BROOK PARK, Ohio — Miranda Neighbarger attended her sixth funeral for a fallen Marine on Monday morning in Columbus, and she wept through most of it. Then she climbed into her car and drove 2 1/2 hours to this Cleveland suburb for a wrenching memorial service for 49 Ohio servicemen killed in Iraq.
By the time she heard the phrase "home of the brave" as a Brook Park schoolgirl sang the national anthem, tears were flowing down her cheeks again.
"It's really starting to get to me," Neighbarger said after a military band had played a slow, mournful version of taps to conclude the one-hour service.
Neighbarger, 24, is a newlywed with a husband in Iraq -- a member of what everyone here calls the "Three Twenty Five," the Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment of Brook Park.
With the Reserve unit ravaged by combat deaths, Neighbarger has been making the rounds of funerals, trying in vain to comfort widows as young as she is.
"You feel so helpless because, really, there's nothing you can say," she said, a gold dog tag hanging from her neck that read "My Husband Is A Marine."
It has been a devastating month for anyone remotely associated with the unit, including the several thousand people who stood in the heat for an hour here Monday night for the solemn tribute. One week earlier, on Aug. 1, four Reservists were killed in an ambush in western Iraq, followed two days later by the deaths of 10 more Reservists in a roadside bombing. The previous week, two other members of the battalion were killed in action in Iraq.
The battalion has lost 47 Marines in Iraq since it deployed in March. The names and photos of the dead were displayed on a massive video screen at the memorial service, along with those of two Navy servicemen from Ohio also killed in action.
Inside the International Exhibition Center, a former military tank factory known as the I-X, there was silence as the names and faces scrolled past. It took three long minutes, and then there was more silence.
Each name, read aloud, fell like a hammer blow, from Cpl. Jeffrey A. Boskovitch through the alphabet to Lance Cpl. William B. Wightman.
In the center of the vast hall, rows of folding chairs had been set up, tagged with signs that read "Families of Fallen Heroes." Row upon row was filled with families that had lost Marines, and from deep within the rows came an occasional sob that cut through the quiet.
