Nevada Marine is killed in attack

Mary Manning and Jace Radke

Tuesday, March 25, 2003 | 11:11 a.m.

A graduate of Tonopah High School became Nevada's first casualty in the war with Iraq, the Defense Department said today.

Marine 2nd Lt. Frederick E. Pokorney Jr., 31, of Nye County was killed in an ambush Sunday by Iraqi forces near An Nasiriya, according to the department.

The Marines encountered Iraqi troops who appeared ready to surrender. Instead, they opened fire on the Marines. The Americans eventually knocked out eight tanks, some anti-aircraft batteries, some artillery and infantry.

Defense Department spokesman Capt. Shawn Turner said that Pokorney was a field artillery officer of the 1st Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment.

Pokorney attended Tonopah High School during his junior and senior years and graduated in 1989. Art Johnson, an auto shop teacher at the school in Tonopah, 200 miles northwest of Las Vegas, remembers having Pokorney in class.

"He was a good a student and one of those kids that got along with everybody," Johnson said. "He was a big, well put together kid who played varsity football and basketball."

Johnson said that during his high school years Pokorney lived with former Nye County Sheriff Wade Lieseke Jr. Lieseke, a Vietnam War veteran, could not be reached for comment this morning.

Pokorney's wife, Carolyn, was in Jacksonville, N.C., at the Marine base, Turner said. A man who answered the phone said he was a relative and said the family would issue a statement later today.

"We're all still trying to take it in," the man said.

In Kingman, Ariz., a woman learned Sunday night that her son is one of the soldiers missing in action in Iraq.

Lance Cpl. James Kiehl is a member of the Army's 507th Maintenance Co., and five members of that company are prisoners of Iraq while others remain unaccounted for.

Kingman police notified Kiehl's mother, Carol Howland, that her son was missing, police Lt. Dean Brice said.

Howland works for the Mohave County Sheriff's Office at the main jail in Kingman, Brice said.

"Hopefully we won't have to go through any more of these kinds of situations," Brice said. "We feel for the families and we're all praying for them."

Kiehl's company, based at Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas, provides maintenance support to an air defense artillery brigade. The group that Kiehl and the prisoners of war were with apparently strayed from protection of other troops and was attacked by Iraqis over the weekend.

In Pokorney's unit, assigned to Headquarters Battery from Camp Lejeune, N.C., eight other Marines were also killed, Pentagon officials said.

About 40 other Marines were wounded in the surprise attack.

Johnson, who has taught at Tonopah High School since 1980, said he has been trying to keep an eye on events as they unfold in Iraq.

"I try to watch when I can, because we have former students deployed over there right now," Johnson said.

In Nasiriyah 230 miles south of Baghdad, the Marines seized two strategic bridges, where securing the bridges embroiled the men in some of the heaviest fighting of the war.

The crucial bridges seized by the Marines, along with one west of the city taken earlier by the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, have enormous tactical significance, senior officers said.

Securing the bridges spanning the Euphrates River gives the Marines two routes to Baghdad, Lt. Col. David Pere, senior watch officer of the Combat Operations Center, said. Marine units can drive north from Nasiriyah to the central Iraqi city of Al Kut, or they can head northwest to Ad-Diwaniyah.

The Marines were under the command of the Marine Expeditionary Force cutting through southern Iraq until a fierce dust storm slowed the march today.

The 1st Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment had begun to round up Iraqi prisoners after they surrendered early Saturday. But the Iraqi forces, dressed as civilians, attacked the Marines.

The 10th Marine Regiments is part of a 7,000-member force built around the 2nd Marine Regiment named Task Force Tarawa in honor of the World War II Pacific Island campaign.