'He Wanted To Fight'

By MICHAEL DUFFY, Brian Bennett, Mark Kukis

Age 25. 1st lieutenant. U.S. Marine Corps. 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force

Hostile fire, Anbar province

Before he left for Iraq, Shaun Blue never talked about the war with his friends. He didn't need to. "We all knew where each other stood," says Mike Bell, a fellow Marine who attended the University of Southern California with Blue. They were juniors when the war began. "All of us wanted to go. All of us wanted to be there."

Blue had considered dropping out of college to enlist in the Marines rather than finishing school and entering as an officer. He was a voracious reader, a philosophy major whose interests ranged from hard sciences to Roman architecture. (His mother says he asked for a copy of Moby Dick as a Christmas present in second grade.) In college he was as serious about conditioning his body as he was his mind. He played pickup basketball in some of L.A.'s toughest neighborhoods. Once, late at night, after drinking beer with Bell, Blue told Bell he was going for a run. He donned a flak jacket for added weight and ran the darkened L.A. streets alone for hours, finally returning to the house shortly before dawn.

Blue set off for his first deployment to Iraq on July 4, 2005. He joined the Marine campaign in Anbar province, leading a platoon in the Fallujah area. Even in the desert reaches of Iraq, Blue found ways to call Bell and his younger sister Amy Blue, who was living in Ireland at the time. "Those phone calls from him were the highlights of my days," says Amy. "Hearing him across all those miles, it was like he was right there with me." He was killed halfway through a second tour in Anbar, while riding in the passenger seat of a humvee that was hit by a roadside bomb. "Twenty-five years is so short," his sister says, "but I am very lucky that I could call him a brother and a true best friend for that long."

"He wanted to fight," says Bell of his fallen friend. "He really, really did. He couldn't wait."