BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Lance Cpl. Eric Orlowski was a proud Marine, but above all he was a proud father, the mother of his young daughter said Monday.

"He was always there for his daughter, and he loved her more than anything," Nicole Kross said of her high school sweetheart.

Orlowski, 26, was killed Saturday in an accidental discharge of a .50-caliber machine gun in Iraq, military officials said.

A Marine reservist, he died on his first deployment.

It was something Kross, 24, herself an Air Force reservist, never worried about.

"He was way too strong. I thought he would have come home for sure," she said, tears welling as she spoke in the Buffalo home the two owned together.

Orlowski smiles out from family pictures, holding 3-year-old CamerynLee on his lap.

The couple had gone their separate ways but their daughter kept them close, Kross said. Orlowski, a reservist for about three years, sent her letters from overseas, the last saying he was headed for Iraq.

"I don't think he was scared," Kross said. "The thing he feared most was leaving his daughter."

He'd called his mother and stepfather and CamerynLee just 10 hours before his death, to let them know he was OK. He knew it was 4:30 a.m. Buffalo time, he said, but it was the only time he could get to a phone.

"He was in real high spirits," Kross said.

At his father's suburban Depew home, a Marine flag waved outside and a gold star, the symbol of a serviceman lost, hung on the door. Philip Orlowski declined to speak with reporters.

Orlowski was assigned to the 2nd Tank Battalion of the 2nd Marine Division based at Camp Lejeune, N.C. About 3,500 Marines and sailors attached to the 2nd Marine Brigade departed for the Middle East in January.

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