Nevada goes a full year without a war death

Ever since her son Spc. Ignacio “Nacho” Ramirez was killed when a roadside bomb exploded in Ramadi, Iraq, friends and other military mothers have tried to understand the pain that Marina Vance has endured the past six years.

“If you’re a mom or a dad, people tell me, ‘How can you deal with it? If my son died, I don’t know what I’d do,’ ” she said. “I tell them, ‘I don’t know what to tell you.’

“You’re feeling a little bit of my pain. So don’t feel bad that you don’t know how to feel. The moment you feel sorry for me, you’re feeling a little bit of the pain to lose a kid, your son or daughter.”

While it won’t bring back her Nacho, she finds comfort in knowing that today marks the first time in more than a decade of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the death toll over a year’s span doesn’t include a soldier, sailor, Marine or airman from Nevada.

“When I see that nobody died, nobody got killed, I’m happy for it because they’re not going through that pain I feel,” Vance said.

As a Gold Star Mother from Henderson, she said it’s impossible to know exactly how someone copes with losing a loved one on the battlefield because everyone grieves differently.

But she appreciates their attempt to understand her pain, and she has open arms when Blue Star Mothers ask her for advice while their sons and daughters are deployed.

“Their baby is going to come back. They’re going to hug him. They’re going to kiss him. There’s my happiness.”

In all since the global war on terrorism was waged in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 79 U.S. military personnel with ties to Nevada have died overseas.

The last was Marine Cpl. Jon-Luke Bateman of Pahrump, who was killed Jan. 15, 2012, one year ago Tuesday in Afghanistan. The first was Army Spc. Jason A. Disney of Fallon, who died Feb. 13, 2002, in Afghanistan.

Nevada’s war dead hail from every corner of the Battle Born state, and their names span the alphabet from Army National Guard Capt. Clayton L. Adamkavicius of Las Vegas to Marine Sgt. Frank R. Zaehringer III of Reno.

Some died in firefights, Humvee wrecks and helicopter crashes, but most were killed by roadside bombs or suicide car bomb attacks, like 19-year-old Marine Pfc. John Lukac, a stellar student from Durango High School in Las Vegas. He joined the Marines after graduating in 2003 because “he wanted to make a difference,” his mother, Helena Lukac, has often said.

“My heart is broken,” she wrote in an email last week. “I can tell you I will be the happiest mother on Earth if I don’t hear of any more casualties ever.”

Ramirez was killed Aug. 9, 2006. A student athlete who graduated from Henderson’s Basic High School in the Class of 2002, he died during the year that Nevada mourned its most war deaths, 17, topping 16 the previous year, 2005.

Of Nevada’s 79 war dead, 50 died in Iraq or Kuwait during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and 28 died from missions in Afghanistan mostly during Operation Enduring Freedom. One, Army Staff Sgt. Kerry W. Frith of Las Vegas, died in the Philippines in 2002.

In Vance’s eyes, the moms who know the tragedies of war don’t view their losses as just a number or another casualty.

“It’s not a casualty. It’s a human being who’s got a mom and a dad. He was somebody’s baby,” she said last week, reflecting on her son. Nacho went from diapers to Little League and through high school to join the Army because he wanted be part of the wave of patriots to defeat terrorism after 9/11.

Vance was at home ironing clothes when the hijacked jetliners slammed into New York’s World Trade Center, killing thousands. Nacho was at school.

“When that happened, you felt like your heart dropped. I was like, ‘Oh my God. Why? How can somebody be so hurtful? Did anybody think about parents, kids, grandparents?’ ” she asked.

“Then Nacho came home and he was like, ‘Mom. Did you see? Did you see?’ He was like, ‘I’m going. I’m so going, Mom.’

“I remember telling him, ‘If you choose not to go, I’m still proud of you. It’s not changing son. If you decide to go, I’m still proud of you. My love for you will not change.’ ”

“He says, ‘I’m going.’ I said, ‘OK. I will be here 100 percent with you.’ ”

When Vance held Nacho in her arms as a baby, she didn’t look into his little face and say, “He’s going to want to be a soldier someday. Nobody thought about that. I didn’t either for the longest time,” she said.

“When you see your son in the coffin, you don’t see a grown-up, at least not for me. For me, that’s my baby there, the one I took care of,” she said as a tear rolled down her cheek.

At last year’s Defending Freedom event to add the last five names to boulders at the Red Rock Canyon War Memorial, founder Phil Randazzo said every year he prays that this will be the last time a name is added. Perhaps that will hold true for this year as U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan.

That ceremony in May in view of the canyon’s picturesque, sandstone cliffs had special meaning for Randazzo because one of the names added was Army Spc. Douglas J. Green, the son of one of his friends, Suni Erlanger-Chabrow of Las Vegas.

“As a mother you don’t get over the grief of losing your child. You get through it. You get by it,” she said.

Green, a 23-year-old infantryman, died Aug. 28, 2011, in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province when he stepped on a homemade bomb after insurgents ambushed his patrol with a hail of small-arms fire.

On Tuesday, veterans at the Army Navy Military Expo signed a Killed-In-Action honor flag that was presented to the family.

Sponsored by Eagle Emblems Inc., the first flag signing of 2013 to recognize one of Nevada’s last war dead is a three-fold honor: for those who have gone before, for those who serve and for the families left behind.

For Erlanger-Chabrow, to mark a year without losing a troop from Nevada means “no other mother will be going through such grief.”

“To me, it means the world that no other family will fell this pain and no other family should have to,” she said.