Word: kimm
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Gunnery Sergeant Edward Kimm, 33, was no kid. Rather, he was a decent man who ungrudgingly kept up his child-support payments and arranged to spend a month every year with his two daughters, 7 and 6, who live in Lincoln, Neb., with their mother. Last week his stepdaughter Christina, 9, recalled that during his last visit, Kimm prepared them for the worst. "He said that if two Marines came to the door at our house, then he would be dead...
...Marine messengers arrived the morning after the news from Beirut, both in Lincoln and two hours northeast at Kimm's mother's home in Atlantic, Iowa (pop. 7,789). "I think the girls are trying to block it out," says Janet Kimm, his exwife. "I've been trying to get them to break down and get it out of their systems." Kimm, a Marine cook whose chili the girls remember fondly, would have been whipping up Sunday breakfast for some 300 men when the explosion came...
...When Ed Kimm enlisted in 1969, he had an idea about somehow redeeming his brother's death, and put in for a tour in Viet Nam, which was refused. He became a lifer anyway, planning to retire (and buy a horse ranch, he figured) around the turn of the century. But his peripatetic Marine career evidently did not jibe with marriage: the Kimms split...
...father, a World War I veteran, died last year) sensed in Ed a grim apprehension when he last visited in April, before Beirut. "He didn't joke around like he normally did," says Elizabeth. "This going to Lebanon bothered him," and he was "kind of withdrawn." Says Letha Kimm, 66, "I think he had a premonition...
Lebanon? "It ain't our war!" barks Kimm's brother John, 28. But all mourn regardless. Each house around Letha Kimm's has a black ribbon tied to the porch. And in the rich, rolling countryside some miles east, Ed Kimm will soon be buried in Pleasant Hill Cemetery, not far from the graves of his father and brother...