An iPhone with a cartoony, angel-winged teddy bear on its case kept catching the soldier’s eye. The phone was stashed in the closet of a back room in what amounted to a lost-and-found locker at a remote U.S. military outpost in the Jordanian desert.
Staff Sgt. Zachary Winthers of the Illinois Army National Guard had been stationed since last summer at a base known as Tower 22. He worked in the installation’s “mayor’s cell,” or town hall, tasked with making sure troops had daily necessities, meals and sleeping quarters. The place was a collecting point, too, for unclaimed items.
Winthers first noticed the curious iPhone while he was cleaning up. It had been there, he figured, “for God knows how long.” It bothered him much of the nine months he was there. No one seemed to know where the phone came from.
He wanted to charge it, turn it on, see whose it was. But no one had the proper charging cable. And it wasn’t as if he could pop over and buy one somewhere along the Syrian and Iraqi borders.
Winthers posted occasional messages to his comrades: Hey, we found a phone. See if it’s yours.
The phone should not have been hard to recognize. Its cover was a Casetify-brand “Angel Bear” impact case. Its backside bore a haloed teddy bear aloft in puffy clouds, clutching a tiny heart that read, “Just Do You.” In beefier print, the cover declared: “I Don’t Care!! What You Think of Me, Baby.”
Below that, in smaller type, it read, “You’re the main character in your life. … Focus your energy on making yourself happy.”
As the end of Winthers’ deployment neared in April, the phone was still unclaimed.
“It felt like someone’s personal device,” Winthers, 29, would say. “Phones have memories.”
Before he shipped out, he had an idea. He got the OK from his first sergeant to take the phone home and try to power it up.
“If anything,” the first sergeant told him, “it’s like a good Samaritan.”
Winthers said, “If someone found my phone, I would want someone to try to do everything to return it.”
* * * * *
More than a year earlier, on the night of Jan. 28, 2024, about six months before Winthers arrived in the desert, Iranian-backed militants attacked Tower 22.
A drone bombed the barracks. Three Army reservists from Georgia were killed: Sgt. Breonna A. Moffett, 23, of Savannah; Sgt. William J. Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, and Sgt. Kennedy L. Sanders, 24, of Waycross. More than two dozen other troops were injured.
The episode marked the worst strike on American service members since the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021. The Georgians’ deaths hit hard in their home state. Their funerals made front-page news.
Sanders’ parents were especially forthcoming with news reporters. Shawn Sanders, her father, and Oneida Oliver-Sanders, her mother, opened their home and answered their phones, telling all who cared to listen about their daughter’s life.
President Joe Biden called to express his condolences.
Kennedy Sanders, in her hometown of 14,000 residents at the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, had been a standout soccer, softball and basketball player. She enrolled at Valdosta State University but left school and later joined the Army reserves.
While home and between deployments to Africa and the Middle East, she worked as a volunteer community basketball coach. She had jobs at the local elections office, at a pharmacy and at the home-improvement store Lowe’s, where in 2022 she was employee of the year.
After the reserves, she dreamed of a career in radiology.
In the weeks following her death, the Army shipped home her belongings. Her boots arrived, her dog tags, too, which her father treasures. Other personal effects were also sent.
But something was never sent.
Her iPhone.
* * * * *
The explosion had hurtled Kennedy Sanders’ body onto the roof of the dorm where she slept.
Chances were, her phone had been obliterated. The Army told her parents as much.
“I was upset,” her father recalled. Shawn Sanders, a former Marine, wanted his daughter’s selfies, her photos, her videos. They offered more to remember her by.
Smartphones are where our electronic devices and our personalities intertwine. Our phones, weird as it may sound, kind of are us. They’re personal journals in every font, meme and emoji imaginable. They’re 3D diaries, digital scrapbooks of our existence.
There were times Oliver-Sanders needed fresh images of her daughter. At times in the months after Sanders was killed, her mother was obsessed by a photograph of her in her casket. Oliver-Sanders sat and stared at the picture. Sometimes all day.
“In disbelief,” she said.
For Shawn Sanders, the days after his daughter’s death felt like he was, as he put it, “underwater.” Now, he said, some days come with tears of joy. Other days it’s pure grief.
But even since before Sanders’ funeral, her folks have found comfort in their hometown’s embrace.
“It’s an overwhelming sense of honor and respect for our daughter and for our family,” Oliver-Sanders said. “People do look to us as the example for grieving parents.”
A stretch of the street in front of their house has been renamed Kennedy L. Sanders Way. A mural of Sanders gazing out over Tebeau Street from the front wall of Kings Washerette features a brilliant American flag and a gigantic eagle clutching a Purple Heart.
Whenever Oliver-Sanders rides past the mural, she says hello and refers to her late daughter by her nickname. “Hey, Munch,” she’ll say, which is short for “Munchkin.”
As this Memorial Day approached, Oliver-Sanders gathered art materials.
Oliver-Sanders, a past longtime member of the Ware County Board of Education, collected hundreds of sheets of purple construction paper, her daughter’s favorite color. Oliver-Sanders packaged them in plastic baggies with copies of pictures of Sanders and handfuls of children’s stickers and glue-on stars for a project created for pupils at Ruskin Elementary, which Sanders attended as a child.
“Kennedy Kits,” they’re called. The idea is for kids to craft framable, patriotic artwork.
“A lot of kids don’t know what Memorial Day is and what it means,” Oliver-Sanders said. “It’s a way to shine a light on what it’s really about.”
On a recent morning, the Sanderses showed up at another school, this one on the outskirts of Waycross.
At Waresboro Elementary, the couple stood onstage during the fourth-grade’s honors day ceremony to present the Sgt. Kennedy L. Sanders True Hero Award. The distinction goes to a child at each grade level who exemplifies good citizenship, makes good grades and who behaves, is athletic and dependable.
The fourth-grade winner was a blond-haired boy whose teacher described him as someone who “consistently goes out of his way to help others. A true friend to everyone, who is always a step ahead.”
As the white-ribboned award medal was presented, along with $25, Shawn Sanders shook the boy’s hand and teared up.
* * * * *
An hour or so after dinner on May 6, Zach Winthers was in his parents’ kitchen.
Winthers had arrived home to North Aurora, Illinois, in mid-April.
His deployment to Jordan had been his second overseas assignment. He had joined the military at age 19 after graduating from Kaneland High, a school surrounded by cornfields about an hour west of downtown Chicago.
“I’m a simple guy,” he said.
He studies biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He did some of his Army training in Georgia, near Augusta.
Winthers likes hiking, camping, boating and fishing. He calls himself “a gym rat.” He’s into strength training. For fun he plays “Magic: The Gathering,” a dueling card game of spells and wizardry. He’s a huge “Lord of the Rings” fan. He hopes to work in forensics, perhaps for the FBI or the CIA.
On that night early this month in his family’s kitchen early, the mystery cellphone he had brought home from Jordan was charged.
He switched it on. It had a passcode. Locked. But when Winthers tapped the phone’s emergency contacts, they opened.
He noticed the name of the phone’s owner, Kennedy Sanders, but it didn’t dawn on him who she was. Sure, he had seen a memorial at Tower 22 with her name on it, but he hadn’t been at the base then. The name didn’t ring a bell.
The phone’s contacts were all nicknames. The first two: “Mama Bear” and “Papa Bear.” Winthers assumed they were Sanders’ parents. Next to each nickname were phone numbers.
Winthers, on his own phone, typed in the number next to “Mama Bear.” It had a 912 area code. Southeastern Georgia.
The phone rang.
Oliver-Sanders answered.
Winthers said who he was and asked if she knew a Kennedy Sanders. “Does this name sound familiar?”
“That’s my daughter,” Oliver-Sanders said, wary of what might come next.
She asked how Winthers got her number.
Winthers read aloud the names of the emergency contacts, “Mama Bear … Papa Bear …”
“That’s her phone,” Oliver-Sanders said.
She was floored.
Winthers, still unaware of who Kennedy Sanders was, asked her mother if Sanders was still on active duty and if he might mail her phone to her.
Oliver-Sanders informed him that she had been killed in action, in a drone strike.
Winthers’ stomach sank. He felt horrible, shocked. As soon as Oliver-Sanders told him, he remembered. He thought, “Oh, my gosh, that’s right.”
He offered his condolences and explained how he came to have the phone. But how it made it to the lost-and-found closet, unscathed, he had not a clue. No one does.
Winthers’ father, stepmother and sister had been in the kitchen listening in the background to the call. They were speechless. “What are the frickin’ chances?” they wondered. “This is surreal.”
The next day, Winthers shipped it to Waycross.
Shawn Sanders later said, “It couldn’t be delivered fast enough.”
* * * * *
A while back, a friend of Sanders stationed at Tower 22 sent Sanders’ parents another phone. Two phones actually.
They’re toys. String phones that Sanders and Breonna Moffett made using Campbell’s Soup cans.
“That’s how bored they were out there,” Oliver-Sanders said.
While her daughter’s iPhone was on its way from Illinois, she informed some of Sanders’ fellow soldiers — “battle buddies,” she calls them — that it had been found, and that it worked.
As a wise mother might, she asked if there was anything she should, um, steer clear of reading.
Nope, they said. “All you’re going to do is laugh.”
Moffett’s father, Bernard, who has come to know Sanders’ dad, joked with Shawn Sanders when he heard the phone was recovered, telling him, “Be careful, man, you might see something there you don’t want to see.”
When the phone arrived and the Sanderses turned it on, a relative informed them of the passcode, a variation of her June 1999 birth date.
In the phone were videos of Sanders and her pals, images that her folks had never seen and probably never would have seen.
“She recorded everything,” her mother said. “You know this generation. They record everything.”
There were glimpses of her everyday life. Her cutting up with friends. Her being … herself. Her being the daughter they raised her to be.
“That’s meaningful to me. It’s more than a gift,” her dad said. “It’s a piece of her that even we didn’t get to see. She was a good girl.”
It was a portal of sorts.
They saw the last message she ever sent, part of a three-way chat with Moffett and another friend at the base: “I can’t wait to go to Target when we get home.”
There was a video of her and Moffett playing with those silly toy phones.
“Now,” Oliver-Sanders said, “I can look at her phone and see video of them actually making them.”
The Sanderses also read again conversations she’d had with her father about staying the course when it came to climbing the ranks, being promoted.
“It’s a modern-day miracle,” Oliver-Sanders said of the phone and Winthers’ efforts to return it. “Thank God he thought enough to bring it back and not just leave it over there.”
Other than his family, Winthers has told only a couple of people about returning the phone.
“I don’t like to boast,” he said.
There was one last gesture, though.
He sent Sanders’ parents something else. Something they are proud to share.
They keep it on display at their house in a curio cabinet with some of Sanders’ crossword puzzle and sudoku books, a mood board and other belongings from her locker.
And, yes, it’s in there with those toy soup-can phones. With good reason. It’s a card with a handwritten a message from Winthers about her very real phone:
“I am truly sorry that it took so long for her phone to find its way back to you. Please know that returning it to you was very important to me, and it was an honor to do so. Her sacrifice, service and memory will never be forgotten.”
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