Their Duty Is to Carry On

Miranda Neighbarger attended her sixth funeral for a fallen Marine on Monday morning in Columbus, and she wept through most of it. Then she climbed into her car and drove 2 1/2 hours to this Cleveland suburb for a wrenching memorial service for 49 Ohio servicemen killed in Iraq.

By the time she heard the phrase “home of the brave” as a Brook Park schoolgirl sang the national anthem, tears were flowing down her cheeks again.

“It’s really starting to get to me,” Neighbarger said after a military band had played a slow, mournful version of taps to conclude the one-hour service.

Neighbarger, 24, is a newlywed with a husband in Iraq -- a member of what everyone here calls the “Three Twenty Five,” the Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment of Brook Park.

With the Reserve unit ravaged by combat deaths, Neighbarger has been making the rounds of funerals, trying in vain to comfort widows as young as she is.

“You feel so helpless because, really, there’s nothing you can say,” she said, a gold dog tag hanging from her neck that read “My Husband Is A Marine.”

It has been a devastating month for anyone remotely associated with the unit, including the several thousand people who stood in the heat for an hour here Monday night for the solemn tribute. One week earlier, on Aug. 1, four Reservists were killed in an ambush in western Iraq, followed two days later by the deaths of 10 more Reservists in a roadside bombing. The previous week, two other members of the battalion were killed in action in Iraq.

The battalion has lost 47 Marines in Iraq since it deployed in March. The names and photos of the dead were displayed on a massive video screen at the memorial service, along with those of two Navy servicemen from Ohio also killed in action.

Inside the International Exhibition Center, a former military tank factory known as the I-X, there was silence as the names and faces scrolled past. It took three long minutes, and then there was more silence.

Each name, read aloud, fell like a hammer blow, from Cpl. Jeffrey A. Boskovitch through the alphabet to Lance Cpl. William B. Wightman.

In the center of the vast hall, rows of folding chairs had been set up, tagged with signs that read “Families of Fallen Heroes.” Row upon row was filled with families that had lost Marines, and from deep within the rows came an occasional sob that cut through the quiet.

Behind the families stood thousands of Ohioans, their heads bowed. There were old men in blue embroidered hats that read “World War II veteran” and middle-age men wearing vests that read “Vietnam Veteran” and “Never Forget POWs/MIAs.” There were younger people too, men with close-cropped hair and “Semper Fi” tattoos and teenage girls in jeans and flip-flops.

Sprinkled through the throng were young men in dress uniforms from every service -- Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard -- who had come to pay their respects.

“We may be separate services, but at times like this we’re all one,” said Staff Sgt. Scott Hitchcock, wearing a blue Air Force dress uniform. He attended with four fellow Air Force recruiters based in Middleburg Heights, a Cleveland suburb.

There was no mention of the horrific bomb that killed 14 Marines, plus a civilian interpreter, on Aug. 3 -- or that the triple stack of antitank mines was the single worst improvised explosive device attack against U.S. forces in Iraq.

There were a few brief speeches by Ohio politicians, all of them received with perfunctory applause save for Gov. Robert A. Taft, who elicited a sudden roar of approval when he said: “They gave their lives in the great struggle of our times, the battle versus terror and terrorism.”

There was a stir too when the battalion’s rear commander, Lt. Col. Kevin Rush, rose in his Marine dress uniform to accept a folded flag from two local veterans groups.

The colonel spoke of how the battalion had been “disrupting the insurgency on a daily basis” in Iraq, and the crowd howled again.

There are times, Rush said, when a moment of silence is appropriate. But now he requested a round of applause for “all our fighting forces” overseas.

Everyone stood and cheered, punctuated by a hearty “Hoo-ah!” -- the all-purpose military greeting -- from a reedy man wearing a Korean War veteran’s hat.

On an access road outside the hall, there had been a brief disruption -- what some in the hall called a “blasphemy”: Six church members from Kansas marched in protest, wielding picket signs that read “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “Don’t Worship the Dead.”

Fred Phelps, 52, the leader of the group, which called itself Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, said God had killed the Marines to punish the military for allowing homosexuals to serve.

The protesters, who included Phelps’ mother, Margie Phelps, 79, and his niece, Rebekah Phelps-Roper, 18, said they had protested at several military memorial services and funerals to remind families that they had “forsaken the Lord,” as Phelps-Roper put it.

Many of those attending the service cursed the protesters as police herded the six toward the far side of the highway. They looked small and distant, dwarfed by a massive American flag mounted on a firetruck ladder provided by the local fire department.

Inside, a video montage showed faces etched in grief at Marine funerals, and the outpouring of flowers, letters and poems on a metal fence surrounding the 3/25 headquarters in a former elementary school in Brook Park. Military bands played stirring songs from all the services, finishing with the Marine Corps hymn.

It was all too much for Neighbarger -- the video, the martial music, the Marine widows with babies on their laps, the downcast eyes of grieving fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, their young Marines gone forever. She wanted to cry again.

“You almost feel guilty that it’s not you, you know?” she said. “But at the same time, it’s like losing a family member because everyone in the unit is like family.”

Neighbarger and her companion, Lindsay Green, 22, whose husband is also serving in Iraq with the 3/25, were feeling drained. They faced a nighttime drive back to their homes outside Columbus, where they planned to attend more funerals.

“The funerals are hard, so it’s good to see all these people come out and show their support,” Green said, surveying the departing crowd.

Green and Neighbarger acknowledged that they had waited at their homes last week, dreading the arrival of Marines in dress uniforms bearing the news that their husbands had died.

But Lance Cpl. Eric Neighbarger, 24, and Lance Cpl. Michael Green, 23, were alive and well with the 3/25 in Iraq, and the two wives were on a mission to support the families of the fallen.

They will attend more Marine funerals this week, they said, but they weren’t certain of the precise number. There were so many of them.