A quiet place filled with stories: The Red Lion Project

Tom Logan gets into a pickup truck and begins to drive away from Lozeau Lodge. After passing under Interstate 90 he makes a quick right turn and begins to head up a dirt trail that gets steeper and smaller each minute.

It’s September 6 and today would have been his sons twenty-fourth birthday.

The bumpy drive comes to the first of two halts as Tom stops the pickup in order to open a gate. He has a key to open the gate, the one that has been stirring up controversy and chaos eight-miles away in Superior, but he speaks little of it other than to say that he would prefer to stay out of the commotion.

Logan is headed away from that, away from the chaos and noise of the battle that seems trivial when compared to the purpose for his visit to the 164-acre property tucked in the middle of Lolo National Forest to the property paid for with his son’s blood.

There is another gate to open just up the dirt path, this one without a lock and made of wood. This one signifying the gateway to what will someday soon become a retreat for the men and women of the Marine Corps who like his son, Corporal Joey Logan, serve their country selflessly and with honor.

As the steep road gets to a point where the pickup engulfs its width, a scarlet gate comes into view.

“You think they’ll know they are here?” Logan asks.

…

Here is vastness. Here is the dense forested mountains Joey fell instantly fell in love with when he fished the waters of the Big Sky State with his father as part of an epic and reinvigorating road trip.

Here is silence. Here is the music of the wind rushing through the trees and a vast expanse of wilderness.

Logan stops the pickup in front of the first visible efforts of a morning of labor at the property – a freshly posted sign made of wood from the Logan’s home state of Texas emblazoned with “Lucky Red Lions” and the logo, all in scarlet red.

Since 1952, the Lucky Red Lions – a helicopter squadron consisting of CH-53D Sea Stallion transport helicopters – flew over the skies of conflicts in Vietnam, Korea and the Middle East.

Joey and the six Marines he flew with carried the tradition of decades of service.

Over the course of his two deployments in Afghanistan Joey served with five other Marines – Captain Daniel Bartle, Captain Nathan McHone, Master Sergeant Travis Riddick, Corporal Kevin Reinhard and Corporal Jesse Stites – a group described by Logan as “professional, highly decorated soldiers” assigned to the Lucky Red Lions Squadron.

Joey formed an immediate bond with all of his squad, in particular Cpt. Bartle, who was a Montana native.

“They would get together and all they talked about was Montana,” Logan said. “I would have loved to have listened in on some of those conversations.”

In his two deployments in Afghanistan, Joey flew in 42 combat missions and countless more supply missions – earning two air medals for his service.

“I think he was trying to shoot for 100 combat missions before he came home,” Tom said.

Prior to each of those missions the Marines would kneel and pray because as Logan said “they never knew when they were going to meet their maker.”

On the evening of Jan. 18 in the mountains of Afghanistan, Joey and his fellow Marines once again kneeled for prayer prior to their second combat mission of the day.

The mission would be Joey’s last.

All six of the squad lost their lives when the Sea Stallion suffered from mechanical failure and crashed into the mountainside.

The January flight would mark the end of the “Lucky Red Lions” and the beginning of the fulfillment of Joey’s dream.

…

Logan walks with purpose, dog tags jingling, as he talks about the future of the site of the Red Lions Project. There are markers for the tentative location of each of the six cabins he and his wife Debbi will begin building this spring.

There are also street signs for each of the six, cut into Texan wood and emblazoned with last names in the same scarlet red.

The property is as vast as it is silent. Logan drives the grounds, full of hope, full of ideas for what the future will hold.

A street sign named for his son is the last location Logan enters on the grounds. Earlier in the morning he placed a cross made of Texan cedar next to his son’s gravestone in an area Debi called “Heaven’s Gate” to finish securing the marker with rocks.

As he begins to find the rocks and secure the cross into place in the westward facing location, the sun shines on Logan’s back as it begins its decent.

With the work completed Logan looks out west towards the forest and then upwards towards the sun. He says being up there was harder in the morning but as his son shines down on him, bright and bold, he feels better.

“It kind of feels lonely up here,” Logan said. “I can’t wait for this place to be filled with stories…”