Sgt. Mark P. Adams, 24, who grew up in Morrisville, died near Ramadi, west of Baghdad, after a roadside bomb exploded near his Humvee. Adams, whom the Pentagon identified Monday, was the sixth Triangle serviceman to be killed in Iraq since the war began in 2003.

The Adams home is tucked down a dirt road in a leftover pocket of pre-boom Wake County. His family -- father Phillip, mother Rene and brothers Marshall, 28, and Mike, 25, sat at a table on the deck there Monday afternoon and remembered.

They remembered a kid who said what was on his mind, who complained at such length about garden work that his father sent him inside -- where he grinned ear-to-ear at dodging the steamy chore. They remembered a boy who followed his brothers in playing with G.I. Joes, in dressing in camouflage and running backyard patrols, then into the real military.

They remembered his Michael Jackson act on the dance floor at Marshall's wedding reception in full Marine dress uniform -- except for one missing white glove.

"Always the life of the party," his dad said.

Mostly they laughed. Sometimes they couldn't.

"I look right there," said Phillip Adams, then went silent for a minute, able only to gesture at an empty chair between Mike and Marshall.

He got his breath again.

"There will be an empty chair at the table from now on."

They agreed that Adams' wrestling career was a turning point.

His was not a tale of natural talent. That's why Cary High wrestling coach Jerry Winterton has used it every year since Adams graduated to inspire his team.

Adams signed up to wrestle as a short, pudgy and unskilled ninth-grader. As his father put it, Adams was "beaten like a wet dog" his freshman year. Winterton said he was surprised that Adams stayed to finish the season on the team, which has won 13 state titles.

Something had happened to Adams, though.

The kid who had complained about gardening was gone. Adams worked hard in the off-season, honing his body, going to wrestling camps, doing everything he could to improve. He didn't start his freshman year, or his sophomore year, or his junior year. But he began to catch up to the kids who had been wrestling years longer.

Then he caught them.

Then he passed them.

For the 1998-1999 team, Winterton did something he wouldn't have thought possible three years earlier: He made Adams the captain.

"He had just outworked everybody," Winterton said. "He went from no potential in the sport, to a little, to OK, maybe, to someone we relied upon to win.

"It was easy to make the decision to put him out front."

That year, the team won another state championship, and Adams graduated and joined the Marines.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he wanted to get into the fight, said Mike Adams. Instead, he was stuck doing duty in the Pacific.

When his enlistment ran out, he left the Marines in frustration and spent about a year studying at Wake Tech, though he wasn't quite sure what he wanted to do. He came back to Cary High as a volunteer assistant to Winterton, and the team won two more titles with his help.

But Adams decided he was wasting his time in school, and in late June he went to see a Marine recruiter and said he wanted back in -- on the condition that the corps sent him to Iraq.

In September, when his unit was getting ready to ship out, his parents went to Camp Lejeune to say goodbye. Mark wore sunglasses all day, probably because tree-stump-tough Marines aren't supposed to shed tears, his mother said.

He had called his father Thursday and was in good spirits, partly because he had been promoted to platoon leader, but also because he so believed in his cause, his parents said.

"He was a Marine's Marine, and he was doing exactly what he wanted to do," his father said.

On Sunday afternoon, Adams' parents drove home from church and saw a strange car in the driveway.

When they turned in, Phillip Adams saw the two men in Marine uniforms and his heart clenched.

Mark Adams, they told him, had been standing in the machine gun turret of the armored Humvee, the only position on the truck that's exposed. A piece of shrapnel from the bomb blast struck him just under the back of his Kevlar helmet.

No one else in the Humvee was hurt.

It's unusual for a platoon leader, with 30 Marines under him, to take the turret. But before Mark had left for Iraq, Mike Adams said, he mentioned another sergeant who had said he'd never get up in the turret. Mark said he wouldn't ask his Marines to do something he wouldn't do himself.

"That was Mark," said Marshall Adams.

(News researcher Lamara Williams-Hackett contributed to this report.)