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thedrifter
11-02-06, 12:53 PM
November 02, 2006 <br />
Citizenship sought for Marine killed in car crash <br />
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The Associated Press <br />
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HUDSON, N.H. — Friends and family of a Marine killed in a car crash last week are pushing to have him...

thedrifter
11-03-06, 07:02 AM
A last wish fulfilled
N.H. Marine who died in car crash granted citizenship posthumously

By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff | November 3, 2006

HUDSON, N.H. -- Penny Jones sat yesterday before a portrait of her only son, Raban Anthony Kimungu, a 24-year-old US Marine who died in a car crash last Friday, less than three weeks after finishing his second tour of duty in Iraq.

An emigrant from Kenya as an infant, Kimungu served two tours in Iraq, suffered a head wound from a sniper's bullet last November, returned to combat, and decided to become a citizen of the only country he ever really knew.

Yesterday, amid the grief in his modest home here, Kimungu's large, close-knit, extended family took quiet pride in the news that the Marine's application for US citizenship had been approved posthumously on Wednesday.

This morning, when Kimungu is buried with full military honors, a native of the East African nation will receive a military rifle salute as the American citizen he wanted to become.

"To him, he got all that he wanted, and I'm happy that he's happy," Jones said.

Federal law allows citizenship to be granted posthumously to active-duty military personnel who die in combat or from disease or wounds related to such service. The law also allows for citizenship for military personnel who are killed in other ways, but an application must be made after death for the approval process to begin, said Shawn Saucier, spokesman for the US Citizenship and Immigration Service.

For Kimungu's family, the bureaucratic process was too much to understand and undertake during their mourning for the young, gregarious man who joined the Marines in a search for direction and discipline after his graduation from Alvrine High School here.

Arthur Martel, a Vietnam veteran from Hudson, stepped up to help the Kimungu family, contacting the staff of US Representative Charles Bass and US Senator John Sununu. Martel told Jones: "I promise you, one way or the other, I'll get him citizenship."

Staff members went to work on the paperwork, and officials at the US Citizenship and Immigration Service said the decision was an easy one.

"It's the least that a grateful nation can do," Saucier said.

Kimungu's family spoke of a man whose military experience led to the decision to become a citizen of the country he had sworn to defend. Pictured in his dress blues, the flags of his native Kenya and the United States intertwined nearby, the image of Kimungu looked out yesterday from a portrait that formed a somber center of attention in his home.

"We are very happy," his uncle, Kariuki Kimungu, said of the citizenship approval. "Having served the country in a noble way and having almost lost his life in war, we feel it is an honor for him and for the country to be a citizen."

Jones appeared exhausted from the grieving, the planning, and the business of greeting the stream of visitors.

"He wanted to fight for the country; he did it from his heart," she said of the child who emigrated to the United States with his mother when he was only 18 months old. But when he arrived home Oct. 11 after his second tour in Iraq, which he had spent with a Marine mortar unit in the violent city of Fallujah, Kimungu was relieved to put war behind him.

"He put his two bags down and said, 'Mom, I'm home for good,' " Jones recalled. "It felt like a bag of sand had been lifted from my back. My thoughts were always with him."

Now, instead of planning for college, Kimungu will be buried as an active-duty Marine.

Yesterday evening, about a dozen of his fellow Iraq veterans from the Second Battalion, Sixth Marines, stood on Kimungu's back porch. Recently back from Iraq, the Marines spoke quietly but allowed themselves to laugh a little.

Sergeant Sean Powers, 30, who served alongside Kimungu for 3 1/2 years, spoke of the juxtaposition of a long-awaited homecoming for Kimungu's comrades with a funeral for their friend.

"It is what it is," said Powers, who had traveled from a Marine base at Twentynine Palms, Calif., for the services. "I really don't have anything poetic to say to make people feel better, so I won't even try."

Ellie