Remembering Julian as a husband, father, soldier

On the day she learned of her husband’s death, Brenda Manglona—the wife of Staff Sgt. Julian Manglona—was planning the couple’s wedding.

“I had been on cloud nine all day,” she said in an interview Thursday, recounting how she and Julian had chosen to forgo a church wedding when they married in 2007. “I wanted to call him that day and tell him all about it.”

Then came a mysterious phone call with an unidentified voice warning that Julian had suffered a heart attack. Military officials are still investigating the actual cause of Manglona’s death. However, Brenda knew what had happened when she returned home later that day to find an Army van parked outside her house.

“I just couldn’t get out of the car,” she said. “We had made so many plans and I was holding onto those plans while he was away. I just didn’t want it to be true.”

Manglona, 39, died while training at Fort Hood, Texas last week. According to news reports, he had collapsed during a 6-mile run, one of the last legs of his training before his scheduled deployment to Kuwait this month. His comrades tried to revive him, to no avail. Manglona later died at a nearby hospital.

Manglona had belonged to a reserve unit in the 29th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, called up for active duty in July. The one-year tour of duty he was slated to begin would have marked his second in the Middle East.

In 2004, not long after U.S. occupation of Iraq began, Manglona re-enlisted in the Army—he first joined at age 18, serving for a term—and soon found himself on his way into combat. He returned in 2006 to the CNMI, where he had long protected his community as a local police officer.

In December of that year, he met Brenda, then a cadet in Air Force boot camp, at a military store on Saipan. She was reluctant, she said, when he first asked her for a date as she was scheduled to leave for training in two weeks. But Julian was persistent and after some urging, Brenda agreed to have dinner with him—only to become so nervous on the night they were to meet that they skipped the meal to spend the evening strolling through the garden at the Hyatt Regency. Julian proposed three months later and they married in July.

“It just felt right,” Brenda said.

The two later became parents to Maxine Julianne Manglona, born on Christmas Eve. Julian had seven children previously and, according to Brenda, did his best to provide for all of them.

Manglona also had a love of the oceans, spending his free time fishing and piloting one of his boats on the water, an interest that crossed over into his police career when he began doing boat safety work and even took part in rescue work.

And then came the day he was to leave again for the Army.

“It was really hard,” said Brenda. “He made so many promises about all the things we would do when he came back.”

As Manglona’s family now works to arrange his funeral and rosaries are said for him in churches on Tinian—where he had lived and where much of his family still does—and on Saipan, Brenda urged those who knew him to remember the man he had become in life.

“He became such a great person, a loving person. He embodied the best father, friend and family member and he always made every effort to make the people around him smile. I love him.”