A vow to always remember

Liz Tate didn’t know Marine Cpl. Christopher L. Weaver in life.
But she knows him in death.
Tate was visiting a friend’s gravesite one day at Quantico National Cemetery when she found herself being drawn to Weaver’s final resting place in a quiet corner of the cemetery.
“I came up here one day and I stood up here,” she said. “There was nobody else here.”
She looked at Weaver’s headstone – which reads Christopher L. Weaver, Cpl., U.S. Marine Corps, Iraq, Aug. 15, 1980 – Jan. 26, 2005, Purple Heart – and wondered how he died
Tate knew that her youngest son, Mark Sanchez, had been serving with the Army in Iraq around the same that Weaver was there. Her other son, Thomas Sanchez recently became an Army Officer. And while Tate found it difficult to watch television while Mark was deployed, she did record a CNN special called “Ambush at the River of Secrets.”  When Tate returned to her Woodbridge home following her first visit to Weaver’s grave, she found her-self watching the report.
“At the end of it, it showed exactly how he died,” she said. “At the end of it, I said, ‘oh my God. That was the same young man I visited today.’”
Weaver, 24, of Fredericksburg, was assigned to the 4th Combat Engineer Battalion, 4th Marine Division, a Marine Corps Reserve unit headquartered in Lynchburg, when he was killed while fighting in Haqlaniya on Jan. 26, 2005.
On that morning, Weaver and his fellow Marines were pursuing an insurgent leader into a part of Iraq that was under insurgent control. They were ambushed in a firefight that left four Marines, including Weaver, dead.
“I never met him, but I saw how his other brother Marines died with him,” Tate said.
Feeling that she got to know Weaver through watching the special, Tate, who is Roman Catholic, began placing flowers on his grave.
“In our faith, once you pass on you go on to a more beautiful life and they’re always with you as long as you re-member them,” she said. “For some reason, this young man touched my heart.”
Tate met Weaver’s parents as they were visiting their son on his birthday. Weaver’s parents live out of town and find it difficult to visit their son’s gravesite as often as they would like.
“I promised them I would come here and spend time with them and make sure he never was without flowers,” she said. “I felt so bad for his mother because I thought to myself, ‘my God, what if this could be me one day?’ Just to know you come to a gravesite and that’s all you have.”
Word of Tate’s generosity spread among Weaver’s friends.
“His friends who come here, they tell me stories about him, so I feel that I really know him now,” she said.
Among her favorite stories is one told by Weaver’s commanding officer, who said that Weaver would always wear shorts and a sweatshirt, no matter what the weather happened to be in Iraq.
“He was known for that,” Tate laughed.
Tate, whose cousin was killed while fighting during the Vietnam War, said Weaver and all the service men and women who have died while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have made the world safer for both today’s and tomor-row’s generation.
“That’s what I’m so grateful for,” she said.