Friends Are Lost In Battle Days Apart

Md. Classmates Die In Iraq, Afghanistan

They met as freshmen in the Army Junior ROTC at Baltimore's Forest Park High School, the quiet, strong boy who couldn't wait to join the service and the outgoing girl whose plans included college before the military.

For four years they competed against each other -- both served as cadet captains, company commanders and drill team commanders. They celebrated their successes: city drill team championships four years in a row, her promotion to executive officer in the JROTC program, his winning a coveted JROTC award.

On graduation day in June 2000, they grinned into a camera together as they locked arms and displayed their diplomas.

And they died within two weeks of each other -- Spec. Toccara R. Green, 23, in Iraq on Aug. 14, when a roadside bomb exploded near her truck, and Sgt. Damion Campbell, 23, on Friday, when his convoy was ambushed in Afghanistan.

"This is not a good day," Toccara's father, Garry R. Green Sr. of Rosedale, Md., said yesterday after learning of Campbell's death. "I was just coming around about Toccara, then I got some more bad news.

"You watch them grow up from the time they are 15 together. They are competing in competitions, and you get really close. They go into the military. You lose one, then you hear about this. I couldn't believe it."

Military officials said Campbell -- assigned to the 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry Regiment, based in Vicenza, Italy -- was killed when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Humvee during a combat patrol. His mother, Donna Robinson of Baltimore, said colleagues in her son's medic unit told her that four people had been injured when a rocket exploded and that they had tried to save Campbell by administering CPR.

"But it was too late," she said. "They gave him the last rites."

Green's transportation unit, which lost a sergeant two months ago, had stopped for a rest break when a bomb exploded near her truck and a piece of shrapnel struck her in the neck, authorities told her mother, Yvonne Green.

Green was assigned to the Army's 57th Transportation Company, 548th Corps Support Battalion, headquartered at Fort Drum, N.Y. She was the first woman from Maryland killed in the conflict in Iraq. More than 2,100 service members have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since military operations started, officials said.

News of the deaths of two former students in just 12 days rocked Forest Park High, where teachers and administrators remember the pair.

"They were two of the most pleasant students you ever wanted to meet," said teacher Brenda Wallace. "When they said last night that Damion Campbell from Forest Park had been killed, I just started screaming. I just broke down. . . . I don't know how many times it has ever happened that two kids from the same high school, from the same Junior ROTC program, two young people who both wanted so much to honor their country have been lost."