Nicanor Angel Alvarez, Marines, Corporal -- Rest In Peace

Nicanor Angel Alvarez, 22

Marines, Corporal
Based: Camp Pendleton
1st Combat Engineer Battalion, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force
Supporting: Operation Iraqi Freedom
Died: August 21, 2004
Anbar province, Iraq
Married
Gender: Male
Hometown: San Bernardino
High School: Pacific High (San Bernardino)
Burial: Montecito Memorial Park, Colton, Calif.


From the San Diego Union Tribune:

Fallen: Nicanor A. Alvarez, Marine Corps corporal
September 25, 2004
Age 22

Nicanor Angel Alvarez planned to go to college and study architecture after he left the Marine Corps.
But the 22-year-old from San Bernardino was killed in action Aug. 21 in Iraq's Anbar province, one of four Marines to die there that day.
Alvarez was a combat engineer assigned to the 1st Combat Engineer Battalion, 1st Marine Division from Camp Pendleton.
He joined the Corps three years ago after graduating from Pacific High School and died in his second tour in Iraq.

Alvarez met his future wife, Sandra, now 21, four years ago, when they both worked at a shopping mall. They corresponded every day during his first tour in Iraq, she said, and he asked her to marry him in August 2003, when he returned home on leave.

"We talked about starting a family. We talked about the chances of us having twins," she told the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

Alvarez was born in Los Angeles and played soccer in high school in San Bernardino. He worked in a pizza restaurant when he was in school, and his main hobby was rebuilding a Ford Mustang convertible.

He also enjoyed playing practical jokes, the family said.

At a family gathering in Colton last year, his fiancee played a videotape of Alvarez saying he wouldn't return from Iraq for at least another year. Then he said he was hiding outside in the trunk of his car.

Sandra Alvarez said the couple discussed the possibility that he might be killed in Iraq, and he wanted her to finish school no matter what happened.

"He was the friend everyone would like to have," his brother Ismael Gonzalez told the newspaper.


Besides his wife and brother Ismael, Alvarez is survived by another brother, Mauricio Fregoso; and three sisters, Alma Gonzalez, Daisy Gonzalez and Kristel Ponce, all of San Bernardino County.

Read more about Marine Corporal Nicanor Angel Alvarez here and here.