In Marine's Death, Clues to a Son's Life

The Marines sent him to an Air National Guard base in New York. Then terrorists struck the Pentagon and World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The world seemed to be going to hell, Alex told a high school friend, and he wanted to get in the middle of it. Apart from that, he had never become the Marine he envisioned. He reenlisted, setting his sights on Recon. Fewer than one in five make it.

Gilda suggested having the Marines send him to college so he would come out an officer: "Doesn't it make sense to seek a commission?"

"So I can be stacking papers and signing things while my men are in the field?" Alex responded. "I don't think so."

'I Struggle With Myself'

Gilda and Fulvio fully supported removing Afghanistan's Taliban government. Given time, Fulvio thought, the United States would lead poorer nations toward democracy. "I am now convinced I was wrong," he e-mailed friends a month after the Iraq invasion.

A year later, Gilda and Fulvio thought the United States shouldn't pull out. Then, for Gilda, came a growing sense that staying was doing more harm. In spring 2004, she joined Military Families Speak Out.

She placed a sign in her living room window: "Bring The Troops Home Now." She kept postcards in her purse calling for withdrawal and slipped them onto windshields in downtown Bethesda. She went to rallies, visited members of Congress. She sent Alex articles on such topics as the challenges of reconstructing Iraq.

"I struggle with myself in deciding whether or not to send you these things," she wrote. "Obviously I want you to have total conviction in what you are doing. To me, this conviction translates to your safety. But another part of me is convinced the more knowledge you have, the better off, the safer you'll be.''

Alex kept training for Recon. At home one weekend, he and Bethesda friend Andy Huff jogged to Bradley Hills Elementary School. Alex reached for a chin-up bar, knocking out 20. He took a quick break and did nearly 20 more. "Whoa," Huff remembers telling him. "That's pretty crazy."

In September 2004, as part of a Recon battalion with the motto "Swift, Silent, Deadly," Alex shipped off to Iraq.

'Enough of the Politics'

Two months later, Gilda heard from Alex's fiancee. A bomb had blown up under Alex's Humvee, sending shrapnel into his foot and laying him up in a field hospital outside Fallujah.

"Mom, Mom, Mom," he said over the phone. "I don't want you to make a big deal out of this. I don't want anybody out there thinking, 'Oh, poor Alex, poor Alex.' "

He asked his parents to visit a wounded buddy at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. While there, they met other Marines, too, including one blinded by a gunshot who asked what Alex did.