 | In Memoriam |  |
| In Memoriam | |
Cpl. Kirk J. Bosselman, U.S.M.C. (KIA)
Kirk Bosselmann killed in Iraq
The grim word jumped out at City Editor Chris Tribbey on Monday morning: A Napa man had been killed in battle in Iraq, little more than a week after American Canyon native Phillip West died while on patrol in Fallujah.
Tribbey spotted the news on the Department of Defense Web site, and we immediately tried to get more information. Almost as immediately, calls started coming into the newsroom from TV and radio stations around the Bay Area. Did we have any information on Kirk Bosselmann, 21, of Napa?
No one could find any family. No one could make any connection. The local civilians who closely monitor the whereabouts of young people in the military said they had not heard of him.
Reporter Carlos Villatoro used his ace tracing skills to try to find nearby Bosselmanns. One in Forestville, in Sonoma County, a couple more within 100 miles or so, but nothing that checked out.
Then, the pressure of calls coming into the Department of Defense spokespeople who deal with such issues -- and with a different group of regional reporters and news outlets nearly every day -- finally revealed some information: Bosselmann was a native of Maryland. He had spent only a short time in Napa County, where he had enlisted in the Army. No one we contacted had any idea why he came to Napa to enlist. One military vet in the newsroom noted that soldiers' pay, when they leave the military, increases if they are discharged far from home. Others suggested some young people feel the need to break their ties with home before jumping into a commitment as significant as the military.
Later, when the smoke cleared, his family and friends provided reporters near Bosselmann's Maryland home with the story.
Bosselmann was an athletic young man who was born in Canada and had been a firefighter cadet in Maryland. He liked to hunt and fish along the winding streams and low hills near Dickerson, Md., a small town near the Potomac River northwest of Washington, D.C.
According to the Washington Post, he left Maryland after high school to seek adventure and become a fire jumper in Northern California. He couldn't find work in that dangerous and romanticized field, so he joined the Marine Corps. Bosselmann's friend Joe Brown told the Frederick News-Post in Maryland, that Bosselmann "enlisted without anybody knowing."
At Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, he spent his off time surfing and riding bulls. He became a sniper in the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. At the time he was killed on Nov. 27 he was involved in what his father told the Post was "hand-to-hand, house-to-house, door-to-door" combat.
In that respect, he shared a fate similar to American Canyon's Phillip West, the Vintage High grad mourned in a series of ceremonies this week, ending Saturday at Tulocay Cemetery.
What Brown told the hometown paper in Maryland sounds similar to what people say about West. Bosselmann "lived life with no fear and no reservations," said Brown. "Š He always tried to be the best at whatever he did."