Salem » Nigel Olsen stood with the ocean to his back, snapped to attention and threw a salute to the camera.

At the time -- more than a decade ago -- it was the playful gesture of a boy who loved to pretend he was in the military.

But now the image of the youngster, clad in camouflage and with his blond locks tucked under a plastic helmet, has come to mean much more.

It is a testament to a boy's long-standing desire to serve in the military. It is a reminder that boys grow into men. And it is evidence the man who died March 4 in Afghanistan was living the life he had always dreamed about.

"It was what he loved and what he lived for," Olsen's mother, Kim, said during a Saturday morning funeral for her 21-year-old son.

It was the second funeral for a fallen Marine in as many weeks in Utah County, which is well-represented in the Camp Williams-based Charlie Company of the 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, which deployed to Afghanistan in November. Just a week prior, fellow Marine Carlos Aragon was buried at the Camp Williams cemetery.

Aragon, whose family was in attendance at Olsen's funeral, was killed when he stepped on an improvised explosive device while on foot patrol in a village in the volatile Helmand Province. Three days later, Olsen was aiding in the arrest of a man suspected of bomb-making when he also stepped on a buried explosive.

Family members said Olsen understood the potential consequences of war. As a devoted member of the LDS Church, he was prepared for the potential sacrifice of his life, they said.

And in a way, he'd been preparing his entire life.

Olsen was just a toddler when his brother, Jeremy Hampton, joined the Navy. Years later, when Hampton would visit his family in Orem, Olsen would insist on bringing his older brother to school for "show and tell."

In 1996, Hampton called home to tell his family the Navy had invited the families of sailors on the USS Nimitz to meet the ship in Pearl Harbor for a cruise. "The minimum age was 8, but there was no keeping him home," Hampton remembered. "So we did what we had to do to make the paperwork make him eight."

When Olsen was a teenager, he would deck himself in camouflage and face paint in preparation for evening games of capture the flag, "only to show up 60 minutes later complaining that the boys were just wasting time talking to girls," Kim Olsen recalled.

Finally, just a week following his high school graduation, Nigel Olsen did what everyone had expected him to do since his was a little boy: He joined the military.

The nation was at war, and some in his family tried to steer him away from the Marines, but the young recruit was determined. "He told me, 'Mom, I want to be part of the best,' and for him, the Marines were the best," she said.

Olsen didn't waiver from his desire to serve, not even when he learned his unit would be deploying to Afghanistan's hazardous Helmand Province.

"He knew what he wanted to do," said Olsen's sister, Stacy Hansen. "He had a dream and he lived it to the fullest."

mlaplante@sltrib.com

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