Remembering Julie Moore, the civilian who helped change military protocol
In April of 2004, Army Staff Sergeant Esau Patterson was serving in Iraq. They'd met years earlier in church, at Ft. Benning in Georgia. They got married, had two children, and were planning a family reunion for when he returned.
But then came a knock at the door. "And there's two uniformed service members standing there," said Kisha. "And they looked at me, and I could see tears in their eyes, and that's when I knew."
A car bomb had killed her husband. He was 25 years old. "I would never get to say goodbye," she said. "I would never get to touch him. I would never get to do anything else."
I asked, "What did it mean to you to have service members there with you?"
"It meant that what he died for was okay, that he was truly protecting and serving this country," Kisha replied.
Those soldiers were carrying out a solemn duty that had not always been performed. During the Civil War, the military had no formal casualty notification system. Occasionally families would receive a letter. By World War I and through the Vietnam War, the military was sending telegrams, until an Army wife named Julia Moore (known as Julie) stepped in.
"She completely changed the culture of the military," said her son, Greg Moore. "In 1965, during the Battle of the Ia Drang, death notices were delivered to spouses by telegrams and taxicabs. Cold, cruel, dispassionate. She was outraged."
Julie Moore's husband, Hal, was a highly-regarded Lt. Colonel then serving in Vietnam when, as she described in a letter, a taxi driver pulled up to her house: "When he rang the bell I decided not to answer; that way, everything would be all right," she wrote. "I finally said to myself, 'Come on, Julie, you have to face up to what's to come, so go answer the door."
It turned out, the driver needed directions.
Greg Moore said, "At that moment, she knew what it felt to get that telegram, and she never wanted to have anybody else get that telegram and not have somebody physically with them."
So, Julie Moore made a deal with the local Western Union office: they would call her whenever a telegram came.
The 2002 movie "We Were Soldiers" portrayed how Julie Moore would rush to comfort the widows.
Even as she cared for her five young children, Moore helped other Army wives on the home front, as she recounted in a 2001 interview: "I think people forget that these men had families. And these families had problems. And the wives are left alone to deal with them as best they can. And these women were really up to the task. They really were."
Together, the Army wives successfully lobbied the base commander. Julie's son Dave Moore said, "What they really wanted was the Army to make a fundamental change, which they did, in that the Army should take responsibility for delivering these telegrams to the wives and personally care for the spouse during that time of cathartic change."
Service members now notify families in person, and offer additional support.
When Army Sgt. First Class Kendrick Ray delivered a casualty notification in 2021, it was a sacred mission. Now, he helps families in the days after. Asked what goes through his mind before he knocks on the door, Ray replied, "I just said a prayer, like, 'How can I be of service to this family? I don't know what they're going through, but give me strength to, you know, face whatever it is once I ring the doorbell.'
"I believe now it's my purpose," he said. "I can let people know, like, 'Hey, you're not alone. we're right here with you, every step of the way.'"
Julie Moore died in 2004. Her husband died 13 years later.
In 2023, the Pentagon renamed Ft. Benning Ft. Moore to honor them both. It marked the first time an American military base had been named for a civilian.
Dave Moore said, "It's not a legacy she asked for; it's a legacy she built herself towards. And the hero rises to a moment and achieves great things."
This year, the Army post was re-named Ft. Benning. But just down the road, at the National Infantry Museum, her name endures.
I asked Kisha Patterson, "When you think about what she did, what comes to your mind?"
"She's phenomenal," Patterson replied. "I can't imagine having received a telegram with that information on it. So, I just thank her. There're husbands that endure this same pain. There are mothers and fathers, there are children that get these knocks. So, she has, yes, she has truly made a difference for all of us."
For more info:
National Infantry Museum, Columbus, Ga.
Story produced by Robbyn McFadden. Editor: Joseph Frandino.
4 women arrested for allegedly aiding escaped New Orleans inmates
Full interview: World Food Programme Executive Director Cindy McCain
Open: This is "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," May 25, 2025
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
18 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Jim Crow meets ICE at ‘Alligator Alcatraz'
A few years ago I came across a profoundly unnerving historical photo: A lineup of terrified, naked Black babies cowered over the title 'Alligator Bait.' As it turned out, the idea of Black babies being used as alligator bait was a beloved trope dating back to the antebellum South, though it didn't really take off until after the Civil War. The image I saw was created in 1897, just one year after Plessy vs. Ferguson established 'separate but equal' as the foundational doublespeak of segregation. With formerly enslaved people striking out and settling their own homesteads, the prevailing stereotypes deployed to justify violence against Black people were forced to evolve. We were no longer simple and primitive, in desperate need of the civilizing stewardship of white Christian slave owners. After emancipation, we became dangerous, lazy and worthless. Worth less, in fact, than the chickens more commonly used to bait alligators. White Floridians in particular so fell in love with the concept of alligators hungry for Black babies that it birthed an entire industry. Visitors to the Sunshine State could purchase souvenir postcards featuring illustrations of googly-eyed alligators chasing crying Black children. There was a popular brand of licorice called 'Little African,' with packaging that featured a cartoon alligator tugging playfully at a Black infant's rag diaper. The tagline read: 'A Dainty Morsel.' Anglers could buy fishing lures molded in the shape of a Black baby protruding from an alligator's mouth. You get the idea. When I first learned of all this, naturally, I was unmoored. I was also surprised that I'd never heard of the alligator bait slur. Why doesn't it sit alongside the minstrel, the mammy and the golliwog in our cultural memory of racist archetypes? Did it cross some unspoken line with the vulgarity of its violence? Perhaps this particular dog whistle was a tad too audible? Or was it the plausible deniability? Did people (including historians) wave it away because babies were never 'really' used as alligator bait? It's true that beyond the cultural ephemera — which includes songs (such as the ragtime tune 'Mammy's Little Alligator Bait') and mechanical alligator toys that swallow Black babies whole, over and over again — there are apparently no surviving records of Black babies sacrificed in this way. No autopsy reports, no court records proving that anyone was apprehended and convicted of said crime. But of course, why would there be? The thing I found so unnerving about the alligator bait phenomenon wasn't its literal veracity. There's no question human beings are capable of that and far worse. Without a doubt, 'civilized' people could find satisfaction — or comfort, or justice, or opportunity — in the violent slaughter of babies. Donald Trump's recently posted AI clip 'Trump Gaza,' which suggests the real world annihilation of Palestinians will give way to luxury beachfront resorts, is a shining example. The thing that haunted me about alligator bait was the glee with which the idea was embraced. It was funny. Cute. Harmless. Can't you take a joke? Now here we are, 100 years after 'Mammy's Little Alligator Bait,' and the bigots are once again using cartoon alligators to meme-ify racial violence, this time against immigrants. Just like the title 'Alligator Bait,' the Florida detention center name 'Alligator Alcatraz' serves multiple ends: It provokes sadistic yuks. It mocks. It threatens. But most crucially, it dehumanizes. 'Alligator Bait' suggests that Black people are worthless. By evoking the country's most infamous prison, 'Alligator Alcatraz' frames the conversation as one about keeping Americans safe. It suggests the people imprisoned there are not vulnerable and defenseless men and women; anyone sent to 'Alligator Alcatraz' must be a criminal of the worst sort. Unworthy of basic human rights. Fully deserving of every indignity inflicted upon them. 'Alligator Alcatraz' cloaks cruelty in bureaucratic euphemism. It's doublespeak, masking an agenda to galvanize a bloodthirsty base and make state violence sound reasonable, even necessary. It has nothing to do with keeping Americans safe. Oft-cited studies from Stanford, the Libertarian Cato Institute, the New York Times and others have shown conclusively that immigrants, those here legally and illegally, are significantly less likely to commit violent crimes than their U.S.-born neighbors. If those behind 'Alligator Alcatraz' cared at all about keeping Americans safe, they wouldn't have just pushed a budget bill that obliterates our access to healthcare, environmental protection and food safety. If they actually cherished the rule of law, they would not deny immigrants their constitutionally guaranteed right to due process. If they were truly concerned about crime, there wouldn't be a felon in the White House. As souvenir shops and Etsy stores flood with 'Alligator Alcatraz' merch, it's worth noting that none of it is played for horror. Like the cutesy alligator bait merchandise before it, these aren't monster-movie creatures with blazing eyes and razor-sharp, blood-dripping teeth. The 'Alligator Alcatraz' storefront is cartoon gators slyly winking at us from under red baseball caps: It's just a joke, and you're in on it. And it's exactly this cheeky, palatable, available-in-child-sizes commodification that exposes the true horror for those it targets: There will be no empathy, no change of heart, no seeing of the light. Dear immigrants of America: Your pain is our amusement. The thing I keep wondering is, would this cheekiness even be possible if everyone knew the alligator bait history, the nastiness of which was buried so deep that 'Gator bait' chants echoed through the University of Florida stadium until 2020? Would they still chuckle if they saw the century-old postcards circulated by people who 'just didn't know any better'? My cynical side says: Yeah, probably. But my strategic side reminds me: If history truly didn't matter, it wouldn't be continuously minimized, rewritten, whitewashed. There's truth in the old idiom: Knowledge is power. Anyone trying to keep knowledge from you, whether by banning books, gutting classrooms, denying identities or burying facts, is only trying to disempower you. That's why history, as painful as it often is, matters. Remembering the horror of alligator bait isn't about dwelling on the grotesque. It's about recognizing how cruelty gets coded into culture. 'Alligator Alcatraz' is proof that alligator bait never went away. It didn't evolve or get slicker. It's the same old, tired cruelty, rebranded and aimed at a new target. The goal is exactly the same: to manufacture consent for suffering and ensure the most vulnerable among us know where they stand — as props, as bait, as punchlines. And no joke is more vulgar than one mocking the pain of your neighbors, whether they were born in this country or not. Ezra Claytan Daniels is a screenwriter and graphic novelist whose upcoming horror graphic novel, 'Mama Came Callin',' confronts the legacy of the alligator bait trope.
Boston Globe
21 hours ago
- Boston Globe
She was the bard of loneliness — who thrived on human connection
Having never read her letters before, despite my enduring fandom — it was Dickinson's wry humor that first turned me on to poetry — what struck me was how committed she was to the virtue of human fellowship, even as she pursued her famously solitary art. It wasn't just birds and irony that saved her from despair. It was the love she had for her family, friends, and fellow citizens. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up 'Love is its own rescue,' she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the writer and abolitionist — not a line you'd expect from a poet who encrypts her pain and longing into frosty hymns and riddles, and whose poems are some of the best descriptions of loneliness available. Yet there she is, year after year, mailing birthday messages, valentines, and kudos, sometimes enclosing pressed flowers or clutches of rowan tied with ribbon. She wrote letters consoling friends on the deaths of their young children. She mourned the loss of her Massachusetts neighbors during the Civil War. She seemed to believe that our caring for others constitutes the only paradise we should ever expect. In a letter to Elizabeth Holland in 1877, she asked: 'Is not the distinction, of Affection, almost Realm enough?' She wanted to be alone but to be known too I discovered Emily Dickinson when I was 16. That summer, I was visiting my grandmother in Ripon, Wis., home of Ripon College and birthplace of Abraham Lincoln's (and Samuel Bowles's) Republican Party in 1854. Dickinson's 'Complete Poems' was 700 pages long — a daunting but worthy reading project for a shy aspiring writer who was drawn more to literature than to the politics of his country. It was a wonderful, haunting experience. I liked her dark, obsessive mind, her wicked sense of humor. But it was the fierce longing her poems exuded that kept me reading into the night. 'It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness,' she writes in a poem from 1862. Elsewhere, she calls loneliness 'an Omen in the Bone' and 'the Horror not to be surveyed.' By 16, I had accepted the fact that I liked spending time by myself. And I found that poetry, like prayer, was a socially acceptable if quirky use of solitude. Writing was also a consolation for my frequent inability to communicate to family or friends exactly what I was feeling. Dickinson had this problem, too. Why else would she write a thousand poems and leave them all behind in a drawer? In Dickinson's letters, one can glean the artist's core paradox of desiring personal privacy and social recognition. I'd felt this paradox myself while cooped up in my dorm room writing poems I would never share. Was I going to be a hermit? Would the horror of loneliness swallow me up? Was the urge to write poetry a blessing or a symptom? What would a therapist say? In 'Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development,' the psychoanalyst Otto Rank makes a useful distinction between the neurotic and the artist, both of whom resist the crowd and run the risk of loneliness. A neurotic, he says, is a person whose neglected creative urges become corrosive to the self. An artist turns them into art. I didn't know how lonely I was in my 20s until I reached my 30s. After college, I gave up writing in order to find a proper career, which meant that I became one of Otto Rank's neurotics. It took me a long time to revive my creative urges — to borrow the bleak Freudian term — and part of the process involved reading Emily Dickinson's poems again. This time, it was clear to me she was writing about depression. 'There's a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons – / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes.' There is indeed. And Pfizer could have used these lines for the opening of a Zoloft ad: 'I felt a funeral in my brain.' 'I heard a fly buzz when I died.' 'Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me.' These are the poems that helped establish Dickinson's reputation as a sly gothic eminence, her distressed meters and slant rhymes striking a fatally minor chord. And it's true that she often 'thought of the Grave,' as she puts it, apologetically, in one of her early letters. But Emily Dickinson died of heart failure, not suicide. This fact was very important to me, and also — not to be macabre — a little bit surprising. She was always so at odds with herself, after all, gnawing at psychic wounds or diving back into the wreck, as the poet Adrienne Rich would say. The question is, what sustained her? I think it was other people. To read Dickinson's letters is to witness just how deeply embedded she was in the social world of her day, despite her famous reclusiveness. With editors, she was coy, ironic, and self-mythologizing. 'You ask of my Companions,' she writes to Higginson during their first exchange. 'Hills — Sir — and the Sundown.' But she also wrote long, gossipy letters to her brother, Austin, when he was away, and she corresponded frequently with the far more adventurous writer Helen Hunt Jackson, who scolded Dickinson for her reticence. Her notes to prominent religious men, including Edward Everett Hale and the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, crackle with wit and genuine theological curiosity. And of course, this latest volume of her correspondence also includes her hundreds of 'letter-poems,' many of which she sent to Susan Gilbert, her friend and sister-in-law, for amusement and commentary. ('Is this frostier?' she asks Gilbert when sending a newly revised draft.) Her humor never flags. At age 50, she wrote: 'We have had two hurricanes within as many hours, one of which came near enough to untie my apron.' She sends honey to a friend with this note: 'Lest any bee should boast.' Still, that longing one feels in her poems gusted through her entire life. 'There is an aching void in my heart which I am convinced the world never can fill,' she writes to her friend Abiah Root at the age of 16, half in response to a religious revival sweeping through her hometown of Amherst. She's pleased for those who were saved by God, but she herself demurs. The whole idea of Eternity, she writes, appears 'dreadful' to her. She assumes that she is 'wicked.' And yet she consistently honors her friends' belief in the Christian afterlife. Heaven was an abstraction, but the people she loved were real to her, and letter-writing offered her a way to remain in communion with them, to express her otherwise wholly Christian kindness and devotion. 'A Letter is a joy of Earth,' she wrote in 1885, less than a year before her death. 'It is denied the Gods.' Elsewhere, she compares a letter to 'immortality.' It was in the realm of her mind where she and her friends could coexist forever. As the late scholar and Harvard professor Helen Vendler puts it: 'The thought that on the Last Day she would be reunited with those she had loved was so moving to Dickinson that she wrote some of her most gripping poems about that imagined reunion.' She made her friends immortal One reason Dickinson's correspondence seems heroic to me is that there are 30,000 unread emails in my inbox. Many of these are spam, but a truly unacceptable percentage of them are not. I am so behind on email that I fantasize about changing my name and creating a new email address to achieve the illusion of a fresh start. My grandmother wasn't like this. She wrote and received letters all the time. She was active in her community — the college, the church, the golf course. She played gin rummy once a week. She babysat the kid next door. She helped me join a baseball team so that I could stand in center field and sniff my glove while mulling over Emily Dickinson's imagery. In contrast, I find social life mysteriously exhausting. Especially the digital version. I just cannot seem to keep up with all the requests, notifications, invitations to follow, and so on. Part of my struggle has to do with a garden-variety case of the blues. But if Emily Dickinson, whose blue periods often lasted for weeks at a time, could remember to wish her cousin a happy birthday, why can't I? One possible answer is that there's something wrong with me. Maybe I never recovered from my early preference for solitude. Maybe I, too, have an 'aching void' in my heart that the world can never fill. Or maybe — this is my most recent hypothesis — we all do. In her 1963 essay 'On the Sense of Loneliness,' the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein argues that loneliness results from the ego's desire for wholeness, what she calls 'an unattainable perfect internal state.' Poetry is one way of pursuing that unattainable state. Perhaps that's why Dickinson wrote the same poem again and again with slight variations. She never achieved wholeness. 'Full and permanent integration is never possible,' Klein writes, 'for some polarity between the life and death instincts always persists.' I think that's what I responded to in Dickinson — that 'polarity,' the tension between a desire for connection and an equally strong desire for isolation. I wonder, because I'm a teacher now, what that tension feels like to young people today, who report being lonelier and more depressed than ever. There are thousands of mental health and wellness apps for teens, including a growing number of AI chatbots designed to teach coping skills or simply offer companionship (the psychologist Paul Bloom calls this ' Recently, I've begun to consider assigning Dickinson's letters instead. At the very least, they model how to weather a bout of depression without forgetting to send buttercups to neighbors for the centennial. More important, they demonstrate that community is the work of imagination to a surprising degree. The author Marilynne Robinson makes this point in one of her essays. 'Community,' she writes, 'consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.' In that same essay, she refers to this love as the 'essence and genius' of democracy. To overcome our loneliness, we do not need to join a church or a bowling league, as Robert Putnam suggests in his landmark book on civic decay, 'Bowling Alone . ' But we do need to find ways to exercise compassion. Compassion feels in short supply these days, and it's tempting to blame our digital culture for exacerbating our epidemic of loneliness. But Kristen Radtke, author of 'Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, ' is skeptical of the claim that the internet is the primary cause of social isolation. People made this claim about the telephone and the radio, too. Yet there is clearly something unique about 'the portal,' as Patricia Lockwood calls the internet in 'No One Is Talking About This,' her novel about the absurdity of life on social media. 'Why did the portal feel so private,' the narrator asks at one point, 'when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere?' In an interview, Lockwood confessed that what attracted her to Twitter was the chance to become 'a spirit in a void.' A Dickinsonian sentiment, and maybe a universal one. But the lesson of Dickinson's letters is that she wasn't just a spirit in a void. 'I know I love my friends,' she writes to Louisa and Frances Norcross in 1873, adding: ''tis love for them that sets the blister in my throat, many a time of day.' These bonds were important to Dickinson, especially in seasons of grief. Wherever else her friends had gone, they lived on in her memory, a verifiable afterlife, and remained eternal companions. As she writes in a letter to Mary Hills: 'To be remembered is next to being loved, and to be loved is heaven.'
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Boston Globe
From Benjamin Franklin to Pony Express to anthrax: How the US Postal Service shaped a nation
While it now grapples with concerns over its financial viability in the modern era, the agency has had a long and colorful history that helped shape the nation. It has grown from serving the 13 colonies to delivering more mail than any other postal system in the world, reaching nearly 169 million addresses and employing more than 635,000 people. Advertisement A new postal service In those early days, creating an American postal system was a key priority for the nation's founders, who needed to communicate with the Continental Army and the colonies. When the Continental Congress met in 1775, it appointed Franklin as the first postmaster because he had served in the British postal service for North America. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The early postal system also became crucial to unifying the diverse, fragmented colonies into a nation by spreading ideas of liberty and independence through letters, newspapers and pamphlets. 'People were reading, getting ideas of what it would be like to be an independent country,' Kochersperger said. Westward expansion When the U.S. Constitution was ratified, Congress was granted power to establish post offices and mail routes that were first used by mail carriers on horseback and later upgraded for stagecoaches. Some evolved into highways still used today. Advertisement Initially running north–south along the East Coast, post roads later extended westward. Historians have said this aided settler expansion into Native lands and was intertwined with the displacement of tribes. As western migration accelerated, mail was sent by ship from New York to Central America and on to California. Delivery typically took two to three months. The Pony Express, operated by private carriers, was started to speed things up. A relay system of riders on horseback carried mail from California to Missouri, the furthest westward railroad stop. The 1,800-mile (2,900-kilometer) journey took 10 days. While legendary, it only lasted about 18 months, until Oct. 26, 1861. The service was scuttled by the Civil War and made obsolete with the advent of the telegraph, said Daniel Piazza, chief curator of philately at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Later, the transcontinental railroad reduced mail delivery from months to days. New types of delivery Free mail delivery to homes began in earnest in 1863 in the nation's largest cities. It was initially created as a response to grief during the Civil War. At the time, the only communication from a father, brother, husband or son usually came through letter-writing. Women lined up daily at post offices, awaiting word. They sometimes got their own letters back, with a note saying their loved one had been killed. Postal officials in Cleveland decided to take mail to people's homes out of compassion. Enthusiasm for home delivery spread quickly, and people living in rural areas wanted it, too. Despite logistical challenges, rural free delivery began expanding rapidly around 1900. By the 1920s, mail carriers mostly had replaced horse-drawn wagons with automobiles. Advertisement Around that time, mail started being sent by airplane as well. The nation's first regularly scheduled airmail service began on May 15, 1918. The initial routes were between Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York, using Army pilots and planes. The post office soon took over air mail, running operations for nine years until turning to fledgling private airline companies, some of which remain major airlines. In the early days, flights were so dangerous that some pilots dubbed themselves the Suicide Club. Thirty-two pilots were killed. Major changes to the system The postal service saw major growth during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's time in office. His New Deal plan to address the Great Depression put people to work building 2,000 new post offices. After World War II, a booming economy and growing population led to a surge in mail. To handle the increasing volume, the post office needed a faster alternative to manual sorting. So, on July 1, 1963, each post office was given a five-digit ZIP code. Previously, clerks had to memorize thousands of points of address information so they could sort the mail, Kochersperger said. The public was skeptical at first, balking at more numbers. So, the post office came up with a friendly cartoon character named Mr. ZIP, who helped convince people their mail would arrive faster. By 1970, postal workers were angry over low wages and a strike was called by leaders of the National Association of Letter Carriers union in New York. Eventually about 200,000 workers joined the postal stoppage, which led to the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970. It authorized collective bargaining rights for postal workers and transformed the taxpayer-supported Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service, a financially self-sustaining and independent agency within the executive branch. Advertisement In more recent times, U.S. Postal Service workers have faced various threats, including anthrax, a serious infectious bacterial disease. Weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, four threatening letters contaminated with anthrax were sent through the mail. Two workers at a mail distribution center in Washington, D.C. died after breathing in the spores, and thousands were potentially exposed. Three other people were killed, and more than a dozen were sickened. The anthrax scare led to major changes in how mail was monitored and sorted and how USPS workers protected themselves. Years later, they'd be designated essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and don protective gear again. Haigh reported from Hartford, Conn.
