American-Statesman -- Three days after Mark Stone was killed in Iraq, the memories he left with friends and relatives are coalescing into a single, distilled image.
It's not the 22-year-old Army sergeant. It isn't the gunner killed in Iraq when a mortar hit his truck. It's the young man from just outside Marble Falls, the lanky guy with dark blond hair who listened quietly, with a somber expression, to what everyone had to say. Change the remembered setting; the quiet manner remains.
"He chose his words wisely," said Zane Lewis, Stone's best friend. "He would never talk just to talk."
The two met at Kingsland Christian Academy, a 40-student high school that stayed open an extra year so Stone could graduate from it, said Joannie Jackson, whose husband ran the school.Lewis described Stone as the guy who one time helped him, without a word of complaint, unload an entire truckload of printers for the family business. It's the kind of thing Stone was always willing to do, Lewis said, seemingly just for the chance to hang out.
The Rev. Calven McCrary, former principal of Kingsland Christian, describes the teenage Stone as someone who struggled with algebra lessons and wanted a swimming pool in the backyard. The family couldn't afford the pool — Stone's mother had died a few years earlier, and a back injury kept his father out of the mills and truck cabs — so Stone began to dig, friends said. Two years later, four feet down, he hit rock. The pool wasn't going to happen. But he grabbed a pickax anyway, just to try.
He didn't think he was college material, McCrary said, so he joined the Army. Family and friends gave him encouragement they don't think he really needed; his father had served, and Stone had pulled out the uniform admiringly from time to time.
Family friend Charles McKay said Stone served a year in Afghanistan. At one point, McKay said, Stone was in a three-day firefight in a field of marijuana leaves. He had served in Iraq for about three months before he was killed. Despite being disenchanted with war, Stone was satisfied with his choice, McKay said.
While in Iraq, Stone kept in touch using a threadbare MySpace page with only a couple of sentences about himself. Now, well-wishers are filling it with eulogies.
Stone's older brother, Jason, said the two talked last week. Mark Stone had just been promoted to sergeant.
"He thought things might be getting worse there," Jason Stone said. "But everything was all right."
Jackson, the family pastor, said one of Stone's ambitions was to become a minister for soldiers. He had just started talking with them about God, she said.