R.I.P. Lance Cpl. Justin J. Swanson

Name: Marine Lance Cpl. Justin J. Swanson

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Age: 21

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From: Anaheim, Calif.

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Assigned to 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.

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Incident: Marine Lance Cpl. Justin J. Swanson died Nov. 10 in Helmand province, Afghanistan, from injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated.

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Died: November 10, 2009

(Taken from www.ocregister.com of Nov. 19)LOS ALAMITOS – Mary Hargrove had been looking forward to throwing a big party next month when her son Justin returned home from the fighting in Afghanistan.

Instead, as dusk fell on Thursday evening, she met the flag-draped coffin of her son, Lance Cpl. Justin J. Swanson, on the tarmac of the military airfield at Los Alamitos. His father, Les Swanson, leaned down and kissed the coffin.

Swanson died last week in southern Afghanistan, in the blast of an improvised explosive. He had volunteered to go to Afghanistan, his second overseas deployment, and had told his mother he expected to be home before the holidays. He was 21.

"He was exceptional," she said. "It's overwhelming how many lives he touched."

His friends knew him as a ladies' man, always good for a laugh, always going out of his way to lend a hand or a shoulder. The younger kids in his Anaheim neighborhood looked up to him as an older brother.

His friends and fellow Marines called him Swani or Sancho. But to his family, he was Justin Face – ever since he was a 6-pound newborn baby and a little girl in the hospital said: "Look at his face! It's so tiny!"

He didn't grow up tiny. He played football at Buena Park High School and – flexing his arms – would jokingly tell friends they needed tickets to his gun show. He had always wanted to join the Marines, in part to set an example for his two brothers and two sisters, and enlisted weeks after he graduated in 2006.

He served in Iraq, returned home last year, and then volunteered to go to Afghanistan. He had been there for less than a month.

"I just told him to be safe and to come home," his mother said. "He said, 'Don't worry, mom. The Taliban doesn't want to mess with Marines.'"

He died on Nov. 10 – the official birthday of the U.S. Marines, and the day before Veterans Day. The Defense Department said in a statement that he was killed by an improvised explosive device during combat operations in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand Province.

Soldiers and Marines, police officers and firefighters stood at attention on Thursday evening as his family met his coffin at the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos. A civilian honor guard of motorcyclists – the "Patriot Guard" riders – stood holding American flags as they waited to ride with the hearse to Westminster Memorial Park, where Swanson will be buried at 12 p.m. Saturday.

"He's a real Marine. He's what other Marines should be looking up to," said Lena Misa, 18, a neighbor who considered Swanson a brother and said he always looked out for her and other young people in the neighborhood. "He had so much pride and honor in what he did."

"He's our hero," she said.

He had called home a few times since he arrived in Afghanistan. He told his mother about the heat and the long hikes and the camel spiders – but never about the danger. He told her there were farms where he was, not much going on.

As she prepared this week to bring him home, she thought about the soldiers and Marines still over there, and said she doesn't want them overlooked in all the attention to her son. "They're not getting any of this fanfare and publicity," she said.

And she said there was one memory of Justin, from when he was very little, that kept coming back to her in the days since his death. It's the memory of a cloudy day, when they were driving toward the beach and could see just a little sun up ahead.

"We don't need no dark clouds," Justin said. "We're gonna chase the sunshine."

"That's just who he was," his mother said. "He was the sunshine. He was a ray of sunshine in everybody's life."