Cavalry Scout, 22, Dies Five Days After Roadside Bomb Attack

Her son was a cavalry scout in Iraq, and yesterday Mary Wallace recalled his childhood in St. Mary's County -- shaping coat hangers into toy guns, asking for a bedspread done in Army camouflage. "I'm going to be a soldier man," she remembered him telling her.

Wounded on a combat mission, Cpl. Matthew P. Wallace, 22, died Friday in a military hospital in Germany, five days after a roadside bomb detonated near his Bradley Fighting Vehicle in Baghdad. His family was gathered at his bedside -- mother, father and three sisters.

One sister read a final letter. One sang to him.

"I think the most important thing to say about Matthew was that he chose this," his mother said. "He wasn't drafted. He knew he was taking a risk, but he chose to do this."

Deployed to Iraq eight months ago, Wallace was atop his vehicle as the gunner July 16 when the bomb went off, his family said. A fellow soldier was killed. Wallace survived but was burned over 95 percent of his body. Hopes that he would somehow make it faded, and his family members flew to Germany.

Told that he was brain dead, they withdrew life support.

The Wallace family returned to their Lexington Park home Saturday night, passing a convenience store where Wallace had once worked.

The American flag outside "was all lit up and at half-mast, and it just touched us all so much," Mary Wallace said.

Just before her son went to war, he explained his reasons, his mother said.

"He chose to go to war so that his sisters' children didn't have to," she said. "They don't even have children yet, but he didn't want them to have to go through what he knew he was getting into. He wanted to let them play in the shade of trees and laugh at what amused them with no fear of bombs dropping on them."

This was a decision he came to at 19, she said, after a period when he felt undecided about his life's course. He had dropped out of Great Mills High School, then earned his General Educational Development diploma in 2001.

When Wallace became a cavalry scout -- often working out in front of the larger unit -- he told his father, "I found the thing I do well," Keith Wallace recalled.