Washington Post -- Her son was a cavalry scout in Iraq, and yesterday Mary Wallace recalled his childhood in St. Mary's County -- shaping coat hangers into toy guns, asking for a bedspread done in Army camouflage. "I'm going to be a soldier man," she remembered him telling her.

Wounded on a combat mission, Cpl. Matthew P. Wallace, 22, died Friday in a military hospital in Germany, five days after a roadside bomb detonated near his Bradley Fighting Vehicle in Baghdad. His family was gathered at his bedside -- mother, father and three sisters.

One sister read a final letter. One sang to him.

"I think the most important thing to say about Matthew was that he chose this," his mother said. "He wasn't drafted. He knew he was taking a risk, but he chose to do this."

Deployed to Iraq eight months ago, Wallace was atop his vehicle as the gunner July 16 when the bomb went off, his family said. A fellow soldier was killed. Wallace survived but was burned over 95 percent of his body. Hopes that he would somehow make it faded, and his family members flew to Germany.

Told that he was brain dead, they withdrew life support.

The Wallace family returned to their Lexington Park home Saturday night, passing a convenience store where Wallace had once worked.

The American flag outside "was all lit up and at half-mast, and it just touched us all so much," Mary Wallace said.

Just before her son went to war, he explained his reasons, his mother said.

"He chose to go to war so that his sisters' children didn't have to," she said. "They don't even have children yet, but he didn't want them to have to go through what he knew he was getting into. He wanted to let them play in the shade of trees and laugh at what amused them with no fear of bombs dropping on them."

This was a decision he came to at 19, she said, after a period when he felt undecided about his life's course. He had dropped out of Great Mills High School, then earned his General Educational Development diploma in 2001.

When Wallace became a cavalry scout -- often working out in front of the larger unit -- he told his father, "I found the thing I do well," Keith Wallace recalled.

His father said Wallace had been partly inspired by his paternal grandfather, who served in the Army but died before Wallace's birth. "I told him all kinds of stories and showed him pictures of my dad, and we went through all sorts of scrapbooks," Keith Wallace said.

In Iraq, Wallace was assigned to the Army's 10th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division. Based out of Fort Hood, Tex., he had earned distinctions as a marksman and the Army Achievement Medal, his family said.

His parents said Wallace had a gift for humor and loved handwritten letters with details about ordinary life -- what his mother referred to as "the blah, blah letters . . . like, 'Then we went to Wal-Mart.' " "It must have made him feel he was with us vicariously," she said.

Lately he had called his family every few days, including just three days before the bomb blast.

"I asked him how he was," his father recalled. "He was kind of silent for a moment. 'Oh, okay, I guess,' he said." His father went on: "I made sure I comforted him with my abiding love for him and my pride in him. I think the rigors of war were beginning to wear on him."

Wallace, thin and muscular, had always loved music. He played guitar with friends in garage bands, went to concerts and bought piles of CDs.

He wore a Walkman "even after they went out of style," said Mathew Korade, his closest friend since childhood.

After sending Wallace many care packages in Iraq, Korade said he had recently bought his friend an acoustic guitar, so he could play in the war zone. "I imagined him opening it," he said.

His voice softened into a near-whisper. "We were like brothers. I loved him more than anything. . . . I just wish he was coming home."