ASSOCIATED PRESS
Estelita Maravillosa held a photo of her slain daughter, U.S. Army Sgt. Myla Maravillosa, at a service yesterday in Inabanga, in Bohol province in the central Philippines.
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Isle soldier buried in Philippines with full U.S. military honors
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Another Hawaii soldier killed in Iraq will be buried in the Philippines
By Oliver Teves
Associated Press
INABANGA, Philippines » Oahu resident Estelita Maravillosa was devastated when her daughter and only child, U.S. Army Sgt. Myla Maravillosa, was killed in Iraq on Christmas Eve, eight years after she moved from the Philippines to Hawaii in search of a better life.
"It's very painful," she said ahead of her daughter's burial in her native village today with full U.S. military honors never before seen by the townsfolk of Inabanga in central Bohol province.
A contingent of U.S. Army honor guards led by Brig. Gen. Gregory Schumacher provided traditional U.S. military honors at a funeral Mass, while Bohol Gov. Erico Aumentado directed all Philippine flags flown at half-mast in the entire province.
Schumacher, commander of the Military Intelligence Readiness Command at Fort Belvoir, Va., told the hundreds of people gathered that Maravillosa was a "true Filipino-American hero" who "represented the very best of the qualities that we desire in our soldiers and indeed represented the very best of humanity itself."
"The ties between the United States and the Philippines are deep and enduring, and she is a symbol of that very strong relationship," he said.
Schumacher knelt as he offered the folded U.S. flag that draped Maravillosa's coffin to her mother, together with her daughter's U.S. military medals, including the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart and the Meritorious Service Medal.
Relatives and friends released white balloons with the message, "We will always remember, we will love you forever." Estelita Maravillosa clutched the U.S. flag and watched quietly as people wept.
"What sorrows I have now, I have to accept because that is her fate," she said at the chapel. "She died not in vain. She died for a cause -- for the freedom of the whole world."
Myla Maravillosa moved to Hawaii when she was 16 to join her mother, who migrated in 1986. She attended Leeward Community College and enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves in 1999.
On Christmas Eve her Humvee was attacked by Iraqi insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades, mortally wounding her, according to the U.S. Defense Department.
Maravillosa, an interrogator assigned to the 301st Military Intelligence Battalion, had been in Iraq for only a little more than a month.
On New Year's Eve, Maravillosa was remembered at a memorial service at Our Lady of Peace Cathedral in Honolulu, where she was a parishioner.
Friends and family have described the petite 24-year-old woman as a reluctant warrior who had planned on studying foreign relations and becoming a U.S. diplomat, although they said her real dream was to be a nun.
In an e-mail to Sister Margaret Michael in Boston -- vocation director of the Daughters of St. Paul, whom Maravillosa had planned to join -- she said she "could envision herself more with a Bible in hand than a rifle."
Her cousin Darlene Rodrigues said everyone was surprised when she joined the Army, but knew it was her ticket to college.
"She had a plan for entering a religious life," Rodrigues said.
She said Maravillosa was "very afraid to go" to Iraq but went anyway. "She was a person of responsibility and integrity. She was very dutiful in that way."