Family, friends mourn Marine

Hundreds gather - some outside a chapel overflowing with people - to honor Cpl. Nicholas L. Ziolkowski of Towson, who was killed in Iraq this month.

By Matthew Dolan
Sun Staff

November 25, 2004

ARLINGTON, Va. - They stood in the rain to observe a funeral service they could not even hear.

So great was the crowd that came to mourn Cpl. Nicholas L. Ziolkowski that the chapel at Arlington National Cemetery could not accommodate the more than 300 friends, family members and fellow Marines yesterday.

The somber, military-honors funeral in Northern Virginia for the 22-year-old Towson Marine killed in Iraq this month filled every pew in the cemetery's Old Post Chapel, and dozens of people stood in the aisles.

Others spilled out into the church vestibule. Still others waited in a line that snaked out the chapel's door and down the driveway.

The service left some wondering whether their grief would ever be heard by the nation's leaders a few miles away in Washington.

"I think it should be mandatory for President Bush to attend each one of these funerals," said Tami Anderson, 25, who owns a salon and spa in Frederick.

Her husband, Adam, 26, a sergeant in the Maryland National Guard who attended a church youth group with Ziolkowski, chimed in.

"So he would have to get a small taste of what it's like to lose someone so close to you?" he asked.

"No," his wife replied. "I think it's important for him to see every one, because he would think more about what we're doing over there.

"Then he'd have to pull out and bring them home."

Just before the service began at 10 a.m., a pair of Marines exited a black Ford Taurus outside the chapel. There was no casket because Ziolkowski was cremated.

One Marine carried a folded American flag, the other held Ziolkowski's ashes in a brass box about a foot high. They marched through the parted crowd and into the red-brick chapel.

A "Service of Thanksgiving" followed, with Bible readings from the New and Old Testaments. Mark Whitman of Towson University led the kaddish, the Hebrew mourner's prayer. Tracy Miller, Ziolkowski's mother, is Jewish.

Ziolkowski's father, Andrew, asked those gathered to leave an empty chair at their Thanksgiving table today.

The vacant spot, he said, would honor his loss as well as the more than 1,200 American men and women who have died since U.S. forces invaded Iraq 20 months ago.

The Rev. Paul Collinson-Streng, the Lutheran pastor at Towson University - the college Ziolkowski had planned to attend - gave the homily, calling Ziolkowski a gregarious young man with a strong sense of patriotism and a desire to share his passions with those he loved.

After Ziolkowski started an intense regimen to get himself ready for military service, Collinson-Streng said, "he demanded that the rest of the family get in shape, too."

Ziolkowski graduated from Boys' Latin School in 2001 and immediately entered the Marine Corps. When he died from a bullet wound in Fallujah on Nov. 14 (though some reports initially said he died the next day), he became the 17th person from Maryland to die in fighting in Iraq, and the fourth in a week.

Ziolkowski was a team leader and scout sniper in a unit that had a reported casualty rate of 25 percent in Fallujah, one of the war's bloodiest operations since the end of major fighting.

His training partner from sniper school who attended yesterday's funeral understood how dangerous their jobs could be.

"They have a bounty on our head over there," said Sgt. Zachary Purvis, 23, who is stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and recently returned from a six-month deployment to Afghanistan.

When the chapel service for Ziolkowski ended yesterday, mourners drove two miles through the tree-lined, winding roads of Arlington to the cemetery's Section 60.

It is a large open field quickly filling up with the bodies of those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ziolkowski was the 95th funeral at Arlington for the Iraq war. In a new row of graves was Ziolkowski's place - No. 8,076.

After prayers, a firing party of seven Marines shot three times in unison. A bugler played taps. Flags were presented to Ziolkowski's parents.

"It was very powerful and very appropriate," Adam Anderson said after the funeral.

"Everything Nick did, he did 110 percent," he added. "That's why the honor of a funeral at Arlington seemed right."