ROTC remembers NH soldier

     The mood of the senior Army ROTC class was somber this past Tuesday evening as Lieutenant Colonel Paul Webber mentioned the death of New Hampshire soldier Marc Decoteau.
      Decoteau, 19, was killed last Friday in the Wardak province of Afghanistan while serving his first tour of combat duty, reports the Associated Press.
     "It's a tragedy," said Webber. "The circumstances illustrate that fighting in an insurgency is hard and dangerous."
     Among the senior cadets was a former Plymouth High School classmate of Decoteau, Evan Weaver, who both fondly remembers Decoteau and his humor.
     "If you had a boring class, you wanted him to be in it with you. He made it better," said Weaver, 21, who attends St. Anselm College, a partnership school with UNH's ROTC program. "He was goofy but with a purpose."
     Currently, there are unattributed reports linking Decoteau's death to an Afghan interpreter, although the Department of Defense has not confirmed the accusations and the incident is still under investigation, reports the Associated Press.
     And although Weaver grieves for Decoteau and what he describes as "an all-American," dutiful family, the situation also has him reassessing his abilities as a soldier.
     "As an officer, I hope to be able to prevent things like that," said Weaver. "If [the accusations are] true, it's definitely going to present some kind of initial problem with interpreters and I hope I'm able to overcome that."
      It won't be long before Weaver may be testing his skills with foreign militias and it wasn't long ago that Master Sergeant King was doing the same. While serving his third tour of combat duty, King's troop was assigned nine interpreters.
     "[Interpreters] get pretty close with the soldiers," recalls King, who was most recently deployed in 2008 to Iraq and who now works as a staff member for the university's ROTC program. "Our interpreter, we called him Sammy, was great. I wouldn't go out without him."
And while Decoteau's death has King remembering the relationships he had with his interpreters, it also has him remembering the deaths of fellow comrades.
     "The first deployment we lost so many guys," said King, who deployed first to Iraq in 2005. "We had 21 total die in my battalion, four directly worked under me. Three of them were 18-21. It's always hard. It's something I try not to think too much about."
      But the numbers are hard to ignore, Decoteau's death comes as New Hampshire's 31 while serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and is the first one of the New Year for the state.
     "There's something about 19-24 year old boys who think, ‘that's never going to happen to me,'" said Webber, whose 18-year-old son was just accepted at West Point and could be serving actively in the Army within the next six months. "It hits home."
      A funeral service will be held Saturday at 1 p.m. at Plymouth Regional High School. A spring burial will be held in Waterville Valley Cemetery in Waterville Valley, N.H.
Memorial donations may be made to the Marc P. Decoteau Memorial fund, c/o Community Guarantee Saving Bank, PO Box 996, Plymouth 03264, to benefit the Plymouth Regional High School lacrosse team. 

Follow Brittney Murray on Twitter at twitter.com/BrittsTNH