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Sgt. Merlin German, Marine burned in Iraq, dies

BY LAURA RIVERA | laura.rivera@newsday.com

May 2, 2008

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More than a year after Sgt. Merlin German nearly died in a roadside bombing in Iraq, his hands burned into nubs and his body in a wheelchair, he resolved to walk into his San Antonio church on his own two feet.

His mother, Lourdes German, who had been "his hands and feet" since that day in February 2005, worried but knew it would be so. "Everything he did, he did himself," Lourdes German, 54, said. "That parish was just overjoyed. The pastor even stopped preaching to welcome Merlin."

Her vigil over her son ended April 11, when German, 22, died unexpectedly in San Antonio after a surgery to graft skin onto his lip. "Even with pain in my heart, I have to keep putting one foot in front of the other," she said.

German, a Marine who grew up in Washington Heights, had become a guiding light to the rest of the service members in the burn unit at the Brooke Army Medical Center, where he spent 17 months as an inpatient and underwent more than 100 surgeries, his family said.

"This kid was not going to go down easy," said Norma Guerra, the hospital's deputy chief of public affairs, who said German called her "his Texas mom." "He was a fighter. And he used to motivate everybody else."

With his quick wit and dapper New York Yankees caps and jacket, German charmed reticent new patients and, in time, drew visitors like President George W. Bush, Dennis Miller and David Blaine, Guerra said.

"He used to say, 'I'm going to look good every day because I don't know if I'm going to be here tomorrow,'" she said.

Though his grandfather was a member of the military in the Dominican Republic, Merlin was prohibited from playing with toy guns as a child, Lourdes said. Yet from age 11, he was telling his brother, Ariel, he would become a Marine. "Part of me thought that he would, but part of me didn't want him to," said Ariel, 25, of Orlando, Fla.

In 2001, when Lourdes retired from a job assembling dolls at a factory and her husband, Hemery, retired as a carpenter, the couple moved to the Dominican Republic, but Merlin and Ariel insisted on staying. Merlin graduated from Woodlands High School in Westchester County in 2003 and enlisted in the Marine Corps that fall, at age 17.

He was deployed to Iraq in 2004. In February 2005, his convoy was hit by a makeshift bomb in Anbar province, according to the Defense Department and family. German was burned over 97 percent of his body - everywhere but the top of his head and the soles of his feet.

In December 2006, during the hospital's annual holiday ball, he surprised Lourdes and brought the crowd to tears when he asked her to dance. It was the first time Lourdes saw him in dress blues. "He was real handsome ... with so many medals."

After his service, for which he received a Purple Heart, Merlin wanted to become an FBI agent, his mother said. He also planned to establish a foundation to help child burn victims. Donations can be mailed to an address on the foundation's Web site, merlinsmiracles.com.