Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
DANDRIDGE — To Jacob Watts, his father’s a man in a photo, a flag in his room and a name his grandmother sometimes calls him by mistake.
Jacob was 5 years old when Petty Officer 2nd Class Chris Watts died April 24, 2004, in a suicide bomber’s attack near an oil terminal on the Persian Gulf outside Basra, Iraq — the only sailor from East Tennessee killed in the Iraq War. Jacob’s now 13.
Jacob remembers his father’s face but not his voice, a few moments out of five years — a trip here, a walk there, a round of video games, a present on his birthday, the folded flag a sailor handed him as his father’s casket sank into the ground.
“I think that was the first time I’d been to a funeral,” he said.
