Atkucunas, an only child, died in Vietnam on Mother's Day 1969. When officers bearing news of his death came to his mother's door, she was getting ready to go shopping for a radio her son asked her to buy and mall to him. Captain of his Olney High School football team, Atkucunas graduated in June 1965, and the following month enlisted in the Marine Corps. The lance corporal, a rifleman with Company F of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division, had served less than a year of his four-year enlistment when he died on May 10, 1969, in the Station Hospital in Da Nang of wounds suffered in Quang Nam Province. He was 18 years old. Atkucunas was survived by his mother who said of her son: "His dreams? Well, he didn't have time to think of the future. He just wanted to fight for our country, to try to make it a better place to live in."