March 8
Pfc Matthew G. Milczark, USMC
Pfc. Matthew G. Milczark, 18, of Kettle River, Minn., died March 8 due
to a non-combat related incident at Camp Victory, Kuwait. He was assigned to 2nd
Battalion, 4th Marines, 1st Marine Division, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
The incident is under investigation.
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Marine killed in Kuwait was 'upbeat,' says stepbrother
Union-Tribune --
Homecoming king, football player, a leader and a good kid.
That's how Pfc. Matthew G. Milczark, 18, from tiny Kettle River, Minn., was remembered yesterday after the Camp Pendleton Marine reportedly died from a noncombat gunshot wound early Monday in Kuwait.
Milczark deployed to the Middle East three weeks ago with Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, 1st Marine Division.
The infantryman was found in a chapel with a gunshot wound to the head.
"When I talked to him 10 days ago, he was upbeat," said Derek Wood, Milczark's stepbrother.
"He said he just wanted to go to Iraq and help out and come back home."
Milczark is the first San Diego County-based Marine to die in the Middle East since thousands from Camp Pendleton and Miramar Marine Corps Air Station began massing in Kuwait. In April, the Marines will replace the Army's 82nd Airborne Division in patrolling a section of Iraq.
Milczark's family said there was never a question that the young man voted Moose Lake High School's 2003 homecoming king would follow his grandfather and three uncles into the military.
After graduation last year, Milczark joined the Marines and spent the summer at boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego.
He returned last fall to Moose Lake High, where he played football, hockey and baseball, to crown the next homecoming king.
Now he's going home to stay.
"He's going to be buried next to his grandmother and grandfather in Moose Lake," Wood said. "He told his father before he left that if he died overseas . . . he wanted to be buried here."
Moose Lake is near Milczark's hometown of Kettle River. The town of roughly 200 people is 107 miles north of St. Paul.
"He had a very large family and he was much loved by all of us," Wood said. "I miss him. We all miss him."
The death is under investigation.
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March 9
Former Marine reservist decided to return to help rebuild Iraq
Associated Press --
PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania -- Robert Zangas believed so deeply in helping to rebuild Iraq that three months after coming home from a nine-month stint there in a Marine Corps Reserve unit, he decided to return as a civilian.
Zangas, 44, was one of three civilians killed Tuesday after several gunmen posing as Iraqi police officers stopped their vehicle at a makeshift checkpoint near the town of Hillah, about 35 miles south of Baghdad.
Zangas and a second victim, Fern Holland, were the first U.S. civilians working for the U.S. occupation authority to be killed in Iraq. Their translator, who was not identified, also was killed.
Zangas' wife, Brenda Zangas, said much of the work her husband was doing for the Coalition Provisional Authority mirrored what he did with the Marines last year. He was a reserve lieutenant colonel with the Marine Corps 4th Civil Affairs Group.
''He did everything from getting the media up and running to going out and buying sandals for kids. He was highly regarded by the Iraqis,'' Brenda Zangas said. ''He was helping people and that was his thing. I know he believed in what he was doing over there was the right thing to do.''
Zangas, a salesman in civilian life, had traveled the globe as part of a Marine family.
His father and older brother also were Marines, said his sister, Patricia Black, of Woodbridge, Va. Although he would likely call Manassas, Va., his home, he graduated from the American School of Isfahan in Iran in 1978, Brenda Zangas said.
Holland, a lawyer, went to Iraq to help women. She investigated human rights violations and assisted in writing the women's rights section of the new constitution.
''I love the work and if I die, know that I'm doing precisely what I want to be doing,'' she wrote in an e-mail to a friend Jan. 21.
Holland, a 1996 graduate of the University of Tulsa College of Law, worked at two law firms in Tulsa before joining the Peace Corps and traveling to Namibia.
She returned to the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but did not stay long.
Tulsa attorney Stephen Rodolf, who kept in touch with Holland through e-mail, said she seemed to be aware of growing threats to her safety.
''We stand out, and those who dislike us know precisely when we come to town,'' she wrote to him.
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