DERBY ? Sometimes – especially in dreams, or leaning back in a chair, staring into the blue yonder – it can seem as if they never left at all. As if they merely hustled out the front door to take care of some bit of business and that must be Joe or Dusty or Ryan coming back home just now. As dependable as the train whistle that blows several times a day out by Highway 15.

The business, however, was war, and they’re gone without a breath left in them. Those left behind are fighting their own battles now, trying to unwind the memories, turn ghosts into flesh and bone. Stanch the blood of Ryan Cox, of Dusty McGaugh, of Joe Herndon, and stand them upright in the Kansas sun, the world whole once again, for just one more moment.

Two soldiers and a Marine. Three bullets in Iraq. One finding each of them.

Ryan Cox

He was tall and handsome, half-black, half-white, and a sucker for a homeless pet. Ryan Cox found the stray cat some 12 years ago. The cat, named Jordan (after the basketball player), has just slithered into Ryan’s room here, just under Ryan’s Marine fatigues, draped on a coat hanger.

The face of Lindsey Cox is reflected in the photo of her stepbrother Ryan Cox, who died at age 19 on Father's Day 2003, the first serviceman from Derby to die in Iraq.

A room that’s still Ryan’s. A bed that’s still made up. The cover pulled so tight you could flip a penny on it and it’d bounce right back up.

The darkness out here can be still and almost lavender-colored across a land that once played host to Indian wars, droughts that ruined crops, and all the dreams upon dreams upon dreams of those who trekked west. Derby, a town of 19,500, lies less than 15 miles from Wichita, snug against the Arkansas River.

Ryan wasn’t one for sitting around. He liked to go. A few years back he came home from school, looked around, and talked Matt and Lindsey, his stepbrother and stepsister, into driving straight to Pikes Peak in Colorado. They listened to Ryan’s Pink Floyd tape most of the way. They had a ball, “even though we about froze to death,” says Lindsey.

He always ran. Sometimes he just ran and ran, a blur down Lincoln Street, over to Derby High, where he lettered in track.

“Every day he’d get out and run,” says Alan Cox, his stepfather. “He tried to get me to go. I said, ‘Son, I’m fat and I smoke. I ain’t going.'”

“I couldn’t keep up with him,” says Matt, 25, “so I never went running with him.”

Clyde Davison, Matt and Lindsey’s grandfather, used to come over, grab himself a chair, and sit out on the front porch. Girls would drive by every 15 minutes or so, and they’d slow down and wave to Davison.

“Say hi to Ryan!”

“Tell Ryan I said hi!”

It got to the point where he considered it his familial duty to sit on that front porch and holler out an “Okey-dokey!” on Ryan’s behalf. Even if the Cox family was giggling that Grandpa seemed awfully committed to getting out on that front porch.

The girls don’t come by waving and saying “Tell Ryan hi!” anymore. “He misses that,” Debbie Cox says of her father.

Just like Debbie hates to be home alone these days because she was always walking around the house and bumping into tall Ryan if he was home. And if she was sick and sitting there watching her soap operas, Ryan would come out of his room and sit with her.

Everyone got a kick when he’d call from Iraq. He’d ask about Matt and Lindsey and Chelsea, his biological sister. He’d ask about the dogs and cat. And he’d ask Debbie Cox what was happening on “Days of Our Lives” and “General Hospital.”

It was Valentine’s Day 2002 when Ryan joined the Marines. He didn’t seek anyone’s counsel, just figured the Marines would push him. He left for Camp Pendleton, Calif., on July 2. That was the day Debbie Cox began to hate the large window in the living room that looks out onto the front yard: “I never wanted to see Marine officers through that window,” she says.

Actually, Matt saw them first. He was asleep on the sofa and the knocking woke him up.

Debbie, who is hard of hearing, was in the kitchen and heard none of it.

Matt saw the Marines standing outside, beyond the large window, the window with a view that Debbie Cox feared. Matt knew what he knew: three Marines in the front yard. “And Ryan wasn’t with them,” he says.

Ryan and Pfc. Jeffrey Kenyon had been in the barracks in Najaf, Iraq, playing around with a fly swatter. It got out of hand. Words were exchanged. Kenyon raised his rifle and asked Ryan if he thought the chamber being aimed at him was loaded.

It better not be, Ryan Cox said.

“The kid was ordered twice to drop the weapon and didn’t do it,” says Debbie Cox, who was briefed on the Marine investigation.

Kenyon pulled the trigger. Then ran to summon help. Ryan, shot in the stomach, died during surgery.

It was Father’s Day 2003. He was 19, the first serviceman from Derby to die in Iraq. (Army Sgt. Jamie O. Maugans, 27, died in April 2002 in Afghanistan.)

Kenyon was sentenced to three years in a military prison.

Months later, Lindsey sat at her kitchen table and wrote a 2 1/2-page letter. She mailed it to the Marine who killed her stepbrother.

“Dear PFC Kenyon,

“… I am not trying to make you feel any worse than I hope you already do. From my understanding you shooting Ryan was an accident. I would like to know if it really was an accident. I don’t understand why if you were so certain the gun was empty why you had to pull the trigger. …

“Were the two of you close? Or did you even get along?”

In the twilight outside the house in Derby, you can see a stanza from Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.” After Ryan’s death, Debbie Cox, Ryan’s stepmother, had them carved into a stone that stands beside the steps leading to the front porch.

Joe Herndon

All those years – 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 – Christmas at the Herndon home had its very own St. Nick. Only it was St. Joe, Joe Herndon, sitting right in the middle, passing around the gifts. He had become the man of the house at 8 when his father died from a heart attack. So there was Joe, passing out the gifts through the years, wearing his daddy’s grin, which had become his own.

Army Spec. Joe Herndon, at right, is pictured with a fellow soldier in Iraq. A sniper killed Herndon on July 29, 2004.

Last Christmas, “no one wanted to do it,” Virginia Evans, Joe’s mom, says.

“I had already bought Christmas presents for him,” says his widow, Melaine.

Gifts he never opened.

People here say you’d meet Joe at some lunch or dinner and he’d corner you and start chatting you up and you’d feel like he’d been a friend for years.

“I wasn’t Joe’s best friend, but I would have been honored to have been so,” says Loren Flaharty, a big man who played football with Joe at Derby High.

It’s a Friday night, and Flaharty and some of his friends from high school are sitting around a wooden table at Buster’s Sports Bar, remembering old football victories and losses.

Back when Joe was a local football hero, there was no picture of him in Buster’s. Now his jersey is framed in glass on the wall, No. 56, with some snapshots of Joe, the soldier, tucked along the bottom.

Funny thing: Buster’s used to be the Derby Pharmacy, which is where Joe’s dad, Ken, worked, which is why when Joe’s mom is at Buster’s, she can see both her son and first husband inside the place. It’s what a small town sometimes is: the living and the dead close together.

The train roared by just moments ago out there by Highway 15.

A family friend once told his mom that Joe could talk with his eyes, he could bewitch you with them. Still, he complained that he could find girls, but not the girl. His mom said to find a girl athlete. So he began dating Melaine Long, who was a sports star in her own right at Derby High, playing basketball, volleyball and running track. He plucked some red roses from his mom’s garden and put them on her windowsill. He took her for walks down by the river.

On their six-month anniversary of dating, Joe got some Hershey’s Kisses and put them on Melaine’s car seat, spelling out I LOVE YOU with the candy.

Melaine’s dad happened to be Ray Long, the little league football coach in Joe’s youth. Tough man, still robust, a football player for Kansas State University some years back. Football is important here. So what if the town doesn’t have some lovely town square? It has a football stadium where the Derby High Panthers play, and that is town square enough. The spirit of Derby is there Friday nights down on the field, where players crash through the night air. Joe internalized that bit of mythology when he was a little boy – that someday he’d be much bigger, he’d be a Derby High Panther, he’d play linebacker.

When 9-11 struck, Joe started talking about joining the Army. He talked about it through the holidays and through the Kansas winter.

He enlisted April 24, 2002. His mom drove him to Topeka, just the two of them in the car. He brought up the subject of dying and said if something happened he’d like to be buried near his dad. And if something happened to his granddad first, lay him next to Granddad.

That Thanksgiving he was home on leave. He and Melaine were driving down Rock Road. Joe had the ring box in his pocket. It was his mom’s ring. They got married in Las Vegas on March 5, 2003. Melaine was happy to get married but disappointed that they didn’t have a big wedding.

Why don’t you have a big ceremony for the family in June? Joe’s commander suggested after the Vegas I-do’s. And Joe ran and called Melaine and told her that his commander had suggested a June wedding, which, to Joe, was code that they’d be flying off to Iraq soon thereafter.

And so they married again, on June 6, 2003, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Derby. Joe’s family and Melaine’s family and some of Joe’s football friends attended.

His first Purple Heart was for a bullet wound to the shoulder.

His mom had a mantra, which she imparted to Joe: “Once you start something, don’t quit.”

That’s what Joe reminded her of the first time he was injured, came home, and got ready to go back to Iraq: The job wasn’t finished, he couldn’t quit.

His second Purple Heart was for a bullet wound to the leg.

“Mom,” Joe had said to his mom, on leave with his two Purple Hearts, “you’re not going to like this. But I don’t have to go back.” She blinked. “But you know what I’m going to do,” he said.

“Mom, I’m going to go back and finish the job.”

Back in Iraq, it was July 29, 2004. There had been a firefight in Hawijah that day. They’d gone house to house. Six hours of battling, of fighting, of dodging bullets. Finally it was over, guns gone silent, dust settled. Joe’s unit took a break. He climbed up on the back of a flatbed truck, just relaxing, a tired kid from Derby.

Pow.

It came from over there, no, over there, no, over there. A sniper. A single shot and Joe was down. The bullet slammed into his right ear and exited his mouth. He was 22.

Melaine had moved to Hawaii to be near Joe’s base. She was at home, sleeping in Joe’s clothes, she missed him so. She heard the knock. Maybe it was the mailman, maybe another soldier’s wife. She opened the door. She closed the door: She had seen them, two people, a chaplain and an officer. She stood behind the closed door.

When Joe died, Ray Long and his wife, Elaine, hopped a plane to Hawaii to be near their daughter. Long stood as tall as he’s ever stood. That doesn’t mean he didn’t twist inside, didn’t come home and stare out into the great yonder in silence.

“I went deer hunting last fall,” Long is saying. “The last night out we stayed at a cabin overlooking a lake. The sun was setting. I was sitting on the front porch. I had got a deer. Had my feet up. Smoking a cigar. Had me a Diet Coke. I saw a big flock of geese coming in, landing. I began thinking about Joe. It would have been something if I could have shared that with him.”

“My husband loves his three daughters up and beyond,” says Elaine. “He finally had a son in Joe. And lost him.”

Long knew someone in the athletic department at Derby High, and he thought maybe a funeral could be held there. Before he could finish asking, he was interrupted. Of course, was the answer.

It was Joe Herndon’s last run inside Panther Stadium. More than 1,500 showed.

Dusty McGaugh

It felt like magic. There was wanna-be gangster Dusty McGaugh out there on the water, riding and whooping it up on a pair of water skis. He was going to church. He was working out. He was walking around Derby, imagining a whole new world. Maybe he wouldn’t wind up in prison, as he had predicted, like a lot of his other friends.

Dusty McGaugh had a war on the home front, and with the help of his twin sister, he seemed to be winning.

Dusty McGaugh and Angie Fischer are shown at Dusty's graduation from basic training at Fort Campbell, Ky. He introduced the Fischers as his parents. McGaugh died Sept. 20, 2003, in Balad, Iraq.

Windy McGaugh fled from Tulsa and her mother in the middle of the night. It was May 28, 1999. She was 16 at the time. “I’ll never forget the date,” she says. “We were always in fear of being hit and manipulated,” she says of herself and Dusty. “Abuses came from so many different levels.”

It wasn’t the first time she had run away, just the last. “We protected each other,” Windy says of Dusty. “When I left home I had tremendous guilt. I had left my brother and didn’t tell him.” (Windy doesn’t know how to find her mother and attempts to reach her independently were not successful.)

She stayed at a shelter for runaways in Oklahoma for a couple of days, then left for Derby, where she had an older cousin, Kim Owens.

“I was ready to help her soon as she got here,” Owens says. “I knew things weren’t going well for her, and that’s why I opened my home to her.”

At Derby High, Windy ate alone on what nickels and dimes she could scrape together. Lisa Fischer noticed her, and they became friends. Soon, Lisa had to explain to her mother, Angie, midway through the month, that she needed more lunch money. “I said, ‘Why?’ ” recalls Angie Fischer.

Lisa told her about her new friend, Windy, who had come from Tulsa, who seemed desperate, who was getting straight A’s, whom Lisa wanted to help.

One day Lisa asked her mother if Windy could live with the family. Lisa’s parents had plenty of questions: What did Lisa know about Windy? Why was she seemingly alone in the world? Eventually they asked to meet Windy. They liked her immediately. Soon she was living with the Fischers.

“Soon as she got here,” recalls Angie of Windy, “she’s thinking about Dusty. She said, ‘I’ve got to get him out of that environment. If I don’t, he’s gonna die.’ I said, ‘Windy, he’s in a gang, he uses drugs. It’s too much for us to take on.’ “

Windy listened, said she understood, and went back to her schoolwork and worries of her brother.

One evening in May 2001, she picked up the phone at Braum’s and it was Dusty, calling from Tulsa. He told her dangerous people were after him. He was “crying, sounding hysterical,” remembers Windy.

“I’ll come get you,” she told him.

She borrowed a friend’s pickup and struck out on the four-hour drive to Tulsa, not telling the Fischers a thing. She found him in an old dilapidated house. Soon as he saw her he asked for some smokes. She looked around and thought: “Here I’m now living a middle-class life and he’s living in a wooden shack with a bunch of young punks. I said, ‘Man, you gotta quit this life.’ “

Everything he possessed he put in a duffel bag and fled with her. Back in Derby she spirited him down into the Fischers’ basement, into her bedroom. He was fidgety, a broken-down gangster. “Relax,” she told him. “Enjoy your freedom.”

She taped a note to the fridge, telling Angie and her husband, Eric, that her brother was sleeping in her bedroom and she’d find him a place to stay within the next several days.

“He didn’t come out of Windy’s room,” recalls Angie.

“We were certainly surprised he was here,” says Eric Fischer.

Eric and Angie calmly explained to Dusty he could stay a couple of days, but he’d have to go. Only he didn’t go. Angie quickly concluded that Dusty merely needed love in his life, to feel wanted. So they told him he could stay a week, then a month. He quit smoking, drinking; he threw away his gang clothes. He turned into a regular Mr. Fix-it around the house. He helped Eric in the garage, working on the car. “We’d give him 20 things to do,” says Eric, “and he’d finish them and say, ‘What else you got?’ “

Dusty started talking about joining the military. Lisa Fischer went with him to sign up in August 2001.

Every night at boot camp in Kentucky – if he missed a night, Lisa can’t recall – Dusty would call her. It was as if he feared the family he had suddenly found would vanish.

As boot camp neared an end, Dusty asked Eric and Angie Fischer if they would come see him graduate from basic training. They hopped a plane to Memphis, Tenn., then into Kentucky, and were astonished at what Dusty – the former gang member – didn’t tell them: He would be getting a Marksmanship Award and a Commanders Award. “He introduced us around as his parents,” says Angie Fischer.

In his letters and phone calls he’d talk about the Iraqi children, about how desperate they seemed, how hurt they appeared. “He never talked much about the conflict itself,” recalls Angie.

He told Windy to stop worrying. Told her he had become an expert marksman with an M-16. Told her to start thinking how they would spend their 21st birthday.

The Army officers who stood at the Fischers’ door in the fall of 2003 wouldn’t tell the family why, but they needed to reach Windy. Only Windy, who by then had enrolled at the University of Denver on scholarship, was in New Mexico on an archaeological dig with other students. They sent the New Mexico highway patrol racing to find her, but they were unsuccessful. Then someone in New Mexico suggested calling rural grocery stores in the areas where past archeological teams had camped out. “One clerk,” recalls Angie Fischer, “said, ‘I know where they are. They were just in here this morning.’ “

According to an Army investigation into the death of her brother, which took place Sept. 30, 2003, in Balad, Iraq, Dusty McGaugh walked out of his tent and sat on his lockbox. Several soldiers saw him and thought nothing of it, believing he was going to take a smoke. Hours later soldiers discovered him lying on the ground, his rifle lying between his legs. The investigators concluded that Dusty had placed his rifle beneath his chin and pulled the trigger. It is also stated in the investigation that Dusty had taken “seven pills” leading up to the shooting, and that days earlier he had confided to several soldiers that he was depressed about being in Iraq. He was 20 years old.

When they sent his wallet home, it had a $20 bill in it – and a picture of Lisa.

Maybe it is nothing, maybe it was a little more, but in a letter on the eve of going to Iraq, Dusty said this to his twin sister:

“Sis,

… We keep getting briefs about going to war. So most likely I might have to go. But that does not mean I’m gonna die! You have to remember … I’m the only one in my platoon that got expert marksmanship. Plus, I learned how to service in the woods & stuff. I think I’ll be cool. But not all people die in war. But if you look on the up side, You get 200,000 dollars, plus my funeral is free. And I died doing something I always wanted to do. And with honors. But don’t tell Angie or Eric.”

Grief and memories

Those who knew the two soldiers and the Marine have seized their sorrow and turned it into sweet memory. The grief is always there in the Kansas wind.

Every now and then the Coxes will get a letter, from out there, the blue yonder – a pretty girl remembering Ryan, some words from a school buddy.

Windy – the Fischers adopted her after Dusty’s death – will be getting married in September. “One of the last things Dusty asked his sister is if we would have adopted him,” says Angie Fischer. “Of course we would have.”

Sometimes, at night, you can hear Joe Herndon’s dog howling from his mom’s front yard. To Joe’s friends, it sounds beautiful.

Two soldiers and the Marine. The ghosts of Derby, perhaps standing, just now, outside Braum’s Ice Cream parlor.