoped, and he needed better money to support his family. He moved through a series of jobs that didn’t pay much.
Eventually, he joined the National Guard.
His father was worried. Gus Brunson’s younger brother, Chris, 28, already was serving in the Army. Chris came home safely, after a tour in Iraq. The father didn’t want to wage that anguished vigil again. But Gus Brunson was proud to be in uniform.
In January, he was called up. His father’s heart sank. Jeffry Brunson said he told his son that he’d go in his place, which wasn’t possible if, for no other reason, than at 51, Brunson is not in any branch of the armed forces. Yet, if someone had to be in harm’s way, Brunson would rather it be him. When his son told him that he’d be behind a 50-caliber machine gun in a Humvee turret, Brunson grew even more alarmed. On their hunting trips when Gus was younger, the lesson was drilled home, “Don’t point a gun at anyone.” Now he’d have to do it as a matter of survival.
Then came Sunday’s road attack.
“I’d like the world to find a better way of solving problems than shooting each other,” Brunson said. “I mean, I don’t see the point in my son dying in something like that. No parent wants to have their son in something like that.”
A couple of nights this week, Brunson has stepped away from mourning to collect himself in the quiet outdoors.
The evening sounds brought to mind a night spent on the side of the Florida Turnpike more than 20 years ago when his family’s moving van ran out of gas. They were moving from Miami to Atlanta. As they waited for help, sitting outside the van, Gus heard the bugs’ sharp music and asked his father what it was. Crickets, was the reply.
Moments later, Gus piped up, “I’ll tell you what they’re saying, Daddy. They’re saying, ‘I love you, I love you.’ “
Brunson said he could almost hear his son’s young voice again this week as he stood listening to the crickets’ song carry across the warm evening air.
Georgia GI died ‘doing what he loved to do’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last year, Carla Hall met her dad for the first time since she was 3 years old after tracking him down on the Internet.
Now, in a few days she will join her newfound family in saying goodbye to him.
Carl Fuller with parents Thomas and Rutha before he left again for Iraq in December.
Hall’s father, Staff Sgt. Carl Fuller of Covington, was among four 48th Brigade Combat Team soldiers killed Sunday in Iraq when their Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb.
“I was so surprised when they informed me he had passed away,” said Hall, who unknowingly followed her father into the Army and is stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. “I just met him.”
Hall, an Army specialist who is a nursing assistant, cradled her 2-month-old daughter, Genesis, as she talked about the last e-mail she got from her father, in which he asked her to tell his granddaughter he said hello and that he loved her.
On Thursday, Hall joined other family members in the Covington home of Fuller’s sister, Berlinda Alexander, to talk about the man with a playful sense of humor, a love of baseball and a passion for the military.
“He loved his family and the military,” said his father, Thomas, a retired truck driver.
Carl Fuller, 44, was born in Troy, Ala., but moved with his family to Jacksonville, where he graduated from Ribault High School in 1979. He joined the Army that August, Alexander said.
It did not come as much of a surprise to some family members when Fuller announced he was enlisting. When Fuller and his four siblings played space games, Fuller always managed to land the role of Capt. Kirk of “Star Trek.”
He also talked about being a police officer and eventually realized his dream, first with MARTA and later with DeKalb County.
He even had the early bearings of a military man, all spit and polish, family members said.
“Everything had to have a crease,” said Alexander, a licensed practical nurse. “Crease the pants. Crease the shirt. He used to iron my clothes.”
This was Fuller’s second tour in Iraq. He and brother Willis served there together in 2003, said Presephoni Fuller, Willis Fuller’s wife. “They were soldiers sworn to protect and serve and that’s what they knew,” she said.
Alexander said her brother worked for a while as an independent trucker but most recently was a warehouse supervisor. She said he told her some time ago that he was thinking of joining the 48th because the unit was taking volunteers.
She said she and other family members talked to or e-mailed Fuller often. But the last time he called she missed it. She was at the hospital with her husband, Kevin, who was recovering from a motocycle accident.
He ended up talking to her daughter, Mya, 16. Alexander said her daughter told her, “Uncle Carl is so crazy.”
Alexander’s children were devoted to their uncle, she said. He would tell them both to “keep their heads up” in sports and school.
Michael remembered how his brother made him smile. He said as soon as he could, he wanted to play his brother’s favorite song in his honor, “Word Up” by Cameo.
The last time Alexander talked to him, Fuller said he was tired, which she found unusual because he never complained. “He said he missed being with my brother Willis, but he had to step up.”
She said the war has been costly for families of those serving in Iraq. But she takes some consolation in knowing her brother had loved serving his country.
“That’s what keeps my family going, because he was doing what he loved to do,” Alexander said.
