The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A tiny sandwich shop closes to remember beloved airman
WASHINGTON » The sign outside said the sandwich shop was closed, but people kept coming in anyway, eager for their lunchtime hoagie.
Inside the tiny restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C., Arlene Wagner nervously wiped tables and laid out trays of food. Bub and Pop’s wasn’t open for business on Wednesday, but it wouldn’t be empty.
“Sorry, guys, we’re closed,” she told a couple of regulars, turning them away and locking the door behind them. “We’re having a remembrance for my son.”
It had been exactly a year since Staff Sgt. Peter Taub and five other U.S. airmen were killed by a suicide bomber while on patrol in Afghanistan.
Now the survivors of the attack were coming here to eat, along with Taub’s commander and more than a dozen other airmen. As Arlene, a wiry 65-year-old in glasses, wondered how they would all fit, a tub of French onion dip fell off a table and exploded on the floor. Arlene jumped.
“I’m just trying to get through the day,” she said.
Arlene had just closed Bub and Pop’s on Dec. 21, 2015, when her older son, Jonathan Taub, the restaurant’s chef, came tearing through the kitchen.
“Pete was killed,” he said.
Wagner checked her phone, saw the missed calls and knew it was true.
Her son, a 30-year-old father with a second baby on the way, was gone. That night, three officers in crisp blue uniforms arrived to officially deliver the news.
Now airmen were again at her door.
Brig. Gen. Keith Givens, head of the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, stepped into the restaurant and hugged Arlene. Next to arrive was Peter’s OSI partner, who had nearly been killed in the blast.
“Hey, honey,” Arlene said, embracing the man, who asked not be identified.
She hugged each person who came through the door, all 17 of them.
“I’m going to take a breath now,” she said, pausing to compose herself. “Thank you for all being here. Now eat.”
They filled their plates with hoagies and salad, chips and dip, and sat in near-silence, unsure how to begin, which stories to tell.
There was Peter’s partner, who had spotted his buddy’s body through the lingering smoke as he made his way to the medevac helicopter. There were the two other surviving airmen, who had been knocked back 10 feet by the blast and were now, like Peter’s partner, dealing with traumatic brain injury. And there was the Marine who had rushed through exposed territory to try to help.
“This is really quiet,” Arlene said. “Should I put on some Christmas music?”
One person missing from the table was Peter’s older brother. They’d been close growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Jonathan was tall and burly. Peter was so skinny and sweet that his parents worried about him.
After Arlene and Joel Taub split, the siblings struggled.
Jonathan was shot in the back during a fight shortly after graduating from high school. He recovered, went to chef’s school and worked in some of Philadelphia’s best restaurants before moving to the District, where he opened Bub and Pop’s with his Mom and stepdad in 2013.
Peter partied too much and dropped out of community college. His solution was to enlist. His father, who’d grown up during the Vietnam War, was wary. American troops were dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Joel told his son that the Army and Marine Corps were too dangerous. Instead he suggested the Air Force.
Peter had served for eight years before being deployed to Afghanistan. Hours before Peter shipped out in 2015, Jonathan made him his favorite hoagie to take to the airport.
On Wednesday, the 33-year-old chef was in the back office of Bub and Pop’s, sitting at a computer underneath two photos of his brother. He couldn’t bring himself to attend the luncheon. Instead, he tried to distract himself with YouTube videos of famous chefs.
“I’m not even sure why they are here,” he said, glancing at security cameras showing the airmen eating lunch. “Is that wrong for me to say?”
They were there, Givens said, to honor and remember Peter, one of 2,383 service members who have died in the longest war in U.S. history.
“If Pete could have chosen to switch places with anyone here, he wouldn’t have,” he told Arlene. “But you know that. You raised him.”
Arlene brought up the polka-dot socks Peter used to wear, even as an Air Force investigator, and the mood inside the restaurant began to lift.
Peter hid the fact that he was being sent to Afghanistan, telling his family he was on his way to Qatar, Arlene recounted. She found out only while helping him pack when his wife, Christina, accidentally let the secret slip. Her ex-husband, Joel, thought their son was in Qatar, out of harm’s way, until the day Peter died in a war many Americans have all but forgotten.
“He told me he was going to get a mug with ‘Afghanistan’ on it and, when he was back, give it to his father,” she said of her son. “That’s how he was going to let him know.”