The 20-year-old Marine corporal bad volunteered to stay an extra week in Vietnam when he was killed in Da Nang, Quang Nam Province, on July 11, 1967, after a lightning bolt ignited grenades and antipersonnel mines stored in his bunker. The Murrell Dobbins Vocational High School graduate had been on more than 30 long-range patrols as a rifleman and reconnaissance scout with the 1st Forward Reconnaissance Company of the 1st Marine Division. He was survived by his mother, to whom he wrote "The only person Marines look up to is God."