An aspiring doctor from Queens who joined the Army after 9/11 to “make the world a more peaceful place” was killed in Baghdad over the weekend.
Pfc. Francis Obaji, a 21-year-old College of Staten Island student, was with the National Guard’s “Fighting 69th” regiment from Manhattan when a roadside explosion caused his vehicle to crash Sunday, military officials and kin said yesterday.
“My son was a hero,” said Obaji’s grief-stricken father, Cyril, 58, as his wife sat quietly, still in stunned disbelief, at the family’s home in Queens Village last night.
The dead soldier’s uncle said his nephew – the oldest of five kids in a close-knit, immigrant Nigerian family – once told him that he had been opposed to the Iraq fighting.
“Personally, he didn’t like the war,” Alphonsus Obaji recalled.
“But he wasn’t afraid of dying. He didn’t think the war was necessary. He thought they should negotiate for Saddam to leave. [Yet] he never questioned his duty.”
A tearful Cyril Obaji said his son had been studying microbiology in hopes of becoming a doctor when he headed to Iraq about six months ago.
The young man had already been slightly injured in the war in December, and his dad said he had hoped that would be his son’s ticket home.
But the soldier was sent back into combat. He recently told his dad he would probably be back stateside by April.
The heartbroken dad explained that 9/11 prompted his son to first join the reserves in 2002.
He said his son had been about to get on the Staten Island Ferry the day the hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers.
The death and destruction that the young man then witnessed on his long walk home afterward changed him, like so many others, forever.
“That made him make up his mind to join the military,” the dad said. “Not for the vengeance, but to make the world a more peaceful place.”
The unit has been especially hard hit in the war.
His death was at least the fourth this month for the “Fighting 69th.”
Other victims included Bronx firefighter Chris Engeldrum, who had been among the first to arrive at Ground Zero on 9/11.