Matt Ferrera in his West Point graduation uniform, May 2005.
Cover
“Our Matty is gone”
by Linda Ferrara
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Friends remind us of the time when, as an eight- or nine-year-old boy, he tried a back flip off the diving board and didn’t make it, smacking his face on the board, causing all who witnessed it to gasp in horror, and he never shed a tear. He was mostly annoyed that we had even noticed. And he was adventurous; there was nothing he did not want to try. When he was five we had trouble keeping up with him on skis. He would take off straight down the mountain – he had no fear.
He was almost 10 when his brother, Marcus graduated from high school and continued his education at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
In the spring of 1994, Matt spent five days at West Point, running through the maze of corridors to find Marcus’ room so he could sit at the computer playing games instead of staying at the formal events with the parents and families of cadets attending the annual parent week.
Seven years later, Matt was a cadet at the same institution, and although he was undoubtedly influenced by his brother’s experience, Matt chose to go to West Point because he wanted to. You could not make him do anything. Each year, only about 1200 students are accepted into West Point and they receive a full scholarship for their four-year education, followed by five years as an officer in the army.
Just a few months after he entered West Point, the future of the United States was violently changed by the events of September 11, 2001. Matt was not intimidated by the thought of what this meant. He graduated from West Point in May 2005, near the top of his class, with a major in Chinese and economics. He joined the infantry, and after graduation became a ranger, and was assigned to the 173rd Airborne in Vicenza, Italy, a choice post.
Marcus had spent a year in Iraq at the time of the Iraqi elections in 2004, and though this had caused plenty of anxiety for me, he had eventually returned home safely. And besides, Matt assured me, in my anxiety over where he would eventually be posted, nothing was going to happen to him!
A few years before, he had given me a photo of himself standing at the edge of a ski-field in Colorado beside a sign that said, “This is the end of the patrolled area. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk”, and of course, he had taken off into the unpatrolled area, probably laughing all the way down at his own sense of invincibility.
In May 2006, Matt joined his 173rd Infantry Brigade in Vicenza, Italy. For a year he led a charmed life, travelling all over Europe, running with the bulls, jumping off cliffs in Croatia, scuba diving wrecks in the Mediterranean, skiing the Alps, spending weekends in Paris, touring Ireland with a friend.
He had a wonderful apartment in the centre of Vicenza, on the third floor of an old building in the heart of the town, overlooking the piazza, and he would sometimes call us as he hung over his balcony observing the street scene below. He had plenty of friends to enjoy life with.
Through a friend, I was given the opportunity to travel to Italy three times that year. My friend’s company contracted with the movie studios to hand-deliver unreleased films to major cities around the world, and I jumped at the chance to deliver to Rome.
Little did I know at the time how precious the memory of those visits would become. After the first trip, I returned home and told my husband and daughter what a wonderful visit I had with Matt.
Vicenza was the first time Matt had his own apartment, not army barracks but a lovely place of his own that he had proudly furnished and decorated. My hard-case little boy had finally grown up, and a mature, self-assured, happy young man had emerged. How grateful I am now to have had those visits. A couple of weeks before his deployment to Afghanistan, my husband and I both visited him, and although we are usually fairly casual with our goodbyes, I left a note on Matt’s table saying, “You’ll never know how much I really love you.”
That visit was the last time we saw him alive. He had been in Afghanistan five months when on November 10 last year he was with a patrol who had been talking to village elders. After leaving on foot, they were ambushed by insurgents who fired from multiple positions using rocket-propelled grenades and small arms. Six troops from the Nato-led Internal Security Assistance Force, including Matt, and three Afghan soldiers were killed.
