Mourners describe soldier as selfless
N.H. graduate was killed in Iraq
HAMPSTEAD, N.H. -- A US Army Ranger killed in Iraq was remembered yesterday as smart, determined, and selfless at his funeral attended by more than 500 people.
Captain Jeremy Grassbaugh, 25, was killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol in Zagabiyah on April 7. He was on his second tour in Iraq.
Brigadier General Michael Ferriter, a top adviser to the US military commander in Iraq, got to know Grassbaugh during his first tour, after the junior officer became Ferriter's aide-de-camp.
"Jonathan was perfect," he said during the funeral Mass, attended by more than 500 people at St. Anne's Catholic Church. "He was always the first to know instinctively the best way to accomplish any mission."
Grassbaugh graduated from Hampstead Middle School, where his mother, Patricia, is the principal, and from Phillips Exeter Academy. He went on to Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a degree in computer science and joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps. He met his wife, Jenna, in the ROTC when he was a senior and she was a freshman. They married 10 months ago on Cape Cod, shortly before he was deployed to Iraq for the second time, and stayed in touch daily by computer.
"I'm so sorry I never got to say goodbye, and I hope you know how much I wish I could have spoken to you one last time," said Jenna Grassbaugh, a first-year law student at William & Mary, calling her dead husband "far more selfless and thoughtful than I am."
