Published: Sept. 18, 2009, 1:57 p.m.

A soldier’s story is most often written when he dies. We see in the clearest of terms the loss, the young life not lived fully, the sorrowful family.

But what of the soldier whose family simply worries?

The nights when sleep comes fitfully thinking of a son in Afghanistan, the call that comes long before sunup in which he describes seeing two children killed by a suicide bomber.

He says in a voice that sounds like he is right around the corner, “Afghans love their children just like we do.”

That is the world of the Penkert family of Greenville.

Their second son, Alex, an infantryman in the U.S. Army, has been in Afghanistan for two months. His older brother Eric is a third-year law student at Vanderbilt University. His younger sisters – Kaitlyn, 17, and Laura Paige, 14 – attend Greenville High.

Mom Evelyn works at First Presbyterian Church of Greenville and dad Rip is in business development with AMEC, an engineering firm.

Alex Penkert was a 20-year-old student at Greenville Technical College when he come home one day two years ago and told his mother he had decided to join the Army.

Rip Penkert was out of town on a business trip and remembers his wife, upset and crying, called with the news.

“I didn’t want to dissuade him from going in,” Penkert said. “We just thought he’d go as an officer.”

Father and son sat down in their Chanticleer home to talk. When it was over, it was the father who stood back in awe of the son who had volunteered to serve his country.

“I was convinced he was doing it for the right reason,” Penkert said. “He really wanted to serve.”

Alex Penkert completed basic training at Fort Benning and then received orders to go to Fort Lewis near Tacoma, Wash. The Army needed him to be a mortarman, 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team 2nd Infantry Division.

The family knew he would go to war. Eventually. But when eventually came it was stunning nonetheless.

“It’s here.”

“It’s really happening.”

“His orders have been cut.”

Before deploying, he was given leave for his grandfather’s funeral and then in May and June, the standard two-week pre-deployment visit.

Life seemed so normal. All the children were home. Most nights Mrs. Penkert cooked supper and the six of them gathered around the kitchen table, its natural wood a reminder of the Sharpies used on so many school projects.

Sometimes he’d show Kaitlyn films of war – the real thing – the stuff he was headed for, soldiers pleading “Dear Jesus please keep me safe.”

She said, “Alex how can you watch this. Isn’t it scary?”

He said it helped him prepare.

“I can feel what he’s feeling,” Kaitlyn said. “It helps to understand.”

He and his dad talked about what would happen if the worst happened. They reviewed his will. They went over all the things the Army wanted them to consider.

On June 6, Rip and Kaitlyn Penkert took SPC Alex Penkert to Charlotte for the flight back to Washington State.

“I took one big breath of him and then he left,” Kaitlyn said.

First Presbyterian members sent 14 boxes of goodies ahead of the team and Kaitlyn has been packing a box and sending it over every week since – beef jerky and Pringles, trail mix and Gatorade powder – items she calls comfort food. Her brother had lost 15 pounds already.

“The food is gross,” Kaitlyn said.

She would like to send more and would accept donations from the community so her brother can be Santa Claus to the soldiers without family or without family who can send them packages.

Penkert was stationed first at Kandahar, then a more remote location and now an even more remote firebase in a high elevation. He is on his feet all day.

“We want him to have plenty of calories,” his dad said.

Alex calls home about once a week, usually between 1:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., which is late morning there. The Penkerts don’t mind. It means everyone is home when he calls.

He has told them he’s been shot at. Almost two weeks ago he told about a cleancut teen on a scooter at a bazaar. The teen pushed something on his wrist, detonating a bomb that ripped his body apart and killed the translator for Alex’s unit and two Afghan children. The lieutenant was hit in the chest and some soldiers were wounded but none died.

Alex was about 25 feet away when he saw a grief-stricken Afghan kick the terrorist’s severed head like a football.

It was tough to hear, but Rip Penkert said he’s glad his son can talk about it. Perhaps the non-physical wounds he brings back will heal or at least not be so deep.

“I am really proud of him,” Penkert said. “I believe in his mission.”

Contact Lyn Riddle at lriddle@greenvillejournal.com or 679-1250.

To donate items for the members of Alex’s unit, call 235-5940.

Published: Sept. 18, 2009, 1:48 p.m.

The passion nibbled and gurgled and grew little by little until it reached on-a-mission status.

A sideline to a full-time job, the passion filled 13 or more years, and like many such things it arrived unexpectedly.

Now Arlene Marcley is the nation’s public face – the spokeswoman – for Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Greenville native considered the greatest natural hitter in baseball history, but banned forever from the sport he loved because he was implicated in the fix on the 1919 World Series.

Documents found in the past few years and other investigations have all but cleared Jackson of the crime of taking money to ensure the White Sox would lose to the Cincinnati Reds. He tried several times to give back money left in his hotel room. He played flawlessly.

Marcley doesn’t need to know about research or game statistics. She believed his innocence from the first time she heard about him, sitting at her desk outside the mayor’s office in Greenville City Hall.

She hadn’t been administrative assistant to Mayor Knox White long, a few months perhaps, when two men came in, gave the mayor a large, pieced-together picture of Jackson and asked him to sign a petition asking the baseball commissioner to lift the ban and let Jackson take his rightful place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

That was 1995. She wasn’t even a baseball fan. Knew nothing about baseball might say it more accurately.

Something about this man’s story resonated with her. The unfairness. The lifetime of shame. See, Jackson was 34 when Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis banned him, despite a Chicago jury’s acquittal.

Jackson lived 30 years more. He had been a hero to Greenville, a textile mill worker who played on the Brandon Mill team and then made it big. The legend of him playing shoeless because his new cleats hurt began at that little mill field off U.S. 123, now a renovated county park.

After the 1919 series, Greenville residents shunned him and his wife Katie. The Jacksons moved to Savannah to operate a dry cleaning business and then came back home where Jackson ran a liquor store in West Greenville.

Jackson had been dead 44 years in 1995 when Marcley realized no memorial existed. Anyone looking for history went to the mill ballpark or Jackson’s grave at Woodlawn, where they left socks, bats, balls.

Marcley staged a Jackson exhibit in the City Hall lobby every July – his birth month – for five years and every year packed up the memorabilia and put it in unused rooms at City Hall and her home.

Then, when the city was getting into the statue-erecting business, she broached the idea of honoring Jackson. She collected $60,000, and Doug Smith, an art professor at Bob Jones University, crafted during his off hours a life-size statue of clay. Schoolchildren would come to the City Hall lobby to watch and if there weren’t a lot of them Smith would let them knead the clay and put it on themselves.

“That was to be my last hurrah,” Marcley said.

The bronzed statue was erected at Main and Augusta in 2002.

But in 2005, Richard Davis, who made flipping houses for a living famous, walked into her office and said he wanted to buy the house Jackson owned – the place he died. Eventually, Davis donated the house for the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum, across the street from West End Field.

She had not a moment of design instruction other than the Martha Stewart shows she taped and watched at night. Yet the place she created with the help of her husband Bill has been praised by people who design museum exhibits for a living.

Marcley estimates 4,000 people have visited the museum, which is free because she believes Jackson would welcome anyone to his home.

She hasn’t given up hope that Jackson will get his due. She feels his spirit in the house. Sometimes she wonders – why me, Joe? – then she remembers.

“It’s just a story that takes hold of your heart.”

Published: Sept. 10, 2009, 10:26 a.m.