Cold Ground for a Summer Love

They saw little of each other at first, with Colin at Camp Lejeune and Kira at her parents' home in Fairfax County. When they did meet on his weekend trips home, they were all heat and sweetness, two young people enjoying their youth and freedom.

When they were apart, they exchanged breathless text messages on their cellphones.

"To me, you are perfect," Kira would write.

"Ur better," he would respond.

They didn't talk much about the future or death, except those stark memories of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that had made things click in his mind. He had always planned to join the service, he had told her, motivated by a deep appreciation for the Americans' liberation of the Jews during World War II. The attacks on U.S. soil sealed his resolve, he told her, and he enlisted right after graduating from Osbourn High School, in the summer of '05.

On the eve of his departure from Camp Lejeune, Kira joined him in North Carolina to say goodbye. They kept the conversation light and normal, hoping to prolong all the perfection. She told him she'd wait for him.

"I told him that seven months wasn't very long at all," she said.

After he left, they moved from those flirtatious text messages to the effusive, romantic language of handwritten letters. "Baby I love you so much and miss you so much," he wrote Aug. 11. "Feel better and know I'll always be a ear for you and you can tell me anything you need to good or bad."

The fall semester began, but Kira's mind lingered on what it would be like when Colin returned. "Will it be cold? Can I wear heels? I want to look as good as possible," she told herself. "Would I throw my arms around him? Or would I be stuck in place with happiness?"

On Aug. 30, as she sat restlessly in class at Radford University, she wrote a poem about the month Colin was to return to her.

"To miss rough hands, stern eyes so much, They knife the heart with thoughts . . . of sweet February."

On the other side of the world, Colin had volunteered for a midday mission in the town of Habbaniya. His Humvee hit a roadside bomb. The blast ignited the gas tank, then the ammunition. He died instantly.