This was just how Army Private First Class Justin R. Davis wanted to go, borne to his appointed place in Arlington National Cemetery by an honor guard amid the measured salutes, mournful music and solemn ceremony reserved for fallen soldiers. Of that, his mother was convinced.

"This would be a dream come true for him," Paula Davis of Gaithersburg said after she watched her big, brash 19-year-old son buried yesterday. "That's what he wanted to be: a hero."

She has the hard evidence of her son's heroism even if she does not have answers about his death June 25, which the Defense Department is investigating as a possible friendly fire incident. In addition to the Purple Heart for being wounded in battle, her son was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star for his service with the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, where he had been deployed since March.

Davis said she had been told that he was in a "hostile environment" but did not know what happened.

"Either way, it doesn't make any difference to me," she said after the ceremony. "It's not going to bring my boy back. If it was friendly, it wasn't intentional."

She was more interested in remembering her only child, a 2005 graduate of Colonel Zadok Magruder High School who seemed destined to join the military. When he was young, he loved the beat of the song "I Am a Soldier in the Army of the Lord," his mother remembered. And as he grew, he craved the excitement, self-discipline and respect he thought being a soldier would bring.

"I don't want for the world to forget about him. He's a brave, courageous young man," she said. "He would tell me, 'Man up, Mom.' I can't man up. I'm a girl!"

Yet she bore her loss with stoicism.

More than 100 friends and relatives in attendance had been upbeat waiting inside the cemetery's main administrative building, but the life seemed to drain out of them as they left their cars and trudged across a field of bright green grass, following the quick tramp of an honor guard that carried Davis's coffin from a hearse. His immediate family settled into a handful of chairs as the others crowded close.

The Rev. Leon Grant of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Rockville read from the Bible: "The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible." Gunshots rang in the distance from another funeral. "O death, where is thy sting?"

The Rev. Hiawatha B. Fountain, the assistant pastor, continued: "Justin Ray Davis, you fought the good fight. You kept the faith. You finished the course."

Friends and relatives nodded, saying in low voices: "Yes. Yes."

The honor guard rapped out three salvos. As the bugler played taps, many in the crowd began sniffling and crying. Paula Davis's head was bowed, her eyes shut tight. The soldiers before the coffin folded the flag on top of it into a neat triangle of stars. A soldier presented the flag to his sergeant; the sergeant to Maj. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sorenson, the senior officer there; the general to the mother, who accepted it with a stifled cry.

The general whispered a few words to her, and the soldiers gave another flag to Davis's father. A woman announced that the ceremony was over. Paula Davis rose from her seat to touch the coffin. After a long moment she walked away. She rushed back, touched the silver coffin again, then tore herself away. And with that, Justin Davis joined the serried ranks of the dead 

19-Year-Old Who Loved Kung Fu and Dreamed of Acting Is Killed in Afghanistan
By Nelson Hernandez 


As she sat on her living room couch yesterday, surrounded by dozens of photos of her son, who was just killed in Afghanistan, Patricia Davis shed no tears. In fact, the strangest thing about the trim townhouse in Gaithersburg with the yellow ribbon on the tree in the front yard was that there were no sounds of mourning at all -- only laughter.

She believed that is the way her only child, Private First Class Justin Davis, would have wanted it. The 19-year-old graduate of Colonel Zadok Magruder High School was a brash, outgoing young man so enthusiastic about kung fu movies and crunk rap music that he made his own videos and recorded his own songs. In his Web site on MySpace.com, he wrote that his heroes were God, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bruce Lee. 

He also was just plain large. Before he went to Army basic training after graduating in 2005, the hefty, 5-foot-10 running back sprinted around the neighborhood and wrapped himself in plastic to sweat off the last few pounds he needed to qualify.

It was a decision he had reached during a one-year stint at the Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, Virginia, relatives said yesterday. In the Army, he found a happy home, they said. He enjoyed the physical exertion, the excitement, the respect that wearing a uniform brought. When he came home, he'd visit Magruder High wearing fatigues and a tight T-shirt to show off both his muscles and what he'd become.

"I don't mind you going in, but I wish it wasn't wartime," Patricia Davis recalled telling him.

"Mom, you should've had more kids," he answered.

Despite his ample self-regard, Justin Davis was recalled by relatives and friends as an unusually thoughtful young man who remembered not only to call his mother on Mother's Day but also his aunt. One of his last telephone conversations home was June 24, to give birthday greetings to a friend.

"I don't have long to talk. I'm going out on a mission," his mother remembered him telling the friend.

Davis was killed later that day. The military has not released much information about the circumstances, saying only that two soldiers were killed in action June 24 in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province in southeastern Afghanistan, an area that is a hotbed of Taliban activity. His mother and cousin said that the deaths are still being investigated because of the possibility that they were caused by friendly fire.

Davis considered his own unit -- Alpha Company of the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division, based in Fort Drum, N.Y. -- to be an elite outfit and was proud to be an infantryman in one of the Army's most frequently deployed formations. In an e-mail to his cousin Kisha Spencer, he described what he did:

"Doin a lot of stuff cant really talk about . . . did some missions wit the CIA n other stuff jumpin outta helicopters you know doin the real job" -- unlike, he joked, his cousin Sergeant Josh Spencer, who is an Air Force satellite communications specialist who has served two tours in Iraq.

In another e-mail home, his mother remembered, he said "the Afghan people are cool" and promised to bring a teapot home for his mother. After serving his time in the military, he wanted to go to UCLA and become an actor, she said.

By yesterday afternoon, his MySpace Web page was flooded with tributes from friends from middle and high school and the short life he led afterward.

"I'll always have a spot in my heart for my amazingly fat, but still amazingly perfect big man," a woman named Melissa wrote.

"God took you cuz he needed another angel to watch over us all," someone named Jilliepoo wrote.

His mother, wearing a black and yellow Army T-shirt, expressed barely a trace of regret. She said she will miss the noise he brought to her quiet house: the television, the music, the stomping up and down the stairway.

"As much as I'm going to miss him . . . I know he died doing what he loved," she said. "I could have cried and begged him not to go, and he probably wouldn't have, because he loved his mom. But then he would have been miserable, and I would have been miserable because I would have known I was making him miserable."

Davis will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on July 16, 2006.

"As weird as it sounds, that would have been a dream come true to him," his mother said.

Justin R. Davis 

Private First Class, United States Army
NEWS RELEASES from the United States Department of Defense 

DoD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Private First Class Justin R. Davis, 19, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, died in Korengal Outpost, Afghanistan (near Kunar Province), on June 25, 2006, when he came in contact with indirect fire while on patrol during combat operations. Davis was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), Fort Drum, New York.

The circumstances of the soldier's death are under investigation as a possible friendly-fire incident.