Osama bin Laden's Death Brings Joy, Not Closure to Parents of Fallen New Port Richey Soldier

Marcy Rowe was far from her home on Edith Street on Sept. 11, 2001.  She was waiting at Greater Rochester International Airport in New York for a flight to Tampa when she saw people crowding around monitors.

American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, the first building hit in the terrorist attacks masterminded by Osama bin Laden. Air traffic was shut down, and Marcy was left stuck in New York for a week in Attica in Wyoming County.

Soon afterward, her son, Michael D. Rowe, a Gulf High School alumni and National Guardsman going through training, chose to enter active duty with the Army. He served one tour in Ft. Polk, La.  Then, he chose to re-enlist and traveled to Iraq’s al-Anbar province. On March 28, 2006, he was killed when a Chinese rocket hit his Humvee on the Amman-Baghdad Highway, a day before he turned 24.

More than five years later, Marcy, now 57, was far from home again. On the night of May 1, she was visiting her brother in Houston, Texas. She came in from the porch of his house and saw a special report on CNN. It said that the man whose horrific actions ignited the War on Terror, and set the course of Michael Rowe’s last years alive, had been killed.

“I said ‘No. No. No,’” she recalled. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

Then came joy.

“I just wanted to go out and shout it to the rooftops.”

She called her husband, Dave Rowe, 65, who had gone to sleep for the night in New Port Richey. She told him the news.

“I just said ‘Good,’” said Dave, Mike's father, sitting on his porch, Monday.

“You didn’t just say good,” Marcy said. He said “Good” with emphasis.

Dave went back to sleep. Marcy couldn’t nod off until around 1:30 a.m. Monday.

“I went to bed with a smile,” she said. “I woke up with a smile.”

It’s been five years since the improvised explosive device hit Sgt. Mike Rowe’s vehicle at point-blank range. He had been in the back of a Humvee leading a supply convoy on the Amman-Baghdad Highway west of ar-Rutbah. It triggered a tripwire that sent a Chinese rocket into the vehicle at point-blank range. Rowe was taken not only from parents Marcy and Dave, but his siblings, his unit, his wife Rebecca and his yet-to-be-born daughter, Neveah; Heaven spelled backward. Neveah turns 5 years old in August.

“I never held any animosity towards the one who killed my son,” Marcy said. “But bin Laden, they could never kill him enough times.”

It’s unnatural for the Rowes to take joy from death, Marcy said. But bin Laden was an “aberration." He was a “disciple of the devil,” Dave said.  

“There are evil people in this world,” Dave said.  And bin Laden was among the most evil of them. He made Dave wish to “get me my rifle and get me over there and do what needs to be done.”

“One shot was not enough,” he said. “That man needed to be tortured.“

And yet, it wouldn’t leave him satisfied. Not even if Dave, a Vietnam veteran, had squeezed the trigger.

“I’ll never have closure,” Dave said. “I will mourn my son’s death ‘til my death.”

Marcy first said the fact that she learned of the attacks of Sept. 11 on one trip and bin Laden’s death on another gave her a sense of closure. Later, she decided closure was not the right word.

“It was fitting,” she said “It just felt right.”

Rowe’s life inspired others, of this the Rowes are sure. His dive coach from Gulf High entered the military after his death. A boy in the neighborhood did, too, and got a chain of dog tags tattooed down his side. In March, some of Rowe's troops came to Edith Street to honor his memory in a party that swelled to more than

”Something came from his life,” Dave said. “That, I think, is what kept me going.”   

The belief has helped Marcy find some peace.

“I know he did what he wanted to do,” she said. “I know he did what he was born to do.”

What does bin Laden’s death give the Rowes?

“Hope,” they said.

So, maybe there isn’t total closure. But there’s joy. And as Marcy passed through security at at William P. Hobby Houston airport on her way home and a security guard asked her how she was doing, she was able to respond simply:

“I said 'Fantastic. The bastard is dead.'"