Mother recalls uplifting manner, faith of son killed in Afghanistan

Published: 2004-07-07

WILMINGTON, Del. (CNS) -- When Marine Lance Cpl. Russell White was around, "there were never, ever any gray skies," said his mother, Tricia White. "You could be sad or mad and he would pick you right up, make you see what was important in life," she said about her 19-year-old son, who was killed June 20 at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan when a fellow Marine's gun went off, apparently by accident. Her last conversation with him was the day he died. It was Father's Day. She was awake when he called from Afghanistan at 1:30 a.m. "I said, 'Honey, I knew it would be you because I just had a nightmare,'" she recalled in an interview with The Dialog, newspaper of the Wilmington Diocese. But she did not tell him the nightmare was about war -- her second in two weeks -- and they quickly changed the subject. "I didn't want him to know I was worried," she said. Russell White asked his mother to wish his father, Gregg, a happy Father's Day. He did not want to wake his father. A funeral Mass was celebrated for the Marine at St. Ann Catholic Church in Bethany Beach June 26 -- Gregg White's 49th birthday. Burial was July 7 at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

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