After Afghan Tour, Young Soldier Dies in Iraq

Courtesy Mellissa Pike

Marine Lance Cpl. Jeremy Sandvick Monroe, pictured with his mother, Mellissa Pike.

Courtesy Mellissa Pike

Monroe pauses -- and poses -- to smell the flowers during his high school graduation in 2004. Friends and family say Monroe had a talent for making people laugh.

More than 100 American soldiers died in Iraq in October. Among those killed was Marine Lance Cpl. Jeremy Monroe. Kathy Witkowsky has this remembrance of the 20-year-old from Chinook, Mont.

Family and friends say that Monroe had a talent for making people laugh. Tall and rail-thin, with a long neck and a mop of dark hair, he could lighten up any situation with his funny faces and comic timing.

"He just did silly things," his mother, Mellissa Pike says, recalling the "Meeyok monster" Monroe created to amuse his younger siblings.

"He'd stick his hands into his sweatpants, and stick the waist of his sweatpants over his shoulder, and he'd run into the woods going, 'Meeyok! Meeyok!' And the kids just loved it," she says.

But Pike says that after serving with the Marines in Afghanistan, her son returned home this summer visibly changed.

"He couldn't eat a solid meal," she says. "And he just couldn't sit still. He was up and down and shaking, and he just wasn't Jeremy. And he became really superstitious after that."

Monroe's younger brother, Zach Gard, had long dreamed of becoming a Marine. Monroe urged him against the idea.

Gard recalls his brother's warning: "He said, 'Don't go. Don't go into the Corps. It'd be the stupidest thing you'll ever do, 'cause you see things that people shouldn't see.' And he also said, 'Somebody's got to do it, but it doesn't have to be you.'"

Jeremy Monroe reported back for duty in September. His unit was sent to Iraq. The night before he left, Pike says she sat her son down to discuss his funeral.

"I said, 'There's a chance that you're not going to come back,'" Pike recalls. "And we were both upset, and I was crying. I said, 'Do you want the Marines to be your pallbearers, or your friends? And he said, 'I want my friends.'"

So last month, his friends carried Jeremy Sandvick Monroe to his grave, in a windswept country cemetery in north central Montana.