Glennett Kelley, of Decatur, Ga., slipped off her high-heeled sandals and walked gingerly through a shallow bed of landscaping stones to touch the Vietnam memorial monument outside the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport.
Among the scores of names of fallen American soldiers, the one at the bottom of the last row was freshly cut, the sand-blasted granite not yet weathered by wind and rain.
Glennett reached out and traced her father's name, Glenn Kelley, with her right index finger while dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex.
"It's important to me to know that my father is included [on the monument]," Glennett said. "Some part of his life will go on as a legacy. It means a whole lot - especially for me - because I never got to know him."
Gathered last week at the monument outside the entrance to the airport were members of the media and veterans group representatives, along with Glennett and her mother, Elizabeth Kelley.
And also there - in spirit, if not in flesh - was Army Spc. Glenn Howell Kelley, a son of Chattanooga who died in the opening days of the Vietnam War in the winter of 1965. Kelley was killed by "an explosive device detonated in his quarters by hostile forces," according to the Army, and left
behind a young wife and 17-month-old Glennett.
Glenn and Elizabeth Kelley had been high school sweethearts at Howard School before marrying and starting a family. Glenn joined the military and was sent to Vietnam.
Somehow, due perhaps to a clerical error, Glenn's name was originally left off the monument to the war dead, an omission Elizabeth has tried to rectify for decades. In the 1970s, she was told that Glenn's name would be added to the stone slab near the entrance to the airport, but years went by and nothing happened.
By happenstance, or perhaps by fate, Elizabeth placed an "In Memory" item last winter in the Times Free Press on the 50th anniversary of Glenn's death - Feb. 10, 1965. A "Life Stories" column about the Kelleys caught the attention of the leader of a war heritage group, Flora Kernea, president of the local Magnolia Chapter of the Gold Star Wives of America.
"This (omission) should have never happened," said Kernea, whose group is dedicated to the families of fallen soldiers. "He should have been on there."
Kernea enlisted the help of a local monument company owner, Terry Nida, to add Glenn Kelley's name and rank to the granite marker.
"It's past time that this should have been done," said Nida, who did the work for free.
Mark KennedyGlennett said it was hard growing up without a dad. Seeing his name etched in stone on the Chattanooga monument - finally - makes him seem more real, she said.
"I used to come out here [to the Chattanooga airport] as a little girl and wonder why my daddy's name wasn't on here," she said. "I was confused."
For Elizabeth Kelley, who never remarried, seeing Glenn's name on the monument earlier this month gave her a measure of closure.
"I still have the first letter he wrote me," she said. "Every day I got a letter. Every day he got a letter. I never replaced him. I think I had the best husband ever."
She pulled faded photographs from her purse, including pictures of Glenn in his starched and pressed Army uniform.
Kernea added to the Kelley family's war artifact collection giving her several small pieces of patriotic jewelry, items originally sold by the Gold Star Wives to pay for the monument.
"It's a heart-warming day," Elizabeth Kelley said.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@ timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/ mkennedycolumnist.