My dear Jessica,
You wrote a lovely letter, my dear. It was filled with lovely thoughts of your uncle, but, the fact is, few will ever tell you of how a Fellow Marine Brother has died. It is personal to us.
Ask us how he lived, or even what his personality was like, or how he was remembered by his brother Marines, and you will probably have some wonderful stories of your uncle to live with.
The Marine Corps is a special society of men and women that do not join to learn a job for their civilian life; the Marine Corps has never advertised that a person that joins will be able to use what he or she learns in the Marines to better his or her civilian career after they are through, but only that they will teach a person how to be one of the best warriors in the world.
They teach us to fight, and they teach us to love our country and our Constitution. They teach us to work as brothers and as sisters, and to protect one another against all harm that is possible, and seemingly impossible, to protect one another against. These and the lives of our fellow Marines are the most important things to us.
I did not know your Uncle Phillip, but I do know that it does not matter how he died. It only mattered that he died doing what he wanted to do, being a United States Marine, and he will always be remembered by his brother and sister Marines as dying doing what he thought was the right thing to do.
We honor your uncle and all fallen Marines. He was the death of one of our brothers as well as your father's brother, and we mourn him just the same, but it does not matter how he died.
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