Military uniforms are symbols of rank, achievement and service. Most of all, they’re always meticulously pressed, polished and starched, billboards to the world of perhaps the most important and meaningful reason people serve in the military — honor.
Raised in Tacoma, Washington, by a single mother in a crime-ridden neighborhood, Phillip Ligon-Butler’s sense of patriotism was sparked by the events of 9/11, leading him to eventually join the U.S. Marine Corps and earn a uniform of his own.
That military service gave him a deep sense of purpose and belonging, said his wife, Carrie Ligon-Butler.
“He was so proud of his service. That was his identity. He was a Marine,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “They say, ‘Once a Marine always a Marine,’ and that was him.”
His hope was to make the military his life, but that changed during a tour in Afghanistan when his Humvee was rocked by an improvised explosive device. Phillip suffered a traumatic brain injury, among other impacts.
Six days later, the Marine Corp began the process of medically retiring him.
On top of a harrowing physical recovery ahead, he faced the psychological toll of losing his sense of purpose, of what he’d been born to do. He strived for a calling and wanted to help others, so Phillip went back to school with a new focus of becoming a youth counselor.
“His whole goal was to better people and help in any way possible,” his wife said. “He had a very rough childhood, so his goal was to guide children and help them with the support he didn't have when he was growing up.”
She also said her husband also went to great lengths to talk other combat veterans “back from the ledge.”
But the effects of his traumatic brain injury worsened, his mental health declined, and he never reached his goal of becoming a counselor. Phillip Ligon-Butler became one of the 18 million veterans each year who take their own lives.
He left behind four children and a wife.
Honor Lives On
Such loss leaves a long wake of devastation for military families all across the country. Even five years after his death, the pain of his absence still weighs on his loved ones, and his wife fights back tears remembering her husband.
At last, however, she believes her family is approaching a major threshold in coming to terms — and their finding strength in a soft and unassuming symbol.
The Ligon-Butlers belong to a growing community of Gold Star families finding solace from custom memory bears made in Wyoming. And like those they honor, the bears wear uniforms.
Wyoming-based nonprofit Bears of Honor repurposes service member uniforms into plush teddy bears for military families, and dress them in clothes made from the veterans’ own uniforms.
The bears have proven an uncannily powerful source of strength for families who’ve lost loved ones, according to survivors interviewed by Cowboy State Daily.
The project was founded by Keri Sommer, a teacher at Livingston Elementary School in Cody. What began in the 1990s with an off-the-shelf craft kit, Sommer has since mastered artisanal bear making and is now using the talent to help others heal.
Coming from a family legacy of first responders, she’s seen the impact that small gestures and symbols can have in times of pain.
Black Hawk Pilot Leaves Behind Wife And 3 Boys
Stephen Roy Dwyer was born in 1985 in Frankfurt, Germany, to a military family. His mother and father both attended West Point Military Academy, and from his earliest years it was his dream to follow in their steps.
He played rugby for West Point and became an infantry soldier upon graduation.
After serving a tour in Iraq, he reverted to aviation with the goal to be Black Hawk helicopter pilot, just like his father, Stephen Roy Dwyer Sr.
He was eventually assigned to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, referred to as Night Stalkers, an elite unit specializing in night-time, low-level, and covert helicopter operations.
Allie Dwyer, his wife, told Cowboy State Daily that her husband lived life with a preternatural vitality, giving himself fully to whatever the task at hand, from coaching rugby at West Point to his tours abroad and most of all his family.
“We lived our life full speed because he was full throttle all the time,” she said. “He lived his life as if there was no tomorrow. He was gone on deployments a lot and serving in the army was a passion and calling, but when he was home, he was 110% with us. But me and our boys were his life, we were literally his whole world.”
That world imploded in November 2023 during a deployment to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Dwyer and four others were flying training exercises on a dark night when the Black Hawk’s wheel clipped the sea surface and brought the copter down.
Like military wives everywhere, Allie was always concerned when her husband deployed. But she told Cowboy State Daily she felt an eerie premonition about his last deployment.
Three days after he’d left home, he stopped responding to her texts. On the fourth day she received the visit at her home in Tennessee.
“I heard a knock and my heart sank. I didn't even have to go to the door to know what was happening,” she said. “I looked around the corner from our stairs and I saw two uniformed soldiers standing on my front porch, and I knew our world was over.”
She described an unfolding scene of hysteria. Her son answered the door and she quickly slammed it shut, yelled at the soldiers to go away and began running through her home screaming.
“I was screaming, and I wasn't actually sure if any noise was coming out,” she said. “I felt like everything went black around me. I couldn't feel my body. It was the worst feeling I've ever felt. I'll never forget that feeling. I'll never forget seeing those soldiers at our door or the look on my kids' faces.”
The pain is still with the Dwyer family, but a small gift of grace that helps is in the form of a teddy bear.
Sommer has made three bears from Stephen Dwyer’s uniforms that his three children, described by their mother as his spitting image, will carry with them through their lives.
Dwyer believes the bears will be an especially potent source of strength now.
“I know how special it will be to actually have their father’s stuff they could snuggle with. I know they're going to treasure it,” she said.
Sommer believes the bears can especially help Dwyer’s youngest child, explaining it this way.
“He didn’t really get to know his dad. Having that teddy bear symbolizes the fact that his father was a Marine and proud of his service,” she said. “Your dad could have put stuff in that very pocket that you’re holding on that bear. It is a sense of comfort and security that might not have been a part of their life.”
Dwyer always wore Patagonia brand T-shirts beneath his uniform. His memory bears will too.
Honor Guard Champion Honored In Death
Jimmy Jalil and Laurin Ulrich Chavez Kresse, who met as officers of the Boca Raton Police Department (BRPD), each knew early on they were destined to be cops, albeit their paths were different.
Laurin found herself on the wrong side of the law in middle school after shoplifting from the local mall in Boca Raton.
Paradoxically, getting busted by the cops is what made her want to be a cop, her husband Jimmy told Cowboy State Daily.
“She got experience with the justice system early on as a teenager,” he said. “She told me, ‘I remember seeing the officer standing there while I was in the mall office, and just knew that's what I wanted to be.’”
After high school, she did a four-year stint in security services for the U.S. Air Force before joining the Boca Raton Police Department.
Jimmy also had leanings toward law enforcement, but that wasn’t apparent until hindsight.
He was on track to become a videogame designer until his college dean pressed him to take an interest inventory personality test, a comprehensive questionnaire that helps identify career pathways compatible for certain personality types. The results were crystal clear.
“Police officer came out No. 1. In hindsight, it's crazy, because it was there all throughout my life,” he said. “I was always playing cops and robbers and I was always the good guy. I could never be the bad guy. I always wanted to be the arbitrator who kept the peace. So the traits were all there.”
Kresse and Jalil met in the BRPD and became close while playing on the department’s co-ed softball team. Their chemistry was a home run. They married and had two children.
Served And Protected Together
At the department, he worked with SWAT and K-9 units. She worked as a dayshift officer as well as in the department's training unit, and led the honor guard. They were the BRPD power couple.
“She's one of a kind. She's tough. People were more scared of her than what they were of me,” Jalil said.
At home, they raised their children with a sense of excitement and fun.
Every year as a family they attended ICE at the Gaylord Palms resort, a convention of interactive ice-carvings. And each year they dressed up in elaborate, family-themed halloween costumes, like characters from Disney’s “PJ Masks,” a superhero gang that fights crime.
But in the late 2010s, Laurin started experiencing recurring symptoms, like sudden and intense headaches and inexplicable stomach distension.
“She always felt like something was wrong with her. She went to the doctors multiple times, and her OBGYN was, like, it could be this or it could be that,” Jalil said, explaining that they sought basic remedies that didn’t help.
Finally, she reached a painful tipping point during a friend’s wedding weekend in Key West.
“It was that weekend when she said, ‘When I get back, I'm going to the doctor’s and I'm going to demand that they do something,’” he said. “The next day, that Monday, she went in and they did a CT scan and found stage four ovarian cancer.”
Two-Year Fight
In evaluating cancer severity, specialists measure what's known as cancer antigen 125 (CA 125), a protein that’s found in higher levels in the blood of people with certain cancers and is used as a tumor marker. If the protein exceeds a count of 25, doctors consider it a threatening indication. Kressee’s count was over 4,000.
They attacked the cancer aggressively, removing swaths of her liver, stomach lining and other organs, before she underwent rounds of chemotherapy. Doctors initially felt confident they’d beat the case.
“When we got the first test back after the treatment, the [CA 125] had fallen to the teens. We basically felt like we had won the lottery, because with stage four you don’t hear a lot of people coming back from that,” Jalil said.
Alas, their hopes were dashed. The protein count jumped precipitously, then jumped again. After a two-year battle, Kressee died Jan 18, 2024.
‘Like Having A Part Of Their Mom Again’
Jalil told the Cowboy State Daily that the toll of her loss is hard to put in words and that the hardest part is thinking how she won’t be there to enjoy and celebrate their children’s milestones.
But the family has since found a potent source of strength in an unassuming symbol: a teddy bear. Bears of Honor began with two personal friends of Sommers’ who were officers in a Florida police department.
“I think anytime you lose someone, immediately you start looking for signs,” Jalil said, halting between long, silent sobs. “You want them to still be around. You need the recognition that they're still with you. Having something like this, made out of a uniform that only holds the odors and the scents you remember of that person, …
“But it’s something you can look at and remember, OK, I’ve gotta be a good person for mom, because she wanted our kids to grow up to be good people. She wanted to raise them to be nice, not bullies, to stand up and defend people that need defending. It gives me and the kids the mental reminder to continue to make her proud, and to keep our promises to her.”
Her posthumous honor feels extra relevant in that Kresse’s biggest personal accomplishment at BRPD was heading the honor guard, a specially selected unit of officers who oversee a department's ceremonial events, including the memorial services of fallen members.
Jalil’s experience catalyzed Sommer to start the nonprofit Bears of Honor, which converts service member uniforms into memorial bears for families of the fallen.
“It was amazing to see because here is something that they can hold and hug. It's like having a part of their mom again and not just a uniform hanging in a closet,” said Sommer.
“It does bring tears to their eyes, but a kind of happy tears because they have that family member back in their life in a way,” she said. “Children put it on their shelf or on their bed, and it's just there again. It’s something that they can cherish.”
Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.
