Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2005 | 11:01 a.m.
Army Pfc. Daniel Guastaferro, the 27-year-old former Cimarron-Memorial High School student who died Friday in Iraq, had wanted to join the military years before he did and "literally had to fight the Army to get in" because the military at first didn't want him, his mother said Monday.
Army officials were concerned about whether he could handle the physical demands of soldiering because he had suffered a snowboarding accident when he was 16 that had required steel plates to be surgically implanted into his arms, valley resident Carol Fabbri said.
Fabbri and her husband Frank Guastaferro recalled that their son had been interested in joining the military as far back as nine years ago and again at at the age of 23.
Daniel had attended Cimarron-Memorial from 1993 to 1995 but did not graduate. He later earned his GED, his mother said. He was very bright, but he was never a perfect student, his parents said.
After living in the Los Angeles area for a few years, it wasn't until just before Christmas 2002 that he was able to enlist. He reported for basic training in early April 2003. Most of his colleagues at boot camp were in their late teens or early 20s.
"My first reaction was that if this is what you want do, then I am behind you 100 percent," Frank Guastaferro said. "I thought he would be ... good at it. I gave him my full support."
Guastaferro, who served one tour in Vietnam during the Vietnam War in the early '70s, said that he never discussed his earlier war experiences with his son while Daniel was serving in Iraq. But Guastaferro remembered that they sometimes talked about it over the dinner table.
He wasn't sure, however, to what extent those discussions of the war shaped Daniel's choice to join and serve.
Daniel hadn't served too long in Iraq. He went to Kuwait in August and was in Iraq by September -- a little less than 5 months, his parents said.
He was in the Army's Infantry air assault team and manned a .50-caliber machine gun on a military Humvee vehicle. Originally he was assigned to a missile launcher and grenade launcher out of a Humvee, Fabbri said.
He was killed Friday -- two days after his birthday -- when his vehicle crashed into a canal in Ramadi, a city in central Iraq on the Euphrates River. Army officials said it was simply a traffic accident.
Two days after an official with the U.S. Army informed Fabbri that her son had been killed in Iraq, she received an e-mail message from him.
Guastaferro had sent the e-mail sometime before he was killed in Ramadi on Friday. For some reason, the message took several days to reach Fabbri's e-mail account, she said.
The message was short, and Fabbri recalled that besides thanking her for a recent birthday greeting, he tried to assure his mother that he was doing well in Iraq.
"I'm okay. Please take care of yourself. I love you," Fabbri recalled the message as saying.
"The more he had gotten into Ramadi the less calls we got," she said. "We e-mailed, he and I, almost daily. And I went into my e-mail and found the last one (Monday)."
"He knew what he was going into, he was doing what he wanted, and none of us were happy when he gave us the news he was going to Iraq, but we knew how he felt about it," said Fabbri.
In the past, Daniel told them that "he could handle" any situation, Fabbri said.
Recently, however, Fabbri said her sister, Daniel's aunt, had told her about a letter Daniel sent several months ago. In it, he expressed some of his basic fears as well as his overall desire to win his parents' respect.
"What he wanted was to not be a failure to the other soldiers that he was with, and that he wanted his family to be proud of him," Fabbri said.
He needed have worried about that, his father said.
In addition to his parents, Daniel Guastaferro is survived by his parents and an older sister, Chistine Saurez. No date has been set for a memorial service.
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