Even before Army Master Sgt. Anthony Link could deliver the dreaded knock on the door, he heard a woman inside shout out in despair.
“No,” cried Talisa Williams, who pulled up a window curtain and saw the men in their dress uniforms. “My baby. Not my baby.”
It was shortly after 5 a.m., July 8, 2012. Standing outside the Brooksville home of Talisa and Clarence Williams Jr., Link, who was with an Army chaplain, steeled himself for the difficult assignment. He was there to tell the couple that their son, Clarence Williams III, a young man of deep faith, love of country and a burning desire to be a soldier like his dad, had been killed in Afghanistan.
Link had served as an Army Casualty Notification Officer many times before, informing several families that a loved one had been killed in action. But each experience brings new challenges, Links says. New sorrows.
Confident that he knew what he’d say, Link says he thought about his oldest child to make sure he’d know how to say it.
“My daughter is about a year younger than this soldier who was killed in Afghanistan,” he remembers. “All I could think of was what if that was my daughter? What kind of help would I need?”
Three years later, Link and the Williams family maintain a deep friendship, a dynamic that has played out with a number of families who he shepherded through the grief and bewilderment that comes with learning a loved one has died in service to the country. As the nation honors the fallen on Memorial Day, The Tampa Tribune examines the critical relationship between troops like Link and the families they assist.
“I don’t know what we would have done without him,” says Kim Allison, whose youngest son, Army Spc. Zachary Shannon, died in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Afghanistan on March 11, 2013.
Link showed up at her Dunedin house to deliver the bad news and has been a part of her family’s life ever since.
They are planning a cruise together in the fall.
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Back in 2008, one of Link’s Army mentors made a suggestion that would change his life. And, as it turned out, the lives of many others like the parents of Clarence Williams III and Zachary Shannon.
Chief Warrant Officer 3 Charles Winston was looking for a few good soldiers to become Casualty Notification Officers and Casualty Assistance Officers.
The notification officers are the ones who, along with a chaplain, knock on the door when an active duty soldier is killed due to combat, training, injury or illness. The assistance officers are the ones who walk the families through the initial grief, the piles of paperwork, seeing the flag-drapped casket and thousands of details that come up in a bureaucratic maze no one wants to enter.
Link, 42, is a human resources official and has been with the Army for more than two decades. He says Winston asked if he wanted to step up and help the loved ones.
“He just said, ‘you are organized, good with people and just seem to be caring about soldiers,’” says Link. “He did this duty and he said, ‘“I need to get some good soldiers in here and take care of these families.’”
Army rules say that all enlisted soldiers above the rank of Sgt. 1st Class, Chief Warrant Officer 2 and any officer is eligible to be trained to notify and assist the families of the fallen.
“We are looking for a level of maturity,” says Linda Johnson, benefits coordinator at Fort Stewart in Georgia, which oversees the assistance and notification officers in the Tampa area.
Those selected by their brigade commanders undergo three days of intensive training, which includes everything from knowing how to fill out the required paperwork for compensation and benefits, how to navigate the Department of Veterans Affairs, hearing from survivors about their experiences and role playing the door knock, Johnson says. After training, there is a test that must be passed each year.
Most of the time, there are separate notification and assistance officers for each case, says Johnson. Aside from helping families of active duty soldiers who have died, they assist families of those who separated from the Army within four months and families of retired soldiers.
Each branch of the service has a slightly different approach, though the Army, Navy and Marines have the same rank requirements.
The Navy and Marines combine the notification and assistance roles into a Casualty Assistance Calls Officer, or CACO. The Air Force uses airmen to make the notifications, and civilians, called Casualty Assistance Representatives, to handle the assistance portion. U.S. Special Operations Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, has its own cohort, drawn from the services, to help the families of commandos.
Across the services, they have been busy. There have been more than 6,800 U.S. troop deaths in support of the wars since 9/11. And more who have succumbed during training or to injury or illness.
Link says though the training was extremely helpful, he still had to reach out to his mentor before knocking on his first door to notify Army Sgt. Federico Borjas’ family that he had been killed in Afghanistan on Oct. 16, 2008.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” says Link. “You’re in a classroom and you role play and all that. You practice and have discussions, but I just needed that reenforcement.”
So Link called Winston.
“‘I know you can do this,’” Link recalls Winston telling him. “‘Just think about you having to go out to my family. Think of how that would be.’”
That, says Link, helped him help the Borjas family.
About 16 months later, Winston’s advice proved eerily prophetic.
“Chief Winston passed away and I had to do that for his family,” says Link, who has helped scores of families, including those of about two dozen soldiers killed in action.
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Shortly after 5 a.m., July 8, 2012, Talisa Williams heard someone at her front door.
“I shook my husband and told him I heard the doorbell ring,” she says. “My husband said he didn’t hear anything.”
Eventually convincing Clarence Williams Jr., an Army veteran and Florida Highway Patrol Officer, that someone indeed was ringing the bell, the two got out of bed and headed to the front door.
Clarence Williams Jr. pulled a window curtain back.
“What do you see?” Williams recalls asking.
“‘Go get dressed,’” she remembers hearing her husband answer.
Not wanting to wait, Williams says she too pulled a curtain back.
“I saw the military hats,” she says. “Two military hats. One was Sgt. Link, the other was the chaplain. I lost it completely then. I already knew something terrible happened to my son even before they rang the doorbell.”
When the Williams let Link into their home, they had no idea they would be letting him into their life.
Link and the chaplain were invited inside. Once he confirmed that the couple were indeed the parents of Spc. Clarence Williams III, Link delivered the well-rehearsed, standardized words that those with loved ones in uniform never want to hear.
“The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that your son is believed to have been killed in action on July 8,” Link said.
“I tried to stay calm, but I lost it,” Williams recalls. “I told him no, it wasn’t my son, but I knew it was my son.”
After giving the parents time to let the news sink in, Link says he began to talk with the couple about the many things that needed to be done.
Though it was early, Link had already been up for a while, printing out the stacks of paperwork and forms that Talisa and Clarence Williams Jr. needed to eventually fill out. Putting on a dress uniform he keeps pressed and hanging in his closet for such assignments, he drove to meet the chaplain and was now helping the family cope with the aftermath of the horrid news.
Because their son was killed in action, they had the option of going to Dover Air Force Base to witness his body come back to the United States in what is called a dignified transfer ceremony.
“The family has to be ready to go pretty quickly for a dignified transfer,” he says. “They might have to leave later that day or the next day.”
Link calmly answered the family’s questions that morning. But it was only the beginning.
There were many forms to fill out, says Williams. Forms authorizing the Army to take care of the body, Forms authorizing burial at the Florida National Cemetery. Forms spelling out the type of headstone.
“We had a lot of decisions to make quickly,” says Williams of the days after the knock. Link, she says, was a constant and calming presence.
He made the travel arrangements to Dover and accompanied the family. He was part of the funeral, escorted Talisa Williams into the service. He was available every time the family had a question.
“It meant a lot to us as a family, because him being a soldier himself, he pretty much knew what we were going through,” says Williams. “It was hard, but he showed us a lot how much care there was, how much love there was. It made our family know that we were important.”
But even after the six months was up, Williams says Link stayed in touch, attending family functions like barbecues as well as memorial events.
“He is an awesome person and has become a big part of our family,” says Williams.
The feeling is shared by others to whom Link has delivered the worst news.
Link informed Thea Kurz when her son, Army Sgt. 1st Class Matthew I. Leggett was killed in Kabul on Aug. 20, 2014.
“He is a great human being with understanding, being able to read where I was at and knowing when to be empathetic,” says Kurz, a bookkeeper from Ruskin, “I just saw him a week and a half ago.”
This September, Chip and Kim Allison will take a cruise with Link and his family.
On March 11, 2013, their son, Zachary Shannon, was one of five soldiers killed when their helicopter crashed in Afghanistan. Link was his family’s Casualty Assistance Officer, walking them through every step of the process.
“I almost felt panic at the end of the six months that, ‘oh my gosh, he’s not going to be our Casualty Assistance Officer,” says Kim Allison. “But the friendship we built up continues.”
Good casualty notification and assistance officers are very important to grieving family members, says Toni Gross, who is intimately familiar with the drill.
Her son, Frank Gross, was 25 when he was killed in Afghanistan July 16, 2011. She now serves as president of American Gold Star Mothers Inc. Tampa Bay, an organization that helps parents whose children have died in service to the country.
Gross says that Army Maj. Heidi Skelton-Riley served as both her notification and assistance officer and was there anytime her family needed.
“She went above and beyond,” says Gross, recalling that, after accompanying her family to Arlington National Cemetery for the burial of her son, Skelton-Riley came down with food poisoning and was vomiting on the plane ride back to Florida.
“But nothing could have stopped Major Heidi,” says Gross.
Not every family is so lucky, she says.
“Some Gold Star moms have had really crappy casualty assistance officers,” she says. “And that causes additional stress and grief to the family. It gives them a sense of hopelessness and helplessness.
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Master Sgt. Anthony Link, who is studying to become a deacon in his church, says that being accepted as a family member is a great honor.
“Most of the time, I have children the same age,” he says of the soldiers whose families he has served. “I just grieve for them and think about the birthdays being missed. The Christmases being missed. The anniversaries.”
Aside from the families, Link says he thinks frequently about the soldiers.
“Oddly enough, I just think about the person that I’m not going to get to meet, but who I get to know a lot about,” says Link, adding that he plans to spend Memorial Day at Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell.
He will attend the annual ceremony honoring the fallen. And pay his personal respects to the soldiers buried there, like Clarence Williams III, whose families he has assisted.
“I will visit quite a few soldiers,” says Link.
Meanwhile, with American service members in harm’s way around the globe, the pressed uniform hangs in his closet.
Ready for the next call to make the dreaded knock on the door.
PHOTO: American flags adorn graves representing Memorial Day. (AP File Photo/Mark Humphrey)