Take a look at the photograph above this story. And understand that the most unusual thing about it is actually the expression on Collin Teem’s face.
“He was always a happy kid, but, when he joined the Marines, he was in his realm,” said Dawn Teem, Collin’s mother. “When he went to Ukraine, every time he would call, I would talk to him, his dad would talk to him, and then we'd get off the phone and we'd look at each other like, ‘Our kid is in the middle of a war and he sounds the happiest he's ever sounded in his entire life.”
It wasn’t the war that made him happy, Dawn said. It was that he was fighting for what he felt was a noble cause.
Collin Teem grew up in Lexington, wanting to be one thing – a U.S. Marine.
A big part of his motivation was, Collin hated bullies.
He enlisted when he turned 18; served and was honorably discharged; then paid his own way to Ukraine to fight for a country that, as he told his mother, “would do it for us.” Collin saw Russia being a bully and he decided to go and fight for the little guy.
Now take another look at the photo. And understand that the reason Collin’s expression is the most unusual thing about it is, that in all but one or two of the hundreds of images and videos of him on Dawn’s phone, Collin is grinning, laughing, horsing around.
His mother noticed the expression on this photo right away.
“I’d always say, ‘You are not smiling.,’” she said. “He's like, ‘I'm trying to look bad.’”
And yet he still felt the need to make it light – a grenade in one hand, a juice box with SpongeBob SquarePants on it in the other.
“That’s him cracking a joke, saying, ‘I have all my essentials,’” Dawn said. “But I mean, I look at that face a lot, and I see so much in it.”
She sees his youth and his whimsy. But she sees a face beyond its 23 years of age, too. She sees pain and concern. She sees the dirt caked onto his hands, his pants.
And she sees love for the people of Ukraine.
“He fell in love with the people there,” she said. “I was told by some other people that he would put snacks and stuff in his backpack and take it out to the trenches. Not for him, but for the Ukraine Army. He said, these guys are in their fifties and sixties and they've been out here months, with hardly any sleep [or] any of the true necessities. I think it broke his heart.”
Barely a month past his 23rd birthday and barely a month before he was due to catch a flight home to South Carolina – a temporary visit – Collin Teem was killed in combat. The date was May 11, 2024. The one-year anniversary of that date is Mother’s Day, 2025.
On this anniversary, Dawn Teem reflects on her son – who he was, who she remembers him to be, and how in the midst of her grief, a stolen identity led to the loss of money she’d planned to use to visit a memorial for foreign soldiers in Ukraine, and almost led to the permanent loss of hundreds of videos, photos, and texts in her social media accounts.
Listen to the story above. It’s one of pain, pride, loss, and hope. And humanity, as only a mother could tell it.
Correction to audio story: The T-shirts commemorating Collin Teem were sold through Goons Up, which honors U.S. Marines. Bracelets were also sold, and those were through Valhalla project.
