Nicholas Ziolkowski planned to enroll at Towson University in the fall of 2005.
“We had sent him all the application materials,” his mother Tracy Miller recalled. “He had friends who were going to come with him, because he had that kind of magnetic personality.”
But everything changed on Sunday when the 22-year-old Towson native, a Marine corporal, was killed in Fallujah, Iraq.
“Nick was truly such a special person,” Miller, a TU employee, recalled. “Everybody who ever met him just adored him.”
Miller is Towson’s director of retention and the National Student Exchange, and serves as a part-time faculty member for the English department. She was relaxing at home Sunday night when two Marine Sergeants pulled up outside.
“I was sitting in the living room when the doorbell rang,” she said. “This has been my nightmare…but I never thought it would really happen.”
Ziolkowski was a sniper assigned to the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, N.C. The Pentagon has not released details about how he was killed.
He arrived in Iraq in June, after six months aboard the USS Iwo Jima. On Friday, Nov. 5, Miller spoke with her son for the last time.
“He called me and said, ‘I’m in Fallujah. I’m OK. Don’t worry,’” Miller said.
His deployment was scheduled to conclude in January, and his tour of duty with the Marines was expected to end in June. Ziolkowski planned to return to Maryland, enroll at Towson, and eventually become a history teacher.
Ziolkowski attended the Boys’ Latin School in Baltimore, and graduated in 2001. Flags at the school flew at half-mast on Tuesday in his honor.
On Tuesday morning the school established a scholarship fund in Ziolkowski’s name; 24 hours later, more than $200,000 had been donated.
Towson University informed faculty and staff of Ziolkowski’s death in an e-mail Tuesday.
A candlelight vigil will be held Monday at 5 p.m. on Newell Field. Cheryl Brown, director for TU’s first year writing program, said the vigil will help express the community’s support for Ziolkowski’s family.
“There’s so many of us who are grieving and who want to express our sympathy,” she said.
Ziolkowski grew up around Towson’s campus. Photography major Ben Leuthold remembers attending elementary school with Ziolkowski at Lida Lee Tall, when the building served as a experimental school.
“He was a very funny guy,” Leuthold said. “He liked being the center of attention, but not in a bad way. The world was his stage.”
Miller described her son as “charismatic and caring.”
Friends and colleagues have visited Miller at her home in Towson. On Tuesday visitors passed around a two-page e-mail from the wife of Ziolkowski’s platoon captain, describing the officer’s observations from the front.
“Nick was a true leader the whole time, taking care of his team and being very, very effective against the enemy,” the e-mail said. He was described as a “hard-working warrior, right up to the end.”
English professor Clarinda Harriss, a long-time friend of Miller’s, called Ziolkowski “warm-hearted, gentle, funny.”
“He taught a lot of us about the other side of soldiering,” she said – the human side.
Harriss, a self-described “peacenik,” has passionately expressed her opposition to the war. She described feeling a “combination of grief and rage” after learning of his death.
Miller said she has been opposed to all wars since her time in college protesting against the country’s actions in Vietnam. She recalled a conversation she had with her son on New Years' Day last year when she said her wish was for peace on earth, and he agreed.
“I said ‘I’m surprised.’ And he said ‘No, I want there to be peace on earth. But if there’s action anywhere, I want to be in on it,’” she recalled. “He thought that the military was the way to make the world a better place.”
In a letter to The Towerlight following an on-campus protest against the war last year, Miller stressed that she was pro-troop, but anti-war.
“I see no reason for any of these young men to be put in harm’s way, especially for an ill-conceived, unnecessary war or its aftermath,” she wrote in March 2003. “While Nick can tell me that this is what he wants to do (he wants to preserve what is beautiful in our country for his children and grandchildren), that will be small consolation if anything happens to him.”
Ziolkowski was one of four Marylanders to die in Iraq in the last week. Cpl. Dale Burger, Jr., 21, of Bel Air, was also killed Sunday in Fallujah. Army Spc. Thomas K. Doerflinger, 20, of Silver Spring, was killed Thursday in Mosul. Lance Cpl. David M. Branning, 21, of Baltimore, was killed Friday in Al Anbar Province.
Ziolkowski will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Nov. 24.
“I cannot imagine that he will never come home again,” Miller said.
|
|
|
| Home | Copyright Brian Stelter |