Lt. Travis J. Fuller

Monday, January 31 2005 @ 08:25 AM EST

Boston Herald -- The kids at the Granville Village School had written a big stack of cards for their own Marine, Lt. Travis J. Fuller, who was once one of them but grew up and went to serve his country in Iraq.
     Yesterday, Principal Robert Thompson had to break the news.
     ``We had to let them know they can't send the letters, but we're going to forward them to his parents,'' said Thompson, who knew Fuller since he was a tyke just starting school.
     The 26-year-old platoon leader from the small Western Massachusetts town of Granville, a 2001 Massachusetts Maritime Academy graduate, was killed Wednesday when a CH-53 transport helicopter crashed in a sandstorm in western Iraq, while taking Fuller and his men to help seal the border for tomorrow's election.
     Fuller, the son of David and Joanne Fuller of Granville, was someone you could rely on to get the job done, someone who knew since he was a boy that there were some things in life you just had to do, friends and educators said.

 ``He was a kid who did things because they were the right thing to do,'' Thompson said. He told the children yesterday, ``We grow up in a small country town. Sometimes we feel like the bigger world doesn't affect us.
     ``But we encourage our kids to go out in the world and make a difference. That's what Travis did,'' Thompson said. ``Unfortunately, he had to make the ultimate sacrifice.''
     ``He was proud to be there,'' said Mass. Maritime Acting President Richard Gurnon, who remembers Fuller as a ``really fine young man . . . someone you'd like your own son to grow up like.''
     ``He was a stand-up guy. He was always ready to do whatever needed to be done,'' said Navy Lt. Chris Tibbetts, an academy classmate. ``All he ever wanted to do was be a Marine Corps officer and lead his Marines into battle and do the best he could.''
     Fuller led his platoon in the brutal house-to-house fighting in Fallujah last fall and was wounded by shrapnel last month. He sent back e-mails that offered ``down-to-earth descriptions of the hell he was in,'' Gurnon said.
     But Fuller conveyed ``a sense he was accomplishing things. He was making the world safer.''
     ``It is just such a crushing blow,'' Gurnon said.

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