Army medic Taylor Burk died clutching his commander's hand and surrounded by a circle of comrades he had returned to the Baghdad streets to protect.
An artery near his neck had been severed by a piece of shrapnel, and there wasn't anything that could be done to save his life.
So they all prayed. When the prayer was over, Taylor was gone.
"All his friends were around him, and he wasn't in pain and he wasn't afraid," Burk's commander told his mother, Tracy Preddy of Canyon, Texas, in a telephone call before his funeral.
That was some important news his grieving family, including his father and stepmother, Tim and Kimberly Burk, of Edmond, needed to hear.
But there is so much more the rest of us back home need to know about Spc. Taylor Burk and what he and others in uniform represent.
For one thing, he was barely 21 years old. Time had not completely wiped away his boyish freckles and the insurgents had not yet hardened his soul.
His father said he was an ordinary kid, except maybe for the gift he had of making everyone smile whenever he entered the room.
"I think he fed off the idea that for the first time in his life, he was doing something important," Tim Burk, whose wife is a colleague of mine at The Oklahoman, said.
But if you take away his glasses, all the B's he made at Randall High School in Canyon, and his fascination with "Lord of the Rings," you will find there was nothing ordinary about Taylor Burk.
That's why his buddies with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment in the 1st Cavalry Division, cried the day he died.
I cried, too, when I read what they had to say about Taylor in a story written by Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Ken Dilanian, who chronicled Taylor's death Jan. 26, the deadliest day in Iraq for the U.S. military.
"We've got people who made it their mission not to leave this base," said Sgt. Andrew Wintz, Burk's squad leader. "We've got people who went home on leave and never came back. He took a bullet and he came back."
Burk demonstrated bravery of the highest sort, the kind of sacrifice a parent might make for a child, but the level of bravery few would ever have the courage to otherwise muster.
Earning high marks
Even though there was a history of military service in his family, not everyone wanted Taylor to join the Army and fight a war.
An older sister, Heidi, was anxious about his safety. His older brother, Matt, whom Taylor idolized, wondered if it was the right move to make.
"But I told everyone we need to make Taylor think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread, and we all did," Tim Burk said.
After it was discovered that Taylor couldn't put his computer savvy to work because he was color blind, he trained as a medic.
Less than a year later, he was on night patrol in Baghdad, riding in a Humvee that had not yet been fitted with extra armor.
Tim Burk remembers asking his son: "Why are you riding without armor? You're the medic. They should be protecting you."
Taylor looked at his dad and said, "Well, if it weren't me, it would have to be someone else."
Then, one night, all hell broke loose.
A rocket exploded and machine gun fire and tracers targeted the convoy from all directions. A bullet hit Taylor in the heel of his foot.
It burned deeply into his skin, and Taylor said he cried like a baby as he laid on his back, firing his weapon blindly into the night sky.
When there was a temporary lull in the fighting, Taylor said he heard a voice not far away say, "Burk, I'm hit."
The voice belonged to Spc. Joseph Bridges, whose thigh had been shattered and who was about to bleed to death.
Taylor's own pain left him as he scrambled to apply a tourniquet to Bridges' leg. As he worked on Bridges, Taylor told his father he again looked up, where tracers appeared like they were moving in slow motion.
At that moment, another bullet hit Bridges in the jaw, but Taylor continued to hover over him, screaming in Bridges' ear that he wasn't going to die.
By then, the squad was trying to fight its way back to the base, but Taylor convinced his commander that the only way to save Bridges was to find a hospital.
And so they did, and both Bridges and Burk lived to talk about that night when they returned to San Antonio, Texas, to recover from their wounds.
For his bravery, Taylor was awarded a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and a Combat Medical Badge.
A moment with Dad
When Tim Burk saw his son, Taylor reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded- up white piece of paper containing the Purple Heart he had received, along with the bullet they took out of his foot.
"Let me show you something," Taylor told his dad.
As he unfolded the piece of paper, treating it like Scripture, he wasn't talking about the Purple Heart.
It was a letter from his commander, telling him how proud he was of Taylor, that made him swell with pride.
It was camaraderie and a sense of duty that led Taylor back to Iraq, when everyone else was telling him that he had earned the right to stay home.
"He believed he was the guy who was supposed to patch up his buddies," Tim Burk said.
Taylor Burk died less than three months after he returned to Iraq and shortly after he got word that his unit would be returning to the states.
When Tim Burk first heard Taylor was dead, he said it was "the most horrible, empty feeling you can imagine and then add some more bad stuff on top of that."
He then had to telephone Taylor's other siblings.
"Oh, the pain," Tim said. "Each of them screamed like a knife had gone through their heart."
A prayer before sleeping
Tim said normally he and Kimberly say a prayer before they go to bed, but he said the dark hole he had fallen into was so deep that night that he couldn't find the words. So, as they knelt by their bed, it was Kimberly who spoke.
"Heavenly Father, thank you for Taylor and all the wonderful things he brought to us," she said. "And thank you for making it possible for him to be greeted in the spiritual world by so many loving ancestors."
At that moment, Tim said a beautiful, comfortable feeling came over him, knowing that Taylor was safe.
You never met Taylor Burk, but I hope you never forget him, either.
