Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14898-2004Dec20.html?referrer=email
Columbine Survivor Is a Fallujah Fatality
By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; Page A18
DENVER, Dec. 20 -- Greg Rund went through hell more than once in his brief life. The first time, in the massacre at Columbine High School, he survived. The last time, in the bloody streets of Fallujah, he was killed by small-arms fire from Iraqi insurgents.
In a military cemetery barely 10 miles from the Columbine campus, Marine Lance Cpl. Gregory Paul Rund was laid to rest Monday beneath an icy winter sun. He died on Dec. 11 while he and others from the 5th Regiment of the 1st Marine Division engaged in a house-to-house search of insurgent neighborhoods during the U.S. assault on Fallujah.
Rund, who was 21 when he died, had been a freshman at Columbine High at the time of the mass shootings by two students there in April 1999. As a Marine, he was serving his second tour of duty in Iraq. But his parents, Mark and Jane Rund of Littleton, Colo., said that those violent interludes would not fill their memories of the son they lost in war.
"Neither Columbine nor Iraq was to define him," Rudd's family said in a statement.
"For him, there was nothing that was insurmountable. He was reckless, smart, off-key, and wonderful. He did everything to the extreme and always knew that somehow, with his humor and a little luck, he would make it through."
Classmates and teachers at Columbine who gathered for the last goodbye Monday added their own memories of Rund's sense of humor -- and particularly of his high school jalopy, dubbed the "Dangermobile," on the roof of which he once mounted a five-foot flagpole.
About two dozen Colorado service members have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, but the loss of a Columbine survivor just before Christmas seemed to cause particular sorrow in this state.
An estimated 800 people, including many Columbine grads, turned out for a memorial service honoring the fallen Marine on Sunday. Colorado Lt. Gov. Jane Norton spoke at his burial at Fort Logan National Cemetery in southwest Denver.
"Some people always wonder if they make any difference," Norton said. "Greg Rund didn't have that problem. He made a difference."
Friends recalled that Rund, who weighed only 140 pounds in high school, had played four years on Columbine's state-champion football team. He was famous for his practice jersey, which said "110 percent." On the day of the Columbine massacre, he was one of hundreds of students who raced down the hallway and out the door safely while two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher, and then shot themselves to death.
Rund had just started his senior year in high school when the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, stunned the nation. He committed to join the Marine Corps as soon as he graduated.
"He was honored to serve his country and he was a patriot," the family statement said. "For him, it was very simple. He saw a need and a calling outside of himself, and he wanted to help . . . but he never wanted to be recognized for his actions."
"His passion touched his patriotism on 9/11," said Rund's pastor, the Rev. Stephen Poos-Benson of Columbine United Presbyterian Church. "His sense of patriotism was offended. Greg felt called to respond."
The Rund family and their neighbors staged a joyful block party earlier this year when Greg Rund came home safely after finishing his first tour of duty in Iraq. But then he was dispatched to the front again. The news of his death in Fallujah reached his family just over a week ago.
The Marine's mother and his wife, Karrisa Marcum, wept throughout the service and the Marine guards' 21-gun salute. His father gazed into space with a look of deep pain, so wrapped in his thoughts that he didn't seem to notice when blustery winds knocked over the floral decorations.
When the ceremony ended, Marcum and the members of the Rudd family each approached his oak casket separately to whisper final words of farewell. This process continued until a cemetery official came through, politely urging the mourners to disperse. "I'm sorry," she said, "but there's a war on. We need this space for another funeral now."
