Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Alfredo B. Silva, 35, Calexico; Killed in an Explosion in Iraq

When he returned to Iraq not long ago, Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Alfredo B. Silva maintained his habit of worrying about his family’s worries.

Don’t fret, he said to the grandmother who raised him. I’ll be fine, he told the aunt who grew up with him like a sister.

There were plenty more family members to calm. Before the war, Silva used to gather each Sunday with his tight-knit clan, 44 relatives living within miles of each other in Chula Vista, Calif.

They watched football and shared menudo or carne asada -- uncles and nieces and his beloved grandfather, whom Silva shadowed as a little boy and whose love showered back.

“His family was the most important thing to him,” recalled a cousin, Cindy Lopez. “He didn’t like that we all worried about him.”

Silva, 35, of Calexico, Calif., was killed Sept. 15 when an improvised explosive device detonated near the military vehicle he was driving while on patrol in Baghdad. He was only about a week into a new stint in Iraq after a stateside furlough that ended Labor Day.

He is survived by his wife, Cecilia, and 12-year-old daughter, Mariel, a softball pitching whiz just like her father.

No one in the family called him Alfredo.

Even after he toughed up on high school sports and grew hard with muscle from construction work, Silva was known to relatives simply as “Boy.” One of his aunts, Julia Robles, gave him the nickname. She was just a toddler when Silva was born and never could pronounce his Christian name. Everyone picked up on it and never let go.

Silva’s father died when he was 4, and his mother moved in with her parents in San Diego County. Silva’s grandparents, Asuncion and Amparo Barajas, raised him like their own.

He followed his grandfather everywhere. The duo would spend weekends at the horse races in Caliente or at the family ranch south of the border.

At 16, during one of the family’s summer stints in Mexico, he met the young woman who would become his wife. Silva dated Cecilia for half a dozen years, traveling across the border on weekends to keep the romance alive.

After his high school graduation, he worked in the family concrete construction business. But with marriage and the birth of his daughter, Silva told his relatives that he was joining the Army.

“Nobody understood why he wanted to do it,” Robles said. “But he wanted to be a little bit more independent. He wanted to help people. He wanted to do something different.”

After his active-duty stint in Texas, Silva joined the Army National Guard so he could return to California and his family.

He loved following the San Diego Chargers and baseball’s Padres. As an adult, his own fast-pitch softball career rarely wavered, and he would drive west to play in night leagues in Chula Vista or Tijuana. His catcher, Efrain Arvizu of Tijuana, remembered Silva as a man of “heart and determination.”

Deployment in Iraq interrupted that life. After months overseas, Silva returned in August to attend his grandmother’s 80th birthday party.

Lopez, the cousin, recalls Silva talking about the confusion of the war, but how the children of Iraq remained his prime motivation.

“He knew it was his job, his duty, and he signed up for that,” she said. “He knew he was there to, in the end, bring these kids a better future.”

Sgt. Joseph C. Barker, who was wounded in the explosion that claimed Silva’s life, recalled a comrade who masqueraded as a tough guy to keep order in the ranks.

“But when it came down to it, he was a softie,” Barker wrote on an Internet tribute site to Iraq casualties. “He was the first to start throwing Beanie Babies and soccer balls to the kids.”