Marine Lance Cpl. Phillip E. Frank

Died April 8, 2004 Serving During Operation Iraqi Freedom

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20, of Elk Grove, Ill.; assigned to 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.; killed April 8 by hostile fire in Anbar province, Iraq.

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Memorial service in Hazlet honors fallen Marine

Associated Press

HAZLET, N.J. — Phillip E. Frank joined the Marines after watching the second of two planes hit the World Trade Center towers.

It was in that moment the young Aberdeen man saw his destiny, said his father, Roy Frank.

“He was devastated by that experience, and it never left him,” Frank said at his son’s memorial service at St. John’s United Methodist Church.

The Defense Department said Lance Cpl. Frank, 20, a member of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, was killed April 8 by hostile fire near the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.

Others who spoke at the service that attracted about 300 mourners — many of them former classmates and teachers — recalled the 2002 Matawan Regional High School graduate’s bravery and compassion.

“There are many of you here who helped make the man we honor today,” said his mother, Georgette Frank. “You all had a part in this young man’s life.”

Frank moved to Elk Grove, Ill., after graduating high school to work for a cousin, but soon turned to the military.

Bryan Burgess was with his childhood friend when they watched the twin towers collapse. He did not expect his friend to become a soldier.

“It was a moment that affected us all, but I was shocked with how it affected Phil. Now it all makes sense to me, because he was always trying to help other people,” Burgess said.

Frank was buried in Des Plaines, Ill., on April 17.

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Marine killed in Iraq wanted to go where he could help most

CHICAGO — The way Phillip Frank saw it, the world was becoming an increasingly dangerous place, and the best way to make it safer was to go where it was most dangerous.

“He wanted to be there to help,” Frank’s 19-year-old wife, Keri, said Tuesday, the day military officials announced that Lance Cpl. Phillip E. Frank was one of two Illinois Marines and one Army soldier killed in Iraq.

Speaking from her home in suburban Elk Grove Village, she said he had joined the military to “help his country and help his family and help me, to make the world safer for us.”

The Department of Defense reported Tuesday that Frank, 20, and Marine Lance Cpl. Torrey L. Gray, 19, of Patoka in southern Illinois were killed by hostile fire in the Al Anbar Province, Frank on April 8 and Gray on April 11. Their deaths followed that of another Marine from Illinois, Pfc. Geoffrey Morris, who was killed April 4 in the same region, the site of intense fighting in recent weeks.

The Defense Department also announced Tuesday that Army Pfc. Gregory Goodrich, 37, of Bartonville, died in Iraq after his convoy was attacked by rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire on April 9. Goodrich was assigned to the Army Reserve’s 724th Transportation Company based in Bartonville, which is near Peoria.

Two days after Keri Frank learned that her husband of less than a year was dead, she and other family members talked about the young man’s decision to join the military — a decision he knew would put him in danger.

Whether they were surprised by his enlistment, as his wife was, or knew as his parents did that he’d thought about a military career for years, when he did sign the papers it made sense.

“He was always the champion of the underdog,” said his mother, Georgette. “He was the one that would always stop the bullies from picking on the little kids.”

It’s not that he was a big talker, they said. Nor was he physically imposing, standing about an inch and a half under six feet. And even though he studied and became accomplished in the martial arts, his parents can’t recall him ever getting into fights.

It was more, they said, a presence that conveyed the message that he would do the right thing, whatever the situation.

“He was just the kind of person who would go out of his way to help you, whether he knows you or not,” Keri Frank said.

Like many others, his choice of how he would help was influenced by the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The World Trade Center was visible from Matawan, N.J., where the Frank family lived at the time. And when the towers crumbled to the ground, Frank was “deeply affected,” his mother said.

It wasn’t until he moved to Illinois and explained to his future wife over the phone in late 2002 why he had enlisted that she realized just how true that was.

“(He said) ‘I want to live in a country where my kids don’t have to be afraid of a 9/11,”’ Keri Frank said. “That’s why he went, so nobody’s kids will have to deal with that again.”

To his parents, joining the military was an extension of what Frank’s mother called the “protector attitude” he’d shown as a boy.

“He said he was going where he’s needed,” said his mother. He told her and her husband, Roy, that the people of Iraq “deserve the freedoms we have in this country.”

On Tuesday, the family still did not know how Frank, who had been deployed to the Middle East in late February, was killed beyond what the brief statement from the military said.

Frank hadn’t told the family much about the fighting in Iraq in his e-mail messages home, Keri Frank said.

“All he kept saying was he wanted to make sure everything here was taken care of and how much he loved me,” she said.

— Associated Press