Soldier had gift for innovation, planned to be an engineer

“ I’m okay. Still on the face of the earth, if you knowwhat I mean.”

Army Spc. Jonathan Castro, 21, of Corona, Calif., wrote those words to former high school classmate and friend Denise Pineda weeks before he was killed Dec. 21, 2004. A suicide bomber dressed in an Iraqi military uniform walked into a mess tent in Mosul and detonated an explosive. Twenty- two people, including Castro, died in what was the war’s deadliest attack on a U.S. installation.

Castro, a combat engineer, joined the Army for the college tuition after declining his parents’ offer to pay for his schooling. He had a gift for technical innovation and creativity and wanted a future in engineering. Working with shop teachers in high school, he had built an electric guitar and designed and constructed a full- size electric car.

He had arrived in Iraq about 10 weeks before his death, and in his clipped, candid e- mails to friends at home, he talked about his missions into Iraq’s interior and about the stubborn insurgency.

“ It seems like if you kill one, 20 more come out,” he wrote to Pineda in November. “ I tell you what, it makes you really appreciate life.”

Castro’s mother, Vickie, sees the for the whole war thing. The written words of her only child in emails people are nuts. Every last one of as bittersweet treasures she them feel that they have to stare can keep forever. “ As I read it, I can you down. Getting shot at de > nitely hear his voice, because he writes

sucks. The worst part is they usually just like he talks,” she says. “ Phone shoot and run.” conversations were wonderful, because

The proximity of the U.S. base to I actually heard his voice. But

hostile urban areas in Mosul was a nowthey’re just my memories.”

factor in the ease with which the

In an e- mail to one of his favorite

suicide bomber sneaked inside undetected, high school shop teachers, Kent Galloway, Army of > cials later surmised. just three days before the bomb blast, the young soldier joked

Castro took note of it shortly before about the ratio of women to men in he died. “ My FOB ( forward operating the Army and re C ected on the malevolence base) is right outside the of hisworld there.

city of Mosul. I can literally spit over

“ As for Iraq itself, it’s beautiful except the fence and hit a city street.”

Family photo