Honoring their fallen
SEEKONK - They decided to have two Masses.
One yesterday, because it was easier for friends to travel here to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church on a Sunday, the other tomorrow, on the actual anniversary, marking the day that 21-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Eric Paul Valdepeñas was KIA, killed in action.
Last year, Eric Valdepeñas was driving a Humvee down a dusty road in Fallujah, in Iraq. Corporal Jared Shoemaker rode shotgun. Chris Walsh, a Navy corpsman who was their "doc," their medic, was in the back seat. Lance Corporal Cody Hill, a cowboy from Oklahoma, was up in the turret, manning the machine gun, scanning the horizon.
The bomb, buried beneath the road, exploded under the Humvee. They call them belly shots, and hardly anyone survives a belly shot. Hill survived, barely, because he was in the turret, and because he is a Marine. Everybody else in the truck known as Victor Five was killed.
"I wake up every day, expecting to see Eric walk through the door," 32-year-old Nora Lough was saying, sitting on her couch, 12 miles from the church, a glass of iced tea on the coffee table. "Eric was my baby brother, and I wake up every day thinking I'm going to see my baby brother."
He grew up in a yellow colonial on Warren Avenue, the youngest of eight siblings. He was an honors student at Bishop Hendricken High in Warwick, R.I., captain of a state championship lacrosse team. He was an engineering student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst when he enlisted.
"He joined the Marines not because he had to, but because he wanted to," Nora said. "He believed deeply in serving his country."
His was not a military family. His father is a doctor, an old-fashioned GP whose practice was just over the state line, in East Providence. His sister Edna teaches at a Quaker school. But his family, resolutely close and devoutly Catholic, put aside their reservations and showed up en masse at Parris Island for his graduation.
"He was so proud," Nora recalled. "He knew we respected his decision."
In Fallujah, Eric and his comrades found and saved a very sick baby girl named Mariam. In a series of risky, nocturnal visits, Eric hid with Cody Hill outside Mariam's house, providing cover while Walsh and Shoemaker tended to the infant inside. They worked to get her to Boston, for the care she needed to live.
Eric, Walsh, and Shoemaker were killed a month before Mariam was flown to Massachusetts General Hospital for life-saving surgery. Nora and her sisters got to hold Baby Mariam before she returned to Iraq. Nora tucked a small photograph of Eric into Baby Mariam's bag.
The day before he left for Iraq, Eric looked at Nora and said, "Just don't forget me."
It stunned Nora, who had never contemplated her brother's mortality. He was so young, so handsome, so smart, so alive. His family and friends have, in fact, spent the last year ensuring that people don't forget. They are building a prayer garden at his high school. There are scholarships in his name at Bishop Hendricken and UMass.
They held a lacrosse game in his memory a few months ago. Hill, one ear missing, the burns that cover half his body still raw, insisted on leaving the hospital in Texas to attend.
Nora hugged Hill gently. "I was afraid I might break him," she said.
A few weeks ago, Eric's brother Sean and his wife, Alison, had a baby boy. They named him Eric James Valdepeñas. Nora is days away from giving birth to her first child, a boy. Eric always said she'd have a boy.
Eric's best friend, Dan Pita, decided to honor him by enlisting in the Army. He is awaiting orders.
Nora Lough sits in her house, waiting for her baby, thinking of her baby brother.
"Eric was Baby Mariam's guardian angel in Iraq," she said. "He'll be my son's guardian angel. Forever."
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
