Based: Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii
2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, III Marine Expeditionary Force
Supporting: Operation Iraqi Freedom
Died: November 25, 2006
Haditha, Iraq
Single
Gender: Male
Hometown: Aguanga
High School: Hamilton High (Anza)
Burial: Cremated
When Jeromy D. West was little, he used to tell his mother, Lisa West-Klopf, that when he grew up, he wanted to be an "army man," like his grandfather and great-grandfather.Read the entire LA Times story about Marines Lance Corporal Jeromy D. West here and read more here and find pictures here and here.
Then, after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was 14, he told her that if he had been old enough, he would have joined right then.
So when he came to her as high school graduation neared and asked her to sign the papers allowing him to join the Marine Corps at 17, she wasn't completely surprised. She eventually signed.
"I tried to convince him otherwise, but I knew he was going to go, either then or when he turned 18" three months later, West-Klopf said. "And I knew the journey was much better shared and spent together."
West, 20, a lance corporal from the Riverside County community of Aguanga, was killed by a sniper Nov. 25 in Iraq's Al Anbar province, west of Baghdad. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.
He had been in Iraq since September, after an earlier tour of duty in Afghanistan, where he guarded poll boxes during the elections there and felt he was part of history, his family said.
West tried to stay in close touch with his family from overseas and had managed to call home twice the week he died, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. He called on Nov. 21, his mother's birthday, and again on Thanksgiving Day, when he caught most of his relatives at home.
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| The parents of Lance Corporal Jeromy D. West with President Bush. |
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