ShareThisFive years ago, Kate Coyne Conn, a Northwest Airlines flight attendant from Memphis, Tenn., was touched when she saw a Marine saluting a coffin containing the remains of a serviceman killed in the Iraq War, as the coffin was loaded into the cargo hold of her passenger plane in Philadelphia.
"I'm very sentimental when it comes to the military, and it just really touched me, his respect for his job," said Conn, now 42.
The Marine was escorting the body back to the soldier's home state for burial. During the flight, Conn gave the crucifix pin she was wearing to the Marine.
"You know how sometimes you're just led to do something? I said, 'I want you to have this,' and that was it. I wanted him to have it because it was special to me."
Apparently, "that cross made quite a journey," Conn said.
This year, the former flight attendant was touched again to find her impulsive gesture immortalized in the new HBO movie "Taking Chance," which stars Kevin Bacon as the Marine, Lt. Col. Michael Strobl, escorting the body of Chance Phelps, a 19-year-old Marine killed on Good Friday, 2004.
Actress Christina Rouner enacts the role of Conn, who is listed in the film's credits as "Tall Flight Attendant." (Conn is 5-foot-9.)
The movie debuted Feb. 21, and will be repeated throughout March on HBO cable television channels.
Conn's gift apparently made a big impression on Strobl. At Phelps' funeral in Wyoming, he gave the cross to Phelps' mother, who placed it on her son's coffin, for burial.
A Desert Storm veteran, Strobl -- who volunteered to escort the body after he noticed that he and Phelps were both from small-town Wyoming -- chronicled Conn's gesture in his journal, and included the incident in the script he wrote after he decided to try to turn his experience into a film. The script later was worked on by the film's director, Ross Katz.
Conn is now a stay-at-home mom in Oakland, Tenn., where she lives with her 2-year-old daughter, Claire, and her husband, Paul Conn, a medical technologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. Retired after 10 years in the air, she was surprised when a Northwest representative called her at home and asked if she remembered the incident with the cross.
She learned that Strobl was trying to get in touch with her because he was working on a movie about his experience. The reconnection led to HBO inviting the Conns to the film's premiere Feb. 12 in New York, where Kate was treated as a celebrity, being introduced to the crowd along with Bacon, Strobl and Phelps' parents.
"Nobody had a dry eye," she said of the screening. "It's not a political movie whatsoever. It's from the heart.
"I come from a very Catholic family, and so my mom always made sure that I had a little guardian angel pin or a crucifix on my uniform," Conn said. "It's kind of like that cross took on a life of its own."
(Contact John Beifuss at beifuss(at)commercialappeal.com. His movie blog is www.thebloodshoteye.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
