BOULDER CITY, Nev. (AP) — Peter Lukac dropped a handful of shell casings from a 21-gun salute onto his brother’s oak casket after it was lowered into a grave at the Southern Nevada Veterans Me-morial Cemetery. He kept one for himself.

“When he was around me, he was the cool big brother,” 15-year-old Peter Lukac said as family and friends said farewell Wednesday to 19-year-old Marine Pfc. John Lukac of Las Vegas.

John Lukac was killed Oct. 30 in a car bomb attack near Fallujah, Iraq. He was the sixth soldier with ties to Nevada killed in Iraq or Kuwait since Operation Iraqi Freedom began in 2003, and the first to be buried locally.

With his father, Jan, and mother, Helena, weeping in the arms of white-gloved Marines, Peter Lukac stood with a blank stare as his only brother was buried on the 229th birthday of the Marine Corps.

“We had a dream to come to the free states,” Jan Lukac, 52, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “He said, ‘I’m so glad to be born here.’ He was willing to die for this country.”

John Lukac was born April 20, 1985, in Los Angeles, two years after his parents immigrated to the United States. They had escaped to Austria from Czechoslovakia, where they had lived under communist rule during the Cold War, separated from their native Hungary.

The family moved to Las Vegas in 2001 so Helena Lukac could work at the MGM Grand hotel-casino. Jan Lukac commuted to his roofing and home refurbishing business in West Hollywood, Calif.

John Lukac was motivated to join the Marines after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“He wanted to protect the country. He wanted to make a difference no matter what it took,” said Helena Lukac, 51.

He urged his parents to sign him up at 17, fresh out of Durango High School. If they didn’t, he told them, he would join when he turned 18.