By Billy Davis

The sharp snap of Ashley Bobo’s snare drum reverberated through Batesville Junior High Sunday afternoon.

Some people, even though they saw her, and suspected her role in what was coming, flinched.  

The auditorium is brick and blocks, and the ratta-tatta-tap seemed to bounce off everything in the half-full room like a bullet, or like shrapnel, flying past your face.

“I was trying to concentrate,” she said later, “and fight back the tears.”

At 2:15 Bobo, a music major from Delta State, led the family of David A. Holmes Jr. down a concrete aisle to the wooden seats on the front row. More family filed in, filling three rows. Bobo marched in place. Her sticks kept the beat.

Then, at 2:18, the Panola County community began to memorialize a soldier killed during the ongoing campaign in Afghanistan known as Operation Enduring Freedom.

Holmes, a Panola County native, was killed June 26, a Saturday, when an improvised explosive device, known as an IED, exploded under the truck he was riding in. He was 34.

Holmes, who had served in the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines, was serving in the Georgia Army National Guard, where he was attached to the 810th Engineering Company.

He was buried at Georgia Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Milledgeville, Georgia.

Mourners learned Sunday that Holmes’ patriotism reached far back, when Orville Robertson told the story of an American flag and his former Junior Air Force ROTC student.

Col. Robertson recalled that Holmes and other ROTC students were taking down the flag after a home football game. A thunderstorm was coming, the wind was whipping, and somehow a corner of the flag touched the ground.

“David had tears in his eyes,” Robertson recalled. “He didn’t know what to do.”

But Robertson, facing down a thunderstorm and a teenage patriot and ROTC lieutenant colonel, knew what to do. He stretched the truth.

 “I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, David.’ I told him I didn’t think it touched the ground,” Robertson said, drawing the only laugh during the ninety-minute service.

Robertson also remembered that Holmes was not just a kind person. “He couldn’t stand unkindness,” the retired colonel recalled. “He wouldn’t stand to see someone be mistreated in front of him.”

Holmes’s family listened Sunday as dignitaries read poems, proclamations and resolutions from Panola County government, the Mississippi House of Representatives the Mississippi State Senate, and the Panola County Sheriff’s Department.

But only one of them, Alderman Ted Stewart, cried. He has lost a son, Manzell Stewart, in 1995 after the U.S. soldier died in a motorcycle accident.

Ted Stewart and wife Pat had also sat through a military funeral for Manzell. They had also buried another son, Marcus, three years before that.

“I kept saying to myself, ‘I’m going to be all right. I’m going to be all right.’ But it just hit me,” said Stewart.

Leaning on the podium, he sobbed when he tried to present a proclamation from the City of Batesville.

Outside the school, in the parking lot, Georgia National Guard Col. Keith Knowlton presented folded flags to ShuRissa Holmes and ShuQuita Drake, two of the late soldier’s four children.

Seven sharply dressed U.S. Army soldiers, armed with the M14s, fired off the 21-gun salute. Everybody knew what was coming, but we still flinched. Again.