LCpl. Travis Layfield, U.S.M.C (KIA)

War casualty from Fremont seemed born to be a Marine

When Hollywood casts a Marine, it thinks Rambo -- biceps bulging and a string of bullets slung across a camouflaged chest.

Lance Cpl. Travis Layfield seemed born to that role.

Family and friends gathered Thursday in Fremont to remember Layfield, 19, who was killed by hostile fire Tuesday in Iraq. They recalled a young man who, from almost Day One, was fascinated with the military, wars, soldiers and guns.

He was a Marine in every sense. And so much more.

``His heart was so big,'' said his cousin Ashley Mills, 19, of Tracy.

Mills remembered a night a little more than a year ago when she was fighting with her boyfriend. She turned to Layfield.

``I had no one else to call,'' Mills said. ``He was with his own girlfriend. And he dropped everything to comfort me.

``He protected me.''

Others who gathered Thursday at his mother's small apartment recalled the time when another cousin broke her arm and had to go to the hospital. It was Travis who stayed by her side to comfort her.

Diane Layfield learned of her son's death Tuesday night. She was returning home from her grandson's Sunnyvale baseball game about 7 p.m. when three uniformed Marines entered her gated apartment complex.

They hadn't said a word. But she knew.

``I just lost it,'' she said.

Two neighbors grabbed her, holding her up. The officers escorted her upstairs. One knelt by her side, giving her what little news he had.

The Department of Defense is reporting that Layfield, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, was one of nearly 20,000 Camp Pendleton Marines trying to quell insurgents in the area in and around Al-Fallujah and Ar-Ramadi. The area is a stronghold of anti-Western fundamentalists and the epicenter of resistance to coalition forces.

Layfield was killed on a day when there were at least 12 Marine casualties in Ar-Ramadi. That same day, Lance Cpl. Kyle Crowley, 18, of San Ramon, from the same battalion, was among those killed in the ambush there.

Layfield and Crowley are among the 642 U.S. military personnel who have been killed since the United States invaded Iraq last year.

Layfield's grandfather was a Navy Seabee in World War II, and he has a cousin and uncle in the Army, relatives said.

Still, no one could quite explain why Layfield seemed hard-wired at birth to be a military aficionado.

``I would be watching some kind of sports on TV,'' his brother, Tyler, 17, recalled Thursday. ``And he would grab the remote and switch it to some boring stuff, something military or on the History Channel.''

When the Marines came by Washington High School in Fremont to recruit him, he was an eager candidate. He enlisted in 2002 and was stationed at Camp Pendleton since September. His first assignment overseas came Feb. 16: He was sent to Germany, Kuwait, and then Iraq, where he had been since last month.

He embraced Marine life with gusto, sporting a ``Devil Dog'' tattoo and a feather tattoo, symbolic of his Lakota Sioux background. His father, John Layfield, a forklift operator at NUMMI in Fremont, is American Indian.

Though deeply proud of their son, unlike many military families who find some measure of comfort in knowing their loved one died for a just cause, John and Diane Layfield, who are divorced, do not support the war, Diane Layfield said.

Layfield's own presence in Iraq presented a dilemma for his two-sided character.

He never thought of ditching his duty as a Marine, but his mother said in his last phone call to her on St. Patrick's Day that he was concerned for the Iraqi people. Among his duties was scouring neighborhood garbage cans and debris-strewed streets for possible bombs.

``He was very proud; he loved what he was doing,'' said his mother, a packer at Scholastic Book Fairs in Union City. ``But he also was asking, `Why are we here? They don't want us here.' ''

Like always, at the end of the call, he assured his mother that he was smart and would be careful. ``I'll be fine,'' he told her.

It was his way to always comfort her, to promise he would make it back.

And true to her son's protector spirit, she recalled another phone conversation in which he explained that a friend had asked him to deliver a goodbye letter to his wife, just in case.

He refused, because he refused to accept that outcome. Besides, he had a better idea.

``He said he wouldn't deliver it,'' his mother recalled. ``He said, `I'm going to take care of you.'