The family of Holly A. Charette, who was killed Thursday in Iraq, remembers a vibrant young woman and bubbly student who wanted to serve in the Marine Corps.

01:37 PM EDT on Monday, June 27, 2005

BY JENNIFER LEVITZ
Journal Staff Writer

It's being described as the bloodiest attack on women at war.

2001 yearbook photo

Holly Charette

It could also be called the darkest day for the friends and family of Holly A. Charette.

They want to picture her clapping at a Cranston East hockey game with a big smile and with plans to go to Applebee's afterward. They want to imagine her as who she had become: a 21-year-old with sparkly brown eyes full of purpose, proudly serving as Lance Cpl. Charette, a Marine in Iraq.

They don't want to think about the rubble and smoke and dusty despair of the suicide bombing that killed Charette and at least three other Marines in an attack Thursday near Fallujah. The explosion injured 13 other soldiers, 11 of them women, in a mission that comes amid a debate over the role of women in combat. Al-Qaida in Iraq said it carried out the ambush.

"All I can think of is that I hope you felt no pain," said Jennifer Bailey, Holly's close friend, as she struggled through a double shift at the Paparazzi restaurant in Garden City yesterday.

Others did the only thing they could: pay their respects and talk about how the good die young. They lowered flags, from the state ones ordered to half-staff by Governor Carcieri, to one waving outside a masonry shop on Fairview Avenue in Coventry. They drove down a shady street in that town, to the pale green ranch where Charette's parents, Edward and Regina Roberts, live.

Roberts, Charette's stepfather, hadn't wanted to talk yesterday morning. "I can't," he said, his voice leaden.

The family said Holly had a fiancé, three brothers, and a lot of people who loved her.

"She was all-American," Roberts forced himself to say. "Just, I don't know, a down-to-earth kid."

An aunt, cousins and a Marine official walked up the hill from the house in the afternoon to address a crowd that comes when a daughter is lost in war. Before the attack, 36 female U.S. soldiers had been killed, according to the Pentagon.

Under the weight of a relentless sun, aunt Charlene Wheetman's voice broke. Her eyes were red and she sniffled as she read from a statement written on yellow notebook paper. Holly was always very positive, she said. She was a daughter, a sister, a grandaughter. Holly's fiancé Alex is still in Iraq.

"Holly was a happy girl who was loved by all of us and everyone who knew her," Wheetman said. "She wanted to become a Marine after 9/11. She was a very proud Marine."

"We are missing a part of our hearts without her here," she said.

AT CRANSTON East, where Charette graduated in 2001, she was known as "Holly Badolly," the kind of student who was always happy no matter what was going on around her. Ernie Bonaventure, a guidance counselor, said she wasn't a class clown; she was just happy.

"Even some of her teachers who aren't the warm and fuzzy type, they refer to her as their little shining star," he said.

With straight blond hair and dimples, she played field hockey and was a cheerleader for the ice-hockey team, wearing the green and white of the Cranston East Thunderbolts.

She worked hard in college-prep courses such as "Introduction to the Real World," which focused on finances and housing in America, not on the war in Iraq.

"She did everything we ask kids to do," Bonaventure said.

Charette wrote her friend Jennifer Bailey a sort of goodbye letter after graduation, when they both knew life would never be quite the same. Bailey was going to college in Florida. "Who am I going to go to Target with for no reason at all?" Charette wrote.

And Bailey had better not forget the "Holly dance," Charette wrote, of their own version of the chicken dance, when they'd flap their arms in imitation of a boyfriend who wasn't very coordinated.

"You felt like a million dollars when Holly was in the room with you," Bailey said.

In a story on the Marine 2nd Division's Web site in May, Charette was interviewed, and explained why she joined the military. She said she'd grown up hoping to be a postal worker. She'd met a recruiter, who "showed me a video from boot camp and I thought, 'Hey, I can do that.' "

Her friends and family said yesterday that she sincerely wanted to serve her country, and to get life experiences other than college.

She wasn't looking for an inexpensive education. "She really wanted to do it," said Wayne Hawkins, 22, a friend. "She enjoyed what she was doing. . . . She always had a big smile, a great way about her."

She enlisted in the Marines in 2002, and was deployed in March with her unit from Camp Lejeune, N.C., and assigned to Headquarters Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force.

She had an administrative job on the base -- a small city of 2,000 troops and tents and buildings, all in the middle of the desert, where in June, the temperature could reach 115 degrees.

The division buzzed with frontline grunts, helicopter pilots and forklift drivers. The soldiers "were trying to create a stable Iraq, a peaceful Iraq," said 2nd Lt. Barry Edwards, spokesperson for the 2nd Marine Division, yesterday.

Charette was young, but so was most everyone else. The biggest bulk of the Marine Corps is made up of troops around the age of 20, Edwards said.

With good organizational skills, she had an administrative job, keeping all kinds of records. She would enter promotions or disciplinary actions into files, and look into things when a Marine wasn't getting paid properly. It wasn't easy. Her office was a tent, "not like carpeted or air-conditioned," Edwards said.

According to the division's Web site, Charette became known as the Marine who brought good news. In a story called "Mail is a mission for one Marine," Charette is pictured in desert fatigues, a slight smile, a ponytail, both hands needed to hoist her mail bag.

"I never really thought too hard about being a mail person, but it's really an important job . . . and people depend on me," she said. "There are a lot of stresses involved, but it's really worth it at the end of the day."

The story said she could be seen carrying the yellow military mailbag slung over her shoulder as she walked the streets of her camp, "most everything covered up in a sandy dust that kicks up as the trucks lull by at five miles per hour."

One week last month, she sorted through 60 bags of mail, each weighing 70 pounds. She would stop Marines in the mess hall and let them know they had mail. She knew everyone's name. The article stated that she would drive around camp in her High Mobility Multi-Wheeleed Vehicle, dropping off mail in her full battle dress, flak jacket, Kevlar helmet, and M-16 A4 Service rifle.

She was, in fact, near battle because her unit was working with Iraqi security forces to prevent insurgents from gaining a foothold.

Women aren't supposed to be on the frontlines in combat units, according to the Pentagon, but women are allowed in combat support units.

In Iraq, where there is what's called asymetrical warfare, meaning people are fighting all over the place, with no clear frontline, the distinction isn't so clear.

Female Marines are taken to such places when a male Marine cannnot perform the task, for instance, to search female Iraqi detainees. Lieutenant Edwards said he didn't know whether that's what she was doing Thursday, but "that's the primary purpose of why a female Marine would be going somewhere."

The Marines were returning to their base when the ambush took place Thursday night. Charette was in a military convoy leaving Fallujah, when they were approached by a suicide bomber whose car exploded and blew up the seven-ton truck that carried her and the other soldiers. She was identified by her dog tags and her name tags, as well as by someone who knew her, said Maj. Jon A. Woodcock, a U.S. Marine instructor stationed in Rhode Island.

When asked yesterday about women being in the field, Woodcock said: "I'm not going to get into the Marine Corps position on women in combat."

Thursday's attack comes at a time when Americans have been debating the role of women in combat zones. In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll last month, 54 percent of the respondents said they oppose female combat roles, while 44 percent said they favor them.

Major Woodcock, 42, with a warm Texas drawl, notified Charette's family of her death around 10 p.m. Thursday. He wore his traditional Alpha uniform: green trousers, khaki shirt and tie, garrison cap and shined black patent-leather shoes. He arrived in his government-issued van and rang the doorbell.

They knew.

"I think when families see two or three Marines wearing a dress uniform showing up on the doorstep late, after hours . . ."

"It's devastating," he said.

In a statement, Carcieri said Rhode Island's state flags would fly at half-staff until Charette's funeral. Her body is being flown to Germany, then to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and then to Rhode Island, by Thursday or Friday. She will be buried in Rhode Island Veterans Cemetery, Exeter, with full military honors. She will probably be awarded a Purple Heart, the military said.

"Her sacrifice represents the best Rhode Island has to offer," Carcieri said. "We can never forget the courage and conviction of those like Holly Charette, who risk their lives in service to their country."

U.S. Rep. James Langevin, D-R.I., released a statement expressing "profound sorrow" over Charette's death.

'As a soldier in Iraq and Rhode Island citizen, she served with dignity and honor," Langevin said.

The news began to filter around the state, in living rooms like that of Athena Karacas, field-hockey coach of Holly Charette.

"I was on the Internet checking the headlines -- . . . initially a female had been killed."

"I said, 'Oh my God, it's one of ours.' When it was Holly, I said 'She's one of my kids.' "

"Right away, I thought of the memory of how she was so proud of being in the service," she said.

Charette had planned to become a mail-delivery person after Iraq, bringing news good and bad.

Al Georgio, the mail carrier on the Charettes' street, saw the line of cars Friday outside the house and got a sick feeling.

He approached the walkway. "I heard people sobbing inside."

With staff reports by Alice Gomstyn

Digital Extra: Post condolences to the family and friends of Lance Cpl. Holly A. Charette, via projo.com 's Tribute to the Troops, at:

http://projo.com/charette/